by Jeremy Friesenhahn

Created on: August 23, 2009

Absolutely. In fact, the moral foundation that America was founded on has long since eroded.

However, it's also important to recognize that a culture's idea of morality is directly related to the where and when. When the U.S. Constitution was written, it was created "So that wise men and morale men may.. correct what we have begun". A direct example of this is present in one of the most oft-quoted lines of the document: "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". A similar line appears in Massachusetts's Constitution of 1780. However, when these lines were written by some of most brilliant minds on earth, these rights were not interpreted to, nor intended to, encompass any group other than white men. This line been vastly reinterpreted as America and the rest of the Western world have come to recognize these lines as literal.

However, as the primary subjects of this section have been endowed with equal rights, the other subject has been near erased in the workings of political documents. "Our Creator" (certainly written as the Christian God) in this document, but as represented in all faiths, has been eradicated in the judicial system of briefs and opinions. The First Amendment disallowed the forcing of a decision to choose a particular deity. This state of mind has come a long way; across the United States, schools are removing the words "God" from the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments may not be posted on public buildings. While both major political parties are still represented as Christian due to traditional beliefs, it has rapidly fallen out of fashion to attribute political reasoning to God (George Bush being the exception; no president since FDR has mentioned God so many times in the State of the Union).

One of the most mentioned concepts of the "American identity" is religion. This is a concept with roots in the land far before it became America; Spanish conquistadors' mottos were "God, Gold and Glory" and the original English settlements' written creeds were of similar lines; spread their God, then profit, then territory. These people became the first Americans. However, while at this time the greatest rifts were those of the Protestants and Catholics or the Puritans and Anglican, America's identity today has been rewritten. The percentage of Americans that identify themselves as Christian had fallen from 86.2% in 1990 to 76.5% in 2001, a massive decline considering the longevity that Christianity has dominated America; approximately 400 years.(ARIS, 2001)

So it's time to reexamine ourselves. What is America's identity? America is the melting pot. The land of opportunity. Where one may go when one has nowhere else to turn. We are not defined by Christianity, ethnicity, or the rights afforded to a group of people. Every day people start anew here, and they always have. To preserve America's morals, we need to keep in mind why it was founded, not by whom.

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