IS AMERICA A CHRISTIAN NATION?

I found two papers on the First Freedom First web site that I really liked.

IS AMERICA A CHRISTIAN NATION? A Dialogue On Religion And Politics In The 21st Century
Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy leads the national nonpartisan grassroots and educational organizations, The Interfaith Alliance and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation, and serves as Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster (Baptist) Church in Monroe, LA.
Rev. Barry W. Lynn is Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and a member of the Supreme Court bar.

Here are some excerpts. I will post more tomorrow:

GADDY: Well, is this a Christian nation? The correct answer to that question is of profound importance for every phase of our corporate life — commerce and community, education and environment, public policy and private liberty — as this, the most religiously pluralistic nation in the world, moves into the 21st century.

Let me direct your attention to Article 11 of the Barbary Treaties signed in Tripoli on Nov. 4, 1796, approved by President John Adams, and ratified by the United States Senate. Drawn up to protect the country’s merchant ships from Barbary pirates, this agreement — interestingly, written in Arabic — begins with these words: “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”

In 1797, the founders of our nation were eminently clear that the United States is not and was not intended to be a Christian nation. Rather, it is a nation in which government is appreciative of religion but resistant to any entanglement with religion. Wise people who understood and valued religion rejected the very idea of a government-established national religion or even the slightest possibility of a religion-controlled government.

A very unlikely coalition of Baptists, Unitarians, Secularists, and Deists gave us the First Amendment’s two-pronged guarantee barring laws “respecting an establishment of religion” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
LYNN: Our earliest Presidents really took this idea to heart. Thomas Jefferson refused to even sign bills declaring national days of prayer or thanksgiving. James Madison even objected to counting “clergy” in the 1790 census.

This separation of church and state, though, didn’t run absolutely smoothly, of course. There were literally riots in Philadelphia
prior to the Civil War over which version of the Christian Bible should be used for daily readings in the public schools. Members of unpopular religious groups were frequently told they could not preach in public and, indeed, non-believers were barred from holding many elective offices.

Finally, in l947, the United States Supreme Court put real teeth into that phrase “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Justices made it clear that this prohibition did not just mean that Congress could not set up one “national religion,” but that it couldn’t give some religions preference over others or even promote religion over non-theistic beliefs.

For several decades, the Supreme Court used that standard to declare unconstitutional a variety of practices by governments including government-written or government-selected prayers that public school students were expected to recite, bans on teaching evolution, and direct government funding of private religious education. It also struck down most restrictions on reproductive choice, which had, as a practical matter, been implemented primarily because of powerful religious interest groups.

Although some of these protections have been watered down over the past 25 years, the essential principles remain strong. They are, however, under relentless attack from those who ignore our history.


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