Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.
—Pat Buchanan, professional Conservative and Fox News analyst
This is a country built on Judeo-Christian values . . .
—Texas senator Ted Cruz
Greetings Christian Right
I bring bad news. There is no God in the Constitution.
I know that in 1607, the first refugees to our shores built a giant cross to thank God for their deliverance.
I know that it reads “in God we trust” on our money.
I know that schoolchildren take an oath of allegiance that says “One nation under God.”
But there is no God in the Constitution. Nor is there any mention of His many aliases: Great Preserver of the Universe, Supreme Judge of the World, or Master Architect.
The Framers could have put God in the Preamble but didn’t. To refresh your memory:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure Domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of . . .I
There is no mention of God in the Presidential Oath of Office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States . . .
And there is no mention of God in Article 6, which states:
. . . No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public Trust under the United States.
And there were no prayers at the Convention. No opening prayers. No closing prayers. And there was a Baptist convention in town. How hard could it have been to drag one of their preachers in for a quickie?
So, again let me see if I can get through to you: God does not appear in Madison’s notes; God does not appear in the Constitution; God does not appear in The Federalist.
You can call America a Christian nation all you want, but God—at least for all you strict constructionists out there—does not appear in the text of the Constitution.
For the Framers, this was not an accidental omission. If they wanted God in the Constitution, they knew where to find Him:
• Eleven of the thirteen states had religious tests for office. The only two that didn’t were Virginia and New York.II
• In New Jersey, New Hampshire, the Carolinas, and Georgia, only Protestants could hold public office.
• The Articles of Confederation (the country’s preceding constitution) mentions the “Great Governor of the World.”
Instead, the Framers chose to go their own worldly way, not hostile to your religion but indifferent to it.
Your Christian forefathers were a lot smarter than you are. They realized that the Constitution had left out any mention of God. They knew at once there was no “God”—Christian or otherwise—in the Constitution. And that’s why they—the religious Right of the day—opposed the Constitution.
Here’s one such protest from the anonymous pamphleteer “Arisocritis”:
The new Constitution disdains belief of a Deity, the immortality of the soul, or the resurrection of the body, a day of judgement, or a future state of rewards and punishments . . .
In fact, those guys thought the Constitution had gone way too far in protecting religious liberties. As quoted by historian Michael J. Klarman, here’s how one delegate put it at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention:
. . . A person could not be a good man without being a good Christian, thus ought to take an oath that they believed in Christ or at least in God.
At ratifying conventions throughout the states, the religious Right were horrified at the prospects that “Jews, Pagans, Infidels, and Papists” might actually hold office. In a Boston newspaper dated January 10, 1788, an anti-Federalist said that “since God was absent from the Constitution, Americans would suffer the fate of ancient Israel “because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee.”
In Connecticut, Christians tried their hand at rewriting the Preamble, aligning it with their own faith:
We the people of the United States in a firm belief of the being and perfection of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the World in His universal providence and the authority of His laws: that He will require of all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful powers among men are ordained of, and mediately derived from God . . .
I know. You get goose bumps just reading it.
In 1863, the Christian Right met at two conventions to blame the Civil War on the godless Constitution. Their solution: another Christian preamble. In other words, the war and the millions of deaths that would follow were the fault of the “heathen” Framers and not the slaveholders trying to preserve a cruel and evil system of oppression.
But at least those Christians got it right. They knew the truth: the Framers had ignored God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost. And that’s the way it’s been for the last 230 years. Much to your disliking.
So now you’ve decided to rewrite history to prove—once and for all—that the Constitution is Christian; the Framers are Christian; the Old Testament is Christian; and for all I know, you may think I’m Christian myself.
Let’s start with the Constitution and your case for its “religiosity,” for lack of a better word.
Look there! You point with childish glee at Article I, Section 7:
If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sunday excepted),III after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law . . .
Yes, the Framers gave the president Sundays off. But they didn’t give senators Sundays off. Or members of the House. In my book, this is hardly a come-to-Jesus moment. And if there was some “religious” connotation, why didn’t they use the word Sabbath?
Then you point to the very end of the Constitution to find this reference to “our Lord”:
. . . Done in Convention of the unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the year of our LordIV one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our names.
