The Truth About Religion in America: The Founders Loathed Superstition and We Were Never a Christian
http://www.alternet.org/belief/155890/the_truth_about_religion_in_america%3A_the_founders_loathed_superstition_and_we_were_never_a_christian_nation/The Truth About Religion in America: The Founders Loathed Superstition and We Were Never a Christian Nation
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Once they begin to circulate, falsehoods—like counterfeit currency—are surprisingly tenacious. It doesn’t matter that there’s no backing for them. The only thing that counts is that people believe they have backing. Then, like bad coins, they turn up again and again.
One counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. It’s one of the Christian Right’s mantras and a favorite talking point for televangelists, religious bloggers, born-again authors and lobbyists, and pulpit preachers. Take, for example, the Reverend Peter Marshall. Before his death in 2010, he strove mightily (and loudly) to “restore America to its traditional moral and spiritual foundations,” as his still-active website says, by telling the truth about “America’s Christian heritage.” Or consider WallBuilders, a “national pro-family organization” founded by David Barton, whose mission is “educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country.” Called “America’s historian” by his admirers, Barton is a prolific writer of popular books that spin his Christian version of American history. And then there’s Cynthia Dunbar, an attorney and one-time professor at Liberty University School of Law. She’s another big pusher of the Christian America currency. Her 2008 polemic One Nation Under God proclaims that the Christian “foundational truths” on which the nation rests are being “eroded” by a “socialistic, secularistic, humanistic mindset” from which Christians need to take back the country.
Unlike some of the wackier positions taken by evangelicals—think Rapture—the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation has gone relatively mainstream. This is the case largely because the media-savvy Christian Right is good at getting across its message. A 2007 First Amendment Center poll revealed that 65 percent of Americans believe the founders intended the United States “to be a Christian nation”; over half of us think that this intention is actually spelled out somewhere in the Constitution. Conservative politicians sensitive to the way the wind blows are careful to echo the sentiment, or at least not to dispute it, even if they’re not particularly religious themselves. Recent GOP presidential aspirants Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry championed the claim with gusto. Even John McCain, who usually left the Bible-thumping to his Alaskan running mate, jumped on the bandwagon in his failed 2008 bid for the presidency by assuring a Beliefnet interviewer that “this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles” and that he personally would be disturbed if a non-Christian were elected to the highest office in the land.
So the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is widespread. In the currency of ideas, it’s the ubiquitous penny. But like an actual penny, it doesn’t have a lot of value. That so many people think it does is largely because they don’t stop to consider what “founded as a Christian nation” might signify. Presumably the intended meaning is something like this: Christian principles are the bedrock of both our political system and founding documents because our founders were themselves Christians. Although wordier, this reformulation is just as perplexing because it’s not clear what’s meant by the term founders. Just who are we talking about here?
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That the founding fathers intended the Constitution to be secular is beyond question; motions to include religious references at the Constitutional Convention were voted down. We know this from the 1788 pamphlet written by NJ-born Luther Martin, who was a delegate for Maryland.
The Constitution's secularism was decried by colonial clergy. John M. Mason, D.D. complained in a 1793 sermon that the "very Constitution which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish, does not so much as recognize his being! ... From the Constitution of the United States, it is impossible to ascertain what God we worship; or whether we own a God at all ."
Thomas Jefferson said it even more directly in an 1814 letter to Dr, Thomas Cooper, stating that " Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. "
Anyone who claims the intention of the founding fathers was to establish a Christian nation should review Article 11 of the Treaty with Tripoli declared in part that "the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion..." This treaty was negotiated during the administration of George Washington and ratified by the Senate under President Adams. (The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution says the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Treaties, and laws made pursuant to the U.S. Constitution, shall be "the supreme law of the land."
"E Pluribus Unum" was the original U.S. motto put forth by a committee consisting of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Pierre Eugene du Simitiere. It appears on the Great Seal of the United States but was never codified into law. "In God We Trust" is a recent invention, put into law in 1956. No one remembers the names of the congressmen who sponsored that bill.
Our Founding Fathers were wise men and had a healthy skepticism about the role of religion in government. Anyone who claims to respect the traditions of the United States should recognize that fact and stop trying to rewrite history to suit their personal beliefs.
Deism
Deism (Listeni/ˈdiː.ɪzəm/[1][2] or /ˈdeɪ.ɪzəm/) is a religious philosophy which holds that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator. According to deists, the creator never intervenes in human affairs or suspends the natural laws of the universe. Deists typically reject supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles, tending instead to assert that a god (or "the Supreme Architect"
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Deism in the United States
In the United States, Enlightenment philosophy (which itself was heavily inspired by deist ideals) played a major role in creating the principle of religious freedom, expressed in Thomas Jefferson's letters, and the principle of religious freedom expressed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. American Founding Fathers, or Framers of the Constitution, who were especially noted for being influenced by such philosophy include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Harnett, Gouverneur Morris, and Hugh Williamson. Their political speeches show distinct deistic influence.
Other notable Founding Fathers may have been more directly deist. These include James Madison, possibly Alexander Hamilton, Ethan Allen,[44] and Thomas Paine (who published The Age of Reason, a treatise that helped to popularize deism throughout the USA and Europe).
In the United States there is controversy over whether the Founding Fathers were Christians, deists, or something in between.[45][46] Particularly heated is the debate over the beliefs of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.[47][48][49]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism#Deism_in_the_United_States
The U.S. Founding Fathers: Their Religious Beliefs
Although the Declaration of Independence mentioned “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,” the Constitution made no reference to a divine being, Christian or otherwise, and the First Amendment explicitly forbid the establishment of any official church or creed. There is also a story, probably apocryphal, that Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to call in a chaplain to offer a prayer when a particularly controversial issue was being debated in the Constitutional Convention prompted Hamilton to observe that he saw no reason to call in foreign aid. If there is a clear legacy bequeathed by the founders, it is the insistence that religion was a private matter in which the state should not interfere.
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In recent decades Christian advocacy groups, prompted by motives that have been questioned by some, have felt a powerful urge to enlist the Founding Fathers in their respective congregations. But recovering the spiritual convictions of the Founders, in all their messy integrity, is not an easy task. Once again, diversity is the dominant pattern. Franklin and Jefferson were deists, Washington harbored a pantheistic sense of providential destiny, John Adams began a Congregationalist and ended a Unitarian, Hamilton was a lukewarm Anglican for most of his life but embraced a more actively Christian posture after his son died in a duel.
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2007/02/the-us-founding-fathers-their-religious-beliefs/
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common sense. It's a shame it's all been lost 
