I scanned my Sonoma County, California phone book when I lived there before 2002. IIRC the Yellow Pages listed over 300 sects and denominations in the county - not merely separate churches, but distinct religious organizations. This, in a county of about 300k population then. If we scale that up nationwide, our 330-million-odd Murkans would support up to 300k sects. A million? Probably not yet, but just wait awhile…
That is absolutely true. No question. However, it is a bit deficient if we are going to be fully honest about the overarching question.
First, the founding documents, questions, and policies were made to differentiate the United States from Great Britain, two nations filled with Christians, but the latter required a specific method of Christian worship.
For that reason we said that not only would there be no compulsion to follow a state religion (and further that we wouldn’t have one) we would allow any sort of religious belief, or indeed no religious belief.
Further, this only originally applied to the national government and not to state governments as mentioned above.
None of this calls into question that our basic laws, understandings, and structure of government was based or “founded” on the Christian religion as it clearly and absolutely was. The moral Judeo-Christian law was embedded in early laws such as forbidding blasphemy, profane oaths, travelling on the Sabbath Day, and prohibitions of sodomy, fornication, and adultery, just for a few examples.
None of what you said supports the 60s-80s Supreme Court jurisprudence.
But I agree with the prior poster that we were not in a literal sense “founded” on the Christian religion because it was so rather obvious that such a religion was who we were as a people that such a distinction needed not to be enacted, and the comments about religious freedom were those of tolerance for those who had other religious opinions because we came here because of state demands that we adhere to their particular Christian denomination of religion.
In a sense, we were absolutely “founded” on the Christian religion, but if you equivocate on that word, then we were not.
All of those examples are from the Old Testament, so it sounds like you’re arguing that the country was founded on Jewish law to me. And, all the current countries that I can think of that have those laws still on the books are Muslim – are you saying that Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was founded on Judeo-Christian law? China and Japan seemed to have had laws against sodomy and homosexuality (from a quick Google search) – are they founded on Judeo-Christian principles?
Christianity, Judaism and Islam come from the same basic foundation. It is not unusual that the laws would be similar. Unless you are saying that the United States was founded upon Judaism or Islam, I’m not seeing your point.
Nearly all the world, Abrahamic or not, had the same prohibitions against sodomy/etc. That’s the point – it wasn’t “Christian” – it was “default”. Thomas Jefferson explicitly stated that the US was, in no way, founded upon the Christian religion. The country was founded by people who were mostly Christian, and undoubtedly their sensibilities bled into the founding principles. But the US was and is explicitly a secular nation, in terms of government and founding principles.
In the late 1700’s? I was a teen in the late 60’s / early 1970’s, raised Episcopalian. Although I took communion in my church and in other Protestant churches, I was taught that it wasn’t proper for me to take communion in the Catholic Church and some Orthodox denominations. Because they believed in transubstantiation and “we” ( my family and my fellow Episcopalians, I guess ) didn’t.
And it WAS something that came up a lot. I frequently had Saturday night sleepovers with friend and I would go to church with their family in the morning. My church youth group spent a lot of time on comparative religion, and we went to services of other dominations and religions a few times a month - a couple of times a year we would get a weekend trip out of it. And we discussed the religion before attending the service and that included the appropriateness of taking communion.
iiandyiiii says it better than I ever could. You just listed aspects of law that are common basically everywhere, and specifically stuff from the Jewish religion. This thread is specifically about Christianity and the founding fathers. Our founding document, the Constitution, says nothing about travelling on the Sabbath or which God, if any, to worship, or any prohibitions on idols, etc.
I would argue that all moral laws come from the same basic foundation – our inbuilt sense of morality. Even chimps have a moral sense. But, that’s an argument for another thread.
ETA: You, meaning Ultravires
I think this is the best take on it. The whole haggling of “Is America Christian or not” is two sides talking past each other with two different definitions on what “Christian” means. America isn’t founded on the Bible, but a large percentage of Americans are Christians.
Quibble: no such thing as “the Christian religion” exists, only scads of sects that may share some symbols but not much else.
Agreed. However I would add to the end of your sentence…and many of our laws and traditions stem from Christianity.
The problem with “we were not founded on Christianity” is that it seems to imply that we were like the French Revolution and therefore the eradication of religion or religious symbols in public is somehow required. That conclusion does not follow.
But I agree that the purpose of the creation of the United States was not to promote Christianity or embed it in government. But likewise the fact that most people were Christians made the government of the United States–it made it contain many Christian elements and one that was inherently Christian. It just had a clause that said that if you were not a Christian, then no problem.
I agree, and “we were not founded on Christianity” implies no such thing. Who said it implied that? It’s like you’re arguing with yourself.
Which element in the Constitution was inherently Christian?
Wrong unless you want to write the Supreme Court out of the Constitution:
… and the fact Griswold is one of my favorite Supreme Court cases ever isn’t why I’m citing to it. The holding in that case was very narrow, but on narrow foundations is precedent built, and later cases have expanded the right to privacy we currently enjoy today.
The right to privacy has to be balanced with the right of minors to not be sexually abused, but all rights exist in a similar balance.
-
Many on the left say that. Just last year in the Bladensburg Cross Case, every year with religious displays around the holidays, the Ten Commandments being posted, etc. Those things would have been wholly unobjectionable at the founding and were not even seriously questioned until the 1960s. Saying that “we were not founded on Christianity” gives the impression that there is legitimacy to those arguments. The founders would have not recognized that their tolerance of non-religion demanded that religion be confined to the four walls of a church.
-
The Constitution was written against the backdrop that it was going to govern a Christian population. That was implicit in its design. It was also written for the limited purpose of governing relations between previously independent states. Anything in it must be taken with that understanding.
