Steve Hochstadt: Defining a 'Christian Nation'
[Steve Hochstadt of Jacksonville is a professor of history at Illinois College. His column appears every Tuesday in the Journal-Courier and is available and on his blog at stevehochstadt.blogspot.com.]
Many Americans are saying that America should be a Christian nation. I wonder exactly what they mean.
Do they mean a Christian nation like the ones from which the Puritans and most of our early settlers fled? In those countries, the king was also the head of their state church. All citizens had to worship in the prescribed manner or face persecution, jail or even death. Our founders created a new nation without a king and without a state church, the first nation in which the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Do they mean a Christian nation like that demanded by the Ku Klux Klan during the decades when the Klan was a powerful force in American politics? Klansmen called themselves defenders of the Christian faith, but they meant only a narrow form of Protestantism, which used violence to exclude Catholics, Jews, blacks and other non-whites....
Read entire article at Jacksonville Journal-Courier
Many Americans are saying that America should be a Christian nation. I wonder exactly what they mean.
Do they mean a Christian nation like the ones from which the Puritans and most of our early settlers fled? In those countries, the king was also the head of their state church. All citizens had to worship in the prescribed manner or face persecution, jail or even death. Our founders created a new nation without a king and without a state church, the first nation in which the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Do they mean a Christian nation like that demanded by the Ku Klux Klan during the decades when the Klan was a powerful force in American politics? Klansmen called themselves defenders of the Christian faith, but they meant only a narrow form of Protestantism, which used violence to exclude Catholics, Jews, blacks and other non-whites....