McCain draws far-right praise for ‘Christian nation’ comments

October 2, 2007

Of all the groups in the religious right, few have been as hostile to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the Christian Coalition. TV preacher Pat Robertson, the group’s founder, has made no secret of the fact that he wants to make sure the GOP nominates anyone but him for president.

But that was before McCain’s now-infamous interview with BeliefNet, in which the senator said, “I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” The U.S. Constitution is, of course, an entirely secular document, but declaring the country a “Christian nation” has been a religious right goal for years.

And just like that, the Christian Coalition’s animosity towards McCain is fading away. (thanks to Morbo for the tip)

In a Christian Coalition of America blog entry entitled: “McCain’s ‘America is a Christian Nation’ Comments Might Make Him President,” Jim Backlin said: “Comments like ‘America was founded on Christian principles’ by Senator John McCain just might make him president.” […]

Who knows? The McCain Straight Talk Express just might begin appealing to a divided conservative community with courageous comments such as these.”

As for McCain’s comments that the “nation was founded primarily on Christian principles,” which is why he wouldn’t want a Muslim president, the Christian Coalition added, “The fact that the left-wing Muslim groups vociferously reacted against McCain’s remarks, just added validity to his comments, and indeed value for his presidential nomination hopes.”

And while McCain is drawing praise from those he dismissed seven years ago as “agents of intolerance,” he’s also generating criticism from the Anti-Defamation League.

The Anti-Defamation League is calling on Senator McCain to “reconsider and withdraw” his comment over the weekend that the Constitution established America as a “Christian nation.”

The move suggests that a statement of clarification that the Arizona senator’s presidential campaign issued on Sunday did not succeed in defusing anger over his remarks in an interview with beliefnet.com.

“We urge you to reconsider and withdraw your statements describing the United States as a ‘Christian nation’ and a ‘nation founded on Christian principles,'” the national director of the Jewish advocacy group, Abraham Foxman, wrote in a letter to Mr. McCain yesterday. “Not only were your assertions inaccurate, they were also ill-advised for any candidate seeking to lead a nation as religiously diverse and pluralistic as ours.”

And at the risk of belaboring this point, I got a polite email last night from a reader who argued that McCain’s comments, while “ill-advised,” were not wrong. The Founding Fathers were, in fact, all Christians, many of them devout. Their faith guided their thinking when creating the Constitution and establishing our government. In this sense, my correspondent claimed, the United States is a “Christian nation.”

That sounds fairly reasonable, but I’d argue that it’s mistaken. Whether the Constitution was written by Christians is largely irrelevant. It was also written by men. Does that make this a “male nation”? Everyone at the Constitutional Convention was white. Does that make our a “white nation”? Of course not.

As for the notion that the Founding Fathers were guided by their Christian beliefs while writing the Constitution, that also doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. They wrote a secular document that makes no mention of God, Christianity, or Scripture. Likewise, The Federalist Papers, which sought to show the merit of the Constitution, base none of their arguments on religion.

It’s what makes McCain’s claim so misguided. For a presidential candidate to look at the plain text of the document and conclude that the “Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation” suggests either illiteracy or poor judgment.

Isn’t Islam the fastest growing religion in the United States? America is a Muslim Nation.

Any trolls out there with a dispensational itch to scratch?

  • Thomas Jefferson. Christian, yes, but considered a Heretic (he edited and revised the Gospel into a “non-fantasy” where all miracles were removed.)

    George Washington. Deist, never was a Christian. On his death bed, he did NOT recieve final rites, was not baptised, did not ask for forgiveness of sins.

    Benjamin Franklin. Deist as well (was Episcopalian), basically figured God was some type of giant Watchmaker who built the Universe, wound it up and left it alone. In fact, he was probably closer to an Atheist, but thats debatable.

    Yes, there were actual Christians who helped form this nation, but our first President would have no chance at being elected now due to his religious beliefs.

  • I guess McCain isn’t letting Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli get in the way of some good old fashioned pandering.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli#Article_11

    Article 11 reads:

    “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 tranquillity, 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.”

  • No, JKap. If I’m not mistaken, Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the United States. America is a Mormon nation. We will ratify this with the election of President Romney. (Joking of course.)

    To whatever extent the Founding Fathers were Christians, they wanted America to be secular. Based on what they knew of recent European, and particularly British, history, they were scared to death of mixing religion and government. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows this. I’m talking about you, Sen. McCain.

  • And apartment dwellers are totally SOL because it is beyond dispute that America is a Landholders’ Nation.

    Evinfuilt beat me to my real point, which is that when you say the Founders were “Christian,” you have to be careful about the meaning. They held beliefs that would hardly be recognizable to even most liberal-but-mainline Christians today. As EF noted, Jefferson devised his own “bible” by cutting large sections of the Bible away.

