http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/barbary/bar1796t.htm
Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary.
Ratified by the United States June 10, 1797
If we ever were a Christian nation someone forgot to tell our Founding Fathers.
No, "not in any sense"
Please don’t post in purple. You look like a sock of raisenbread. Who, by the way, also shouldn’t post in purple because it’s annoying.
Unconstitutional or not, it is a fact that it’s there and in all probabitity will be for a long time to come.
Ridiculous comparison. The source of Christmas is a Christian holiday-- duh!. Independence day has absolutely no connection to any religion. But of course you know that.
OK, maybe one or two from 200 yrs ago. I guess that nullifies all the presidents since then, huh?
The fact that the vast majority of the nation is Christian is irrelevant to the nation as a whole? If you say so…
What is happening? BTW, I’m an atheist. I have no interest in this country being Christian. I’m just calling it as I see it.
IMO, you have to be “Christian” to become president. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get as much of the Christian vote.
I sincerely doubt that many of the presidents would be active Christians if they weren’t in politics. It’s a necessity for them to keep up the charade.
Interesting that most of those who consider the US “Christian” are professing atheists. I, and nearly all of the Christians that I personally know, consider the US not Christian. I’m speculating that what we tend to do is compare the culture we see to our personal views: if you’re an atheist (let’s put you at the left end of a spectrum, for illustration’s sake), then the US culture as a whole entity is to your right - therefore, it’s “Christian”. If you’re a Christian (and, again for illustration’s sake, let’s put you at the right end of the same spectrum - oh, and let’s also for a moment not get our panties in a twist over my choice of “right” for Christian, please!) - then the US culture as a whole entity is to your left and therefore not Christian.
Sure, we see a lot of social conventions and cultural displays, etc., that have an outwardly “Christian” appearance or background. But to a devoted Christian, what matters is not the appearance or the outward action, but the attitude of the heart. If you celebrate Christmas as a day to drink eggnog, exchange gifts and sing songs, etc., but your heart is not celebrating that Jesus was born so that he could be your Savior, then you’re not a Christian in God’s eyes (cite: the Bible). Same with Easter and the whole chocolate bunny thing, or even going to a church - if your heart’s attitude is a selfish one, it isn’t “conformed to Christ”, it’s “conformed to the world”, and your fellow man may judge you a Christian, but Christ himself will separate the sheep from the goats.
Now, on an individual basis, no man has the right to judge the heart of another man, so don’t think I’m going that way. But I’m trying to clarify why I (and the above-mentioned Christians that I personally know) don’t consider this a Christian nation.
ok did not post in purple this time…discussions on religion will never be resolved in the forst place simply because not everyone feels the same way.all i meant by wanna be christains is that they practicce on sundays ans the rest of the time it goes straight down the drain ,and like i also said this is true in the town i lived in…so once again if i offended anyone i am sorry
Let me again clarify. I was not asking whether the United States is, or ever was, a “Christian nation” in a constitutional sense, the way the United Kingdom is. Marvin Olasky argued for the strong Christian sensibilities of the Founding Fathers and their colonial generation in his book Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America (Crossway Books, 1995), but he was probably flat wrong; you can read an excellent debunking-review by Catholic scholar John J. Reilly [ulr]http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/fflav.htm. (I’ve read only the review, not the book.)
But it is certain that this country was founded mostly by people who considered themselves an essential part, not merely of Christendom, but of Protestant Christendom, and considered that this set them apart from non-Protestant peoples (including the Indians, the Mexicans, the Quebecois, the Africans just off the boat, and most nations of the Old World). I suggest that this attitude played a central role in forming our strangely durable myth of “American exceptionalism.” This way of thinking grew even stronger after the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. It remained strong in the 20th century even if the latitude was expanded to encompass Catholics and Jews. According to the studies and surveys cited by Michael Lind, this attitude is now in a severe long-term decline.
Are these sources accurate? And, if so, what will be the effects, not merely on the role of religious viewpoints and observances in public life, but on our sense of “American exceptionalism”?
I should emphasize that if the change we’re looking at is a real one, it is above all a generational change. “Generation X” and the “Millennials” would appear to be less religious, or at any rate less Christian, than the Baby Boomers – many of whom, in their youth, took religion as such very seriously while rejecting their parents’ traditional faiths to explore new spiritual paths. And, within the next three decades, the Boomers will gradually move into retirement while the younger generations will come to the fore. We might be well on our way to becoming a “secular society” like Britain, but one or two generations behind the curve.
This might be a discussion for another thread – but in their books Generations and The Fourth Turning, Boomer authors Neil Howe and William Strauss expounded a theory that Anglo-American civilization has been passing through a regular, predictable series of generational cultural cycles ever since the Tudor period. One result of this is that, every four generations, we can expect a period of religious or spiritual “Awakening.” But the most recent Awakening, the 1960s, was different from all those before because its spiritual core was not Christian. If their theory is correct, then the sons and daughters of today’s “Millennials” will, when they come of age, start another Awakening – but it is likely to be even less Christian in nature than that of the 1960s. Does anyone else care to speculate along these lines?
