Was America Founded On Christian Principals?

Few matters ignite more controversy than America’s Christian roots and whether they are valid.

The battle over America’s beginnings muddles wishful hero worship with efforts to commandeer America’s past so to steer her future. The most vocal proponents of Christian America and their counterparts advocating a completely secular state necessarily cherry-pick data to prove exaggerations while discarding inconvenient details.

By transforming our Forefathers into faithful servants of Christ the Religious Right risks compromising the biblical message. Baptist theologian Al Mohler warns advocates of Christian America have “confused their cultural heritage with biblical Christianity,” while Believers must exercise their views, cheapening what constitutes Christianity for political gain profanes the Gospel.

Moreover, Believers should refuse Big Government operating in Christ’s name. while empty pews in Europe testify, politicized religion impedes ministry. Beautiful cathedrals dot the Old World, but with scant congregants, they memorialize a funereal dearth of faith coming from state sanctioned pulpits.

Meanwhile, those most ardently challenging America’s Christian origins wrongly portray the Founders as rank secularists. They would seemingly reduce religious liberty to mere freedom of worship letting Believers pray in their hovels, but in public: Be seen and not heard.

 

The hardcore Left once highlighted how they supposed the political establishment exploited religion to keep workers content. Karl Marx thought religion reflected a palliative. Modern denizens of political correctness reckon the Founders so irreligious that they had sought to diminish spiritual influence. Under this flawed auspice, the First Amendment justifies evicting crosses from parks, purging prayer from schools and ousting “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

President Obama, champion of religious pluralism,(as I am) can’t even credit our “Creator” when quoting the Declaration.

The most damning evidence of a non-Christian past is a humiliating 1797 treaty with the Barbary Pirates. President Adams sought to stem unremitting Muslim raids against Mediterranean shipping and protect American sailors from African slavery. This obscure treaty submitted, “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

But diplomacy in North Africa through studied weakness proved as futile then as today, so Marines took action inspiring the snippet, “… to the shores of Tripoli.” By the 1800s, replete with a burgeoning navy, subsequent treaties contained no such obsequious bows to Islam. Still, the secularists rejoice.

 

As historian John Fea notes,

 

 

“If the Treaty of Tripoli is correct, and the United States was not ‘founded on the Christian religion,’ then someone forgot to tell the American people… The idea that the United States is a ‘Christian nation,’ has always been central to American identity.” But debate rages over whether the Founders were Deists and why the Constitution bears no mention of God.

Excerpt from Forbes 

(Personally...I can sing God Bless America and Pledge Allegiance to the flag as one nation under God...but I would refuse to put my hand on a Bible and swear on it. I don't know who wrote and edited it many times and  where they got their unbelievably strange information from.)

 

 

I wonder how this issue has so divided our great Nation.The first Pilgrims who came here at great risk came to escape religious persecution, and they were of a variety of faiths, as were the Founding Fathers.

Still fighting over what God we should worship and how?

 

Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims all worship the God of Abraham but have never agreed on how to do that. Is that their Gods fault or the fallibility of humanity to be able to read the mind of an elusive Supreme Creator?