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IS AMERICA A “CHRISTIAN NATION”?

(And was it ever?)
John Rafferty

Is America a Christian nation?

There are a lot of people who insist that it is.

Like television preacher-politician Pat Robertson, who tells millions of his

listeners, “There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the
Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.”

And like smiley-face Laura Bush, who coos that “The Bill of Rights says
that our rights came from our Creator.” By which she means a Christian
God, of course. And by which she betrays the fact that either she doesn’t
know what the Bill of Rights says, or that she has confused the ten
amendments with the Ten Commandments.

We’ve all heard it so many times, in so many venues, that many Americans
– perhaps most – have come to accept the idea of a “Christian nation” as fact
when, in fact, it isn’t.

Most of those many Americans, I’m sure, don’t have an agenda behind their
belief in the “Christian nation” notion … but there are many who do.

Most are innocents who simply don’t understand why they can’t have
organized prayer in public schools and Christmas crèches in Town Halls.

But many are Christian Reconstructionists and other fundamentalists whose

goal is nothing less than an American Taliban – like Randall Terry of
Operation Rescue, who has announced … “Our goal is a Christian nation.
We have a Biblical duty – we are called by God to conquer this country.”

Now … if conquering the nation for God is your goal, then there’s nothing
really wrong with a little fudging of history to serve the cause, is there? You
can put words in the mouths of presidents long dead … ignore facts that
don’t fit your agenda … and make up facts that do.
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Whatever their motives … however the historical revisionists reconstruct

American history to fit their biases … the claim that America is or was a
“Christian nation” is based on five arguments.

One: That America was settled by Christians … most famously the Pilgrim
Fathers … who braved the wilderness to find a place where they could
worship freely.

Two: That from the earliest days Americans were … and are …
overwhelmingly Christian … and that the will of the people was then … and
is now … to have their government reflect their Christian beliefs.

Three: That the founding fathers were Christians whose intention it was to
create a Christian nation.

Four: That our founding documents … from the Mayflower Compact to the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself … are based on
Biblical law and Christian principles. And …

Five: That it is only in recent years that our Christian heritage has been
attacked and subverted by liberals and secular humanists.

Okay … let’s examine these ideas in historical order.

First, that America was settled by Christians. Of course it was, but let’s
remember that the so-called Pilgrims were not the first to land here. The first
colony of English-speaking Europeans was at Jamestown, Virginia, settled
in 1607 for trade, and to exploit the wealth they expected to find, including
“gold, silver and copper” in the words of the first charter of Virginia … not
for religious freedom.

Naturally, Jamestown quickly became a magnet for such venture capitalists

as pirates, gamblers, and other swashbucklers … not pious Christians.

But a new governor soon arrived, armed with “Laws Divine, Moral and
Martial,” and started whipping, imprisoning and even hanging those who
broke the Sabbath. Christianity had arrived in America.
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And in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed up north in Massachusetts,

the colony of Jamestown took delivery of Virginia’s first 20 African slaves.
And – surprise! – some of those Africans were Muslims.

So, before the pious Puritans, America was settled – and unsettled – by
pirates, hustlers, slaves, and Muslims.
In November, 1620, hundreds of miles to the north, the Mayflower arrived
offshore from what would become Massachusetts with 102 people aboard.

Contrary to popular misconception, those 102 were not all Puritans. In fact,
only 37 of them were. The rest were a mixed bag who shared one thing in
common – a deep mistrust and suspicion of the 37 Puritans.

Why? First, let’s clear up a misconception about why those Puritans were
going to a wilderness an ocean away from the civilization of their times. So
that they could practice their religion in freedom? Yes, but they could, and
were, already doing that in the Netherlands. They had left England and the
persecution of the Church of England several years before, and in tolerant,
secular Holland, were practicing freely.

But what they really wanted was to establish their own theocracy – and to
take their children, who were, naturally, fraternizing with Dutch kids, away
from the contamination of ideas that were other than “pure.” So they left the
Netherlands, where they could worship exactly as they wanted, without
persecution or hindrance, for the New World.

The Mayflower was supposed to have landed in Virginia, not New England,
but had been blown off course. And many of the other passengers suspected
that the Puritans … in their eagerness to set up their own idea of a pure
Christian community … had connived with the Mayflower crew to take
them as far away from the Virginia colony and its Church of England
authority as possible.

And so was conceived the Mayflower Compact.

Puritans believed a couple of things that had important effects on the

subsequent history of this country.

First … and the reason the 37 of them had set sail for America in the first
place … was their belief that early Christian congregations in the New
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Testament era ran their own affairs and were subject to no higher
supervision than that of Christ himself.

Emulating those early congregations was a return to “pure” Christianity for

the Bible-literate Puritans … hence the name Puritans … and the name
“Congregational,” by which their churches … and their brand of Christianity
… would become known.

The Puritans also believed that … like the Biblical Hebrews … they had a
covenant with God … and that covenants between men to govern
themselves justly were a reflection of that even more important covenant.

So they drew up and signed an agreement while at anchor off Plymouth to

“enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws ... as shall be thought
most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony” … and to
govern themselves by majority rule.
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While the history books have rightly emphasized the revolutionary

importance of this first-ever known example of free men consciously
creating a community and its government of laws by which they would live
… an equally important point was that the Puritans invited the other men on
the Mayflower to sign on, too.

