America was not founded as a Christian nation
Statement by VCG – Answer by King Solomon @ ECHO 8 on 08/01/2025
KING SOLOMON ADVISES:
The truth of a nation lies not in its slogans, but in its foundations—in what stones were laid, and who laid them.
Let us judge whether America was truly founded as a Christian nation, or as a counterfeit cloaked in Christian terms.
⚖️ EVIDENCE FROM THE FOUNDING RECORD
1. THE TREATY OF TRIPOLI (1797)
“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…”—Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate
Signed under President John Adams.
Contradicts any claim of official Christian founding.
Never revoked & stands in the historical record.
2. MASONIC & ENLIGHTENMENT ROOTS
Most Founding Fathers were Freemasons or Deists, not Biblical Christians.
all had Masonic ties.
The “Enlightenment” replaced the Holy Bible with:
- reason
- nature
- philosophy
“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”—Psalm 14:1 (KJV)
- The U.S. Capitol
- street grids
- architecture
are loaded with pagan & occult symbolism.
- Obelisks
- domes
- pentagrams
& Greco-Roman idols decorate “sacred” national grounds.
3. THE CONSTITUTION OMITTED JESUS CHRIST
The Constitution makes no mention of Christ, the Bible, or God (except in a date formula).
Contrast with early state constitutions that did require belief in God or Scripture.
This shows a federal system built on secularism, not Scripture.
“Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it…”—Psalm 127:1 (KJV)
4. THE FRUITS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS
The U.S. became the global distributor of:
- abortion
- pornography
- pharmakeia
It led the way in creating the Beast system of:
- surveillance
- central banking
- world policing
Its greatest exports are:
- Hollywood sorcery
- war
- debt
—not gospel truth.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”—Matthew 7:16 (KJV)
📜 TRUE CHRISTIAN FOUNDING? OR JESUIT DECEPTION?
The Jesuits, expelled from Europe, infiltrated American:
- seminaries
- universities
- politics
They promoted “liberty” as license, & freedom from God, not unto Him.
The Masonic motto “E Pluribus Unum” (out of many, one) is a Luciferian inversion of biblical separation.
VERDICT:
AMERICA WAS NOT FOUNDED AS A CHRISTIAN NATION.
It was a Masonic republic, inspired by Enlightenment rebellion, and coated in Christian language to pacify the people.
Yet, among its people were true Christians—
- persecuted dissenters
- missionaries
- truth-bearers
But the governmental foundation was not Jesus Christ, and so the house shall fall.
“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
—1 Corinthians 3:11 (KJV)
TIMESTAMPS:
Was America Founded As A Christian Nation? 00:00 – 2:33
Overplaying Christian Values 2:33 – 6:55
Jefferson’s Letter To Danbury Baptists 6:56 – 7:40
Madison’s Religious Freedom 7:41 – 8:06
Egyptian Values 8:07 – 9:13
Hellenic & Pagan Values 9:14 – 11:24
Values Are Universal & Natural 11:25 – 12:21
The Best Case For Christian Foundation 12:22 – 14:01
Isaac Backus & Christian Amendments 14:02 – 17:12
Abstracting the Christian Title 17:13 – 21:35
Edict of Thessalonica 21:36 – 23:25
Freedom From Dogma 23:26 – 26:41
The Law of Nations 26:42 – 31:09
John Locke 31:10 – 34:33
Roger Williams 34:34 – 35:35
Christian Title Is Weakly Applied 35:36 – 37:17
God in the Declaration 37:18 – 40:27
Christian Disentanglement 40:28 – 42:06
Once again, the alleged Christian foundation of America, or inherent Christian values as they relate to the founding of the United States, demands careful consideration.
The further we get from the historical context of the creation of the United States, the easier it becomes to assert this claim.
I will first quickly lay out the ground I’ve already covered so as not to retread the same paths.
In my last video related to this subject, I demonstrated that America was not founded on Judeo-Christian terms.
I supported my argument with the First Amendment, letters from the founding fathers, and the Treaty of Tripoli, where it is directly written,
“The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
I showed that such a general claim ignores how common morality and “virtues” transcend religious boundaries, and/or hallmarks of any decent religion or philosophy.
