Most respectfully acsenray, I must disagree. The Constitution establishes a lot of the parameters of our limited form of government, but certainly not all of them. It doesn’t say that we follow the English common law for example, or what the rights reserved to the people are (Bill of Rights). As the Declaration said, these things were self evident. I think that this debate needs to look further than the 1787 Constitution and the 1789 Bill of Rights on the issue of church and state separation. What were the individual states doing? At what point did the establishment clause of the federal constitution, which limited the federal government, begin to apply to the states? I suspect that there is an argument that it did not until the 13th and 14th Amendments, and then not until much later when the doctrine of selective incorporation began to apply.
I respectfully believe that your approach makes the body politic completely static in theory, which it is not in reality. The civil war, for example, fundamentally changed the nature of the constitution and body politic beyond the mere text of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which were largely ignored in practice until the 20th century. But if you look at Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the spirit of the nature of the nation was reinterpreted, and as a matter of fact, it stuck as people, particualry in the North, adopted it’s interpretation. This despite the fact that it wasn’t law, but merely a speech (little noticed at the time, but long remembered.) The Gettysburg Address was aimed at our better angels, while the radical republicanism of the period was aimed at the consolidation of power, and it too had a surprisingly powerful effect.
I would like to put forth the argument, and maybe this thread is not appropriate, that the Constitution, brilliant, yet flawed, as it is, is not for most people a statement of the principles that this country was founded upon, and to which they look every day. Yes, most people know about some of the five rights in first amendment, and fewer know the preamble. Most people look for founding principles consciously or unconsciously to the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address for what this country stands for. These are fundamental principles that people agree in the abstract on. I do loving ending sentences in prepositions so.
So to get back to the point of the thread, do these constitute the establishment of this nation as a Christian nation? Certainly not in the sense that the Vatican is a Roman Catholic Christian nation, or that the United Kingdom has its head of state as the protector of the official faith. Certainly not as Saudi Arabia holds that the rulers are the direct descendants of the false prophet, etc.
Religion usually holds that it must be the central, and sometimes only, focus of the existence of the faithful. And while there are many salutary mentions of the Almighty by our founders in their writings, including the Declaration and Address, the constitution is curiously completely void of these except for the First Amendment and the no-test clause, and there to put forth rules only. But none of these folks have ever suggested for the slightest moment that the USofA was a religious endeavor even secondarily, and certainly not primarily in the way that you would expect devout people to do if it was their intention to enshrine their faith in their national institutions. There were substantial religious controversies at the time among the various denominations of protestantism (and for you purists, other non-Catholic denominations of Christianity), and there certainly was a Jewish community ;j in the USofA at that time, which was non-Christian in its entirety.
Fortunately, in the 21st century, we finally have a leadership in the executive branch that recognizes the inherent evil of atheism and actively discriminates against it in various public statements, and seems determined at long last, to make sure that there is some test of particular Christian faith for governmental positions and in particular for judgships. We cannot expect to continue to have the umbrella of God’s protection over our nation unless our government officials pass this test. As Reverands Falwell and Robertson publicly stated, it was the election of gay leaders like Rep Barney Frank that removed God’s protection on 9/11. Only by the removal of these kinds of sinners from office, by impeachment, by criminal prosecutions, hounding through the press and judicial action, and the eventual presence of properly faithful leaders can we be assured that God’s umbrella of protection will cover us.