But that—in case you hadn’t noticed—is in the portion added after the Constitution, written in the pastV tense, and is simply how they dated official documents back then. It also follows what is clearly the last line of the Constitution proper:
Article VII. The Ratification of the Convention of nine States shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.
And that is how the Constitution ends. As an actor, I know a last line when I see one.
We have now concluded our Christian portion of the Constitution: one “our Lord” and one “Sundays excluded.” For people who claim to be on the side of God, you are desperately insecure about it.
• • •
Having so brilliantly deciphered the Constitution, you then turn to the Founders, scavenging every word they wrote, translating every phrase, inspecting every oil painting, fervently determined to make them over in your own Christian image.
Let’s start with:
There he is, you shout: the picture of George Washington at Valley Forge, deep in the snow, on his knees—praying.VI And just for the record: once while a private at Fort Dix, I too prayed to God. “God,” I pleaded audibly, “please don’t send me to Korea.” And when I ended up in Germany, I never even thanked Him.
And why would I? He’s God. What’s He need my thanks for? Much later, after my second hip replacement, I had some choice words for both God and my doctors. My conversation with God—which will remain between us—was: if God could do this to one of His Chosen People (me), what did He do to His unchosen ones?
Anyway, my point is prayers are not always a sign of a personal, long-lasting commitment to the Almighty.
But what about Washington’s first inaugural? Isn’t that proof of the man’s Christian faith? Him with his hand on the Bible—the one he brought from home? Yes, but that was, sorry to say, a Masonic Bible. George Washington was a Grand Master Mason—about as high as you can get in that secret society—and that is what he took his oath on. And Masonic Bibles do not acknowledge the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
And what about the oath he took? You know, where he famously added “so help me God” at the end? Sorry, but that’s how every Mason concludes his oath—with the words “so help me God.” Don’t ask me how I know. It’s a secret society.
So every president since Washington, up to Donald Trump, has added “so help me God,” not knowing it was Masonic and not God-inspired.
But didn’t Washington go to church every Sunday? Yes, and always left before communion because he didn’t believe in the Miracles of Christ.
As for the real George Washington and his beliefs, let’s hear from a man who should know, his pastor of twenty years, Bishop William White, who said:
I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which would prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation . . . In other words, beyond his generally moral character and the fact that he went to church regularly, there is no other proof that he was a believer.
A less cautious response comes from Bishop White’s assistant, the Reverend James Abercrombie, who replied years after Washington’s death: “Sir, Washington was a Deist.”VII
Then there’s Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his journal shortly after Washington’s death:
When the clergy addressed Genl. Washington on his departure from the govmt, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the XnVIII religion.
You people find the best example of Franklin’s faith when, during a contentious moment at the Constitutional Convention, he urged his fellow delegates to pray for guidance. A motion unanimously defeated.
You suppose, of course, that Franklin wanted to pray to the same God you do now. But Franklin had a number of names that he used instead of “God.” To give only a few: Great Architect of the Universe (a Masonic name); First Cause, and Author and Owner of Our Systems (Deist names); and Powerful Goodness (Franklin’s favorite). Benjamin Franklin had more names for God than Jared Kushner has lawyers.
But the one name Franklin never prayed to was Jesus Christ.
That hot afternoon at the Convention when Franklin proposed that everyone pray reminds me of my mother, who always suggested an enema no matter the sickness. It may not help, but “it couldn’t hurt.”
To know how Franklin really felt about prayer, I refer you to a letter he sent to his brother in 1735. After hearing that 45 million prayers had been offered in all of New England seeking victory over a French fort in Canada, Franklin wrote:
If you do not succeed, I fear, I shall have but an indifferent opinion of Presbyterian prayers in such cases as long as I live. Indeed, in attacking strong towns, I should have more dependence in works than in faith.
Still, you cling to Franklin like he was one of yours. Here you are quoting Franklin’s letter to the president of Yale University, who had asked him for his views on religion. Franklin wrote back this:
Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That He ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable services render Him is doing Good to His other children. That the Soul of Man is immortal and will be treated with Justice in another life respecting its Conduct in this.
For some odd reason, however, you always manage to leave off the rest of the letter:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and His Religion, as He left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to His divinity . . .IX
You can quote endlessly about Franklin’s faith in Christian ethics, but none about his faith in Jesus the Christ. Like the other Framers, Franklin was a strong believer that religion—especially Christian religion—was a public necessity to “restrain [men and women] from Vice, to support their Virtue, and to retain in them the Practice of it till it becomes habitual.”
