Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Most Americans, including Senator John McCain, believe that that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Jon Meacham does a good job of demonstrating the inaccuracy of this notion. But when he writes that the “founding principle of the nation” was that “all men are created equal,” he fails to mention the obvious fact that men like Washington and Jefferson, who eloquently defended the separation of religion and state, did not really believe that “all men are created equal.” This famous phrase appears in the Declaration of Independence, the original draft of which Jefferson wrote in June of 1776. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other members of the Continental Congress made some changes to Jefferson’s draft before it was finally approved on July 4. In the list of the offenses of the British king listed in this text, we find the sentence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Jefferson and his colleagues had no trouble understanding the grievances of the European colonists vis-à-vis the British, but they were incapable of understanding the grievances of the “Indian Savages” who were defending themselves against foreign colonists who were taking their land. When he was president, Jefferson wrote Secretary of War Henry Dearborn on August 28, 1807 that “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Missisipi [sic].” In a later letter to John Adams, dated June 11, 1812, Jefferson wrote that despite the progress of some “Indian Nations,” many “will relapse into barbarism & misery, lose numbers by war & want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains.” As for Jefferson’s slaves, he obviously did not see them as equal to white men. He also obviously did not view women as the equals of men. (Women did not gain the right to vote until the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920.) So when Jefferson and his peers declared that “all men are created equal,” they meant that all white males are created equal. Like most people, they shared most of the biases that prevailed in the society in which they were immersed. There were some things they simply could not see.

Meacham, A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation - New York Times, October 7, 2007

The only acknowledgment of religion in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith….

Thomas Jefferson said that his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination.” When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city’s clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time) - a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., saying, “happily the government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. … Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a “Christian party in politics.” Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed “Christian amendment” to the Constitution to declare the nation’s fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.

The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation - that all men are created equal - in the divine.