I’m not saying all members of the Tea Party make this claim but MANY members rant about it. Also MANY Christians that are not affiliated with the Tea Party make the same claim.
In reality those weren’t the Founding Fathers intentions.
Please read The Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 which states:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries”.http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?col…
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Tea Party: Why Do A Lot Of You Want To Make The Nation Christian Like The Founding Fathers Supposedly Intended?
Posted on November 12, 2011.
They don’t and the Founding fathers didn’t either.
That is one treaty with a non-christian nation, they would have said whatever necessary.
If we weren’t founded on christian standards/morality then that would have been in the Declaration or Constitution.
We stand for freedom.
If you idiots choose to be agnostic, so be it.
We would PREFER a solid Christian nation. WE ALSO refuse to legislate such.
Enjoy your freedom.
TEA Party is NOT a religious movement, period. There are religious people involved, but it’s not policy. Stop smearing or obfuscating the issue. Being virulently anti-Christian doesn’t win you elections.
You obviously know nothing about the Tea Party or the founding fathers intentions… Ever read the “Mayflower Compact”? You know the document that has God mentioned several times and Christianity is mentioned once that John Adams later would call this the foundation of our constitution.
The official treaty was in Arabic text, and a translated version by Consul-General Barlow was ratified by the United States on June 10, 1797. Article 11 of the treaty was said to have not been part of the original Arabic version of the treaty; in its place is a letter from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli.
They wouldn’t make such a clear distinction in our country, this is foreign relations and we were not going to abuse the christian faith like the English had done for so long.
Well, I’m not affiliated with the tea party, and feel exactly the same about making America a Christian nation as I do making it a Hatian Voodoo nation, but I seriously doubt anyone who is in the Tea Party will play with the deck you’ve stacked, and I do like a good challenge.
So why would anyone want to make America a Christian nation. Well, my argument is going to stem from keeping politics and religion separate. I believe the government should never have any religious authority, and that includes moral authority. The government shouldn’t be your mommy. It’s there for real crimes and real emergencies. Police should be catching murderers and thieves, not making sure you brushed your teeth this morning. But when people get in positions of power, inside or outside the government, it’s very very important that they have good ethics. Corruption and power is a combination that has resulted in trillions of dollars in losses and billions of deaths or worse the world over for thousands of years. One of the primary goals in setting up any government should be preventing this kind of abuse of power.
That’s where Christianity can come into play. Many people’s moral code comes from their religion. Christianity would give us a consistent, unambiguous moral code. You’d be able to point at someone and prove their actions were evil, because there would be an agreed upon definition of evil if America were Christian. This wouldn’t be without its problems, of course; America not being a Christian nation has diplomacy advantages as you’ve already pointed out. But one way or the other, it would be much, much easier to ensure that people entrusted with power had a functioning moral compass if there was an agreed upon moral code. That far outweighs the other in my opinion.
Christianity, especially protestant Christianity, is an excellent choice in my opinion, because it has a history of fighting against governments who have adopted it and abused its authority. First the romans, then the inquisition, before finally Martin Luther won the fight to let ordinary people read the Bible and English Kings divorced religion and power. American protestantism is founded upon people fleeing “official” churches to America where they could practice religion freely and openly. The early Anabaptists based their religion on fighting a history that converted people at swordpoint, and promoted being good examples and letting people come to Christianity on their own. If anyone understands just how important it is to keep religion and power separate, it’s protestants. And modern Catholics, because truth be told when the Protestants themselves got some power in some parts of the world they returned some nasty favors.
That code can’t come from the law, because people will be expected to live up to that code in positions where no one is watching them. It’s the old “who watches the watchmen” argument; eventually you just have to trust people to do the right thing, and when their entire moral code is based on what they can legally get away with, they simply won’t do the right thing. Reliably.
So since good ethics are necessary in order to trust people with power, and for most people ethics come from either religion or what they can get away with, and I don’t believe in legislating what people can get away with to enforce a moral code, that leaves religion as the best choice for fighting corruption.