Hey Dan,
I have this wonderful book:
Documents Illustrative of the Union of the American States, 69th Congress, House Document No. 398, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1927. 1115 pp.
This has everything of interest, the States comments on ratification of the Constitution, Madison's notes on the Convention. I haven't read everything, but everything that deals with religion. The index gives no reference to Christ, Christian, God, Church, Establishment, Jesus or anything else except "religious test, forbidden" which is, as far as I can find, the only mention of religion in the book. I believe it is impossible on this showing to conclude that the Founding Fathers had little interest in religion at all, as far as they wrote or spoke. There were complaints about Parliament's establishment of Catholicism in the Province of Quebec. In the States' demands for further Amendments to the Constitution there was the First Amendment complete in embryo. But I have read nothing about religion in the documents except that government should leave it strictly alone or unmentioned.
The very idea that most of these people who founded our nation wanted a Christian or Religious Nation is absurd. They wanted people to have the right to free exercise of religion in the privacy of their homes and churches, and to protect it from government intervention of every kind. |