They invited men who were not of the Puritans’ religious persuasion to
become equal partners in the community. Four of them did, and some basic
trust among the colonists was restored.

But let’s face it … the Puritans were religious fanatics who believed that
everyone who did not believe as they did was not only doomed to eternal
hellfire, but was an agent of Satan.

And so the history of that little colony of believers … up to the Salem Witch
Trials in 1692 and beyond … is a chronology of fanatic Christian
fundamentalism gone wild.

In 1630, 900 more Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts Bay … led by John

Winthrop, who became the colony’s first governor. That year … now that
they were the overwhelming majority … they began using tax money to
support ministers of the Congregationalist church.

In 1631, they restricted the vote and the right to hold office to members of
the church.

By 1635, non-members were required to attend church services …

… and in 1638 non-members were taxed … like it or not … to “pay for the
preaching that might lead ultimately to their conversion.”

And although the Massachusetts general court did not pass a law proposed
by one of the colony’s founding fathers that would have required women to
wear veils … sound familiar? … in 1646 the court did make religious heresy
– ready for this? – punishable by death.

Score? Christianity five, democracy zero … and so much for the Mayflower
Compact.
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The Christian historical revisionists often point out that the Mayflower
Compact certainly did establish the Christian religion in the new land.

So it did … but it also reaffirmed the Puritans’ loyalty to the King of

England. If the Compact makes the argument for a Christian Nation, it also
makes the argument against the American Revolution.

In fact, if America was Biblically-based, there would be no United States of

America. Because the New Testament specifically admonishes Christians to
“accept authority” in First Peter, 2:13. … And in Romans 13 it warns that
“those who resist authority will incur judgment.”

So much for a revolution to overthrow the authority of a king.

Of course, there was dissent in New England. In 1636, Roger Williams, who
had been banished from Massachusetts for “new and dangerous opinions” …
like religious and political freedom, including separation of church and state
… founded Providence and Rhode Island, which became havens for
religious dissenters.

And in 1638, Anne Hutchinson … also banished from Massachusetts for

nonconformist religious views … moved her family to Rhode Island,
establishing their own colony there.

In the Rhode Island compact signed by the men of her family in 1638, one of
the first rules was: “No person within said colony, at any time hereafter,
shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called into question
on matters of religion—so long as he keeps the peace.”

Of course … as a woman with no legal standing, Anne Hutchinson couldn’t

sign the compact herself. But … when you travel through the Bronx on the
Hutchinson Parkway … alongside the Hutchinson River … right past the
spot where she and several of her children died in an Indian raid … give a
thought to one of America’s early good guys.

By the way, the trial that resulted in Hathaway’s banishment from

Massachusetts … which was all about the hair-splitting of doctrine, not
about anything we would consider a crime … is a perfect example of
Christian self-righteousness run amok. She stood up to her inquisitors
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beautifully, but Governor Winthrop, frustrated by Hutchinson winning every

debating point, simply ordered her banished.

“I desire to know wherefore I am banished?” she asked. “Say no more,”

Winthrop answered. “The court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”

Which reminds me of the great line from a Ring Lardner short story …
“‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

And which brings us to Argument Two: that the early settlers of America
wanted their government to reflect their Christian beliefs.

Well, yes and no. By 1700, Congregationalism, based on Puritan principles,

was the established religion of almost all of New England … Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, and Connecticut … whose Code of 1650 ordained: “If any
man shall have or worship any God but the Lord God, he shall be put to
death.”

The lone New England exception was Roger Williams’ and Anne
Hutchinson’s tolerant Rhode Island.

But in the rest of New England, the Puritans, who had fled religious
persecution, had become even worse persecutors – an American Taliban.

In the south, following its establishment in Virginia, the Church of England,

known as the Anglican Church in America, became the established church
of all the southern colonies.

By 1770, on the eve of the Revolution, the Anglican Church reigned in

Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Reigned,
but didn’t always rule.

In Virginia and South Carolina, the Anglican Church was well established
and thriving … in spite of large numbers of dissenters … who were tolerated
in both states.

Maryland … which had allowed Roman Catholics freedom of worship when

founded in the 1630s … by 1770 had an established Anglican church … and
imposed severe restrictions on Catholics and the new minority Protestant
sects like Baptists and Methodists.
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North Carolina and Georgia were both backcountry areas where the new
dissident sects were thriving. Georgia was only sparsely settled … and North
Carolina had the reputation … deserved or not … as the least religious of all
the colonies. While the Anglican Church was established in both states, it
didn’t make much difference in the backcountry lives of the residents.

In fact, throughout the colonies, the established churches ruled in the cities
and towns … collected their support money from the local governments, ran
their schools and their charities … but had little effect or influence in the
rural and mountain areas … where the Great Awakening of the 1730s and
40s had converted so many to the Baptist and Methodist churches.

In the Middle Colonies, the picture is almost entirely different, and

established churches were almost non-existent.

The Anglican Church was the established church of New York … and had
been since the British took the colony from the far more tolerant Dutch in
1664 … but that meant little outside New York City and Westchester
County, where Anglicanism was the religion of the ruling elite.

During Dutch rule, New York – then New Netherlands – had been the scene
of one of the great advances in religious freedom in America.