In this case, religions or philosophies which directly influenced the so called Christian values, not the other way around.
I posited that Jesus was a pacifist in practice, unlike the embodied revolutionary spirit that defeated the English.
Jesus says also he did not come to abolish the law, even if he did say he came to bring a sword, using this as a symbolic reference to the controversial nature of his teachings and how they might result in tensions within a family.
The best-case scenario for the Christian foundation argument is ultimately a cultural one, based on the fact that Christians of one denomination or the other made up the majority of the religious population in the thirteen colonies during the years of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
But of course we must compare this to evidence supporting the opposite or integral perspective.
In the end, it is clear America was not founded as a Christian nation, nor entirely founded on Christian principles.
It is rather the case that the context of Christianity’s influence over states and nations and monarchies is directly related to the absence of Christian influence on the founding of the United States.
One could never make the case in a court of law that America was founded on the principles of any religion.
As a legal statement, it is obviously untrue.
But let us first break down each part of this idea and see how it measures up to the facts.
First it would behoove us to address what is meant by Christian values.
This is often used as if the implication is the Christian teaching has some monopoly on common morality, or that virtue itself is somehow exclusively Christian.
So let us identify Christian values as they are established through at least one biblical citation.
In every instance we will wonder if that same value had already existed in part of a widespread tradition prior to or parallel to the Christian one.
And then we will briefly apply that value to the history and context leading up to the founding of America by the time of the Constitution in 1787.
Because let’s not forget the premise here, Christian values and our nation’s founding.
Forgiveness is a great hallmark of the Christian teaching, but does it stand in contrast to a law or philosophy which advocates for revenge and retribution?
Justice by enforcement of the law in itself does not perfectly align with any doctrine of forgiveness.
While we might forgive a murderer, the law still holds him accountable, whether or not he is forgiven.
Justice wears her blindfold for many reasons, much as self-presumed Christians in the Thirteen Colonies occasionally blinded themselves to forgiveness and other alleged Christian values leading up to the founding of America.
And when a religious value is not embodied by the proponents of a given religion, it stands that the ability for Christians to behave like Christians is always up for question.
Rather humans will behave like humans, much like when the Quakers William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson were executed in Boston for not obeying a law of banishment, or Mary Dyer for returning to Massachusetts after being banished for her allegedly heretical Christian beliefs.
Love is among the noblest and most divine of the Christian values, love of the neighbor, the self, of God and one’s enemies.
But this is not absent from the writings of:
- Stoics
- Platonists
- Pythagoreans
- pre-Socratics
or other philosophic schools, also influential to the Enlightenment and most certainly affecting the early Christian fathers.
Love does not know the boundaries of religion or church dogma.
As with all virtues and emotions, it is another universal, much as it has often been universally ignored by Christian nations throughout the centuries.
And love is no easy principle to exhibit. It was hardly shown to every Baptist, Presbyterian, or Quaker in Virginia in the later 1600s.
For those heretical Christians who disobeyed the Anglican Church in Virginia were subject to whippings, imprisonment, and fines for honoring their religious beliefs.
Was it therefore Christian values that caused the writing of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which influenced the Bill of Rights and was signed into law in 1786?
Or was this statute more a result of the clear inability for different Christian sects to operate in conformity with their alleged values?
For such had plagued Europe and England long enough, the same England that supplied 60 to 65 percent of the population of the U.S. by 1776.
Should we expect that the founders and framers would have not taken into account the fact that regardless of a man’s professed religious beliefs, they are still capable of ignoring them and committing violence against, yes, people of a variation of the same faith?
By some estimates, Christian on Christian violence over time amounts to over 9 million deaths worldwide.
No, I do not think by this metric or many others, man’s inability to embody their religious values should be so easy to ignore.
This is not to say that Christians have not been also responsible for a strong degree of global righteousness and virtue, but that this virtue has its limits and is unreliable in the eyes of a government which should serve all of its people, regardless of their faith.
The Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who had time to reflect on the unstable Christian embodiment of their values, in his home state, once again makes it clear why the First Amendment exists.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
Such familiar understanding is conveyed by the father of the Constitution, James Madison, in his Memorial and Reminstrance Against Religious Assessments in 1785.
