gman wrote:What is the definition of a Christian nation? I don't believe the founders set out to establish Christianity as the official state religion. Some may have wanted to, but they didn't do it. If that is the definition of a Christian nation, then we are not a Christian nation, and never have been.
I think we are agreed then.
I would go further and say that founders like Madison, Jefferson, Washington and Franklin were deeply skeptical of religion in general. They were products of their culture, which was profoundly based on the Enlightenment principles that humanity could figure everything out and didn't need God's help. They of course were wrong in that respect, but it did lead them to put in place safeguards to prevent religion from turning into a state-sanctioned oppressor, which they knew from recent history was quite possible.
Other founders were much less skeptical of religion and supported the explicit freedoms granted for all religions to practice as they saw fit. Both sides got what they wanted, which was that religion should stay out of the government, and government should stay out of the church. Twenty years later, as that generation began to die off, the backlash to Enlightenment atheism and deism was born in the 2nd Great Awakening. Given the nearly deified status the founders have held in American life (and certainly no less so in the generations immediately following them), preachers felt it necessary to Christianize founders like Madison (an atheist), Jefferson (a deist), Washington (an agnostic, at best) and Franklin (a secularist libertine). How else, after all, could it be effectively argued that America was fulfilling God's will as it pressed forward with manifest destiny?
The culture war has continued ever since, as has our struggle with conflating American supremacy and Christian virtue. In fact, I would argue we sometimes border on creating a state religion in our zeal to promote divine blessing for the notion of American exceptionalism, and in so doing we step a little closer to the Roman imperial cult of the first century.
