Surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans classify themselves as Christians. There is, therefore, a sense in which it is correct to say that America is a Christian nation. It would also, in the same sense, be accurate to call it a white nation or a right-handed nation. All of these descriptive assertions are equally valid, and equally inadequate and misleading.
The religious right, however, believes that America is a Christian nation in an additional sense. It believes that Christianity is somehow integral to the Founding Fathers’ conception of what the country should be. This belief is quite mistaken. It is little more than a convenient myth created to buttress other familiar claims of the religious right—that prayer should be allowed in public schools, or that sectarian schools and charities should receive state support.
What evidence do members of the religious right bring forward to support their view that Christianity is somehow part of the nation’s foundations? They are eager to call our attention to the Declaration of Independence, in which God is indeed invoked, yet they seem to think it self-evident that the God mentioned in that document is their God. In fact, that is very unlikely.
One must bear in mind that Jefferson, the presumed author of the Declaration, held religious views that, though shared by many Enlightenment intellectuals, were regarded by orthodox Christians as equivalent to atheism. Late in his life, Jefferson tried to clarify his views on religion by producing a sort of scrap-book version of the New Testament. He cut out and pasted into a blank book those passages of Scripture that he regarded as believable. He never published this “personal Bible,” which he titled “The Life and Morals of Jesus.” He seems to have kept it solely for his own use.
What is striking about its contents is what is missing: there are no passages describing Jesus’ divine parentage, his miracles, his claim to be the son of God, or his resurrection. In other words, for Jefferson, Jesus was entirely human. He was a moral teacher, not the Christ or Messiah, and certainly not God.
The God in which Jefferson did believe was a totally impersonal being; a god whose only job was to establish the laws of nature and set the universe in motion.
In the Declaration’s first sentence, Jefferson refers to “Nature’s God.” This was a common way for deists like Jefferson to distinguish between the God they accepted and the one they rejected—the God of Revelation. Perhaps Unitarian-Universalists would be satisfied with Jefferson’s God; it is highly unlikely that those on the religious right would recognize it as the God they worship.
It is noteworthy that the religious right rarely cites the United States Constitution in support of its “Christian nation” claim. That’s understandable, for the Constitution, which is arguably our nation’s only founding document, is entirely secular in content. God is never invoked, or even mentioned. Religion is discussed only twice, and where it is substantively addressed—in the Bill of Rights—there is an explicit prohibition of government interference in the religious affairs of the citizenry.
That prohibition means not only that the government cannot favor one religion, or sect, over another, but also that it cannot “…constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, (or) aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs” (Supreme Court: Torcaso v. Watkins, 1961).
In other words, the Constitution is not only firmly neutral with regard to Christianity, it shows no preference for belief over non-belief.
We can only draw the conclusion that America, while it may be Christian in a demographic sense, is resolutely non-Christian in a governmental sense. This must be so if we are to honor the Founders’ vision of a nation that respects the right of each citizen to believe, or not believe, as he or she chooses.
