Leaving Religion Out Of Government, Like America's Founders

THE GREAT AMERICAN culture war rages on, centered around and symbolized by a simple question, ostensibly answerable: "Is America a Christian nation"? In 1797 the United States Senate voted unanimously that the government of the U.S.A. is not Christian, nor any other religion. President John Adams signed it into law, where it remains today. As Casey Stengel used to say: "you could look it up." So that settles that. Similarly, few if any of our so called "founding fathers" were Christians; they were, for the most part, deists. They were people who, for the most part, were highly fearful of combining religion and politics, very scientific, and very disdainful of superstition and religion, which they tended to regard as superstition. Thus, the United States was not founded on Judeo- Christian principles, nor is it, officially or legally, a Christian nation. It simply happens to be a nation in which a large percentage of the population, currently about seventy three percent and dropping rapidly, self identifies as "Christian". You conservative right wing Christian republicans out there, and you know who you are, are both glad and fortunate that you are wrong every time you claim America is a Christian country, even though you may not know how fortunate you are. Consider; what is officially christian today can be officially something else, who knows what else, tomorrow, officially. Best that it be officially nothing, officially secular, and leave it at that, right? Not that there's anything wrong with the Christian faith, or any other. But governing a nation effectively is not a religious activity, it is a political, economic, and scientific one. When the Christian faith dwindles to a few million american members, as it will inevitably, you'll learn what it feels like to be a true minority, and at that point, you'll be yelling for "minority rights", just as the atheists and gay people do now. Why not simply call it even, my fellow Christian evangelist types, accept the verdict of our founder - fathers, and leave religion out of the American system of government, public schools and all? That way, when the atheists and deists take over, you'll have a sound legal argument to fall back on.