I’ve noticed some posts on Facebook about America’s Christian history. Some people dispute the influence that Christianity had on the founding and development of our nation. Fact-checkers should do some fact-checking. There were only a few atheists among our nation’s founders, before and after 1787, when the Constitution was first drafted. Even Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, was not an atheist, although he did deny the tenets of Christianity. His creed was short: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and in endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.” Like the deists of that era, their ethical values were co-opted from the Bible. Consistent Darwinism destroyed Paine’s creed and anyone who shares it today. There’s no way to account for anything like “religious duties” in the atheist worldview.
Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor
The most damning assessment of a matter-only cosmos devoid of a Creator is that we got to this place in our evolutionary history by acts of violence whereby the strong conquered the weak with no one to support or condemn them. Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor repeatedly raises the issue of accounting for the conscience, good and evil, and loving our neighbor. It’s shocking to read what atheists say about a cosmos devoid of meaning and morality.
Buy NowCut back to Christianity and the founding of our nation. A single line in the first Treaty of Tripoli (ratified June 10, 1797) is often cited as incontrovertible evidence that our founders self-consciously denied any attachment to the Christian religion, and that there has always been a radical separation between religion and civil government. This conclusion is based upon Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which reads:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims],—and as the said States [of America] never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.[1]
Who would have thought that a long-forgotten treaty would play such a role in the debate over religious freedom, justice, and Christian involvement in politics?
Several anti-Christian groups have used the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli—which was drawn up to put an end to raids on American ships by Barbary Coast pirates and the enslavement of Christians—to drive a provocative wedge in our culture and disrupt the idea that religion played a significant role in the founding of our nation. The only way the debate can be settled is to survey the historical record. When surveyed, the record will show that the Treaty of Tripoli does nothing to disturb the proposition that America was founded on easily fact-checked Christian principles.
The phrase “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” has been attributed to George Washington numerous times. A portion of the above quotation found its way into the September/October 1980 issue of Liberty Magazine, a publication of Review and Herald Publishing Company. The full-page reproduction of Article XI gives the impression that George Washington wrote the words. Washington’s signature follows the excerpted line that reads, “The United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” As we will see, Washington never signed the treaty. An article by Ronald B. Flowers, “In Search of a Christian Nation,” in the July/August 2004 issue, got it right by stating the treaty was signed by John Adams.
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy concocted a story of how Washington “acquiesced” to the radical deistic views of Joel Barlow, the American consul in Algiers, by maintaining that America was not a Christian nation. Here is how the story is reported:
In answer to a direct question from a Muslim potentate in Tripoli, Washington acquiesced in the declaration of Joel Barlow, then American Consul in Algiers, that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”[2]
This excerpt gives the impression that Washington went to Tripoli and had a conversation with the Muslim potentate, where Washington answered a question relating to America’s religious foundation. This is pure fiction. Washington had no direct involvement with the Treaty. He had left office before the Treaty was signed.
Norman Geisler, evangelical author of Is Man the Measure? and many other books on Christian apologetics, uncritically accepted the Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s conclusion concerning the Treaty of Tripoli and George Washington’s part in it. Geisler states that “our nation’s founders were largely humanistic (or deistic)…. There were few evangelical Christians among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon being a notable exception. And when George Washington was asked if the United States was a Christian country, he replied that ‘the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.’”[3] Geisler provides no evidence to support this claim.
The Case for America's Christian Heritage
Even some of our nation’s Founders who did not identify as Christians could not escape the impact the Bible had on our nation’s founding and the moral precepts that held the fledgling nation together. America’s Christian heritage is writ large in its state Constitutions, charters, laws, symbols, and repeated stated reliance on the overruling providence of God. We need to heed the words of Benjamin Franklin who quoted Psalm 127:1 during the drafting process of the Constitution: “except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it,” and “that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel.”
