RightOFLeft on November 18, 2008 at 3:26 PM

History does not support your statement.

Michael Medved (who, BTW, is Jewish) wrote in The Founders Intended A Christian, Not Secular, Society

John Marshall, the father of American Jurisprudence and for 34 epochal years (1801-35) the Chief Justice of the United States, wrote: “The American population is entirely Christian, and with us Christianity and Religion are identified. It would be strange indeed, if with such a people, our institutions did not presuppose Christianity, and did not often refer to it, and exhibit relations with it.” His colleague on the court (1796-1811), Justice Samuel Chase, delivered an opinion (Runkel v. Winemill) in 1799 declaring: “Religion is of general and public concern, and on its support depend, in great measure, the peace and good order of government, the safety and happiness of the people. By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion, and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.” These judicial opinions make clear that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment never constrained early judges from classifying the United States as an enthusiastically Christian society.

Medved goes on to note:

In fact, at the time of the first Continental Congress, nine of the thirteen original colonies had “established churches” – meaning that they each supported an official denomination, even to the point of using public money for church construction and maintenance. These religious establishments – clearly in contradiction to the idea of a “secular government” – continued in three states long after the adoption of the First Amendment. Connecticut disestablished its favored Congregational Church only in 1818, New Hampshire in 1819, and Massachusetts in 1833.

Amazingly enough, these established churches flourished for nearly fifty years under the constitution despite the First Amendment’s famous insistence that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Their existence reflected the fact that the founders never wanted to secularize all of government, but intended rather to allow the states to handle religious issues in their own way while avoiding the imposition of any single federal denomination on the diverse, often quarreling regions of the young nation.

INC on November 18, 2008 at 3:40 PM

Here’s something from Front Page Magazine:

# Every president of the United States has taken his oath of office on the Christian Bible. To emphasize the connection between our government and that book, our first president kissed the Bible after swearing to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

# The first Congress appropriated sums of money for Christian missionaries to American Indian tribes. After passing the First Amendment, it voted a salary for a Congressional chaplain. It wasn’t until the Civil War that a non-Christian gave an invocation at an opening a session of Congress.

# And, it wasn’t until the 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education that the U.S. Supreme Court got the barmy notion that the First Amendment erected a “a wall of separation between Church and state” – words not used in the Amendment, which speaks of an “establishment of religion.”

# Prior to that, Americans understood the First Amendment the way the Founders intended. Webster’s 1828 Dictionary (published less than 40 years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights) defines an “Establishment of Religion” as “an ecclesiastical authority, as in the Anglican Church in England.”

# Up to the era of creative jurisprudence, the First Amendment was never taken to exclude non-denominational school prayer, Bible reading in the classroom, “one nation under God,” “in God we trust,” public displays of the 10 Commandments, and creches in parks at Christmas, among other mild manifestations of our heritage.

INC on November 18, 2008 at 3:46 PM

You can argue and reach to try to make your points, but you can’t change history.

INC on November 18, 2008 at 4:04 PM

If you disagree with the Constitution, there’s a process for it to be amended. You cannot, however, state that the Founders’ words meant one thing, when in fact that was not their intent.

They were not perfect men, but their intellect and integrity and desire to hammer out a “more perfect union” are in stark contrast to the thinking of many today.

INC on November 18, 2008 at 4:17 PM

LimeyGeek on November 18, 2008 at 4:13 PM

Prayer went on in public and private schools until the 1970’s. Schools used to be primarily locally run with state supervision. There was no national education department until Carter was elected in 1976 and it was payback to the NEA for their help in electing him.

INC on November 18, 2008 at 4:19 PM