Christianity was one of these influences but not the only one, and not all of Christianity was adopted. A Christian may not, by the most basic rules of the Faith, worship other gods, make graven images, or work on the Sabbath. The First Amendment not only allows these things, it protects the right to do them. Indeed, the laissez faire capitalist system the Framers adopted could be said to be at odds with Christianity. A purely Christian government would have social welfare systems in place, and "charity" might even be mandatory. The Framers and their immediate political heirs largely left such up to private entities, or the discretion of smaller government entitities.
Regier asks "what is a Christian Nation?", then never really answers the question from his perspective. I would submit that it is a nation where Christianity is given a place of legal primacy and the Bible is considered on a par with the founding documents. A place where indeed, the rules of the Bible may be codified into law for no other reason than their presence in the book. A place where laws contrary to the Bible may be struck down, for that reason alone.
Whether or not one wants this nation to become that (and I would suggest that more of the "Christian Nation" crusaders do than will quite admit it), that is not the nation our Founders and the Framers intended to give us. Hence, they did not mean us to be a "Christian Nation".
-Eric
Susan, no one is saying that the structure of our Nation wasn't influenced by Christianity. It was also influenced by Judaism, English law, Roman and Greek philosophies of citizenship and republicanism, and the development of legal systems going back to the Code of Hammurabi. Yet no one ever calls us a "Jewish Nation", a "British Nation", a "Roman Nation" or a "Hammurabic Nation".
Maybe I wasn't clear in the first half of my reply. I'm finding the debate as to what English Common Law was based on very interesting, as I am currently studying English Common Law.While I understand Jefferson's argument, there is still so much evidence that can't just be passed over.
Patrick Henry prepared for his career as an attorney by studying the Bible and its application to law. So did James Madison. Charles Finney decided to be an attorney, but while reading the law books of his days he was confronted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and gave up law to become an evangelist. In fact, the second most popular book at the time of the American War for Independence was Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a four-volume text predicated on the symbiotic link between Holy Scripture and law.
But by the end of the 19th Century, America’s leading jurists had set themselves on a course to obscure and deny the hand of God in this nation’s legal system. Prior to 1900, American lawyers studied the law from a book by William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1767. The first 140 pages of this book outlined the biblical precepts and principles that controlled English common law; the rest of the book detailed how this law was being interpreted in England. America’s Founders used Black-stone’s principles to undergird the legal system of their emerging nation.
In 1870, however, legal trendsetters under Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell at the new Harvard Law School deliberately substituted evolutionary legal principles for the fixed, uniform and universal laws of God, which Blackstone’s Commentaries had previously enshrined in American jurisprudence. Charles Darwin had published his earth-shattering book on evolution in 1859, and the evolutionary principles outlined there for biology were already beginning to infiltrate other areas of learning
July 4, 1821 - John Quincy Adams:
"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. From the day of the Declaration ... they (the American people) were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct."
"Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the Foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity?"
1833 - Noah Webster:
"The religion which has introduced civil liberty, is the religion of Christ and his apostles ... This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free constitutions and government ... the moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws."
As for whether our country was, at one time, a Christian State, I would say, "no" for the reasons you gave.The United States of America is not a Christian country or state. The writers of the Constitution said, very wisely, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In other words, there will be no state church (such as the Church of England), but the people may worship according to their wishes, anytime and anywhere. But while our STATE wasn't, and isn't, Christian in the literal sense, I would submit that we were founded as a Christian nation, in the sense of nation defined as, "The people of a nation or country or a community of persons bound by a common heritage".
"Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian ... this is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation ... we find everywhere a clear definition of the same truth ... this is a Christian nation."
First chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, wrote:
"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty ... of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers." (1816)
John Adams wrote:
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Thomas Jefferson, the man "blamed" for the wall of separation between church and state said:
"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?"
James Madison:
"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not on the power of government...[but] upon the capacity of each and every one of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."