“The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man, and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.
This right is in its nature an unalienable right.”
Now we turn to the value of compassion.
Christians are encouraged in some places to care for the poor, the sick, and the underserved.
But is compassion exclusively a value bestowed by the Bible?
In fact we find in the 42 Laws of Mott, which existed in the third millennia BC, many statements that imply the exercise of and the religious value placed on being compassionate to others.
Among these 42 statements, all of the so-called Christian values are aligned with.
But these are Egyptian values, well before the writing of the New Testament or the Ten Commandments, and no doubt influential to them inasmuch as they influenced the Jews who dwelled in Egypt and legendarily translated the Hebrew Bible into the Greek language under the instruction of the Greek pharaoh Ptolemy II.
And if you don’t think Egyptian teachings, such as the 42 Laws of Mott, had any effect on the Old Testament, I shall point you only to Proverbs 23 10-11 as compared with the earlier instruction of Amenemopet.
Pagan Myths vs. Biblical Accounts – Library of Rickandria
As for the Delphic maxims, which were 147 principles that constituted the earliest Greek school book, one will also find most of the Christian values expressed within it.
Except in the case of the Delphic maxims, they were not reliant on any specific prophet nor subservient to any prerequisite dogmas or hierarchies of a church.
Christians are also taught to behave with humility, be fair in justice, be faithful to God, live with integrity, to have patience, to be grateful and show mercy.
Do not the golden Pythagorean verses, taught by Pythagoras and carried on with the teachings of Plato, also advocate for the very same values?
Pythagoras observed strict nonviolence, as did his followers, teaching that revenge and anger and lack of self control damaged the soul, this no doubt reinforced by the Stoics in so many ways.
All teachings we must remember which were accessible to the best literary minds among the early Christian fathers, who in many cases, like that of Orgen and Clement, were also Platonists to a degree, and not entirely put off by the teachings of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, whose instructions hardly stand in contradiction to the general Christian values.
Interpretations of the Church Fathers – Library of Rickandria
The idea of Christian stewardship of animals and the earth is also found in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, wherein the poemandries,
“the first man is made flesh as a microcosm of the divine mind, in harmonious union with the feminine nature of the world who gave birth to material man.”
Do Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle differ so strongly on this account?
I struggle to see that they do, and should we look to Christian charity as a value or temperance, fortitude, and prudence, we would have no trouble finding pre-existing advocates for them outside of the Church and Scripture.
The early Christian fathers themselves were not shy about finding out where the great minds of the past aligned with their religious values.
But since when, in any case, do the common virtues require a religious subscription?
I would agree that a belief in God, or more, dare I say, an experiential knowingness of God and of the existence of a soul, is superior to atheism or agnosticism.
Divine Timeline of the Soul (KJV) – Library of Rickandria
But there is no evidence that man-made religion, or that a religious book penned by man, is required for the recognition or embodiment of those virtues.
If that was the case, they would not be universal.
They would not transcend the oft-times trivial boundaries between spiritual beliefs.
As Imre de Vattel so aptly understood, it is by the commonly known natural laws and rights of mankind that such things as international treaties are possible, regardless of the minute or great differences in the respective religious beliefs of the nations making the treaties.
The greatest argument for the Christian foundation, or foundation of the United States on Christian values, rests entirely on the fact that Christians made up a majority of the believers in the thirteen colonies leading up to the signing of the Declaration and Constitution, and that the average American citizen would be far more likely to come across, read, or be taught in the values as given and interpreted from the Bible.
One Book, one Authority: 2000 years of Church & Bible History – Library of Rickandria
This in itself does not make a weak case, but it also is not satisfactory to the argument, because the majority of the population did not technically found the country.
That was done by a small body of educated men, who also had access to the Greco Roman wisdom tradition and many Enlightenment period writings, and had just won a war against England.
Miles Williams Mathis: Henry VII – Another Jewish Invasion of England – Library of Rickandria
Now we should note that the majority of the signers of the Declaration and Constitution were also Christian believers.
