America is a Christian nation. That’s an idea former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has harped on time and time again during his political career.
And while he didn’t explicitly talk about it today during his presidential announcement, it’s bound to pop up some time during his campaign.
That’s because most Republicans agree that America is a Christian nation. In fact, according to one recent survey,
57 percent of them actually want to establish Christianity as the official state religion of our Republic. That’s right - 57 percent of Republicans want to turn our democracy into a theocracy! Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave.
The idea that America is some sort of “Christian nation” is so out of whack with the both the history of this country and the enlightenment values that inspired its founding that it just boggles the mind.
Despite what Mike Huckabee would have you believe, most of the most influential people who created this country -- Founding Fathers like Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin -- were not devout Christians, and many were actively hostile to religion having any role whatsoever in public life. But the Founders didn’t just believe that America should be a secular nation, they actively worked to make it one.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, was the main force behind Virginia’s famous 1786 “Statute for Religious Freedom,” which ended the Church of England’s role as Virginia’s official state religion and guaranteed other faiths an equal footing under the law.
Jefferson was so proud of this law that he made it, along with the founding of the University of Virginia and writing the Declaration of Independence, one of the three accomplishments listed on his tombstone. He designed and wrote his own tombstone, and considered the Virginia Statute to be more important than that he was president for two terms - something he omitted from his tombstone.
Jefferson’s friend James Madison, although a Christian, also worked to keep America secular. In 1811 he vetoed a bill that would have authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor, because as he put it, doing so “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty."
The greatest Founding Father of them all, George Washington, was no friend to theocracy, either, and one of his landmark accomplishments as our nation’s first president was, in part, a rebuttal to the idea that America was a Christian nation.
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