Well, it uses the phrase “our Lord”, at least, in a purely rhetorical sense.
Oh, piffle.
This is as silly as the claim that the country was founded as a Christian nation.
There were, indeed, several members of the Continental Congress that arranged for the Declaration of Independence and several members of the Constitutional Convention who were Deists. That the Deists included several of the more prominent participants is also true.
However, taken in aggregate, it is no more true to claim that they were “mostly” not Christian than it is true to claim that they were hoping to found a Christian nation.
This site attemps to identify the denominations of the “Founding Fathers” at three points: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederacy, and the Constitutional Convention.
You can argue the pros and cons of labeling Jefferson, Franklin, and Harnett as “Episcopalian (Deist)” instead of just “Deist” and you can point out that certainly many of those men, such as Washington, appeared to have been more concerned with the unifying effects of public worship than in holding an actual belief in the spiritual teachings of their professed denominations, (I would not be surprised to find Madison among that group, as well), but a claim that some unknown majority of all the men who were present at the creation of these documents were “really” closet deists who were just making a show for the public requires more than just your assertion. I would want to see a significant number of diary and journal entries from either the men or their families before I accepted the claim of “mostly non-Christian” that gets bandied about with such abandon (and without any evidence being offered).
However, regardless whether Washington, Madison, and some few (unnamed and uncounted) others might have participated in religion out of public duty, there does not appear to be any evidence that those feelings were held by a majority of the members of the several conventions.
Well, there you go. And with detailed forensic analysis of the Founding Fathers’ exhumed remains, we may also one day prove decisively that this country was founded as an “enlarged prostate” nation. (Sorry, ladies!)
I’ve never liked McCain, even at the height of the bizarre cross-partisan McCainMania era, which is thankfully long overwith. It’s hard to tell whether he’s just shamelessly, desperately pandering or actually believes the shit he’s been spewing for the past year or so, but… frankly, I’m not sure which scenario would be worse. The “maverick” image thing worked for a while as a media-hype buzzword, but on closer review I think “maverick” was really just a PR-spin euphemism for “prick whom nobody likes.” His recent political minstrelsy for the fundamentalist knuckle-draggers, however, makes me wish Jon Stewart would invite him on The Daily Show one last time just to give him a good nose-cracking sucker punch with a fisted roll of quarters.
I often find relief in the thought that, relatively speaking, I’ll be dead soon. I sympathize with those of you who’ve procreated, though, and moreso with your progeny.
That’s right. After all, the “year of our Lord” bit merely identifies the dating system in use. Currently, the US Armed Forces’ newspaper, the Stars & Stripes (Pacific edition) is published in Japan and has the Japanese dating system on it. That certainly doesn’t establish the Armed Forces as a Shinto force.
If the USA is a Christian nation then many of the Christians are not living their religion,as the crime and bigotry seem to still be with us. They want In God We Trust kept on the money but they trust more in the sword than in God. slogans are nice but no good if not followed.
What about love your neighbor as your self? Be good to your enemies etc.
We have a devout “Christian” president who has acted far differently than he preaches.
I read that Japan has the least crime of all nations so maybe we should follow Japan in that sense?
Monavis
I truly hope you will live for many more years.
Monavis
I don’t understand why McCain insists on sucking up to people who can’t stand him no matter what he does and thereby offending the few people that can stomach him. McCain needs to accept the fact that these voters are a lost cause and he’s better off going after others.
How funny is it that there are three reference to the practice of slavery in the Constitution and none of God (outside of the insignificant dating convention). We’re more a Slavery Nation than a Christian one.
Maybe McCain was agreeing with the Supreme Court that “this is a Christian nation.”
Regards,
Shodan
If you will forgive me for stating the obvious:
Because he’s LOSING.
The bloom is so far off his rose he’d damn well better try some hail mary’s to get some momentum or he’s in danger of not making it to the primaries. That sort of motivation will make a man do weird and unusual things.
Prediction: Hillary/Romney for all the marbles.
But it’s one thing to say that this is a Christian nation (ie, that most people in the US are Christians) and something completely different to say that the Constitution established a Christian Nation (when it explicitly disallows the establishment of any religion).
Can you explain to me what Christian values are??
I always wonder how those people who think the founding fathers meant this to be an officially Christian country explain why they simply didn’t explicitly do so in the Constitution, instead of doing pretty much the opposite with the non establishment clause.
Do they think there was a group of atheists with muskets to the founding fathers’ heads, ready to kill them if they made the Constitution explicitly say this is a Christian nation? Did Satan himself possess them and prevent them from writing the text they really wanted to put in there? Did the liberal-biased pamphlet writers pressure them somehow?
Not necessarily. In the culture of that time, it was equivalent to our usage of “A.D.”
I would wager that most of the people on the street can’t tell you what AD stands for.
You linked to a case from 1892 which which decided that statute preventing “importation of foreigners under contract to perform labor” did not apply to clergy. The decision makes a (somewhat specious) argument that Americans are “Christian” people and that it therefore could not have been the intent of the statute to prevent the importation of contracted clergy to serve a church. It does not say that the Constitution establishes the state itself as being Christian and it would have been wrong even if it had.
The website you linked to is kind of amusing, by the way. It appears to be an expressly theocratic organization called “Vine and Fig Tree” which claims to be “Opposed” to “Secularism, Humanism, Anti-Family Sex, Hedonism, Autonomy, Totalitarianism, and Mass Death.”
I guess they went looking through the language of centuries old Supreme Court decisions in order to find archaic and chauvinistic expressions of approval for Christianity in order to prove that the US was intended to be a Christian theocracy.
I’m glad they’re against mass death, though.
Didn’t the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli pretty much clearly state that the US was not founded on Christianity? And this was back when them fella’s would’ve known.
What the words that unanimously passed Congress?
And McCain has become more obviously loopy in the past few years. I’d have voted for him in 2000, still think he would have done better than the current guy, but he was showing his age in '04.
A link to excerpts taken from a book written in 1932 regarding the religious beliefs of the Presidents. I haven’t had the time to read through it all, but it seems well documented:
About a buck ninety-five for a used late-model in “fair” condition (no major mechanical defects or body damage, knee joints bend smoothly without too much “play,” some superficial scratches and/or stigmata OK) but I’ve heard of collectors paying upward of $15 for the truly immaculate ones that have never been out of their plastic shell.
Look at what Bush does. The opposite is the set of Christian values.
McCain lost those voters when he bent over and spread 'em for Bush in the 2004 convention. Sad really. The North Vietnamese couldn’t break him, but Rove could.