USA is NOT a Christian nation and never was. It is a nation of diversity founded by those fleeing religious tyranny and the only country with a constitution against the combination of church and state. It was founded as a secular nation and its Founding Fathers intended to keep it that way. The United States of America is based on the notion that all man is created equal and stands for "freedom for all" despite one's race, wealth, or religion.
Pledge of Allegiance
"I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all."
That's the way it was originally written in 1892 and the way school children recited it for more than 60 years. The words "under God" were not added until 1954 during the McCarthy era when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy took advantage of the Red Scare to force his personal religious views on the USA. He convinced this nation that not being a Christian nation would cause us to suffer the problems of communistic Russia and thus conned the government into making the Pledge of Allegiance more Christian friendly. The Pledge of Allegiance has now been turned into a pledge against the allegiance of America and against what our Founding Fathers stood for.
In God We DON'T Trust
The motto "In God We Trust" did not appear on any U.S. currency until 80 years after the country's birth and 76 years after it was already forbidden in the Constitution of 1708. In 1863 the Christians took the first major step in destroying America's freedom by putting the motto on the back of Florida National Bank Notes. The first United States coin to bear the motto was the 1864 two-cent piece but U.S. dollar bills remained patriotic all the way up until the 1950's during the McCarthy era.
E Pluribus Unum
In 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution, the first Great Seal committee selected "E Pluribus Unum" as the official motto for the United States. Not until July 30th of 1956, once again during the unpatriotic McCarthy era, was the motto changed to "In God we trust" when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the resolution into law. Translated from Latin, our traditional motto means "From many, one." A handful of Americans mistakenly assume our founders chose the motto in reference to the biblical story of all life coming from one God. The motto actually refers to the integration of the 13 independent colonies into one united country. The words are also symbolic because if you notice they contain 13 letters.
Christians have been trying to overthrow the secular country in attempts to force thier religion and only thier religion on to the citzens that live here for quite some time. The first documented attempt regaurding US currency was in 1861 when Rev. M. R. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase a letter that read:
Dear Sir: You are about to submit your annual report to the Congress respecting the affairs of the national finances. One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins. You are probably a Christian. What if our Republic were not shattered beyond reconstruction? Would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation? What I propose is that instead of the goddess of liberty we shall have next inside the 13 stars a ring inscribed with the words PERPETUAL UNION; within the ring the allseeing eye, crowned with a halo; beneath this eye the American flag, bearing in its field stars equal to the number of the States united; in the folds of the bars the words GOD, LIBERTY, LAW. This would make a beautiful coin, to which no possible citizen could object. This would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism. This would place us openly under the Divine protection we have personally claimed. From my heart I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters.
The Founding Fathers
The Founding Fathers of the United States are the political leaders who signed the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution and set forth for a secular nation. Granted some of our founding fathers may have been Christians but most did not side with any religious party and were deists, meaning they believed in a god just not a personal one. All of them however did support the Separation of Church & State and intended for the USA to be a secular nation. They felt religion had no place in government and they also did not want people segregated nor rejected based on their religions or lack thereof. The fact that even the Founding Fathers who were Christians strongly wanted religion to be kept separate makes the decision even more powerful.
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, revolutionary, and radical intellectual from Britain that migrated to the American colonies just in time to take part in the American Revolution. He is well known for being the author of the powerful and widely-read pamphlet, Common Sense (1776) that advocated independence for the American Colonies from the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1793 later wrote a book called The Age of Reason that took issue with Christian doctrines. A passage from that book reads,
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled it would be more consisten that we call it the word of a demon rather than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind and for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel."
"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man."
"There is scarcely any part of science, or anything in nature, which those imposters and blasphemers of science, called priests, as well Christians as Jews, have not, at some time or other, perverted, or sought to pervert to the purpose of superstition and falsehood."
"Everything wonderful in appearance has been ascribed to angels, to devils, or to saints. Everything ancient has some legendary tale annexed to it. The common operations of nature have not escaped their practice of corrupting everything."
"The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind."
"The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense."
"Priests and conjurors are of the same trade."
"The Bible is a book that has been read more, and examined less, than any book that ever existed."
"As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of atheism -- a sort of religious denial of God. It professed to believe in man rather than in God. It is as near to atheism as twilight to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious or irreligious eclipse of the light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."
Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd President of the United States (1801–09), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers. Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment (reason as the primary basis of authority) and strongly favored the separation of church and state. He also wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786) of which Section 2 (which remains part of Virginia law, in Article 1, Section 16 of the Constitution of Virginia) declares that:
"...no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."
