America: A Product of its Time

Too often I see people insisting that the United States is a Christian nation. Perhaps I fell asleep during that particular history or government class (in seventeen years of education, it’s entirely possible), but I never remember hearing anything regarding this.

As far as I can recall, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were written based on principles conceived during the Enlightenment era, “a time when man began to use his reason to discover the world…. The effort to discover natural laws…led to scientific, political, and social advances.” John Locke’s idea of “life, liberty, and property” was crucial to Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Imagine if we had copyright rules back then! But I digress.

Prior to the Enlightenment, a nation had never been founded on the same principles as ours, one being a separation of church (i.e., religion) and state. There’s a clause in the Constitution that specifies “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust…” (Article 6, section 3). Both of these ideas were VERY radical when they were written! Back then, kings derived their authority from God. This is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind; they wanted government to come from – another radical idea – the governed. No matter how vehemently you disagree with Obama’s (or, for that matter, Bush’s) policies, your elected leaders were elected by the people – they did not inherit their position from their predecessors.

“But the Puritans came here in search of religious freedom!” Yes, this is true. However, this was in the early 1600s. Remember the Enlightenment I mentioned earlier? That was in the 1700s – around the same time America declared independence from England. Perhaps the people who say we are founded on Christian principles refer to the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God. The problem here is that the Declaration is just that: a declaration. Nowhere does it give us – i.e., Americans – any laws. That’d be the Constitution.

An oft-passed over document is the Treaty of Tripoli, written in 1797. In a preliminary draft, Joel Barlow, a diplomat, wrote the following quote:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…” (Article 11)

Pretty big stuff, right? Here’s the clincher: This treaty was reviewed many times before it was ratified by Congress and got John Adams’ signature on 10 June 1797. If that line were false, that phrase would’ve be excised.

But it wasn’t. Imagine that.

“But our Founding Fathers were Christian!” Okay, some were. Most, however, were deists; they believed in a god but they didn’t believe in any holy book (ie, the Bible, Quran, Torah, etc.) – as many Americans at the time were. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin were either Deists, Unitarians (Adams), or held their own beliefs (in a letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, Jefferson declared he was “in a sect by myself, as far as I know”). Thomas Paine came out with this doozy of a quote in his book, The Age of Reason:

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.

Ouch.

Say what you will about our education system. But what can you say about a system that asks its students to question what they hear? To point out fallacies in others’ arguments? I can’t, in good conscience, sit idly by as people continue to spread this notion that America was founded on any sort of Christian beliefs when the facts disprove it. My teachers wouldn’t allow it; you shouldn’t, either.

Sources:

• http://www.nobeliefs.com/Tripoli.htm
• http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html
• http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html
• Enlightenment quote: http://www.historywiz.com/enlightenment.htm