Protestants created the nation and they did the best job of it that has ever been done.
ansel12 “Protestants created the nation”
I think it’s more nuanced than that. you could more accurately word it as “English history + Anglican Protestants and Deists/enlightenment folks created the nation”
Many of the leading Founders, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were Deists or influenced by the Enlightenment. They argued that rights come from “Nature’s God” rather than a specific church. They sought to create a Secular Republic that protected religious freedom.
Precisely because there were so many competing Protestant sects (Baptists vs. Anglicans vs. Quakers), the Founders were forced to adopt Religious Neutrality (the First Amendment). In a sense, the USA was created by Protestants who realized they couldn’t agree on which kind of Protestantism should rule.
AND, The American legal system was not “created” from the Bible alone; it was a continuation of centuries of English legal tradition (Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus). These were “Protestant” by virtue of being English, but their origins were often medieval and pre-Reformation.
The Founders looked to Republican Rome and Democratic Athens for their models of governance. The architecture of Washington D.C. is intentionally Neoclassical—Greek and Roman—rather than Gothic or Cathedral-style.