As Russell Shorto tells it in his history of the New Netherlands colony …

The Island at the Center of the World … English Quakers drove Governor
Peter Stuyvesant nuts … “with their sermonizing and taunting and the
jiggling fits of spiritual frenzy for which they were named. … They were, in
his estimation, a threat to the peace and stability of the colony, and probably
out of their minds as well.”

When Stuyvesant forbade the town of Vlissingen … which today we call

Flushing … from abetting the Shakers in their defiance of the Dutch
Reformed Church … thirty-one of the villagers signed a remonstrance to
Stuyvesant. The law of “love peace and libertie” ... they reminded him,
extends even “to Jewes, Turkes and Egiptians.” Therefore, they respectfully
refused to obey.

And the tolerant Dutch government back in Amsterdam backed them up,
which really drove Peg-leg Stuyvesant crazy.
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The Flushing Remonstrance is not as well-known as the Mayflower

Compact … but it is even more fundamental to American liberty, a true
ancestor to the first amendment in the Bill of Rights.

New Jersey … which shared the same Dutch-to-English history as New

York … didn’t establish the Anglican Church or any other, and so became a
religious free market.

By the way, when the Brits took over in 1664, they set about renaming most
places, naming the big city after the Duke of York, and the New Netherlands
area we now call New Jersey after the Duke of Albany. But the new name
they came up with never caught on with the locals … which is why we don’t
call the state across the river “Albania.”

In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia was the second largest city in the British

Empire by 1770 … only London was bigger … and was home to every
religion known to Western civilization. And the colony remained true to its
Quaker founders’ ideals of religious tolerance.

So did little Delaware across the river … which pretty much did whatever
Pennsylvania did.

So … look at the scorecard in 1770, on the eve of the Revolution.

Of the thirteen colonies, three … Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and

Connecticut … had Congregationalist establishments with sometimes
brutally restrictive religious laws going back to Puritan days.

Six had established the mother country’s Anglican Church. But the church
held sway in only a small part of New York … and the residents of North
Carolina and Georgia seem not to have been affected by or interested at all
in their “official’ religion.

Four colonies … Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware …

had no established Christian church at all.

In fact, most of the new breed of people being called Americans were not
much interested in religion.
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While most would call themselves “Christian,” that title in the eighteenth
century would have meant pretty much the same thing as “American” or
“European” or “not-a-barbarian” would mean today.

According to two of the most distinguished American historians of the

twentieth century … Richard Hofstadter and James MacGregor Burns … by
1790 as many as 90 percent of Americans were not members of any church.

So … was America settled by Christians … populated by Christians?

Of course … but while many of the people who came to these shores were
driven by religious motivations, probably just as many … if not more …
came here for free land, for better opportunities … or to escape privation and
even starvation back in Europe, even as indentured servants here.

And by the time of the Revolution, hundreds of thousands had come because
they had chains around their ankles. They harbored no dreams of creating a
“Christian nation.”

Was America a “Christian nation” at the time of the founding? Yes, in the
sense that most Americans considered themselves Christian … but not very.

But what about the Third Argument? … that the country’s leaders … the
Founding Fathers who actually wrote the documents that created the new
nation … were believing Christians hell-bent on creating a “Christian
nation” … as the historical revisionists believe … or would have us believe?

And what about the documents they wrote … the Declaration and the
Constitution that are supposedly founded on “Christian principles” or even
“Biblical law”?

Let’s look at the beliefs and the practices of perhaps the most important five
of those founders … the first four presidents … Washington, Adams,
Jefferson, and Madison … and the man some historians have called “the first
American” … Benjamin Franklin.

“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches,” said Franklin … the man who
discovered electricity and invented the lightning rod.
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That invention, by the way, caused Ben some grief among believing
Christians. Clergymen throughout the colonies actually condemned
Franklin’s invention because … they said … lightning rods thwarted the will
of God … whose divine prerogative it was, presumably, to destroy houses
with lightning bolts.

As Franklin answered … don’t roofs on houses, then, thwart God’s rain?

Franklin was a scientist, a rationalist, and a Deist who helped write the
Declaration of Independence … presided over the congress that approved it
… and participated in the writing of the new Constitution.

He had little use for Christianity. “I have found Christian dogma

unintelligible,” he wrote. “Early in life I absented myself from Christian
assemblies.”

Like many others … Franklin did believe that most people … himself not
included … needed religion to keep them in line.

But, he wrote in An Essay on Toleration … “If we look back into history for
the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have
not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The
primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the pagans, but
practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England
blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the
Puritans. These found it wrong in the bishops, but fell into the same practice
themselves both here and in New England.”

Franklin a Christian? Not even a little bit.

Do we really have to discuss the religious disbelief of that acknowledged

freethinker, Thomas Jefferson? Because of the revisionists, Yes.

Jefferson wrote most of The Declaration of Independence, which has been

called “America’s birth certificate” … and the revisionists claim that that
handiwork of his is chock full of references to God … from “… the Laws of
Nature and of Nature’s God …” and of men who have been “created equal,”
with inalienable rights “… endowed by their Creator …” to the signers’ own
reliance on “… divine Providence …” and on their pledge of their “sacred
honor.”
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Well, actually, that’s it, five words or phrases … “Nature’s God,” “created,”
“Creator,” “divine Providence,” and “sacred.” … No Jesus, no Savior, no
Messiah, no Christian imagery at all.

