U.S. Founded as a Christian Nation? Yeah... Right...

The Right Wing (Or the Evil Empire, take your pick in my book) has asserted, often loudly and with great reverence, that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation!

Not hardly...

It's Final Jeopardy and the category is: US Myths and Fallacies

The answer is, "All of them." You have thirty seconds. Please put your answer in the form of a question.

(30 seconds later)

Right wing, contestant number one, you have thirty trillion dollars and own 85% of the wealth of the United States. What was your answer?

Uh, I said, "How many of the Founding Fathers were Christians?"

Oh, I'm sorry, Right Wing. That is an incorrect answer. The Correct answer is "Which of the Founding Fathers were businessmen?"

That's right, boys and girls and all the ships at sea, our Founding Fathers were Businessmen first, liberals (yes, really, liberals, interested in freedom, democracy and wary of large tyrannical powers that sought to limit personal freedom and choice) and, mostly not too fond of religions.

Now, it must be pointed out that they were against ORGANIZED RELIGIONS. This is an important distinction. They believed in faith, but they adamantly refused to allow a personal faith to interfere in the business of creating a government. They went so far as to put that into the FIRST AMENDMENT in the bill of rights.

You see, organized religions have this habit of screwing up governments. As observed by Thomas Jefferson (you know, the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence? Third President of the United States? Banged his own slave girl and fathered children with her? THAT Thomas Jefferson?) in a letter to German Baron von Humboldt in 1813:

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose."

Now, let's fast-forward to today. Our right-wingers have availed themselves of the lowest grade of ignorance to manipulate the poor, southerner/mid-westerner for their own purposes.

Now, least you think that perhaps he was talking about corrput politicians and priests and not about religions in general or Christianity in particular, he went on to say at another time:

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."

The score is Reason 2, Religions 0. And proof that not all of the founding fathers were interested in making a "christian nation."

But let us go further and examine the right-wing notion that they were trying to do just that: create a Christian Nation.

They were crafting a nation. They only needed a 2/3 majority to get the work done. And all of the 13 original states had to sign onto the newly drafted Constitution. If we were a nation of people wanting it to be a Christian nation, why didn't they put it in the Constitution? Why, instead, did they specifically and categorically deny the right of the government to dictate what religion a person had. Not only that, but why did they put that prohibition against the government into the very FIRST amendment which became our Bill of Rights? Going one step further to pound this home, why did they make that the FIRST PROVISION OF THAT AMENDMENT IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS? If these were all good and godly men foaming at the mount to create the first truly Christian Nation, why did they go so far out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot on the journey to that religious destiny?

Well, the easy answer is because they weren't that interested in God. In fact, they were so not interested in God, that the word God doesn't appear in the Constitution. Nowhere. Not a peep. In fact, "deity", "Creator" or any reference to anything even remotely of a religious, let alone "christian" nature is glaringly absent from the Constitution - aside from the prohibition on the part of government to create laws based on one.

You think, maybe, they were sending a message?

To refresh your memory:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Not only did our founding fathers tell the government you can't establish a religion, but it went on to say that you can't pass laws that tell others how to live based on a particular religion or faith since they may have a different faith and that law may interfere in the free exercise of it.

This isn't exactly what I would call "Christian Nation building" here.

The truth of the matter is that the founding fathers saw what the Church of England had done to the people in England (and elsewhere where other religions governed or had a strong hand in the running of a government). They knew that allowing any religion, regardless of who believed in it, or how many, to be able to take power in the government would be a disaster for the free, open society they envisioned.

So why were they so into a free and open society? Aside from a large dose of off-shore repression England engaged in before the Revolutionary war (and for a period of time thereafter, in fact), the founding fathers were BUSINESSMEN. Almost all of them were rich land-owners. Almost all of them were extremely well educated. Almost all of them owned businesses or were heavily invested in them.

In ANY society run by dogma, the clerics only need to decide something is subversive or immoral, then pass a law to outlaw it or restrict it. In a free and open society, people can smoke, drink and fool around howsoever they please. They can indulge in the vices the church often railed against: Smoking, drinking and fooling around. Many of the founding fathers owned (or were invested in) distilleries. Others owned tobacco plantations. Almost all of them owned slaves (something ELSE the churches hated and wanted abolished).

The founding fathers were creating a businessman's paradise, folks, NOT a nation of Christians. The LAST damned thing they wanted was some stupid church to get its meat hooks into the government to shut down their distilleries, make them stop harvesting tobacco (and hemp, by the way), or, heaven forbid, take away their slaves. Profits would plummet.

A cadre of "Christian Nation Builders" they were not.

So the next time you hear a right-winger talk about our found fathers as Christians interested in a Christian nation, you can do what I do: Laugh, point and call them ignoramuses who don't know anything about the nation they want to run into the ground.

Tell them I sent you...