Some would have us believe that the United States was founded on the principals of Christianity, and that the US is in fact a Christian nation. We see this tendency in the addition of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the controversy surrounding the (now defunct) lawsuit to remove those words. Interestingly the Pledge was originally “written by a Baptist minister(Pledge of Allegiance – A Short History)”:http://history.vineyard.net/pledge.htm, and contained no references to God at all. Similar tendencies are seen both in law and in public discourse, where it is not uncommon to hear the claim that we were founded as a Christian nation stated by those who wish to inject religion into the government.
“Here(The Founding Fathers and A Question of Faith: American History 101)”:http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon179.htm one can see in the original words of some of the most influential men in the infancy of the United States that the US was indeed _not_ established as a Christian nation. The common tendency to assert that the United States _is_ a Christian nation would likely have greatly upset many of those men who are most respected in our short national history.
