A lot of the colonists were fleeing the state religion. Some, like the Quakers, weren’t Christian. (There were also Jewish immigrants early on.) And I’ve been told that the motivation for that “no state religion” clause was Massachusetts. The other states didn’t want that.
Eh?
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If that is true they probably feared that the state religion would be Episcopalian rather than Congregationalist.
Massachusetts is the state that Roger Williams left because as a Congregational pastor he wasn’t Congregationalist enough.
Massachusetts is the state (well, colony) that had the witch trials.
Massachusetts was the last holdout on keeping its established state religion.
In order to hold state office in Massachusetts a person had to avow:
And I’ve read that while they used the word “Christian” it was effectively enforced as “Protestant” (because it went without saying that Catholics weren’t real Christians).
My understanding is that you are reading contemporary ideas into historical circumstances. After world war 2, the US reinvented it’s image of itself, as societies can do after catastrophe.
Certainly christianity influenced deism and the enlightenment.
But that is not the same as establishing the US as a “christian nation”.
The reformation had almost ripped europe in two. The US was specifically established as a nation that was not religious.
The term “judeo-christian” was invented in the 1950s, for example.
I don’t know what state constitutions have to do with it. We are taking about the federal government, not state ones. And I’m assuming those state constitutions have artifacts from their earlier governance in which religion was definitely not separated from the state.
Isn’t it telling that even with all that precedent, that kind of language was specifically omitted from the federal government?
Eh, that’s a bit of revisionist history.
They were a collection of different states that were mostly very religious, having state-sponsored churches and requiring office-holders and in some cases even voters to be Christian. But the different states had different religions and saw the benefit of not squabbling amongst themselves over which version of Christianity would dominate.
Lucy mentioned Massachusetts. Here’s what Maryland had to say about religion:
New Jersey specified that you had to be Protestant to have civil rights:
And so on. Others required faith in the trinity or avowing that both the Old and New Testaments are the inerrant word of God.
So if you want to split hairs… I will grant you that we were not considered a “Christian nation” but rather a federation of Christian states. If you think there’s a meaningful distinction there then the latter is probably more accurate.
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I think that is an incredibly meaningful distinction actually.
I admit that I am less familiar with the state constitutions.
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You might find this interesting. It was my source for the Maryland & New Jersey quotes.
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Quakers, like modern Unitarians, don’t have to be Christian. The movement grew out of Christianity, to be sure, but even early on they rejected a lot of the trappings of Christianity.
A lot of the founding fathers were deists. Again, they grew up in a Christian tradition, but many of them didn’t think of themselves as Christian.
God In America: People: Thomas Jefferson | PBS
Like other Founding Fathers, Jefferson was considered a Deist, subscribing to the liberal religious strand of Deism that values reason over revelation and rejects traditional Christian doctrines, including the Virgin Birth, original sin and the resurrection of Jesus. While he rejected orthodoxy, Jefferson was nevertheless a religious man.
Jefferson famously cut up the Bible to remove the stuff that he thought obscured the message of Jesus, whom he believed to be a great moral teacher, not the son of God.
To be clear, the reason for this was largely because it was recognized that there would never be agreement on which Protestant sect would be the federal religion.
The federal government could never have come into existence if they’d tried to usurp that power from the states. It was a separation of powers thing, not an opposition to state religion.
There were some who were indeed opposed to state religion (like Jefferson). But that’s not why there was sufficient support to prevent a federal religion. Most people just wanted to keep their own state’s religion.
That makes sense, but having attended a Quaker college myself, there was never a question of their identity being anything BUT Christian. Certainly that’s just one group’s/church’s view, and there are others, but having been immersed in a Quaker environment, this is still a foreign concept to me.
Most modern evangelicals would have little common ground with their Jesus Christ.
Sell your possessions and give to the poor, welcome strangers from a foreign land, overturning money-changer tables in the temple, self-sacrifice, give to Caesar, must remove the plank in your eye, whatever you do to the least, etc.
I am sure some follow it pretty closely and I don’t judge people who try to do good without following 100% of what he preached - I’m sure not one of us here fully follows his teachings.
Interesting, I didn’t know this, and growing up I lived at the intersection of Quaker and Academy streets, named after… you guessed it, the quaker academy that used to be there. I think it was basically an elementary school and maybe high school. The ‘Religious Society of Friends’ may or may not explain what is known as the ‘Friends Church’ in town.
I think the salient point is that there religion was separated from the federal government.
It might have been a federation of christian states, but the christianity of those states was accidental as far as the federal government was concerned.
People may very well have thought of themselves as living in christian states. And i believe they though of themselves more as citizens of their state than as citizens of the country. Certainly that was true of the South, with deadly consequences in the civil war.
So perhaps it makes a kind of cultural sense to take that historical personal identity as being christian, and graft it back onto the national identity after people started thinking of themselves primarily as “american” instead of being from new york, or virginia, or whatever.
That doesn’t mean this process didn’t create a novel idea of america as a “christian nation” starting in the 50s.
I think it also does not do justice to the idea of separation of church and state, which has a long history of both secular and religious support, to see as simply being a kind of truce because each denomination knew it couldn’t win out and be the state religion. It is much more than that.
Wait, nobody has brought up how Lindsey Graham advocated for the assassination of a foreign head of state?
I think it’s a common enough sentiment in several circles as to be unremarkable.
while i agree with that, it undermines a lot of things when it is a sr member of the govt vs a caricature like mtg/her ilk vs some blogger vs a shock jock. so…it still stands out, albeit just a little.
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Some members of Congress were on a zoom call with Zelensky where he was apparently asking for a no fly zone. Ukrainian officials asked that no one share photos of Zelensky during the call for security reasons.
Can you guess which two morons tweeted out pictures of Zelensky during the call anyway?
Rubio and Daines.
I wonder how much oligarch money will flow their way for their cooperation
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Ukrainian secret service need to take that as a direct and ongoing threat to the life of their president and need to proceed as American secret service would.