Let me try that again. The O’Reilly review of Olasky’s book is at http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/fflav.htm.
And you can find a website (including discussion board) devoted to Howe and Strauss’s theory of generational cycles at http://www.fourthturning.com/.
Man… I typed up a post last night, but it looks like the boards choked before it was sent.
Anyway.
My view is this:
There are certain moral standards which are ingrained into every human being (excluding the occasional sociopath) and many other species. To the best of my knowledge, there is no society on this planet which would consider sticking pins in babies’ eyes to be a moral act. You don’t have to be taught that this is wrong; I’m quite certain that someone raised in perfect isolation would respond very negatively to watching such an act. Likewise, there is no society I know of which would consider giving one’s excess goods to someone in need an immoral act (assuming those goods are his or hers to control in the first place), with the possible exception of fanatical objectivists. This is foggier; children do need to be taught that sharing is strongly encouraged, but I don’t believe any toddler would look upon two other people sharing their own belongings as an evil act.
This is the ‘natural law’ theory.
Christianity is based largely on much older religions, which are based on these standards. Sharing is good, sticking pins in babies’ eyes is bad.
American society is based largely on Christianity. Christianity is based largely on older religions. Older religions are based largely on natural law. Chain rule-- American society is based largely on natural law.
Religion and government can never be completely independent of one another, since both are shaped by the same people. Christianity is not the same as it was one thousand years ago, for example, because its followers have changed.
So while American society is based on Christianity, those aspects of Christianity which it borrows are in common with virtually every other religion. The country recognizes its Christian roots to a greater degree than its (many) others, so in that sense, America is Christian. In terms of how closely our laws resemble the religion’s traditional standards, we probably more closely resemble Islam. No, seriously.
Ermm . . . stoyel, are you suggesting that Christian traditional standards are expressed in American public life in the same way that Islamic traditional standards are expressed in the public life of modern Islamic countries? Would you care to expand on that?
No, I’m suggesting that there are aspects that American public life shares with Christian traditional standards, and there are also aspects that American public life shares with Islamic traditional standards. There are also, of course, aspects of Christian standards that are shared with Islamic standards.
For example: Islam grants women the right to property and some degree of independence. Christianity is more inclined to grant women the right to be property, and little more than that. (The fact that some Muslim nations don’t allow women to hold property is an example of their culture affecting their religion rather than vice versa.) Thus, America’s view of the rights of the different sexes is more similar to Islamic teachings than it is to Christian ones. The fact that our schools prize mathematical and technological prowess so highly is more in common with ancient Arabic culture than ancient European.
Until someone steps forward and says “this cultural norm is absolutely Christian, and this one is absolutely Islamic,” then which religion gets to lay claim to the American tendency toward, for example, monotheism?
The question is hopelessly vague, and if there’s nothing stopping me from free-associating, I can probably spin up a pretty good argument that America is in fact Wiccan. Or Satanic. Or Zero-Ontologist. Or all three.
“Zero-Ontologist”?
Zero Ontologists believe, if I’m summarizing this correctly, that the universe is basically one big equation, with positive and negative elements that add up to zero. The reason that anything exists is that something must exist in order for the adding-up to be performed. There is some entity performing the adding-up (and which presumably wrote the equation). I believe it also involves time moving in a cycle; the universe is created and destroyed and recreated ad infinitum.
I’m sure it’s more complicated than that. I understand it’s popular with mathematicians, which strikes me as silly; there’s nothing to make 1 - 1 = 0 any more or less valid an equation than 0 = 0, but hey, whatever floats yer boat.
Based on that explanation, I feel fairly confident in declaring that the United States is not a Zero-Ontologist (nor Wiccan nor Satanic) nation or culture.
Little late here; sorry, computer’s been in the shop.
You may feel confident, but the point is, you cannot expect a factual answer to this question unless you provide factual premises.
As you have left it up to your respondents to define characteristics as ‘Christian’ or ‘non-Christian’, then all answers are completely valid. Including my flippant ones.
You haven’t given any basis upon which you are denying the statement that America is Zero-Ontologist. If I say the emphasis in schools is veering more and more toward mathematics, and this religion is favored by many mathemeticians, therefore America is Zero-Ontologist – then my answer is at least as reasonable as it is to say that because the emphasis in colonial times was on Biblical teachings, and Christianity is favored by many students of the Bible, America was Christian at that time.
You have already had responses arguing against your statement that colonial America was Christian. Your definitions need a lot of clarifying, or you can never receive anything approaching a factual answer. As stated, your question is entirely a matter of opinion.