Christian American? More Thoughts
I've been posting a bit lately on this whole idea of America's Christian identity. There are those who are insistent that America is a Christian nation and that this identity is enshrined in the Constitution. Such was the insistence of one John McCain in a beliefnet interview. I've already posted my thoughts on that fiasco!
Well Jon Meacham, author of the must read American Gospel, offers his response to McCain in a NY Times op-ed piece. In many ways the essay sets out in brief what Meacham has argued in his book. The title of the essay catches it well -- "A nation of Christians is not a Christian nation." I think that really says it all -- yes Christianity is the nation's dominant religion. It has been since before the nation's founding, and likely will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean that we're de jure or even de facto a Christian nation. We are a secular nation -- that is, our nation's laws while they may reflect a cultural heritage influenced by Jewish and Christian tenets is by definition secular -- it is not governed by religious law. It is ruled by human enacted laws.
Meacham offers an important response to John McCain and any others who would insist that this is anything but a secular nation.
Well Jon Meacham, author of the must read American Gospel, offers his response to McCain in a NY Times op-ed piece. In many ways the essay sets out in brief what Meacham has argued in his book. The title of the essay catches it well -- "A nation of Christians is not a Christian nation." I think that really says it all -- yes Christianity is the nation's dominant religion. It has been since before the nation's founding, and likely will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean that we're de jure or even de facto a Christian nation. We are a secular nation -- that is, our nation's laws while they may reflect a cultural heritage influenced by Jewish and Christian tenets is by definition secular -- it is not governed by religious law. It is ruled by human enacted laws.
Meacham offers an important response to John McCain and any others who would insist that this is anything but a secular nation.
The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation — that all men are created equal — in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country’s tapestry, not the whole tapestry.I would agree wholeheartedly!
In the 1790s, in the waters off Tripoli, pirates were making sport of American shipping near the Barbary Coast. Toward the end of his second term, Washington sent Joel Barlow, the diplomat-poet, to Tripoli to settle matters, and the resulting treaty, finished after Washington left office, bought a few years of peace. Article 11 of this long-ago document says that “as the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,” there should be no cause for conflict over differences of “religious opinion” between countries.
The treaty passed the Senate unanimously. Mr. McCain is not the only American who would find it useful reading.
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