    CB’s e-mail writer is correct, obviously, that the Founders were greatly shaped by living their entire lives in a Christian society, and that socialization has broad and deep (and largely subconscious) impacts that are undeniable. But they were also intelligent and disciplined. To their credit, they were able to legislate against their inherent socialized biases. To claim otherwise is to say that because they were all socialized in a British society, they intended the Constitution to create a British nation — which is nonsensical, as they were in fact doing exactly the opposite.

    Similarly, one should ignore their Christian “upbringing” and look at the words they actually wrote.

  • “By the end of the 18th century, deism had become a dominant religious attitude among upper-class Americans, and the first three presidents of the United States held this conviction, as is amply evidenced in their correspondence.” From the article, “Deism,” in the 1967 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

    It is decidedly not the case that the founders were devout Christians. Many were deists, who, among other things, didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, nor even that God fiddled in our affairs after he got done creating the universe.

    Hence the “Jefferson Bible,” in which he removed all references to Jesus’s magic tricks, and simply left his message behind.

  • The Anti-Defamation League is calling on Senator McCain to “reconsider and withdraw” his comment over the weekend that the Constitution established America as a “Christian nation.”

    And McCainiac will point out that he threw in a “Judeo Christian,” during one of his drivellings, therefore the ADL is being unfair.

    What a freak.

  • In this sense, my correspondent claimed, the United States is a “Christian nation.”

    This is bunk. The US was founded on Enlightenment principles outlined by French philosophers. In the sense that a label can be applied to the nation based on “what the Founding Fathers created” the US is in fact an Enlightened French philosophical nation.

    But even that is too simplistic. This nation is now over 200 years old – we aren’t the same nation we were in 1789. We no longer find slavery acceptable (something many of the Founders did), we no longer think that voting should be kept only to white, male landowners (something many of the Founders did), we no longer think that genocide against the native people of the land is an acceptable practice (do we notice a theme here)? The US has evolved, and our ideas of religious freedom have evolved with them. So even IF the Founders believed that people should be restricted from office because of their religious beliefs (which they EXPLICITLY did NOT believe) or even IF the Founders believed that this was a “Christian Nation” (which many of them EXPLICITLY did NOT believe) it wouldn’t matter because they aren’t here anymore. We elect officials with the rights we have now, not the ones that existed back in 1789. And NOW it is completely unacceptable to restrict a person’s ability to hold office because of the religious beliefs that they hold.

  • If the founding fathers had wanted to create a nation that mixed church with state, they certainly had a lot of examples of documents and writings from previous centuries that would have shown them how to do so. ‘Divine right of kings’ political doctrine and the Christian philosophers like Aquinas would have been familiar to them. Yet they didn’t put any of that kind of language in the seminal documents they wrote. Not even in the federalist papers.

  • The US was founded on Enlightenment principles outlined by French philosophers.

    Whoa, think again. Try English philosphers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and Americans like Thomas Paine. French philosophers may have accepted them, but the political philosophy came from them- I think Rousseau who apes Locke and Hobbes even wrote after the American revolution started. And Alexander Hamilton, the principal architect of American government institutions, was a leading member of the decidely anti-French federalists.

  • Maybe McCain will be the third-party-conservative-James Dobson-endorsed candidate for president. He’ll lose, of course, but he can die happy knowing he was, at last someone’s nominee for President.

    But Lieberman would be SOL in getting the VP nod.

    Imagine that, two birds with one stone.

  • Hark is right, the founding fathers (the ones we hear about at least) were mostly deists.

    Just to name a few:
    George Washington
    Thomas Jefferson
    Benjamin Franklin
    John Adams
    Gouverneur Morris
    Ethan Allen
    Thomas Paine

    Thomas Paine was even very openly critical of christianity (he wrote “The Age of Reason” specifically intending to criticize it).

  • Horse shit.

    Most of the Founders were Master Masons.

    The Constitution itself is very similar to the charter for a Masonic Lodge.

    Are we then a Masonic Nation? Do you have to know the handshake in order to vote?

    Please.

  • Deism was actually the fastest growing religion in the USA between 1990 and 2004 (the most recent detailed statistics I’ve been able to find). But the numbers are still pretty tiny and whoever said George Washington couldn’t get elected today on the basis of religious beliefs alone is probably right. Neither could Jesus Christ for that matter, for one thing he was Jewish but his own beliefs and teachings were also way too New Testament for today’s American Christian I’m afraid. Too 70s, man.

  • Does that make this a “male nation”? Republican answer: YES! Everyone at the Constitutional Convention was white. Does that make our a “white nation”? Republican answer: Double YES!

