History

Hartmann Report - Today’s Republicans (and Sam Alito) claim that America was founded as a Christian nation; the truth is that one of the most unique things about the “American experiment” was that we were the first explicitly secular nation in the history of the world.

Every country, throughout history prior to the 1770s, was either run by a specific religion (from King David’s day through the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire and beyond); a collaboration between church and state (French kings and Catholic popes; English kings and the Church of England); by a hereditary leader claiming to descend from divinity (Alexander the Great, the Pharaohs, the Japanese royal family); or by a breakaway sect claiming to speak for their god (Mormons in Salt Lake City, the Pilgrim political leaders in early Massachusetts).

The United States was the first country at that time in history to openly reject any role for religion, a prohibition that appears twice in our Constitution and repeatedly in the writings of the Founding generation as you can read in great and astonishing detail here.

Religious leaders in the Founders’ day, in defense of church/state cooperation and collaboration, tried to argue that for centuries kings and queens in England had said that if the state didn’t support the church, the church would eventually wither and die. They wanted subsidies, like Bush’s and Trump‘s “faith based initiatives,” and to avoid all taxation.

“Father of the Constitution” James Madison, himself an active Christian, flatly rejected this argument, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston:

“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”... MORE