re: Why America was founded as a Christian nation

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America was founded on Judeo-Christian values by men who believed in freedom of religion.

Many of the founding fathers believed in a higher power/God but weren't necessarily "Christian"

Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Franklin
James Madison
John Adams
Thomas Paine

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Marciano1

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said Deism without saying Deism.

The ignorant will claim that it wasn’t based off a few vague references to Jefferson and Franklin

Freedom of religion is still freedom of religion

I didn’t know that all 13 colonies required a declaration of faith, but I do know that the Constitution rejected that approach in the Religious Rest Clause:

“no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

In my view, it’s more accurate to say that the US was founded by people who were mostly (but not all) Christian, all of whom were products of the Western intellectual tradition, which is shot through with Christian concepts. The founders did not, however, establish the US as a Christian nation, and they made this explicit in the First Amendment.

Our experiment of self-rule through our representative government is a direct result of the Enlightenment. And it was the Enlightenment that finally allowed mankind to throw off the shackles of religion and to live in a world of reason. For too long we had been bound by them, but were finally free to think for and govern ourselves.

Thank God for the Enlightenment.

Judeo-Christian

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Well, if it was, it's not anymore. Christianity in the western sense is slowly shrinking.

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False, it is on the rise. Gen Z is slowly waking up to realize they will have to restore the Republic.

The Constitution leaves out the words God, Jesus or Christianity.
This was intentional. Madison was pressured by religious leaders at the time to specifically include Jesus and Christianity in the Constitution.

It’s hard to imagine now, but Madison leaving religion out of the Constitution was considered radical at the time.

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Just wanted to get in before the first "the founders were Deists!" post.

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Thomas Jefferson definitely was more in the deist camp and even wrote his own version of the New Testament that was essentially the teaching of Jesus without the miracles or focus on his true nature. However, Jefferson was certainly an outlier with a leaning toward European philosophy. I do think deism was more common in the late colonial up to 2nd Great Awakening but I imagine these more deist leaning people were still calling themselves Christian.

This is just my own amateur history/psychology/theology thought here so take it with a grain of salt. I think the rise of deism in this period was partly due to early Protestant theology like Calvinism being a bit ill-suited for psychological health. I think that is why Arminianism ended up becoming the dominant overarching structure for Christian faith. A faith that holds that the grace of God is regenerative, everlasting, but resistible leaves room for choosing to be redeemed. Whereas traditional Calvinism leads to an almost neurotic obsession with evaluating whether your character on the balance proves you are saved.

Does that describe any of our founding fathers? I'd have to become a historian and spend the rest of my life reading their saved correspondence and try to piece it together or find someone else with reputation who has already done it. I think calling them Christian is still fair because I don't think any of them would have identified otherwise if asked. What was truly in their heart? Hell, you don't know that with people who tell you they are Christian today.

That’s right let’s not forget the Jews, They have contributed more than any other religion outside the Christians from blood to medicine and monetary wealth for our great Nation.

Antifas
BLM
Trannies
Social democrats

Not so much…