by Graham

Created on: August 21, 2008

Many, especially Christians, would argue that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation. "In God We Trust" decorates our coinage and George Washington prayed, however do occurances such as these constitute a Christian Nation? No, as the Founding Fathers never intended the United States to be a Theocracy or to have the church rule as the government. The pilgrims from England escaped religious persecution from a Protestant-Christian government under the Anglican church.

From America's beginnings at Jamestown in 1607, the Virginia Company and its settlers carried Christian sentiments and these convictions carried through out the generations until the American Revolution in 1776. So it might be argued that the people of the land practiced Christianity both Protestant and Catholic. However, to claim that America was founded as a Christian nation would be some what misleading. Those who catalyzed the Revolution did not seek to institute Christian ideas into a new government, rather they sought to overthrow legal principles they found to incroach on their rights as English citizens. The American Revolution was very much a political war rather than a religious one. The unrest felt by the citizens came from being taxed without being directly represented in Parliament as well as those disenters that created fervor in the people such as Thomas Paine. On the other handin the Declaration of Independence it does state "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". However, The Declaration of Independence included the clause about a Creator in order to define what the higher purpose of a government ,in general is to do: which is to govern a people according to those principles. The Founding Fathers of the United States were generally Christian and so some of those religious sentiments seeped into the ideology of the Constitution, though the form of government chosen (a democratic-republic) was modeled after the Pagan Roman Empire rather than any Judeo-Christian form of government (a theocracy, or monarchy).
The United States cannot be said to have been founded as a Christian Nation because of the religious sentiments of the Founding Fathers. The American Revolution was fought for primarily social and political reasons and the very form of government that makes up what is the United States of America was drawn from a pagan nation. A government might be very different from a nation though. A nation is more about the people as a whole. If the questioner really meant government than, no the United States was not founded as a Christian Nation, but if Nation refers to a largers people group (ie Americans) than yes when the United States was founded many of the Americans already here were Christians already.

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