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"America was founded as a Christian nation" [1]

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Date: 2023-10-28  

We are going to be hearing this a lot from Republicans in the coming months, now that one of their avowed Christian Nationalists is sitting in the Speaker’s chair. Yet it’s a myth that comes up again and again and again as Republicans have fully abandoned democracy and are now embracing theocratic fascism.

In fact Mike Johnson himself said America was founded as a “Biblical Republic” and that the separation between Church and State does not exist and only protects religion from the state, not the other way around.

This, of course, is pure nonsense and INCREDIBLY dangerous. We are at Defcon One now in this country, with religious fascism literally sitting two seats away from the Presidency.

So what DID the Founding Fathers actually say about religion?

Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in…any church,” he declared. In a call to arms against what he called church-state tyranny in early America, he insisted that “every national church or religion accuses the others of unbelief; for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”

George Washington: "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

Thomas Jefferson: " The Christian God is a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust . We discover in the Bible a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication . On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."

James Madison: “It was the universal opinion of the [18th] century, that civil government could not stand without the prop of a religious establishment and that the Christian religion itself would perish if not supported by a legal provision for its clergy.” But as President, Madison found that, “the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of church from the state.”

John Adams: “the United States is not, in any sense, a Christian nation.”

Seems pretty clear to me that America was not, in fact, founded as a Christian nation. What do you think?

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