The most emailed article in the New York Times right now is Jon Meachem’s Op-Ed “A Nation of Christians Is Not A Christian Nation.” Here’s a nice little excerpt:
The only acknowledgment of God in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God’s authority, but the effort failed.
A pseudonymous opponent of the Connecticut proposal had some fun with the notion of a deity who would, in a sense, be checking the index for his name: “A low mind may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think himself slighted and dishonored if he is not complimented with a seat or a prologue of recognition in the Constitution.” Instead, the framers, the opponent wrote in The American Mercury, “come to us in the plain language of common sense and propose to our understanding a system of government as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, not a God appears in a dream to propose any part of it.”
Full Story The rest of the article is all kinds of other examples of how the US of A isn’t a Christian nation, (this in response to John McCain’s statement that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation”).
Legally, I’m certain Meachem is right, and I love the article. But as an American who grew up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood I have to report that I’m sometimes annoyed at just how Christian my life is. We’ve got the National Day of Prayer (which is entirely Christian) and the War on Christmas courtesy of the uber-American Fox News, plus the fact that I attended more than a decade of Jewish day school but had the Lord’s Prayer memorized before the Amidah… Sadly, with Bush in the White House I don’t think McCain was too far off the mark. It may not have been set up in the Constitution, but most days it seems like the unspoken eleventh ammendment in the Bill of Rights.
*warning* Don’t any of you people ever take me to CiCi’s pizza! There food looks offensive!|Urban_Elegance|
I really love the way you discuss this kind of topic.;’,-”