Tom DeLay Says Americans Forgot That God Created This Nation And Wrote The Constitution

“I think we got off that track when we allowed our government to become a secular government, when we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that He wrote the constitution, that’s based on biblical principles.” –Tom DeLay

Video of the interview where DeLay said this in the video above, via Right Wing Watch

Contrary Views From Previous Posts:

Alan Dershowitz Debunks John McCain’s Claim of a Christian Nation

Recently John McCain–whose presidential campaign is in the sewer–declared that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” What an ignoramus! McCain should go back to school and take Civics 1, where he might learn that the United States Constitution was called “the godless constitution,” by its opponents, because it was the first constitution in history not to include references to God or some dominant religion. The Constitution mentions religion only once, in prohibiting any religious test for holding office under the United States.

The Bill of Rights mentions religion twice, once in prohibiting an establishment of religion (a clear reference to any branch of Protestant Christianity, which was then the dominant religion) and a second time, in guaranteeing the free exercise of all religions. Several years after the ratification, the Senate ratified a treaty with the Barbary regime of Tripoli which expressly proclaimed that “the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” In fact, many of our Founding Fathers, including the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, were not Christians but rather were deists. In other words, they believed in the existence of God, but not in the divinity of Jesus or the divine authorship of the bible. Today they might be called Unitarians; in fact, John Adams, another author of the Declaration, and the President under whom the treaty was ratified, is buried in a Unitarian church, along with his wife Abigail and his son John Quincy.

Roger Williams–the religious leader most responsible for separating church and state in America–put it very well a century earlier: “no civil state or country can be truly called Christian, although the Christians be in it.” That is what is so striking about American history, namely, that a nation of Christians ratified a Constitution that did not in any way establish “the United States as a Christian nation.”

Joseph Ellis On The Creation of A Secular State

[The Founding Fathers] created the first wholly secular state. Before the American Revolution it was broadly assumed that shared religious convictions were the primary basis for the common values that linked together the people of any political community, indeed the ideological glue that made any sense of community possible. By insisting on the complete separation of church and state, the founders successfully overturned this long-standing presumption.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice

10 Comments

  1. 1
    Philo Vaihinger says:

    I think we got off that track when we allowed our government to become a secular government, when we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that He wrote the constitution, that’s based on biblical principles.
    That would’ve been, what, 1787, in Philadelphia?
    Maybe a little bit later, when the anti-federalists forced Madison and his friends to add the First Amendment.
    Or a little earlier, with the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786.
    Hard to say, exactly.
    All the same, this is indeed a Christian country, just as India is a primarily Hindu and Muslim country, Russia is an Orthodox country, Poland is a Catholic country, etc.
    And there is in fact a hell of a lot of Christianity in our laws.
    Much less than formerly, thanks to the sexual revolution in America a key element of which was the anti-clerical revolution in the law brought about by federal judges starting with the Warren Court, back in the mid-20th Century.
    All the same, the US most certainly is a Christian nation.
    What? Did you think it was Buddhist?
    Did you somehow miss the national public hoopla of Christmas just two months ago?
    Really?

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    See Alan Dershowitz’s article. The argument against this being a Christian nation is based upon law, not the number of people who celebrate Christmas.

  3. 4
    Philo Vaihinger says:

    Law is not relevant to the question. The relative prevalence of Christian belief is.  As the relative prevalence of Buddhist belief would be to the question, “Is Sri Lanka a Buddhist nation?”

  4. 5
    Philo Vaihinger says:

    The question is asking, “Are the people there mostly Christian?”
    Or Buddhist, or whatever.

  5. 6
    Ron Chusid says:

    You misunderstand the issue. It is a legal issue. You are using “Christian nation” in a way which is unrelated to how others use the term. It is about law and not about what religion is most prevalent.

    The situation in Sri Lanka is ambiguous because their Constitution refers to the “foremost place” of Buddhism but comes short of making it the official state religion. The United States was established as a secular nation with no state religion. Those who claim the United States is a Christian Nation are rewriting history (and law) to deny separation of church and state and to allow Christian beliefs to influence public policy.

  6. 7
    Diane says:

    No Tom, I did not forget it.
    I never learned it. I learned that the first settlers came to the US to worship freely.And that we were a nation where religious freedom was cherished. Not that we were a christian nation.
    It is you who are wrong. And a liar.

  7. 8
    Ed Meadows says:

    Why is it when criminals are caught being criminals they suddenly become very religious?  I’m thinking of Nixon’s Charles Colson and now little Tommy Delay.  Why is Delay not in jail, he was convicted?

  8. 9
    Ron Chusid says:

    Just guessing, I’m wondering to what degree it is to influence people (including parole boards) that they have turned their lives around, and to what degree it is a reaction to the stress of incarceration. They are away from usual support systems and are a captive audience, which might make them more susceptible to persuasion. In Delay’s case, I don’t know how religious he was in the past, but the religious right provides a friendly audience for conservatives who say what they want to hear. I wonder if he makes any money from speaking to such groups.

  9. 10
    bjobotts says:

    Freedom from religion brings forth the basic founding principle of our democracy…’Tolerance’.  One would not be persecuted either for having a religious belief or having none.  Because Jews live here does not make it a Jewish nation anymore than Christians living here would make it a Christian nation.  Our nation was founded on MORAL principles.  i did not need a commandment to tell me it was wrong to kill or steal etc.  Did some ‘God” have to tell you?  Mythology is filled with all sorts of Gods will rules for living that fit our democratic republic as well as Christian dogma put together by a pagan, Emperor Constatine.  Religion has no place in our government which is why it was intentionally left out of the constitution. 

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