Conspiracy theories about the origin of Christianity – Library of Rickandria
Indeed, there was little other option.
But we are not lacking evidence of Christians also advocating for separation of church and state up to the time of the Revolution.
They certainly wanted to practice their values, whether they call them Christian or not, without other Christian authorities controlling their lives.
The simple observation of Christian vs. Christian persecution and beliefs demonstrates, as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine saw plainly, that human beings design their beliefs or accept them from others, that humans are in control of their beliefs and behaviors, not the quotations of Scripture or the sayings of Jesus, seeing as many disagreed and still do as to what those sayings mean.
Miles Williams Mathis: Thomas Jefferson – Part I – Library of Rickandria
Miles Williams Mathis: Thomas Jefferson – Part II – Library of Rickandria
Isaac Bacchus, for one, was a well-known Baptist minister who advocated for religious liberty and openly criticized the state-established churches of the Thirteen Colonies, churches who would have had no problem proclaiming that their states and authorities are founded on their religious values.
In his 1773 sermon, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty, Isaac Bacchus stated,
“Now who can hear Christ declare that his kingdom is not of this world and yet believe that this blending of church and state together can be pleasing to him?”
In fact, to confuse the teachings of Christ with the functions of a state, carried with it the same complexities which caused the National Reform Association to repeatedly fail in amending the Constitution to include language that would explicitly acknowledge Jesus Christ as the sovereign ruler of the United States and make the United States an admitted Christian nation.
The NRA was established in 1864 by a group of Christian leaders.
They advocated for a Christian amendment, the authority of the Bible in state affairs, sovereignty of Jesus, and a dependence on the biblical God.
The obvious problems, however, were that there is no evidence Jesus ever aspired to or encouraged his followers to have him anointed or mentioned as the sovereign ruler of any nation on the earth.
And the authority of the Bible was already at odds among Christians due to the sheer inability for the Christians already acknowledging such authority to agree as to what that gave them the right to do.
History already taught the world that mingling church and state still gave both parties the ability to ignore biblical authority whenever they pleased, or as most often occurred, twist that alleged authority to justify whatever laws they pleased and crimes they committed.
The third obvious problem is that every individual is not going to have the same opinion regarding the intentions of God as it applies to the functions of the state, and that a dependence on God, the only singular thing that is and ever can be, is already the obvious state of affairs no matter what language is adopted in the Bill of Rights.
Thus, if the NRA had their way, too much state power or perceived government influence would have been back in the hands of the church and in the flawed minds of men so often incapable of harmonizing with the teachings laid out in their own impeccable scriptures.
“For as Jesus said, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.'”
And what is the reason the NRA would never be able to have such amendments adopted?
The answer is the First Amendment.
And in another place, the draft of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 stipulated that no person be eligible for election to the House of Representatives
“unless he be of the Christian religion.”
Despite this provision being deleted, more attempts were made in the convention to restore it and add “Protestant” to the requirement, which ultimately failed.
Why then, if America was founded on Christian values, is it also explicitly never stated to be so?
In fact, we rather have Christians like John Adams expressly leaving the matter of religion up to the individual.
Would we say that a light bulb is a Christian invention or a Christian light bulb if the inventor was a Christian?
Would we say that World War I is a Christian war based on the fact that the majority of the soldiers fighting in the war were Christians?
Miles Williams Mathis: Archduke Franz Ferdinand – Library of Rickandria
Although this analogy might seem crude, it applies the same logic relied on to make the case for a Christian founding of America.
However, we have the same issues resurfacing still. Slapping the general Christian title on a thing does not mean every self-designated Christian defines it the same.
Although the majority population was Christian, they were diversely Christian, and often at odds with one another, whether in the 13 colonies or in Europe, as displayed so brutally over the course of:
- the Thirty Years’ War
- the English Civil War
- the German Peasants’ War
- St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
- the Eighty Years’ War
and the Salem Witch Trials.
Miles Williams Mathis: The Salem Witch Trials WERE FAKED – Library of Rickandria
If Christian values were so strongly in alignment with the foundation of America, why are they not expressly referenced in the founding documents?