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  • I’m curious as to what will happen when McCain joins the evolution deniers (after all, none of the founding fathers were Darwinists, right??)

  • Is there really a reason to try to present a rational rebuttal to these people? They’ve been slapped down time and time again, but still make the same arguments. And they keep saying things like “The Supreme Court kicked God out of schools.” They are not interested in reasoning, they are interested in forcing their views on everyone else.

    FWIW, if you read deeply into their proof and evidence of us being a christian nation, they don’t consider the constitution the beginning of “The Nation.” They rely very heavily on the pilgrims and others who were here way before 1790. The “pilgram paradigm” is, of course, no more valid than any of the other examples above (Georgia was a penal colony, we’re a nation of criminals!) but they will run with it.

    The Christian Co-alition is basically dead anyway, I think they are just trolling for attention at this point.

  • Actually, some like Jefferson and Franklin certainly read and appreciated French Enlightenment authors, but my point is that they could just have easily got their secularism from British or American sources, and in fact, that was overwhelmingly the case.

    Remember, although now it’s become just a footnote in history, John Locke’s First Treatise On Civil Government was a large become defending secularism and refuting religion-based arguments made to justify the right of monarchs to rule. The Second Treatise was the book that briefly and elegantly outlined the principles upon which our system of government is based. The only reasn the First Treatise is largely forgotten is because people took it for granted that we would live in a secular Republic, that it was ebyond dispute, and that it was a good way to live. Seems the First Treatise needs to be remembered again in these modern times.

  • The only reasn the First Treatise is largely forgotten is because people took it for granted that we would live in a secular Republic, that it was beyond dispute, and that it was a good way to live.

    That is, they came to take it for granted after reading the Treatise and planning, establishing, and living in the newly-formed Republic.

  • I am guessing Senator McCain did not see the Hollywood movie- “National Treasure” with Nicholas Cage..
    As everyone knows the United States was founded by- Wealthy White Slave/Land Owning Elitists that were members of a secret society that measured success with compass in terms of degrees, that involved passing an electrical current through a filament that produced someone called an “Illuminati”..why only 33 degrees and not 45 though?

    These “Illuminati (s)” as the story goes hoarded vast treasure and used terms as “Manifest Destiny” and meaningful violence to justify subverting other cultures/religions that stood in the way of progress.

    Doubtless to say the years of imprisonment at a North Vietnamese POW camp rendered Mr. McCain world view only slightly distorted, and his filament permanently fried.

  • Thomas Paine was even very openly critical of christianity (he wrote “The Age of Reason” specifically intending to criticize it).

    Jim: And at least some Christians are well aware of Payne’s criticisms. I can remember my Southern Charismatic Christian Dad warning me of the danger posed by Payne’s “poisonous” writings.

  • What the religious right forgets is that most of the founding fathers were opposed to evangelicals. The evangelicals learned to love Thomas Jefferson and his wall between church and state because it ended persecution of evangelicals. And he was definitely not of the evangelical faith.

    It’s funny how the Christian Coalition links together “left-wing” and “muslim”. If anything, the groups we are fighting in Iraq are very right wing.

  • Wait a minute. The Founding Fathers were all British or of British descent. That would make America a British Nation which means …

    Holy Crap, we’re still a colony!


  • Paul C.: It’s funny how the Christian Coalition links together “left-wing” and “muslim”.

    That stood out for me too. Add “fascist” to the mix, and you’ve really muddied the waters of political reality! If there is a God, he will surely judge these people harshly for their ceaseless twisting of the truth.

  • An earlier comment said that the founding fathers were scared of mixing government and religion. This is far from the truth, as is the misconception that separation of church and state means something akin to a chinese wall between the two.

    The constitution merely says that the government will not respect one religion over another. That when it deals with religions, it must treat them equally.

    Churches and religious groups, of all faiths, are one of America’s greated community resources, and the notion that the government shouldn’t work with them because the constitution prohibits it is not only incorrect, but is also stupid, and deprives our communities of the benefits working with these groups can bring to our communities.

    I myself, I’m not a believer in any religion. But unlike some of the others who share my view on religion, I am not opposed to religion, or feel some need to wipe out its influences on our communities. Provided we don’t treat any one religion with preferential treatment, there is no constitution reason to exclude the government working with religious organizations to carry out public policy.

    I am also equally opposed to the attempts by religious organizations, like the one headed by Pat Robertson, to establish law based on their religious tenets.

    But I think the effort by atheists and other non-believers to eradicate religion from our government are equally wrong. I am not offended by the words, “Under God” and do not feel that saying them is forcing me to believe anything or to change my views in any way. I am not offended by our Congress opening their sessions with a non-denominational prayer, and do not feel that any member of that body who is not a believer should feel that religion is being forced on them by that act. I do not feel offended by carrying money that says “In God We Trust” on it.

