Several Christian posters here at SoulCast have insisted that the United States of America was founded on Christian principles. I find this claim untenable. For example, only three of the Ten Commandments are codified under U.S. Law. Murder, theft, and perjury are illegal. On the other hand, the freedom of religion guaranteed by our Bill of Rights appears diametrically opposed to the first two or three commandments (depending on the version you use), and desire for a neighbor’s property forms the cornerstone of capitalism and free market economic theory. Despite all this, Christians still insist that a careful examination of our nation’s founders and early documents will reveal that our nation was built upon Biblical principles.
I doubted this, but I really didn’t have the energy to investigate it at the time. I later discovered the Treaty of Tripoli, a peace agreement with a Muslim nation on the north African coast that was actively pirating our Mediterranean shipping lanes. The eleventh article of that treaty, seeking to assure the Bey that the United States was not in the practice of waging religious wars against Muslim nations, stated the following:
“The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
The treaty was signed on January 3, 1797, and sent home for ratification by the Senate, as required by our Constitution. The treaty was read aloud on the floor of the Senate on May 29. The treaty was ratified by unanimous vote on June 7 and signed by President John Adams into law on June 10, 1797. The entire text of the treaty was printed in at least two Philadelphia newspapers and at least one in New York, generating no public controversy whatsoever.
Our founding fathers were mostly deists, arguably the intellectual equivalent of modern atheists in the days before Darwin. The Constitution was influenced more by Montesquieu, John Locke, and the Magna Carta by anything in the Bible.