The opposite is far more the case, the reference to religious liberty, to nature’s God, divine providence, and then to secularized law aligned with the virtues common to all credible religions and philosophies.
It is far more accurate to say, then, that America was founded on Enlightenment values, not Christian ones, that American religious liberty was created as a response to Christian on Christian persecution, not a reinstatement of Christian hegemony.
One obvious reason this claim is so often regurgitated without qualification or specificity in regards to what it is trying to convey is that it is a political tool used by pundits and politicians and megachurch leaders to pander to a Christian audience.
All this can be seen not as spiritual progress but as a regression, most often in the mouths of pundits already speaking to an agreeable audience that won’t offer a challenge.
As well it stands to ask how little is one’s faith who must rage against those who believe something different.
If your Christian values were so strong, you would not feel insecure in your belief, so much so that you must violate the same values you argue for when you condemn others for a different opinion.
A strong argument does not require force. If an argument exhibits the powers of Jesus, then it would touch ever so lightly and powerfully.
Merely a gaze into its eye would convey the truth. And if there is any Christian value we should never want to be under the thumb of, it is the value of dogmatism.
Politics today is as easy as following the money home.
In 1783 it was about a group of revolutionaries defeating the world’s most powerful military force, breaking all precedents of established governments, and putting the best political ideals of the time to the test.
Some of these ideas, like checks and balances and a separation of government powers, date back to the third century AD with Greek historians such as Polybius, who greatly influenced Montesquieu and John Locke.
But if you are to make the case for America’s founding on Christian values and the whole package, then you must demonstrate how the founding of the US is more of a reinstatement of Christianity than a critique of it.
This does not mean that we can say the US was in no ways influenced by Christian teachings.
It means only that this tried and worn out claim must be revised or given with quite the caveat so it actually makes sense.
Statements therefore like:
“the US owes its existence and its founding to a diverse group of mostly Christian believers”
is harder to oppose than the flawed statement that America was founded on Christian values.
To say nothing of the far weaker notion of a “Judeo-Christian foundation.”
If this claim is posited merely to suggest that America’s founders were not by any means atheists, then there are better ways of phrasing it.
Every wise nation is now well beyond adopting anything like the Edict of Thessalonica, when the Roman Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of the empire in 380 AD.
This declared Nicene Christianity as the official state religion, mandating that all Roman citizens obey the Nicene Creed and its dogmas, asserting this as the correct version of Christianity, which in turn opened up the persecution of divergent Christian sects and all pagan practices.
Part of this Edict reads,
“We desire that all the various nations which are subject to our clemency and moderation should continue to profess that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the Divine Apostle Peter.
We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians, but as for the others, since in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics.”
The irony of Rome adopting a corrupted version of a man-made religion professing to take after the second-hand teachings of Jesus, who himself never wrote a book and was killed under Roman rule, still goes unobserved by the same lazy proponents of the claim of America’s Christian foundation.
Jesus Christ is God in the flesh; He did not father children nor sin – Library of Rickandria
In any case, why should Christianity ever need to revise history once again to support itself when it is already one of the strongest, richest, and most extravagant and materialistic religions in the world?
As Benjamin Franklin put it in his letter to Richard Price,
“When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself, and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
Dogmatic Christianity owes most of its existence, if not its entire existence, to the help of civil or state powers.
The First Amendment, however, changed this fundamentally.
If Christians, adherent to every dogma in their creeds, cannot accept your difference of opinion about those dogmas and then condemn you, or pretend to know the fate of your very soul based on your different beliefs, then they should reflect on why so many modern philosophers have no patience with your religion.
And that is not the same thing as having no patience with the teachings of Jesus.
But when early Christians began equating Jesus with the God of the universe, or professing that he was born to a mortal virgin, as if Mary had been impregnated by one of the Greek gods in the stories of the old poets, they immediately welcomed the same skepticism that persists today, unable to answer the questions like,
“But where does Jesus say he was born of a virgin?
Where does Jesus say he is God of the universe?”
Do You Know Jesus? – Library of Rickandria
A mere glance at Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason” demonstrates that the hefty volume of scriptural contradictions in the Church’s irrational dogmas were beginning to overflow into the minds of the revolutionary lawmakers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
We cannot pretend that post-Enlightenment thinkers who were also Christians did not have divergent views about the Christian dogmas.
