A terrific editorial in the New York Times provides some interesting insights into what many of the founders of the US thought about religion and its influence on the country.
A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian NationBy Jon Meacham, 10/7/2007
JOHN McCAIN was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last year for very long -- the senator, who once referred to Mr. Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance," was there to receive an honorary degree -- but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood. In an interview with Beliefnet.com last weekend, Mr. McCain repeated what is an article of faith among many American evangelicals: "the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."
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The only acknowledgment of God in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated "in the year of our Lord 1787." Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God's authority, but the effort failed.
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The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation -- that all men are created equal -- in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country's tapestry, not the whole tapestry.
In the 1790s, in the waters off Tripoli, pirates were making sport of American shipping near the Barbary Coast. Toward the end of his second term, Washington sent Joel Barlow, the diplomat-poet, to Tripoli to settle matters, and the resulting treaty, finished after Washington left office, bought a few years of peace. Article 11 of this long-ago document says that "as the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," there should be no cause for conflict over differences of "religious opinion" between countries.
The treaty passed the Senate unanimously. Mr. McCain is not the only American who would find it useful reading.
Read the entire article (nytimes.com)