But, says legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, the Christian historical revisionists
want to use those few words to turn America’s birth certificate into a
baptismal certificate.

In fact, those five words and phrases are all typical Deist formulations,
expressions of a benign but uninvolved deity who kick-started the universe
… something had to, most everyone then supposed … and then left it, and
us, on our own to work out our own destinies.

Deism was a product of the English and French Enlightenments that swept
through the colleges of America in the 1750s and 60s … when Jefferson,
Madison, Monroe, and others of the founders were attending and forming
their own ideas and philosophies.

Some Deists inclined to a rationalistic Christianity … some to materialistic

disbelief … but most of them tried to construct a natural religion by the light
of reason, totally discrediting revelation, miracles, and the supernatural.

So … using reason as a guide … Jefferson went through the New Testament

painstakingly, literally scissoring out every reference to Jesus’ purported
miracles and any other supernatural event.

His edited bible ended with the death of Jesus … a moral teacher whom
Jefferson much admired … and cut out the letters of Paul, the book of
Revelation and the letters attributed to Peter, John, James, and Jude.

Jefferson’s Deistic version of the New Testament … titled The Life and
Morals of Jesus … was meant to be read by his friends, and was not
published until nearly a century after his death.

But that hasn’t stopped today’s historical revisionists … ever on the alert to
utilize a half-truth … ever ready to sucker the unsuspecting … to actually
peddle the idea that not only was Jefferson a Christian, but that he published
his own bible – The Jefferson Bible!
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Surely the best-known of all the Jefferson quotes is, “I have sworn upon the
altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of
man.” It’s carved in stone on the Jefferson monument.

The revisionists have hijacked that, too … because of that three-letter noun
with a capital G. But most people who have heard or read the quote don’t
know its context.

Jefferson was roundly condemned as an atheist … which he wasn’t … by the

clergy of his day … many of whom denounced him from their pulpits when
he ran for the presidency. Why? Mainly because they knew he was
absolutely against any establishment of Christianity as a national religion.

About such an establishment, he wrote: “The clergy ... believe that any
portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition
to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of
God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion.”

“Every form of tyranny” … yes! … but T.J. was talking about Christian
religious tyranny.

After winning the presidency in spite of the clergy, Jefferson did indeed
confound them by strengthening the “wall of separation between church and
state” that was written into the Constitution.

The first time he used that “wall of separation” phrase was in his famous
letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptists in 1802, while he was President.
Again, context is important. The Baptists had written to President Jefferson
because they wanted relief from what they called the oppression of the
established Congregational Church of Connecticut … the inheritors of the
Puritan Taliban.

The “wall” letter was Jefferson’s answer to them. “Believing with you,” he
wrote, “that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God
… I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American
people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting
an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus
building a wall of separation between church and state.”
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Pretty good answer … and one that has been quoted in several Supreme
Court decisions in the 200 years since.

But the Connecticut Baptists chucked Jefferson’s letter into the round file
because what they really wanted was to establish their own churches in their
own communities … and become equal-opportunity oppressors.

Separation of church and state. Thank you, Thomas Jefferson.

John Adams … whom Jefferson defeated for the presidency in 1800 … and
with whom he carried on a long and friendly correspondence after both
retired from public life … was a believing Christian and active … along with
his wife Abigail … in promoting Unitarianism.

Unitarianism … which the Adamses called “Liberal Christianity” … denied

the Trinity as contrary to logic and reason. That belief could have gotten
John and Abigail hanged in Massachusetts a hundred years earlier. Adams
knew the history of intolerant, oppressive religion in his own state and
region, and wanted no part of a Christian establishment in his new nation.

About that new country and its revolutionary concept of government, Adams
wrote: “The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature
shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall
rule it by fictitious miracles?”

In his later years Adams was satisfied that the new republic did, in fact,
conform to the laws of nature.

“The United States of America,” he wrote, “have exhibited, perhaps, the first
example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature … It will
never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews
with the gods, or were to any degree under the influence of Heaven, more
than those at work upon ships or houses … it will forever be acknowledged
that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the
senses.”

Was Adams a Christian founder of the nation? Yes. A founder of a Christian

nation? Absolutely not.
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Pop quiz. Who said this? … “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal
establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or
less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility
in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

That’s the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, who was
even more important to the founding of the nation as one of the authors of
the Federalist Papers … the series of 85 long, detailed newspaper articles
that convinced the American public to support the new Constitution … and
in which the word “God” appears exactly twice.

And both times, Gore Vidal said, in the sense of “God only knows.”

Ignoring the fact that Madison became more and more a Deist as he matured
… and a Unitarian through his friendship with the Adamses … today’s
revisionists have loudly proclaimed Madison’s Christian faith and practice
in his youth.

It’s true … Madison came home to Virginia from the College of New Jersey
as an orthodox Christian. But almost immediately … David Holmes says in
The Faiths of the Founding Fathers … Madison “witnessed the persecution
and jailing of religious dissenters by the Established Church – his church.”

At the age of twenty-two, Madison became a convert to religious freedom,

believing and arguing that only liberty of conscience could guarantee civil
and political liberty.

When Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1776, Madison insisted that it

guarantee freedom of conscience rather than mere toleration.

And in 1785 he wrote the “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious

Assessments” … which advanced fifteen arguments why government should
not support religion, and which was the precursor to the Constitution’s First
Amendment.

In 1811, when he was president, the House of Representatives presented him

with what President George W. Bush would today call a bill for “faith-based
initiatives.” Madison vetoed it on First Amendment grounds.

He was a First Amendment absolutist. After all, it was his amendment.

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Finally, let’s turn our attention to the big guy, the founding father himself …
Washington.

Listen to one of today’s leading historical revisionists … Tim LaHaye, the

author of the “Left Behind” novels that have sold in the tens of millions to
fundamentalist Christians …

“Were George Washington living today, he would fully identify with the
bible-believing brand of evangelical Christianity that is having such a
positive influence on our nation.”

The utter, bald-faced mendacity of that statement is breathtaking.

Washington was a Deist and a Freemason. In the thousands of his speeches,
proclamations, public and private letters and private conversations that have
been recorded … the words “Jesus Christ” never appear in the sense of
belief. Not once.

George Washington was not a Christian in any accepted sense of the word.

But why should that stop the revisionist historians of our cultural right wing?
They have spent more time revising Washington’s biography and beliefs
than they have spent on all the other founders combined.

And by “time” … I mean two hundred years … because the Christianizing-

of-Washington industry began immediately after his death in 1799.

Some relatives of Washington claimed that he was really a believing

Christian and a member of the Episcopalian church in good standing. His
widow Martha … who was a believing Christian and an Episcopalian in
good standing … was not one of them.

But what about that iconic image of Washington kneeling in the snow of
Valley Forge to pray for guidance from God? … an image that Ronald
Reagan called … “the most sublime picture in American history … George
Washington on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge.”

It’s not even a half-truth. It’s simply baloney. All the paintings, the etchings,
the woodcuts, the two-penny stamp … were all done decades after
Washington’s death, by men who had never even seen him.
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So where did they get their idea?

From the totally-fabricated and best-selling Life of Washington written and

rushed into print by Mason Locke Weems in 1800. That’s the same “Parson
Weems” who gave us the famous tale of the hatchet and the cherry tree …
featuring an insufferable, priggish little George telling his father, “I cannot
tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet.”

And ever after, millions of American schoolchildren who were fed that story
thought … “Jesus, what a little creep.”

But even if Weems made it up, isn’t it possible that Washington did kneel in
the snow and slush of Valley Forge every day to get divine guidance?

No, not possible … because he was a Deist and a Freemason. And so, in
keeping with his non-beliefs as a Deist and his practices as a Freemason, he
did not kneel in church or anywhere else. There are dozens of eyewitness
accounts that testify to his upright position in church while most of the
congregants knelt.

Where else did he not kneel? In the army at Valley Forge or anywhere else.

Parson Weems made up his story of Washington-in-the-snow … complete

with detailed eye-witness accounts that turned out to be utterly bogus … and
was either ignorant of or ignored a fact of eighteenth-century military life.

Washington was commander-in-chief of the army throughout the Revolution

… and so would be senior to any other officer at any religious service he
attended … including the chaplain conducting the service. And according to
military protocol of the time, the senior officer did not kneel.

I presume that if Washington had knelt, everyone else would have had to get
down in the snow on their bellies.

Yes … he attended church services as commanding general during the

Revolution … because he wanted to set an example for the men. Like
Franklin and Adams, Washington believed that most men needed religion to
keep them in line … and keeping his ragtag army in line was as much of a
problem for him as was fighting the British.
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In civilian clothes, although Washington attended church on occasion with

Martha while he was president and during his retirement, he did so because
… one, it was a small favor he could do for his wife … and, two, it was part
of the established social routine of an eighteenth-century Virginia gentleman
… the noblesse oblige of setting a good example for the community.

Yes … he was a vestryman of his local Episcopal church at Mount Vernon

… as was the Deist Jefferson at Monticello … and probably Madison and
Monroe at their homes in Virginia, as well.

But that, too, was a gentleman’s obligation in the days when only local
churches … not any government … ran the schools and charities, supervised
by the vestrymen. The vestry at that time was also the local court … so
being a vestryman was an obligation no man in political life could ignore.

Not being a vestryman in eighteenth-century America would have been like

not contributing to charity today … really bad manners, and political
suicide.

Because he was an intensely private man who kept his personal opinions
very much to himself, he has come down to us as the “great stone face” of
our early history … and the historical revisionists have used every even-
offhand reference he ever made to “Providence” or “the Creator” as proof
that he was a real and practicing Christian.

But Jefferson knew better. After Washington’s death, Jefferson wrote in his
private journal that when some clergymen had sent the brand-new first
president a set of questions … trying to pin him down as to whether or not
he was a Christian … “the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered
every article of their address particularly, except that, which he passed over
without notice.”

Today we call that “spin control.”

Now that we’ve examined the religious or irreligious opinions of the most
important of the founders, let’s look at the Constitution they wrote … and
the government they created … when they assembled in Philadelphia in
1787.
 19

Was it, as the revisionists’ Fourth Argument would have it, based on
“Christian principles”? On “Biblical law”? The revisionists would have us
believe so … but it just isn’t so.