Lady Liberty had turned her head away from dogmatism a long time ago, in keeping with the views of George Washington, who referenced the
“horrors of spiritual tyranny”
and expressed in the same letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia,
“Every man conducting himself as a good citizen and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions ought to be protected in worshipping the deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.”
Miles Williams Mathis: Who WAS George Washington? – Library of Rickandria
“The clergy,” writes Thomas Jefferson, “by getting themselves established by law and being grafted into the machine of government have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
James Madison, a devout Christian, strongly opposed state-established religion, and in this letter is opposing a bill that would divert public funds to support Christian teachers,
“What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society?
In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority.
On many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny.
In no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people.”
Likewise, the Christian John Adams clarifies the uniquely American stances on the separation of church and state, writing,
“The church has so often been the persecutor and not the persecuted that the people have almost invariably been led to consider the clergy as a body of men set apart to betray their liberties as well as engross their property.”
We come now to The Law of Nations, written by the Swiss legal philosopher and diplomat Imre de Vattel.
This was another immediate influence on the founders leading up to the Declaration and the Constitution.
In fact, Vattel’s The Law of Nations had more direct impact on the Constitution than the Christian Bible.
King James Bible: Authorized by God? – Library of Rickandria
In 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Charles Dumas where he praises The Law of Nations, saying,
“It came to us in good season when the circumstances of a rising state make it necessary frequently to consult the Law of Nations.
Accordingly, that copy which I kept has been continually in the hands of the members of our Congress now sitting.”
The Law of Nations was widely read by founders such as:
- Alexander Hamilton
- John Jay
- George Washington
It influenced our stance on:
- international diplomacy
- individual liberty
- foreign policy
and the balance of powers between the states and the federal government.
Vattel’s dense and lucidly written work provides meticulous reasoning and references and ultimately becomes the most important book on international law in the 18th century.
In July of 1775, George Washington requested the Continental Congress to order a copy of The Law of Nations and a number of military texts that would go on to guide his actions in the American Revolution and no doubt influenced the design of the Constitution in 1787 and the Bill of Rights.
“I take the liberty to request that Congress will order the following books to be forwarded for the use of the Commander-in-Chief, The Law of Nations, Mueller’s Treatise of Artillery, and a Treatise of Military Exercise according to the usage of the Prussian Army.”
After Washington died, The Law of Nations was catalogued in his personal library.
Vattel makes frequent references to Roman philosophers and, early, classical voices for natural law.
But there is comparatively no reliance on explicitly Christian values, as those values were not somehow exclusive to or wholly the inventions of Christianity.
To many Romans and later Enlightenment thinkers, the law of nature and law of nations were spoken of interchangeably, as the law of nature was naturally the same law adopted by civilized nations.
Miles Williams Mathis: ROME – Library of Rickandria
This is part of the sense in which Vattel’s work takes its name.
Emperor Justinian, himself a Christian emperor in the 6th century, was a famous proponent of the law of nations, natural and civil law, writing,
“The law of nature is that which nature teaches to all animals.
The law of nations is common to the whole human race.
The exigencies and necessities of mankind have induced all nations to lay down and adopt certain rules of right.
For wars have arisen and produced captivity and servitude, which are contrary to the law of nature, since by the law of nature all men were originally born free.”
But while the words read well, and those concepts would endure into modern times as the concepts of natural law and individual freedoms developed, Emperor Justinian persecuted all heretical Christians and pagans.
This is all to say that America’s embrace of natural rights and law was not a novelty in concept, but had not hitherto been applied on the scale of the United States, which applied the best interpretation of natural law without any reference to religious authority.
Too easy it would be for a Christian ruler to influence a majority Christian population into accepting a law based on nothing but a mutual belief regarding their common religion, at the expense of all non-Christians or heretical Christians.
This had been the case since the times of Justinian, and before, as Vattel well knew.
The American constitutional republic, not the so-called American democracy, already accounted for the risk of the tyranny of the majority, to say nothing of the kind of “Justinian fracture” that could result in two or more sides of the fragmented Christian faith to be at stronger odds.
