No, they don’t. They all specify that they’re a people organized under a political entity. Kinda like how “Boy Scouts” and “Boy Scouts of America” are two different things.
What you are arguing about is ridiculous. One of you keeps saying “America has a Christian majority and a Christian culture!” while Dio and the gang respond with “No it doesn’t! America doesn’t have a Christian government!” You guys can’t agree on what the phrase “America is a Christian nation” is even supposed to refer to.
That’s where I step in. We have dictionaries to settle this sort of conflict. Dictionaries clearly state that a nation refers to a group of people. It’s why we have terms like “nation-state”, “Palestinian nation”, “Nation of Kurdistan”, or even the previously mentioned “Red Sox nation”. Before you say anything, yes, I realize the Red Sox one isn’t a real nation. But the other ones are. They dont’ have to have a state to be a nation, or else “Nation-state” would be redundant.
If you’d all just use the time-honored debate courtesy of defining your terms, you wouldn’t have to fight about it for 30-50 posts.
ETA: Your cite sucks, and you edited it. The full cite is:
and the key reads “Key: “S:” = Show Synset (semantic) relations”. So it’s half thesaurus and half dictionary. Unless you want to argue that nation, state, country, land, commonwealth, etc all have the same definition, you have to do better than that cite.
mbdojo.com America was not founded by a group of Christians. The church even complained that after 50 years ,still no religious man had been president. Here are quotes by our founders.
Nation-state is a clarification of size, not of quality.
We have city-states like the Principality of Monaco or the Vatican and nation-states like Spain. We also have states in the sense of a political division within a country, such as in the US or India or Australia.
Again, you’d do well to consult a dictionary or encyclopedia before stating these things. A Nation-State is a state that governs over a nation, as opposed to a group of nations. It’s not the same as a city-state and has nothing to do with size.
Wiki:The nation-state is a state that self-identifies as deriving its political legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit.[1] The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity.
Dictionary.com: a sovereign state inhabited by a relatively homogeneous group of people who share a feeling of common nationality.
Lastly, Merriam-Webster: a form of political organization under which a relatively homogeneous people inhabits a sovereign state; especially : a state containing one as opposed to several nationalities.
All of the other cites back me up too. Without the political organization, there is no “nation.”
ETA even if we were just talking about the population, it would STILL be inaccurate to say that a population is defined by majority demographics. so calling America a “Christian nation” is inaccurate no matter what definition of “nation” you want to select.
I agree with DtC here…America is specifically NOT a ‘Christian nation’. It was specifically set up to separate church and state for very good reasons…and to protect religious freedom for it’s citizens, regardless of whether they are a majority or a minority. In fact, I’d say that it was set up to protect the minority from a tyranny of the majority WRT religious affiliation, as well as on matters political.
That’s a very interesting point, xtisme, but we really need is yet another definition of either, “state”, “nation”, “country” or “Christian” to really keep the conversation going.
The federal government was set up that way, but many of the states were not. If you read the early state constitutions, many of them specify Christianity as the official religion. That didn’t last very long, though, and was pretty much ended in the first few decades of the 19th century. Prayer in school was fairly common well into the 20th century, however.
I would say that we are largely a Christian nation*, but one that does it’s best (most of the time) to not push that religion too much on the non-Christian minority. And said minority is increasingly becoming larger.
*nation, in this context, meaning the people, not the government
If Rush Dumbo said the moon was made of green cheese, all his fellow Republican followers would not only believe it without question, they’d swear it was the fault of the Democrats!
Yes. And if “America is a Christian nation” was simply a matter of demographics, as Chessic Sense implies, it would be a big yawner - and there would be no mention of the Founding Fathers. Those who are hot on this clearly want the laws to reflect Christian moral codes.
BTW, in an article I read yesterday about those Baptists in Haiti, the minister of their church said of the ringleader “there is no better Christian.” Words of one syllable department.
Yes indeed. And the leader of this little group seems quite the star. She has this buying service that seems to have a problem paying its employees. Someone who worked with her is quoted as saying that she doesn’t think very far ahead (duh) and changes business models every few days, whenever one of the investors who keep her business afloat talk to her. She bought this house to use an an orphanage - it is now in foreclosure. But it’s all fine, since God wants her to take Haitian kids.
What do you think that it means for the U.S. to be a Christian nation? What do you mean by your odd claim that some vaguely mentioned, but never actually identified, group wants to “de-Christianize” the U.S.?
If the U.S. is, indeed, Christian, what does that mean? Are Buddhists and Muslims and animists and Wiccans not part of the nation? Are Jews not part of the nation? How about Unitarians? Mormons? Catholics? (There are certainly Christian groups that exclude one or more of the latter groups from Christianity.)
The United States is a Christian nation because a majority of Americans are Christians. As this is a free country you don’t have to be Christian and you can have any faith you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. You also don’t need to have any faith at all.
That is the beauty of living in a free country. There will always be the Madeline Murray O’Hare’s that fight that religion is bad. Our constitution separated church from state but it will never separate us from practicing our own God given beliefs no matter what the the majority or minority thinks.
Someday we may be a Muslim nation, if more then half of us are Muslim. We may become an atheist nation. Why does it matter, we are free? Isn’t that good enough…
Only 85% religious, no wonder they seem threatened. I say we indoctrinate the little bastards in school before they get a chance to think for themselves. Don’t want the trend tp continue.
It’d be a little confusing if they were taught from a different bible in each class, so maybe we let Texas choose a version for us like they do with other text books. We should unify classroom materials as well. Can you imagine how it would look to kids if Mrs Gonzalez’s class had a different version of the 10 commandments posted than Ms Bernstein and Mrs. Washington had yet a third? Maybe we can go “back to basics” and just teach the ‘Old Testament’. I’m sure the Jews won’t mind us implying that their holy text is superseded by a new one. There will be a few problems here and there, but Northern Ireland probably has some out-of-work folks who are used to dealing with polite exchanges of religious differences.
When someone uses the phrase “America is a Christian nation,” they mean MUCH more than a descriptive phrase regarding the people within a territory.
The implication of the statement is that the entire nation lives under policies that are driven by or designed to support a particular religious viewpoint. It does not simply mean “most citizens of the country called America are Christian” - it implies that the country called America is made up of ONLY Christians, and it implies that that belief system runs the country in political and economic as well as spiritual ways.
Let’s not play innocent and pretend that when some says “America is a Christian nation,” they’re just talking demographics.
It’s no surprise our country is losing its morals when you remove them from the young. Morals are bad you know. We should all be able to do whatever we want, whenever we want, as long as we can get away with it.
Then we make a big deal out of it when someone important gets caught doing what everyone else is doing… Because it is not socially acceptable. Is that an oxymoron or what?
We don’t even teach ethics anymore. Our prisons are full to capacity. Why is this? We are going back to a gang mentality.
It doesn’t take a religious person or a Liberal or a Republican or a scientist to figure this out. It’s common sense. I really wish we could all get rid of the “us against them” philosophy that dominates this board and back to some serious problem solving.
As my Grandfather used to say, “There is more then one way to skin a cat”. Now you can call PETA on me for saying that or get thinking!
How can we teach our children right from wrong without any religious materials involved? Unless we don’t want to teach them right for wrong. That is also an option.
It is my view that people who post dictionary excerpts as though it proved something are committing hamster abuse, and should be dragged away and beaten senseless. Which shouldn’t take very long at all.