  • Since when were the founders Christians? For the most part they had nothing
    to do with Trinitarian Christianity. Many were straight-out Theists, claiming
    no Christian denomination as the basis for their belief in a God.

    I’m glad that McCain made that ludicrous statement; it shows how unfit he is
    to govern himself, let alone this nation.

  • I think it is not wise for McCain to make such a statement.

    Is he simply trying to hitch a ride with the conservative base of the republican party so his presidential bid will not falter any more then it has ?

    This is a Jewish Nation, a Christian Nation, a Hindu Nation, a Native American Nation, a Hispanic Natiion, a White Nation,

    and it was founded on Religious Freedom, not a goverment sponsored intolerant religious belief that has become the foundation of his political party.

    Buckle

  • Paul Harvey and Prayer

    Paul Harvey says:

    I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I’m not going to sue somebody for singing a Ho-Ho-Ho song in December. I don’t agree with Darwin , but I didn’t go out and hire a lawyer when my high school teacher taught his Theory of Evolution

    Life, liberty or your pursuit of happiness will not be endangered because someone says a 30-second prayer before a football game.

    So what’ s the big deal? It’s not like somebody is up there reading the entire book of Acts. They’re just talking to a God they believe in and asking him to grant safety to the players on the field and the fans going home from the game.

    But it ‘s a Christian prayer, some will argue.

    Yes, and this is the United States of America , a country founded on Christian principles. According to our very own phone book, Christian churches outnumber all others better than 200-to-1. So what would you expect — somebody chanting Hare Krishna?

    If I went to a football game in Jerusalem , I would expect to hear a Jewish prayer.

    If I went to a soccer game in Baghdad , I would expect to hear a Muslim prayer.

    If I went to a ping pong match in China , I would expect to hear someone pray to Buddha

    And I wouldn’t be offended.
    It wouldn’t bother me one bit.
    When in Rome …

    But what about the atheists? Is another argument.

    What about them?
    Nobody is asking them to be baptized. We’re not going to pass the collection plate. Just humor us for 30 seconds. If that’s asking too much, bring a Walkman or a pair of ear plugs. Go to the bathroom. Visit the concession stand. Call your lawyer!

    Unfortunately, one or two will make that call. One or two will tell thousands what they can and cannot do. I don’t think a short prayer at a football game is going to shake the world’s foundations.

    Christians are just sick and tired of turning the other cheek while our courts strip us of all our rights. Our parents and grandparents taught us to pray before eating; to pray before we go to sleep.

    Our Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. Now a handful of people and their lawyers are telling us to cease praying.

    God, help us.
    And if that last sentence offends you, well .. just sue me.

    The silent ma jority has been silent too long. It’s time we let that one or two who scream loud enough to be heard that the vast majority doesn’t care what they want. It is time the majority rules! It’s time we tell them, you don’t have to pray; you don’t have to say the pledge of allegiance; you don’t have to believe in God or attend services that honor Him. That is your right, and we will honor your right . But by golly, you are no longer going to take our rights away. We are fighting back.
    and we WILL WIN!

    God bless us one and all … especially those who denounce Him , God bless America, despite all her faults. She is still the greatest nation of all.

    God bless our service men who are fighting to protect our right to pray and worship God.

    2008 will be the year the silent majority is heard and we put God back as the foundation of our families and institutions … and our Military come home from all the wars.

    Keep looking up.

    If you agree with this, please pass it on.

    If not delete it.

    ‘AND THAT’S THE REST OF THE STORY’

  • AMERICA NEEDS TO WAKE UP AND REALIZE THAT IF WE TURN AWAY FROM GOD WE WILL BE TURNED INTO HELL. REGAURDLESS OF WHAT YOU THINK EVERY KNEE WILL BOW AND EVERY TOUNGE WILL CONFESS THAT JESUS CHRIST IS LORD AND CREATOR OF ALL. EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!
    AND NO MATTER WHAT PEOPLE SAY THAT WILL NOT CHANGE….
    JESUS DIED FOR OUR SINS AND SUFFERED SO MUCH FOR YOU AND ME, GIVE HIM THE CREDIT HE DESERVES. HELL IS A HORRIBLE PLACE YOU DONT HAVE TO GO THERE!!!!!!!!! GOD IS IN CONTROL AND IF YOU WOULD JUST OPEN YOUR EYES YOU COULD SEE THAT. ITS ALL IN THE BIBLE……
    GOD ALWAYS MAKES A WAY FOR ME AND HE CAN DO GREAT THINGS IN YOUR LIFE TOO.

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