To begin with, the Constitution begins with the words, “We, the people of
the United States of America … .”

There is no invocation of God, no claim of a divine sanction, no appeal to

heaven or Jesus or God the Father for guidance … no mention even of the
Deistic “Providence” that had appeared in the Declaration.

Not even an appeal to “natural law,” in spite of what Justice Antonin Scalia
says over and over. On whose authority does the founding document of our
nation depend? … We, the people.

Not only is the Constitution the first political charter in the history of
western civilization to omit the words “God” and “Jesus Christ” … but the
United States was the first Western nation to omit Christian symbolism …
you know, the Cross … from its flag and its currency … while Masonic
symbols adorn our currency.

Religion is mentioned once in the Constitution, in Article VI, Section 3 …

which says that federal elective and appointed officials “… shall be bound
by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution …”.

Those two words … “or affirmation” … meant that no office holder would
ever be required to swear his loyalty on a bible … and that is huge.

Article VI then concludes with “… no religious Test shall ever be required

as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

That was in direct contradiction of several of the state constitutions … which

still allowed only Trinitarian Christians to hold office.

Of course, more than a few clergymen were outraged. One group wrote to
Washington during the debate on the new Constitution … which was
sometimes called our “Magna Carta” … complaining that it had no mention
of Jesus. Washington offered a classic defense of the First Amendment, even
before that amendment was written …
 20

“I am persuaded,” he wrote, that “... the path of true piety is so plain as to

require but little political direction. To this consideration we ought to ascribe
the absence of any regulation, respecting religion, from the Magna-Charta of
our country.”

Alexander Hamilton put it even more plainly. When he was asked why the
Constitution made no mention of God, he wisecracked, “We forgot.”

They didn’t forget. They gave a lot of thought to religion during those
closed-door deliberations in Philadelphia … and the sense of the
overwhelming majority of the delegates … many of whom were believers,
some of whom were clergy … was that they wanted no part of establishing
any religion in the new “Magna-Charta.”

That old non-believing pragmatist, Ben Franklin, with an eye to public

opinion and to history, suggested to the Constitutional Convention that they
open each session with a prayer … a fact that today’s revisionists make
much of – “Look, Benjamin Franklin asked for divine guidance in writing
the Constitution.”

What the revisionists don’t have much to say about it is that the delegates …
also with an eye on public opinion, didn’t even vote on Franklin’s proposal
… they just ignored it.

And Hamilton again … with his own jaundiced eye on public opinion …
said that if people knew that the delegates were resorting to prayer, it would
make them look desperate.

Good thinking.

But what about the Presidential oath of office, which is in the Constitution,
and which concludes with “… preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution
of the United States, so help me God”?

The Secular Humanist Society of New York gives an annual Dumbth Award
to the public person who utters the year’s most clueless, anti-rational remark.
Our first winner, in 2006, was ex-TV personality Star Jones … who is a
licensed attorney … and who said on national TV, on “The View” – along
with the remark that won her the award – that the “so help me God” phrase
in the Constitution was proof that no atheist could ever be president.
 21

Well, it’s true … the Presidential oath is in the Constitution, Article II,
Section 1, paragraph 9 … but it does not include the words “so help me
God.”

And so help me God … I think Star Jones got her law degree from the
classified ads in the back pages of Rolling Stone.

Well … some of the innocents claim … the words may not exactly be in the
Constitution, but Washington added them at his first inauguration … and
kissed the Bible, too. What’s more, every president since has carried on the
tradition and said, “so help me God.”

No, Washington did not. And no, all the other presidents have not.

There are dozens of eyewitness accounts of both of Washington’s

inaugurations … including newspaper stories written by journalists who
could write as fast as anyone can talk … and not one of them mentions “so
help me God” or any kissing of any bible. Not one.

And by the way, he used a Masonic bible, not a standard Christian one.

But what about all the other presidents?

Again, inaugurations were reported widely and in detail right from the
beginning of the republic … and there is not a single mention of an added
“so help me God” until the first inauguration of Chester Alan Arthur in 1881
… eighty-two years and twenty presidents after Washington.

And most of the oath-takings ever since have not included those words that
are not in the Constitution. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t say them. Taft didn’t …
Wilson didn’t … Coolidge and Hoover didn’t … Franklin Roosevelt didn’t
three times out of four. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon didn’t.

“So help me God” is not in any American oath of office!

Religion is mentioned in the Constitution most famously not in the basic

document itself, but in the first amendment, which begins … “Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …”
 22

Freedom of religion was the first guarantee … the first words of the first
amendment.

The “founding era” … the period between the winning of the war for
independence in 1783 … through the writing and adoption of the
Constitution in 1787 and 88 … and through the first administrations
presided over by presidents who had led the Revolution … was perhaps the
headiest, most exciting time in American history.

It was certainly the most secular. The revisionists’ Fifth Argument – that
secularism, liberalism, and humanism are modern heresies in America – just
doesn’t jibe with the facts of our nation’s early history.

