Some of the claims in Mr. Fox’s letter of Oct. 26 grossly misrepresent the actual history, while the rest fail to distinguish between a country in which Christians live among others of different (or no) religious belief, and a country whose laws and founding documents are specifically Christian. A more complete history tells a different and repugnant story that Christians should be deeply ashamed of, not proud of.

The history of the relationship between Christianity and the US government is littered with atrocity, disease, death and destruction committed by Christian leaders and followers. Its roots can be traced back to official Christian Church pronouncements that date back to the period of Columbus’ voyages. These gave official Christian sanction to centuries of European and early American efforts to kill or convert the Native American population to Christianity by any means necessary.

White Christian nationalism also gave the US the Confederacy and the institution of slavery that it was based on, and whose leaders saw their project as the culmination of the Euro-Christian domination it promised. At the opening of the Alabama succession conference in 1861 a prominent Southern Baptist minister called on the Christian God to preserve the Confederacy “as long as the sun and moon” shone.

It is precisely this murderous intolerance of many white Christians to those who did not share their supremacist views that make the following legal and political actions all the more telling.

At the beginning of the Revolution, 10 of the 13 states had established Christian denominations; all were disestablished by 1833.

During the constitutional convention some delegates wanted Christianity officially recognized, an idea rejected by the majority. In the 1870s, an organization of Christian ministers attempted to insert into the preamble recognition of Almighty God, Holy Scripture, and Jesus the Messiah. The proposal failed, as have all others..

The principal framers of the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deists and Unitarians; only some were Christians. Various references to deities were all generic deistic, not orthodox Christian, terms. The Declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson, was not an orthodox Christian. To see this it is only necessary to compare his Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth with the Gospel text it was extracted from.

The claim about the 1892 Supreme Court decision grossly misrepresents the facts. Just one justice expressed his personal opinion that the United States was a Christian nation. His opinion was not an official ruling, was not binding and established no precedent. In contrast, there is the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty, ratified by the Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1796, begins “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. …”

The Constitution is not only secular, but has the first and sixth amendments that explicitly prohibit any requirement for or endorsement of either a specific religion or religious belief in general, thus establishing the foundational principle of the separation of church and state.

Chris Esposito

La Grande