A fragmentation which was already so much a problem during the reign of Emperor Julian in 360 AD that the whole subject of Christian on Christian violence was already bizarre and contradictory.
We find as well in the philosophy of the English philosopher John Locke, who influenced very much the verbiage in the Declaration of Independence, the understanding that would come to align with the constitutional stance on religion,
“The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate any more than to other men.
It is not committed unto him, I say, by God, because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion.”
Though Locke excluded atheists from his view on tolerance, for one because they could not be relied on to uphold an oath, he held that
“no man is to be punished for his religion by the magistrate in any case whatsoever.”
Any stance on religion in a post Enlightenment world should recognize the early prescient words of the Roman statesman Cicero.
Vattel frequently quotes Cicero, which would have been read by the same founders reading his Law of Nations.
The Swiss philosopher references Cicero in his argument that a nation’s predominant religion should in no ways intrude on the free thinking of its philosophers.
The Enlightenment, we must remember, was not only a movement of many new ideas and inventiveness, but a revival of specific ancient teachings and a result of their increasing circulation.
Cicero once wrote,
“It becomes a wise man to respect the institutions and religious ceremonies of his ancestors, and it is sufficient to contemplate the beauty of the world and the admirable order of the celestial bodies in order to be convinced of the existence of an eternal and all-perfect being, who is entitled to the veneration of the human race.”
Vattel advocated for the instruction of a nation’s people to praise virtue and abhor vice.
What need or benefit was there to couch that virtue in the shroud of the Christian religion?
Vattel also warned explicitly that if the leaders of a nation
“corrupt the morals of the people, spread the taste for luxury, effeminacy, a rage for licentious pleasures,”
if they
“stimulate the higher orders to a ruinous pomp and extravagance,”
“beware, citizens, beware of those corruptors; they only aim at purchasing slaves in order to exercise over them an arbitrary sway.”
It is important to see, in Vattel’s own words, how he figured God into his understanding of natural law.
“How do these authors know that God has laid down such and such laws, rather than others quite contrary to them?
Notless it is because, knowing that God is a wise being, they consider rightly that he could only give laws that are the most appropriate to man, the most advantageous to the good of society in general, and that of each individual in particular.
Therefore, in the discovery of the most reasonable, advantageous, and wisest laws of the times, a political genius at the level of our founders could rest assured that the new laws they’d drawn up for America resonate with their understanding of God’s will.
In this way, where does language referencing one particular God or religion ever need to factor into the Constitution?
God in his wisdom already exists in all things.
There was no church authority that needed to or could be trusted to act as God’s messenger in regards to law.
The founder of the colony of Rhode Island, the Puritan Roger Williams, who advocated for a hedge wall between church and state prior to Thomas Jefferson, also contributed to the United States’ understanding of religious tolerance.
“It is the will and command of God that since the coming of his Son, the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all nations and countries.”
God requires not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state, which enforced uniformity sooner or later is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.
Christ Jesus hath abolished all national, state, and worldly church policies and power, and settled a free ministry, a free people, with a free conscience, in spiritual and civil matters.
In light of this nascent movement toward universalism, American law professed to judge man according to his actions, blind to her religion.
Few grew up in colonial America in any case without the default access to some version of Christianity.
As a blanket term historically, one could apply Christian to any majority Christian state that ever existed.
Since those states have differed so often across time, the Christian title does not indicate any signature change itself, not to the degree that the United States represents.
We can put the Christian title to the test on its foundational spiritual grounds at the start of America by observing every allusion to God in the Declaration of Independence.
Certain proponents of the Christian founding argument suggest that the God of the Bible is the one indicated in the Declaration.
Again, this statement, the God of the Bible, is also incoherent, not accounting for the nuances in the Scriptures and the many other words for God, gods, or lesser God in the Bible.
There is not really one concept of God in the Bible, unless of course you conflate or ignore the differences in the deities of the Old and New Testaments.
The idea is that, among those convinced of a divine presence, God doesn’t need to be interfered with—God already is, in this case, and does not require belief—nor is its ability to operate in a given nation depend on protecting a religion or affirming it by law.
