Is the US a Christian Nation?

A recent headline in my local paper asks this question: “Is the U.S. really a Christian nation?” To many the answer is no, and they are right to a point. America is not a juridically Christian nation, that is, the founding documents do not prescribe Christianity for its citizens, but that lawyer’s response in no way gainsays the profoundly Christian culture and character of America’s founders and of generations of American leaders.

The language of the founding documents is redolent of Christian teaching. For example, “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Where, pray tell, does that idea come from? It comes from Christian teaching. First from Genesis where God creates man in His own image and then from the New Testament, where St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, writes in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (KJV)

And Christianity suffuses the writing of not only the founders and but also of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, who, while certainly not a religious man nor even identifiably Christian, demonstrates in his writing the rhythms, cadences, and literary devices of that most poetic of all English translations of the Bible, the Authorized or King James Version. For many generations, Americans of all classes and educational levels breathed the King James Bible in with their mothers’ milk. Anyone possessed of even a modicum of cultural literacy can discern that if he has the ears to hear and the eyes to see.

            In what can only be called special pleading, many choose to believe that secularism motivated the authors of the founding documents when in fact grievances against the established church were never part of the conversation. When our founders led their revolution against England, they were not leading a charge against Christianity or the established church; they merely wanted the same rights as their English Christian brethren. In fact, not once in the Declaration’s long list of grievances against the King is religion or the established church mentioned. Religion was not among the reasons that they rose up in rebellion. In fact, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, our Bill of Rights, were added after the Constitution was drafted, some thirteen years after the Declaration, in order to persuade reluctant states to ratify.

And don’t forget that in the beginning of our republic, the Bill of Rights applied to the Federal Government only, which incidentally, was the reason the Danbury Baptists wrote their letter to Thomas Jefferson, who used the phrase “separation of church and state” in his answer. That phrase does not appear in the Constitution.

            America has always been a Christian nation and in the future is likely to become even more Christian. What religion are the millions of Mexicans immigrants legal and illegal bringing with them?