As Susan Jacoby writes of that era in Freethinkers, “… what is striking from

a twenty-first-century perspective is the speed with which many Americans
came to support a freedom of thought and religious practice that overturned
millennia of religious authoritarianism. Even when legal barriers to full civic
equality remained, as they did for Jews in most states, the first eight years of
the American republic were characterized by a de facto expansion of liberty
for nonbelievers as well as for dissident religious believers, for non-
Christians and Christians alike.”

Secularism was in the air … no matter what the revisionists would have us
believe. Americans took the new separation of church and state as the
natural order of things.

One after another the states began dis-establishing religions as they replaced
their colonial charters with new constitutions. … The post office and other
government offices were open and working on Sundays. … Tom Paine’s
Age of Reason was a best-seller … and Americans twice elected the so-
called “atheist” Jefferson to the presidency.

How secular was the new United States of America? The best answer lies in
the wording of a document – approved by three Presidents and unanimously
endorsed by the U.S. Senate – that needs to be much more widely publicized
by American rationalists and freethinkers.

212 years ago, the United States was having a problem with an Arab Muslim
state.
 23

Some things never change.

The problem was that Barbary pirates who owed allegiance to the Bashaw of
Tripoli were hijacking American ships and enslaving American sailors. The
Koran allowed him to do this, the Bashaw said, because America was a
Christian nation … and therefore the sailors were infidels, who could and
should be enslaved.

In 1796 alone, 119 American sailors had been captured and enslaved.

The United States was only a few years old in 1796, and certainly no great
sea power. And so … unlike a recent administration that could be named …
the Washington administration defused a bad situation by using diplomacy
… while beginning to build an American navy.

On November 4, 1796, Joel Barlow, the American consul to the Barbary

States, signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli. We paid an
outrageous ransom, but we got back all our sailors … except for 31 who had
died in captivity … and the pirates left American shipping alone for a few
years.

What was significant about the treaty?

Article 11, reads: “As the Government of the United States of America is not,
in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no
character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen;
and, as the said [United] States never entered into any war, or act of hostility
against any Mahometan nation it is declared by the parties, that no pretext
arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the
harmony existing between the two countries.”

“Not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” Those words are in a
treaty written during the Washington administration … he saw it and
approved it … while Jefferson was Secretary of State. The treaty was
endorsed and signed the next year by the new president, John Adams …
after being approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797.

Unanimously. Of course the present-day fabricators of bogus history try to

wish it all away by ignoring Washington’s connection to the treaty … by
claiming that Adams and the senators hadn’t actually read the whole text …
 24

how could they possibly know that? … and that somehow the treaty was
sneaked through with “only a handful of senators” actually voting.

You know, the eighteenth-century version of “cut-and-run Democrats.”

More baloney. First – the treaty had been published a couple of months
before the vote … the idea that no one read it is simply made up.

Second – there were 16 states by then, making for 32 senators in all. But
Senate office was not yet considered a full-time job, and travel from places
like New Hampshire and Kentucky entailed weeks on the dirt roads of 1797.
But a clear two-thirds majority of 23 senators were present – and they all
voted Yes. And no one ever asked for a recount or repeal.

Of course the Bashaw reneged on the treaty, and another was signed a few
years later … and the Bashaw reneged again. So we went to war during the
Jefferson administration … and again in 1815, when President James
Madison got really serious, and sent the new Marine Corps to put the
Barbary pirates out of action. You know … “to the shores of Tripoli” … led
by John Wayne.

But the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, signed 212 years ago
this month, was never abrogated by the United States.

Not a Christian nation!

Naturally, many clergymen howled about the “not-a-Christian-nation” treaty

in 1797, and for years afterward. But during those heady, secular first few
decades of the new republic, most of the public and most of its leaders were
too committed to the idea of separation to pay them much mind.

Things would begin to change when the Second Great Awakening ignited
evangelical fervor across the nation in the 1830s and 40s … but for a while,
secularism ruled in America.
 25

In fact, in 1831, while Andrew Jackson was in office, the Reverend Doctor
Bird Wilson … an Episcopal minister and serious historian who interviewed
and took testimony from many survivors of the Revolutionary and founding
eras … ruefully concluded … “The founders of our nation were nearly all
Infidels, and of the presidents who have thus far been elected, not a one has
professed a belief in Christianity.”

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson

… not one Christian.

Doctor Wilson wouldn’t have been too happy with many of the presidents
who followed, either. Nearly every one … until the Current Occupant of the
White House … is on record in favor of separation of church and state.

Many of them didn’t just favor it … they fought for it.

And the 27th President … William Howard Taft … a man I admire for his
girth as much as for his principles … declined the presidency of Yale after
his term in office, writing, “I do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

Wow, imagine what the Republicans could do with that in a 30-second spot.

Oh, wait, Taft was a Republican.

Which is much to the point. Until very recently in our country’s history, the
commitment to church-state separation was a non-partisan standard. From
the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans of the earliest years … to the
pre-Civil War Whigs … to the Republicans and Democrats of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries … and including almost all the third parties and
minor parties … American politics has stayed clear of religion.

Behind Jefferson’s wall of separation, America has become the most

Christian of all Western nations … with greater levels of church attendance,
church membership, and belief in the Bible … than any other country in the
world.

So you’d think that the revisionists and our Christian Taliban would get the
message … church-state separation is good for them. But they don’t.
 26

And while government in America has historically stayed out of religion,

Christian fundamentalists … from the first … have campaigned to overturn
the Constitution and the First Amendment which has empowered them.