Let me put it another way: Franklin believed in Christianity as a religion that kept the people in check, much like the plantation owners who gave their slaves an hour off on Sunday to praise the Lord.
But Franklin drew the line at Christ as his personal savior. To clarify the difference, the author Walter Isaacson refers us to Carl Van Doren’s biography where he contrasts Franklin with the “fire-and-brimstone” Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards. Where Edwards preached fear and bigotry (“Man was a perpetual Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God”), Franklin exalted “tolerance, individual merit, civic virtue, good deeds, and rationality.”
Yes, you can claim Jonathan Edwards—and his famous “terror” sermons of 1733—as one of your own. But not Benjamin Franklin.
The best you can come up with for John Adams is this quote from Newt and Callista Gingrich’s Rediscovering God in AmericaX:
Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free government but of Social felicity under all governments and in all Combinations of human society.
After that, there is only more of the same as Adams—in a handful of letters—extols the virtues of a Christian morality. Which does not necessarily make him the kind of Born Again you’d like him to be.
In fact, John Adams was a member of the New England branch of the Unitarian Church.XI Unitarians did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the infallibility of the Bible, the Holy Trinity, or Original Sin. They not only did not believe that Jesus was God, they were certain that Jesus Himself never claimed to be either. Put a hat and a beard on a Unitarian and, in the right light, you might mistake him for a Reformed Jew.
What we do know is Adams’s opinion of the clergy: comparing their sermons “preached by the grossest blockheads and most atrocious villains” to the growth of “fungus” meant to “charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant.”
And here’s Adams—again in his own words—as he seems to address men much like yourselves across the centuries:
With a power bordering on tyranny, ministers . . . were able to . . . cultivate with Systems and Sects to Deceive millions and Cheat and Pillage hundreds and thousands of their fellow creatures.
And with a modesty that seems to escape the rest of you, Adams said this: “. . . The secrets of eternal wisdom are not to be fathomed by our narrow understandings.”
Throughout his life, Adams apparently suffered from bouts of melancholy, and when I checked the index of David McCullough’s biography, I found nine listings “as a Christian” but more than twenty for “Despair of.” John Adams, it seems, spent more time on his knees out of hopelessness than he ever did in prayer.
James Madison—whom you often refer to as the “Father of the Constitution”—remains one tough nut for you to crack. Try as you will, you really have to go digging for anything that remotely suggests that Madison supported a Judeo-Christian constitution.
Oh, there is that time when Madison as president signed into law a “national fast day”—a day of “public humiliation and prayer”—during a bleak moment in the War of 1812. It was a law passed by Congress that I say Madison signed more out of political expediency than his devout faith in a benevolent providence.
And here is a quote—and a solitary one at that—by the Conservative writer Joshua Charles in which Madison called religion “the duty which we owe to our Creator.” And that’s about it. Interestingly, that quote comes from his “Memorial and Remonstrances Against [italics mine] Religious Assessment” in which he opposes state-supported churches.
Elsewhere, we discover the true Madison, who feared “religious bondage that shackled the mind,” warning against the “clergy’s infernal infamy” and their “diabolical Hells of Persecution.”
Madison’s entire career—as a politician, lawmaker, and intellectual—was devoted to the separation of church and state:
• His “Memorial and Remonstrances,” written in 1785, provides the intellectual basis for Jefferson’s “Statute for Religious Freedom.” “Religious opinions, beliefs, and practices are not the object of civil government.”
• At the Constitutional Convention, Madison introduced a provision for the establishment of a national nondenominational university.
• As president, in 1811 Madison vetoed a bill that would have given an Episcopal church a charter within Washington, DC, on the grounds it violated the First Amendment.
• Also in 1811, Madison vetoed a law that would have given federal land to the Baptist Church in the Mississippi Territory. Again on the grounds that it would “blur and indeed erase” the “essential distinction between civil and religious functions.”
Madison may not have been the father of the Constitution, but he was most certainly the father of the separation of church and state.
And may I remind you folks, it was Madison and his First Amendment that made God’s commandment “Thou shalt have no other God before Me” downright unconstitutional!
