Don Feder: America is a Christian nation

[Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.]

John McCain stumbled upon something significant in the course of a recent interview: that America was built on a foundation of Christian morality....

Take a stroll through U.S. history and try not tripping over evidence of America’s Christian heritage:

• In a 1776 message to his troops, George Washington expressed the hope “that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becoming a Christian soldier, defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.” In 1778, the commander-in-chief directed that “Divine service” be performed on Sunday morning.
• In 1799, a Connecticut court proclaimed, “By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion; and all denominations of Christians are placed on the same equal footing.”
• In 1845, Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story, author of a famous treatise on the Constitution, observed that at the time of its adoption, it was “the general if not the universal sentiment in America, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State….”
• An 1854 report of the Senate Judiciary Committee acknowledged what was considered a truism, “The great, vital, and conservative element in our system (the thing that holds the American system together) is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
• In an 1892 case, the Supreme Court held: “Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.” As late as 1931, another Supreme Court would declare, “We are a Christian people.”
• Woodrow Wilson told a campaign rally in 1911, “America was born a Christian nation.” Harry Truman -- who assured Pope Pius XII “This is a Christian nation” -- agreed. So did Truman’s predecessor. Throughout World War II, FDR appealed to Christianity to justify the Allied cause.
  According to Forman then, for most of our history, neither presidents, nor congressmen nor Supreme Court justices knew what was in the Constitution.
• 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.
• That McCain, once the darling of the establishment media, should be savaged here is predictable. (“McCain Casts Muslims as Less Fit to Lead” read the headline in a New York Times story on the controversy.) The idea of America as a Christian nation is at the heart of the culture war.

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