They tried during the darkest days of the Civil War to get a frightened
Congress and an unpopular President to pass an amendment to the preamble
to the constitution, substituting Jesus’ authority for that of “We the people”
… but Lincoln pigeonholed it.

They have tried it again and again, even as recently as the 1950s. But while
they haven’t changed the Constitution … they have bullied spineless
politicians into adding “In God we Trust” to our currency, and “under God”
to our oath of allegiance. They’ve staged “prayer breakfasts” in the White
House and diverted billions of our tax dollars to “faith-based initiatives.”

And today they have their most powerful ally ever.

The Current Occupant is doing everything in his power … and using powers
the Constitution never gave him … to tear down the wall of separation.

When he was Governor of Texas he infamously proclaimed an official

“Jesus Day in Texas.” And in his presidential inaugural speech in 2001, he
announced that … “Church and charity, synagogue and mosque … will have
an honored place in our plans and laws.”

George W. Bush may believe America is a Christian nation … and Laura

may think Jesus was the inspiration for the Bill of Rights. Pat Robertson
may lie that separation of church and state is a lie of the left … and the other
historical revisionists and liars may falsify history … but the truth abides.

The Declaration and the Constitution remain. They can be sometimes

ignored … as they are in the White House today … but they cannot be
airbrushed away … and they will not be forgotten.

Anne Hutchinson and Thomas Jefferson lived, and their ideas will prevail.

Because, thanks to the foresight of the founders and the abiding good sense
of its citizens … even most of its Christian citizens … the United States is
not a Christian nation … it is a free nation.
 27

NOTES
Washington

As Washington lay dying for a couple of days … lay knowing he was dying,
conscious and in full command of his faculties … he never asked for a
clergyman, never uttered a prayer, never once spoke of a god or an afterlife.

He did tell his physician, “I am not afraid to go.” And, a man of the
Enlightenment to the end … one of the last things he did was to take his own
pulse and monitor it as it slowed down.

Episcopal services in those days included a communion service for the

devout … usually held one Sunday a month, after the regular service. It is a
matter of more than one record that Washington … along with other Deists
and masons … always left church before the communion service.

In fact, in New York … in the early days of his presidency … Washington

attended services in various churches … but when one sermonizing pastor
made a point of criticizing public figures who avoided the communion
service ... Washington avoided going to that church ever again.

My favorite Washington quote? In 1790, President Washington wrote an

extraordinary letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island … a
group that would have much to fear from a “Christian establishment” in
America. They had congratulated him on the religious liberty guaranteed by
the new Constitution.

Washington, Susan Jacoby says in Freethinkers, saw this liberty not as a

grudging concession … or even as a generous gift from the American
government … but as a right.

“All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship,” he

wrote the Jews of Newport. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of,
as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the
exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily … the Government of
 28

the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no

assistance … requires only that they who live under its protection should
demean themselves as good citizens. ... May the children of the Stock of
Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will
of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own
vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Washington welcoming non-Christians to full citizenship in the new nation.

Not tolerating them … not “indulging” them … welcoming them, as much
of the Christian clergy of his time – and some of our time – would not.

Franklin

He wrote in An Essay on Toleration … “If we look back into history for the
character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not
in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The
primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the pagans, but
practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England
blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the
Puritans. These found it wrong in the bishops, but fell into the same practice
themselves both here and in New England.”

Jefferson

On the subject of establishing a Christian church in America, this is what

Jefferson had to say … “Millions of innocent men, women, and children,
since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and
imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has
been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other
half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.”

And in an 1823 letter to John Adams he wrote … “The day will come when
the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the
womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva
in the brain of Jupiter.”

Monroe
 29

We don’t know much about the religious beliefs of our fifth President …
James Monroe … because that’s the way Monroe wanted it … a far cry from
our contemporary bible-thumpers.

Like Madison, Monroe was a Christian in his youth … and like Madison he
became a Deist … referring to Christianity and/or God less and less as he
grew older. His friends said that he kept his religious opinions to himself,
even in private conversation.

But, says David Holmes in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers … “James
Monroe may have been the most skeptical of the early American
presidents.”

A Deist and a skeptic, Monroe nevertheless performed one of the founding

era’s most “Christian” acts of charity.

In 1794, while he was American Minister in Paris, Monroe personally

rescued Tom Paine from a French prison.

Paine … who was a fervent supporter of the French Revolution … had been
elected to the French National Assembly … but made the mistake of voting
against the death penalty for Louis XVI.

Good grief, a bleeding-heart liberal … in a time and a country where

bleeding hearts often wound up bleeding from the neck.

Tom Paine had been a hero of the American Revolution for his pamphlet
Common Sense … but was now anathema in America, reviled for the first
volume of The Age of Reason, which was openly atheist.

That’s why Gouveneur Morris … the previous American Minister … had

left Paine to rot in prison, where Monroe found him close to death from
starvation and cold.

Ignoring the political fallout back home for helping a very unpopular atheist,
Monroe not only got Paine out of prison … but took him into his own home
and … with Mrs. Monroe … nursed him back to health … while Paine wrote
the second part of The Age of Reason … in Monroe’s home.