The right wing in America tries to tell us we are a Christian nation, rather than a nation of a majority of the Christian faith.
The fact that the Constitution does not have a religious test, that we have separation of church and state, is ignored, as the right wing promotes its propaganda.
So they tell us the Founding Fathers were “good Christians”, when in fact, in many ways, they were not!
And they fail to accept that many of our Presidents have doubted organized religion entirely, or have been Deist, Unitarian or Quaker , which are seen as a few steps away from atheism by many experts.
For the record:
The following Presidents had NO specific religious affiliation:
Thomas Jefferson
Franklin Pierce
Abraham Lincoln
Andrew Johnson
Ulysses S. Grant
Rutherford B. Hayes
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Barack Obama
Deist Beliefs
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Tyler
Unitarianism
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Millard Fillmore
William Howard Taft
Quaker
Herbert Hoover
Richard Nixon
That makes 18 Presidents who do not fit the mold of a typical religious person.
At the same time, some Presidents have been very devout, including:
James A. Garfield
Benjamin Harrison
William McKinley
Woodrow Wilson
Jimmy Carter
The other half of our Presidents were irregular church goers, and in many cases, they were not very committed to their faiths, but would identify with a faith that was considered Christian, with John F. Kennedy the only Catholic President..
The largest number of Presidents (12) were Episcopalians; 8 were Presbyterians; 4 Methodists; 4 Baptists; 3 Disciples of Christ; 2 Congregationalists; and 2 Dutch Reformed Church.
Republican Robert Ingersoll quotes from the “Golden Age of Freethought,”
On Religion:
“They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanat. s and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.â€
Defining the meaning of the Declaration of Independence:
The Declaration of Independence announces the sublime truth, that all power comes from the people. This was a denial, and the first denial of a nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to govern others. It was the first grand assertion of the dignity of the human race. It declared the governed to be the source of power, and in fact denied the authority of any and all gods. Through the ages of slavery, through the weary centuries of the lash and chain, God was the acknowledged ruler of the world. To enthrone man, was to dethrone God.
As far as many today making the incorrect claim that our founding fathers created this country as a Christian Nation, the facts noted from the period of “The Golden Age Of Freethought” demonstrates that this is not the case. This was the time when the Republican Party took pride as the “Critical Thinking Man’s Party.”. Unfortunately this is not the case today and my family’s 150 legacy has been shamed.