Subject: America: Why We Are Still a Christian Nation

Psalm 33:12 “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord…”

Just months before Barack Obama was elected President of the Unites States, he told America something no other President had ever said: “Whatever we once were, we’re no longer a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” Now, only a week away from electing a new president, many Christians are discouraged that America’s Christian roots will continue to be ridiculed from the White House for another 4 years.

Obama is the first President in American history to claim we are not a Christian nation. What does he mean? To be a Christian nation, do the citizens all need to be Christian? Or does that nation’s laws require everyone to follow biblical morality? That’s how Obama defined it: “Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Should we … stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.” Maybe a Christian nation is one where all the leaders are Christian? So what would define America as a Christian nation?

In his May 2016 article ‘Is America a Christian Nation?’, David Barton recounts American history that confirms the indisputable fact that we as a nation are Christian. He begins with a quote from former Supreme Court Justice Davis Brewer’s book ‘The United States: A Christian Nation’: “Of all the nations in the world, America is most justly called a Christian nation” because Christianity “has so largely shaped and molded it.” So the criteria for a nation being Christian are its foundational values and principles that have shaped it. For America, that’s the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Former Chief Justice to the Supreme Court Earl Warren said it best: “I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, the reservation of powers to the people… I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”

The following list of just a few of the Bill of Rights were all taken from biblical Christianity: 1) The right to exercise your religion and to speak your mind (The 1st Amendment), 2) The right to protect yourself with guns (The 2nd Amendment), 3) The right to security against unreasonable searches and seizures (The 4th Amendment), 4) The right to life, liberty, and property, unless you have committed a crime (the 5th Amendment), 5) If you did commit a crime, the right to a speedy trial with an impartial jury (the 6th Amendment), and 6) The right to equal protection under the laws for life and liberty (the 14th Amendment).

Many of our Presidents echo the same sentiments as Justice Warren. Just listen to former President Theodore Roosevelt: “The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally… impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teaching were removed.”

On July 4, 1776, the United States Congress approved the final text of our Declaration of Independence, which in itself contains five references to the God of Christianity (two in the first paragraph, one in the middle, and two in the last). Former Chief Justice Joseph Story, founder of Harvard Law School and author of the three-volume classic Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, explains why our founding fathers linked our national identity with Christianity: “There never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundations… I verily believe Christianity necessary to the support of civil society… In [our] republic, there would seem to be a peculiar propriety in viewing the Christian religion as the great basis on which it must rest for its support and permanence.”

So the definition of a Christian nation is one whose founding documents, which shape its laws and policies, are based on Christianity. The rhetoric of a President who attempts to revise American history can’t change that. There is one way to destroy America’s identity as a Christian nation: rewrite our Constitution and Bill of Rights. As you decide who to vote for next week, pay attention to which candidate wants to do just that.”