Is the USA a Christian Nation?

Last updated on: March 9, 2015 at 9:36 am by Kermit Zarley

Is the USA a Christian Nation? 2015-03-09T09:36:42-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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That depends on who you ask. How you define what a Christian nation is? How are you going to get people on the same page with that one? You aren’t. Definitions will be all over the map!

Last Tuesday, Idaho state Senator Sheryl Nuxoll and two other fellow Republican senators refused to attend an Idaho Senate session because Hindu cleric Rajan Zed of Reno, Nevada, opened it with a Hindu prayer. Senator Nuxoll defended their absence by saying the U.S. “is a Christian nation based on Christian principles.” She added, “I would have been fine if we had also had a Christian prayer.” She had earlier called Hinduism a “false religion.” But she later says she didn’t intend to say that. (Information for this post is taken from an Associated Press article published today.)

Several of the most prominent founding fathers of the United States of America were professing Deists. They included Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, although Jefferson was somewhat ecclectic in his religious beliefs.

What is a Deist? Foremost of all, Deists believed that the universe was created by a power that was not necessarily a personal being. They generally believed that Jesus was a great moral teacher and probably the world’s greatest ever. But they did not believe in miracles and therefore they did not believe Jesus arose from the dead. And they certainly did not believe Jesus died a substitionary death for people’s sins.

How can all of that be called Christian? It can’t. If you believe in the New Testament, Deists certainly were not Christians. But you could adhere to some beliefs peculiar to Deism and also hold dear certain basic Christian beliefs, such as that Jesus was the Messiah/Christ of Israel, Savior from sin, and that he arose from the dead. That would make you a Christian if you sincerely believed it. An apparent example was Episcopalian George Washington, who also held some Deist beliefs.

It was the influence of Deism that caused Thomas Jefferson to compile his so-called “Jefferson Bible.” He created it by taking the four gospels of an English New Testament and cutting out all of it that pertained to Jesus’ miracles and his ressurection from the dead. And as did many Deists, Jefferson often castigated organized religion.

However, it should be recognized that there were no schools or creeds of Deism that helped establish what Deists believe. Deists was a result of Enlightenment that merely held in common a few precepts, and all Deists did not embrace the same principles. Some did believe in a personal God. Deism was an inexact category. Thus, people would claim that so-and-so was a Deist even though that person denied it.

So, I think it’s about impossible to say whether or not the U.S. is or ever has been a Christian nation. But I do think Senator Nuxoll is right in saying that the U.S. was founded upon many Christian principles. And, of course, this happened because there were indeed many religiously devout members of Congress who signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and they were “born-again Christians” if I may use that redundant terminology.

What gets me is that Senator Nuxoll’s clerical critics for her above remarks have included a female rabbi. Rabbi ElizaBeth Beyer said Nuxoll “should be called upon to offer a public apology, and perhaps even be sanctioned by the Senate for her inappropriate, insensitive and insulting remarks.” What! No religion in the world condemns belief in the worship of multiple gods more than does Judaism. Just read the book of Isaiah, especially chapters 42-48. Jews gave the world the legacy of monotheism–the worship of one God as the creator of the universe. Christianity and Islam got their monotheism from Judaism. Hindus worship something like 33 million gods. I don’t see how they keep track of them all.

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