Fisking Clayton Cramer (or why this nation was not founded on Christianity):

Yes, well, Mr. Cramer rather has his hands full being repeatedly Fisked in the blogsphere—but, let me point out that Ed Brayton has replied to Cramer’s post, where he attacks me and Brayton for daring to claim that the United States was founded on secular principles, and that many of the quotes by our founding fathers demonstrating otherwise are simply false. And Brayton gives Cramer the Fisking that he deserves. Cramer trotted out various state constitutions, all written before the US Constitution was ratified, and all of them basically establishing some form of Christianity as the official religion of the state, requiring religious tests for public office, etc., or otherwise integrating Church & State in a myriad of ways.

Brayton explains why all of this does not prove that the United States was originally conceived of as a “Christian Nation,” meaning one whose public institutions and principles, are “founded on Biblical Christianity,” or one that otherwise was “publicly” (government) as opposed to “privately” (culture) Christian:

Something obviously changed between 1777, when the Continental Congress finished writing the Articles of Confederation, and 1787, when they wrote the Constitution. What was it? Well for one thing, a powerful movement for disestablishment of state churches had begun, fueled largely by events in Virginia in 1785-1786. The Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, written by Jefferson and pushed through by Madison while Jefferson was serving as our ambassador to France, was an enormous victory for the forces of church/state separation, and Madison's powerful defense of disestablishment and separation, his Memorial and Remonstrance, was widely distributed among the several states thereafter. The first amendment's religion clauses, which established the principle of separation at the federal level, were modeled directly on the ideas found in that bill. With the passage of the Bill of Rights, the movement to disestablishment grew stronger, and by 1833, all of the original 13 states had done away with their official religious establishments, though some vestiges of that earlier era can still be found in unenforced and unenforcible language in some constitutions.

For some reason, Cramer seems to want to freeze frame a time period before the passage of the US constitution, which was an enormous sea change in the relationship of state and church in a thousand ways, and pretend that documents from that time show the conception of the constitution more accurately than the constitution itself. And remember, the advocates of establishment greeted the constitution with howls of opposition, calling it a godless document that would bring down the wrath of God upon us all. Clearly, this was a major change from the conceptions of government found in earlier documents, not only around the world but within the states themselves as well.

Let me point out that every single state constitution that Cramer refers to as requiring declarations of belief in the Christian religion to hold public office, or otherwise integrating Church & State in various ways, violated—according to the views of Jefferson, Madison and others—the inalienable right of “liberty of conscience,” as much as slavery violated the equal rights of black persons. When we declared our Independence in 1776 by appealing to “inalienable rights” of life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness, the right to “conscience” was arguably the most important specific right contained within the general inalienable right to liberty that our framers were concerned with. Those state constitutions that Cramer refers to were as anathema to our founding principles as was slavery. Those state constitutions, in many ways, represented the “old” traditions of the West, as did slavery, serfdom, & divine rule of Kings. The principles espoused in the Declaration, in many ways, represented a radical break with tradition. And as with slavery and those other things that I mentioned, those state establishments of religion had to go. It was a matter of when, not if. And, as Brayton points out, within a relatively short period of time (1833), they all did.