It's an often-parroted claim, this belief that the United States is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles. I got curious, so I decided to take a look at the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and see how well they actually reflect the Christian worldview.
I started with the Bill of Rights, and things went sour very quickly.
Freedom of religion is not a Christian principle. "Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one." Deuteronomy 6:4. "You shall have no other gods before me." Exodus 20:3.
Freedom of speech is not a Christian principle. "Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only that which is good for building others up according to their needs, so that it may benefit those who listen." Ephesians 4:29.
Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution endorses slavery, and even lets the government make money from the slave trade, by enacting a tax of $10 a person on any slave imported. I'm pretty sure that's not a Christian principle, and if it is, then I quit Christianity.
Article 1, Section 2 further enshrined bigotry by counting slaves as 3/5 of a person; their votes only counted for 3/5 as much as a free white person. Again, if this is what a Christian government looks like, I want no part in it.
All of Article 2 of the Constitution makes provision for the people of the United States electing a president. Despite what you might think, democracy is not a Christian principle. Please feel free to point out any instance in Old or New Testaments where any religious or political leader was chosen by popular vote. In the OT, every king was specifically chosen by God. In the NT, church leaders were chosen by the elders already in place (see 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, where Paul gives Timothy instructions for how to pick future leaders). If the United States was truly a Christian nation, our leader would be chosen by God, not by us, because what do we know about running a country? You might say that God is no longer in the business of choosing national leaders like he was in the Old Testament, which is a fair point, but still does not affect the fact that democracy has no basis in the Bible.
In fact, it's pretty difficult to find any part of the Constitution or Bill of Rights that embodies a uniquely Christian worldview. Perhaps the Declaration of Independence has more to say?
On the surface, it looks pretty good; the author, Thomas Jefferson, refers to "the laws of Nature and Nature's God," and later argues that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Okay, now we're cooking with grease.
There's just one problem. Jefferson wasn't a Christian. There's a reason he referred to "Nature's God" rather than "the God of the Bible" - because he didn't believe in the God of the Bible. He was what's called a deist; he believed in a God who created the universe and then stepped back to watch it unfold, not acting, not interfering, not affecting humanity. That's basically the opposite of what we believe about God, but that's the God he was talking about in the Declaration. In other words, just like the Constitution, the Declaration was not based on Christian principles. (Jefferson, by the way, was the fellow who created the idea of a "wall of separation" between church and state.)
Further, the Bible is strangely mute about the supposed "rights" that we are "inalienably" endowed with. Life is not a right that we are entitled to as humans; it is a gift from God, and he is quite within his bounds to remove it from us if he desires. Liberty is not a right either; we are never in our lives truly free, in that we are either enslaved to sin or enslaved (as Paul says in Romans 1) to Christ. The pursuit of happiness speaks for itself; Jesus' own life ended with suffering and martyrdom, as did eleven of the twelve apostles, as do millions of Christians globally even today. On the contrary, we as Christians are commanded to die to ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ - the pursuit of happiness could not be farther from our mandate as Christians.
What should a truly Christian nation look like? If it were really based on the Bible, it would have a provision in the Constitution that involved providing for the poor, the widows, and the orphans, because Isaiah 58 says that God would rather have that than have us worship him. The legal code would mandate that a victim forgive the person who committed a crime, because forgiveness is Biblical. Our budget would include little to no spending on the military, because we would trust God to keep us safe without resorting to murder and bloodshed. These are just a few examples.
So where do we get the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles? What part of our founding documents are uniquely, or even substantially, Christian in nature? This claim, about the United States being Christian, is often shrieked by people who believe that Christians should have a major role in politics; I've spent a lot of time pointing out how silly and destructive such a thing is, but now I'm going straight back to the source to show that Christianity has never had a role in the politics of this country. Politics brings out the worst in people, especially in Christians. I hope that this will be sufficient proof of the fact that Christianity and politics have never mixed - nor were they ever meant to.
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