How it was ...

[A big Brain welcome to Salon readers.]

Josh Marshall reminds us the United States was not created to be a "Christian nation".

I've sort of gotten tired of explaining that, no, the Founding Fathers actually weren't all born-agains and bible thumpers. Not hardly. (Probably better to say that the great majority ranged from believers in an entirely impersonal God -- Deists -- to believing Christians who nonetheless viewed popular religious enthusiasm with a polite and paternal disdain.) But presidential candidate and former Arkansas Governoer Mike Huckabee, himself a Baptist minister, actually told a crowd yesterday that "most" of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were "clergymen."

...

One was a clergyman. The Rev. John Witherspoon of New Jersey.

One of my heroes, John Adams:

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."

The United States is a secular nation, period. The minute it becomes 'christian' (or any other religion) it no longer remains the United States. The U.S. is a nation of men, not of God.

Adams quote from here.