Many of the State Constitutions, which were close to the people contained religious declarations and religious oaths. See, e.g.
Again, to say that the United States was not “founded on Christianity” is true only in its most literal application and says nothing about other issues which are always appended to that statement.
You said “religion or religious symbols in public”, not “…on government land.” Are you saying that the “Left” is trying to ban the display of crosses on necks, in churches, in private windows, in tattoos? Is the “Left” in this country trying to ban burkas? Or, do you mean government-sanctioned religious display, which is very different from your earlier statement? Can we agree that was a pretty drastic movement of goal posts?
And, the State Constitutions have nothing to do with the Founding Fathers, so would seem to be irrelevant to this thread. If you were to ask me, did some states have an established religion at their founding I would say, “Probably!”, but that’s not what this thread is about.
The courthouse is “public” no? I didn’t move any goalposts.
The State Constitutions have everything to do with it. The Constitution was written to determine the nature of the national government and its relationship with the states and nothing more. The fact that the founders permitted a society where states could have actual established religions sort of slams the door on the idea that they would have abhorred a nativity scene at the county courthouse.
This is a classic example of the “fallacy of the excluded middle”. Even a very strict interpretation of separation of church and state–one in which Ten Commandments monuments in courtrooms or on the lawns of state capitols are prohibited; “In God We Trust” is recognized as an inappropriate national motto for a religiously diverse country; and so forth–does not confine religion to “the four walls of a church”. Even in a country with very strict SOCAS rules, there would be–as of course there in fact are–a vast array of spaces for the active promotion of religion, “spirituality”, irreligion, and anti-religion, and including the promotion of religious belief in general or of a group of related sects or of one specific religious denomination. Those spaces include (among other things) those moveable-letter signs outside the churches, the exteriors and front lawns of private homes, the bumpers of privately-owned vehicles, all sorts of advertising and branding of privately-owned businesses, the distribution of pamphlets or other literature in public places, billboards along the sides of public highways, newspapers and magazines and books (all of which may be purchased, with taxpayer dollars, for display in and loan from public libraries, and which can also be sent through the United States Mail), private schools and private colleges or universities, student organizations in public high schools and most especially in public colleges or universities, radio and television (whether specific programs, or Very Special Episodes of otherwise non-sectarian programs, all the way up to and including entire radio stations or TV channels), message boards and blogs and other websites, and pretty much everything from private conversations to public lectures (the latter of which in many cases could take place in places owned and operated by various levels of government).
What, exactly, is implicit in the design of the United States Constitution that would somehow make it unsuitable as a governing document for a population that is not majority Christian?
The fact that it said only that “Congress” shall not establish a religion but left each state free to do so with the knowledge that many states had done so and those were all Christian denominations.
That makes the idea that the Constitution requires that religion be restricted to only those public places you mentioned nearly laughable.
I have no problem with the idea that as we become a more heterogeneous population with a diversity of religion that perhaps it is a better idea not to have these displays on government property. If you want to have a living constitution and amend it by fiat to say that the Constitution prohibits these displays on government property, then that is another thread. But to say that the founding fathers would have demanded that they be stricken because this country “was not founded on Christianity” is simply not supported by history.
Oh, give me a break. The courthouse is a tiny subset of “in public”. You said “in public” not “on public, government owned land.” Just own that goalpost move. Jeez. This isn’t going to be useful discussion.
The State Constitutions have nothing to do with the Founding Fathers and Christianity, which is the purpose of this thread, except for those State Constitutions that the Founding Fathers wrote. So, I’ll give you that for those states where the FFs wrote the Constitutions. Otherwise, we have the written record of one of the FFs specifically saying that the US is in no way founded on the Christian religion. So, yes, they may not have abhorred a nativity scene, just as they may not have abhorred a menorah or the Hebrew Commandments or the Bhagavad Gita, since the US was in no way founded on the Christian religion.
Good, so you agree with me that the founders, while not basing a government strictly on Christianity, nonetheless would have had no problem with religious displays on government property, and that they further recognized that they were establishing a government in which individual states could compel Christian worship?
If we can agree on that, then I won’t quibble about the “founded on the Christian religion” statement because it is technically true. I only object when the statement is used for nefarious statements that are wholly disconnected from history.
The thing is, I don’t see any way to restrict this argument to just the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. You can’t say that the “red states” can promote Christianity, without also saying that the “blue states” can restrict or even outlaw Christianity. In fact, by the plain text of the First Amendment, all the states can also censor speech they don’t like, and lock up journalists who publish things the state government doesn’t want published, and call out the National Guard or the State Police to go all Tiananmen Square on any kind of assembly (however peaceable it may be) that the Powers That Be in that particular state don’t like. And although the rest of the amendments that make up the Bill of Rights don’t specifically include that “Congress shall make no law…” language, the Bill of Rights were adopted as a unit, and before the Civil War it’s doubtful that any part of the Bill of Rights would be held to apply to state governments, so having convicted someone of seditious slander of state institutions or blasphemy against the One True Faith or the propagation of anti-science propaganda, a state government could also sentence that person to be drawn and quartered, or have their brain forcibly re-wired, or who knows what; and of course such a “conviction” could be done by some Star Chamber panel of judges, no jury or other due process rights required–IF all we are looking at is the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments) of the U.S. Constitution.
But we don’t live in the Antebellum Era, the Constitution has been repeatedly amended since the adoption of its first ten amendments, and in particular the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that, as the United States Supreme Court put it, “…a provision of the Bill of Rights that protects a right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the Federal Government and the States”.