The United State’s Founding Fathers lived in a world where the horrors of religiously founded states were in quite recent memory. They had local examples like the Puritan history in Massachusetts with the burning of witches and exile of heretics like Roger Williams who went on to found Rhode Island to provide a land with freedom to dissent. They had the English Revolution with Oliver Cromwell ending the alternating slaughter of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics by making the heads of both roll. They also were able to see the power of the king as the head of the Church of England be able to influence church politics and Catholic nations having the pope and arch bishops dictating state affairs.

Their’s was a world where there were Protestant states, Catholic states, Orthodox states, and Muslim states. I know their were also states of other religions, but those weren’t the ones they were worried about. They saw the mess it brings about, but they wanted no part of it. The United States was “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion“.

It’s annoying when people in the US, especially political figures, ask whether or not we’re a Christian nation. Then there’s countries like Britain. Sociologically they are less of a Christian nation than the US. Legally, however, they are a Christian nation, unlike the US. The Richard Dawkins Foundation recently sponsored a survey of “Census Christians”, those who tick the “Christian” box on their census forms, to see how Christian they really are and the results were not surprising with most of that group not fitting any religious definition of what a Christian is. If you have the time, this debate is quite interesting:

(Video via Atheist Media Blog)