As the author of the “divinely inspired” Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson—of all people—is your go-to guy when it comes to God. After all, he’s the one who wrote:
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, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
While “Creator” and (an earlier) “Nature’s God” are not much to hang your hat on, it’s more than enough for you and your religious Right to convert Jefferson into a divinely inspired man of the Lord.
Never mind that when rebelling against a king, who else higher can you call on for vindication than nature’s God? Never mind that in 1820, Jefferson explained his “religious” references this way: “The Declaration of Independence was meant to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.”
In other words: the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence was not so much evidence of Jefferson’s own faith but the rhetorical flourish of a writer trying to make his case.
The Christian Right of Jefferson’s time were closer to the truth. For example, the Reverend Dr. John Mason, clergyman of New York, writes (in fear of a Jeffersonian presidency) that he believed Jefferson a “confirmed infidel.”
And an anonymous preacher put it this way in the New-England Palladium:
Should the infidel Jefferson be elected President, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous prostitute, under the title of the Goddess of Reason, will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to the worship of the Most High.
The basis for this contempt if not downright hatred of Jefferson (and his secular philosophies) is not hard to trace.
• He had championed the atheistic revolution in France while an “ambassador” to France. Endorsing the decapitation of priests while happily favoring the name change of Notre Dame to the Temple of Reason.
• He wrote and helped pass Virginia’s Statute of Religious Freedom.
Which legislates the following:
• the end of tax-supported churches;
• religious tests for office are prohibited; and
• that no man “shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship.”
After rejecting an amendment that would have included the words “Jesus Christ” in the body of the law, Jefferson’s bill was passed on January 16, 1785. Celebrating its passage and its welcome around the world, Jefferson wrote:
It is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many Ages during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests and nobles, and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who has had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.
Jefferson’s Act of Religious Freedom is the guiding influence on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that, officially, separates church and state. As Jefferson put it: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
That is from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, where he then goes on to give his account of Christian history: “Millions of innocent men, women, and children since the introduction of Christianity have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned . . . [all to] make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites [in order to] support roguery and error all over the earth.”
And don’t blame me. Write your angry letters to Jefferson. He’s the one who said it. I’m only the messenger.
Despite your paltry claims that the Founders and Framers were devoted, practicing Orthodox Christians, inspired by the Holy Spirit to form a more perfect union, the truth, as it so often does, eludes your grasp.
Here’s why:
• Not one of them believed that their souls would rot in Hell for eternity because they were not devout Calvinists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Something Similar.
• Not one of them believed that they knew who created the universe. Or when.
• Not one of them believed they had been chosen as personal “instruments” in God’s grand design for America.
Yet you go on and on, positive you recognize God’s hand in the writing of the Constitution. So may I ask—disrespectfully—what God exactly are you talking about? Because you have so many.
There’s the Old Testament gods. The merciful God who helped Sarah give birth when she was in her nineties. There’s the militaristic God who ordered the Hebrews to skin the Canaanites alive.XII There’s the vengeful God who slaughtered every human being on the planet with His forty days of rain, saving only Noah and his family. Then watched helplessly as Noah and his daughters replenished the population with their incestuous fornications.
Then there’s your New Testament God, or the Son of God—now represented by so many denominations, sects, divisions, branches, and offshoots it’s hard to know which Jesus you’re talking about. To name just a few: Protestants, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Adventists, Mormons, Methodists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox Catholics, Russian Orthodox Catholics, Ukrainian Orthodox Catholics, Baptists, Southern Baptists, Anabaptists, and T. D. Jakes.
Finally, there’s your God—the One who denounces evolution, homosexual love, and stem cell research.
So let me know. You say God is in the Constitution. Fine. Tell me which One.
Grace be with you all. Amen.
I. I quote it in its entirety in case you think I’m lying.
II. The states of Madison and Hamilton, respectively.
III. Italics mine, in case you missed it.
IV. My emphasis.
V. The only sentence so written.
VI. And we know that never happened because, as the historian John Rhodehamel points out, George Washington would never dirty his uniform.
VII. See my earlier definition of a Deist.
VIII. Jefferson’s abbreviation for Christianity.
IX. Italics mine.
X. News sources indicate that Mr. Gingrich is currently writing a book about Donald Trump’s White House. No doubt to be called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
XI. The First Parish Church of Quincy, Massachusetts.
XII. What the Canaanites did to deserve that I’ll never know.