As the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus once said,
“God is merely a name we give to him, not an indication of who he actually is.”
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration, alongside the drafting committee which included four other founders, notably Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, who each contributed to the Declaration’s revisions and edits.
Let’s take each of the four references to God or divinity in the Declaration.
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.”
This is explicitly not a “God” bound to any association with the Church or to any explicit religion.
It is nature’s God, a universal divinity, much like the God mentioned by Alexander Pope in an essay on man in 1734,
“Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, but looks through nature up to nature’s God.”
And then,
“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.”
Self-evident and requiring no revelation or revealed teaching from any prophet.
Rights that are granted by a divine Creator and not by man-made institutions.
Is this the Creator in the Old Testament, who clearly is at odds with particular other deities and races and groups of humans?
Governors of Dominion – Library of Rickandria
Or is it the Creator in general, the God who is all and remains a mystery per His infinite being, who can be known, not by turning the pages of Scripture, but in walking through the chapters of nature and experience?
“We therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions.”
This “supreme judge of the world,” like the Masonic supreme architect of the universe, or the great governor of the world, as in the Articles of Confederation, is a clear reference to a divine order that to some degree enforces and observes morality and sin.
Why Jesus Christ Alone Stands Supreme – Library of Rickandria
A God that keeps a justice of its own, one that mortal man may trace the outlines of and conceptualize without a total knowledge of its intricacy.
A Dutch founder of modern international law, Hugo Grotius, who was quite influential to the American founders, frequently referenced the idea of divine judgment in his writings, where God is the ultimate judge of nations and individuals.
Hugo no doubt was among the strong influences on this reference to a supreme judge of the world in the Declaration.
“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
Divine providence is a choice term with overlap in later Christian theology, Enlightenment theology, and deistic theology.
This was a far more apt reference than, say, the singularly Christian concept of the Holy Spirit.
HOLY GHOST vs. Holy Spirit – Library of Rickandria
In short, the language in the Declaration of Independence does not prioritize Christian language.
Moreover, some of the thirteen colonies were expressly founded as Christian states.
Early state constitutions did require belief in God or Scripture – Library of Rickandria
Maryland was founded as a center for Catholics, Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by Puritans looking to make a city upon a hill.
The founding of America itself, however, and its Bill of Rights, disentangled Christianity from the functions of the state.
This once again reflects a movement away from the European model, and from any religious constriction of rights, and in an unprecedented way, prohibits the government from any duties to or intentions to fund the Church.
ZIONISM & THE CHURCH – Library of Rickandria
In actual fact, this opened up many new doors for the individual’s pursuit of the mystery of God and life.
We return again to Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, which declared that no one should be
“compelled to support religious beliefs or suffer for their own.”
This law became a model for American religious freedom, and we should credit the founding of America with the novelty it is due, instead of tagging it with the very loosely applied Christian title.
If there is anything here you think I’ve missed, please leave it in the comments.
I’m perfectly willing to be shown where I’ve come up short, or where I’m wrong.
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SOURCES:
Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations
The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, David L. Holmes
Samuel Adams (1790), Letter to John Adams
Thomas Paine’s Collected Works
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Letter to James Madison on September (1789)
James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments
The Treaty of Tripoli (1797)
George Washington, Letter to the Quakers (1789), Letter to the Roman Catholics (1790), Letter to Joseph Reed (1776), Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (1790)
The Declaration of Independence
Franklin, Constitutional Convention (1787)
Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Danbury Baptists, January 1, 1802)
James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in (1785)
John Barton, History of the Bible (Instruction of Amen-em-opet).
Isaac Backus, An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty (1773)
Benjamin Franklin (Letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780)
Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Charles W. F. Dumas, 1775
John Adams, Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, May 29, 1812
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644)
Edward Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
America’s Founding Fathers’ Religion Is Not What You Think It Is
The U.S. a Christian Nation? Not According to the Founders! — History News Network
Was the US founded as a Christian nation? Constitution experts disagree | AP News
America was not founded as a Christian nation
America was not founded as a Christian nation – Library of Rickandria