“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.” - a letter to Dr. Woods
“The Christian God can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, evil and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed, beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him. The are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.” - Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr
Jefferson calls the Christian God "a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust." - Letter too William Short Monticello, August 4, 1820
"We discover [in the gospels] a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication." - The Jefferson Bible
“Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.” - Notes on the State of Virginia, query 17 1784
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." - Letter to John Adams, from Monticello, April 11, 1823.
Benjamin Franklin is one of the best-known Founding Fathers and was a leading author, politician, printer, scientist, inventor, civic activist, and diplomat. All of us owe him thanks for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He also helped to make independence possible by securing the French alliance during the American Revolution. Franklin was a leader of the Enlightenment and his views on organized religion can be summed up in two of his quotes;
”Lighthouses are more helpful than churches”
“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”
"He (the Rev. Mr. Whitefield) used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard."
"In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it."
“Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands. They were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s Lecture. It happened that they produced on me an effect precisely the reverse of what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appealed to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself. In a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.”
John Adams was not only the first Vice President of the United States but also the second President (1797–1801). Adams supported the ethics that Christians pulled from their religion but rejected most Christian theology and has gone on record to state, ”This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!” During one of his speeches he quoted the Treaty of Tripoli and stated that the United States was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity."
"But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed."
"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion's Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years."
"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles."
“It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [formation of the American governments] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven...”
James Madison was the fourth President of the United States and is considered to be the "Father of the Constitution." Let's take the time to hear what he has to say about religion and Christianity...
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
"Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together"
George Washington led the American Continental Army to victory over Britain in the American Revolutionary War and was also elected the first President of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Washington did frequently accompany his wife to Christian church services but there is no record of him ever taking communion and he would regularly leave services before communion. Washington was a Freemason and portraits of him still exist in many Masonic temples. He was an early supporter of religious toleration, the condition of accepting or permitting others' religious beliefs and practices which disagree with one's own. He also supported freedom of religion, the freedom to not follow any religion or to not believe in any god (atheism). Washington felt that the expansion of reason and science was far more important than religious fundamentalism.
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their [not our?] religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society."
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The United States Constitution (1787) serves as the law of the land for the U.S. and displays the intent of our Founding Fathers, a secular government. Some will say it shows support of Christianity since it contains the words "of our Lord." At the end of the Constitution it records the year of its ratification by stating, "the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven." The mentioning of "our Lord" in the text does not suggest the country appeals to any particular supreme being but it merely conveys the English translation of the Latin, Anno Domini (AD) "in the Year of our Lord."
Treaty with Tripoli
The Treaty of Tripoli (the Treaty of Peace and Friendship) was a 1796 peace treaty between the United States and Tripoli. It was signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796 and at Algiers (for a third-party guarantee) on January 3, 1797 by Joel Barlow, the American consul to the Barbary States of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis. It was ratified by the United States on June 10, 1797.
Article 11"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
In an attempt to deny that this country was not founded on Christianity some have claimed that the original Arabic version of Article 11 was not an article at all but rather just a letter from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli. Nevertheless, the English version of Article 11 was recorded in the certified copy on January 4, 1797 and is contained in the version that was approved by President John Adams and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and ratified by the Senate.
Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence is the document which the Thirteen Colonies in North America declared themselves independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain and explained their justifications for doing so. It was ratified by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. This anniversary is celebrated as Independence Day in the United States.
Many Christian's who try to claim that The United States of America was founded upon Christianity usually use the Declaration of Independence as their "proof" because of the mentioning of a God and of a creator. One thing you must know first is that the Declaration of Independence was created before the establishment of our lawful government with the Constitution and does not represent the laws the Founding Fathers had for their country. Its sole purpose is to declare freedom from Britain and other restraints along with hopes for liberty and the pursuit of happiness no mater one's background or beliefs. It was not until the Constitution when they officially decided how this newly freed country should be ran. The mentioning of a god in the Declaration does not describe the specific personal god of Christianity (YHWH) and the majority of the Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson who held deist beliefs.
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." This passage talks of a "Creator" but does not imply a particular creator nor a god of a particular religion. It is merely a fancy way of saying we were all born with equal rights and are entitled the them as people no matter what. It does not try to claim who or what we were created from. Whether we were created by the Christian god, a four armed Elephant god, or by evolution (as we later discovered) we still came to be, and upon that creation of us we are entitled to certain rights as people no matter our differences.
This site contains content, topics or Bible verses that some may consider inappropriate for those under the age of 14. CONTEXT: All Bible references on this site are within their context and based upon the most accurate translations.