Buy NowDuring the 1984 presidential election, People for the American Way (PAW) aired a commercial entitled “Founding Fathers/Separation of Church and State.” Actor Martin Sheen narrated the propagandistic segment. Sheen said: “Today the voices evoking religious dogma have invaded the highest places of government, challenging the ideas of our Founding Fathers and the separation of church and state.” What did People for the American Way use to support this claim of the views of the Founding Fathers? PAW turned to a chopped quotation from the Treaty of Tripoli and maintained that they were the words of George Washington. Sheen continued: “‘The government of the United States,’ insisted Washington, ‘is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion or any other religion.’”[4] PAW cannot even misquote with integrity. Nowhere does the Treaty of Tripoli contain the words “or any other religion.”
The issue regarding whether Washington ever said or wrote that the government of the United States was not founded on the Christian religion is an old debate. Others, more honest than today’s critics of the Christian America position, have called the story of Washington’s denouncement what it really is—a myth.
There is a myth (and it was revived in 1962 during the discussion following the Supreme Court’s decision against the constitutionality of state-sponsored prayers in public schools) to the effect that Washington once declared, while he was President, that the government of the United States was not a Christian nation.[5]
A book dispelling hundreds of similar false quotations and misleading attributions states that “the statement was not Washington’s” and that diplomats had used that phraseology because they were “eager to make it clear that Christianity was not an American state religion, and that therefore the U.S. government bore no official hostility toward Islam.”[6]The late anti-theist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) stated, “secularists like myself who like to cite this treaty must concede that its conciliatory language was part of America’s attempt to come to terms with Barbary demands.”[7]
The war with the Barbary pirates has a long but often forgotten history. The United States were at the mercy of pirates on the open seas and had no way to combat the piracy and kidnappings. We were forced to pay bribes to the Muslim potentates. In March 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with the ambassador of Tripoli in London.
When they inquired by what right the Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America’s two foremost envoys were informed that “it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
In 1797, our young nation was at the mercy of the Islamists and their implementation of Sharia law against infidels, that is, Christian nations like the United States. The 1797 treaty with Tripoli was an attempt to be conciliatory. The Muslims were still smarting after the Crusades, which the United States played no part in. The treaty was to “reassure the Muslims that the agreement was not with an extension of earlier Christian nations that took part in the Crusades.”
According to Frank Lambert, Professor of History at Purdue University, the assurances in Article 11 were “intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.”
The Treaty of Tripoli was not written in a cultural and political vacuum. There is a lot of history behind it.
In The Federalist No. 24, Alexander Hamilton argued that without a “federal navy . . . of respectable weight . . . the genius of American Merchants and Navigators would be stifled and lost.” In No. 41, James Madison insisted that only union [among the states] could guard America’s maritime capacity from “the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians.” John Jay, in his letters, took a “bring-it-on” approach; he believed that “Algerian Corsairs and the Pirates of Tunis and Tripoli” would compel the feeble American states to unite, since “the more we are ill-treated abroad the more we shall unite and consolidate at home.”[8]
Circumstances changed by 1805 when a new treaty was written, signed, and implemented. By then, the United States had a navy.
We’ve learned much since our dealings with Islam in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is no way to reconcile with a religion that believes all infidels must either submit to Islam or die. Personally, I believe adding Article 11 was a mistake. It revealed a weakness that was exploited and still is. Israel turned over Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005 as a show of good faith. The Islamists saw it as a weakness. Every Jew was forced to leave. Everything they built was left for the Palestinians who occupied the territory. Hamas came in and destroyed all of it and built miles of tunnels for the ultimate goal of destroying Israel.
A prominent member of John Adams’ cabinet, Secretary of War James McHenry, objected to the language of Article 11 before its ratification. He wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott Jr., September 26, 1800: “The Senate, my good friend, and I said so at the time, ought never to have ratified the treaty alluded to, with the declaration that ‘the government of the United States, is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.’ What else is it founded on? This act always appeared to me like trampling upon the cross.”
[1] William M. Malloy, Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements between the United States of America and Other Powers, 1776-1909, 4 vols. (New York: Greenwood Press, [1910] 1968), 2:1786.
[2] Ernest Campbell Mossner, “Deism,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 2:334.
[3] Norman L. Geisler, Is Man the Measure: An Evaluation of Contemporary Humanism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1983), 124-125.
[4] Press release from People for the American Way: “Founding Fathers/Separation of Church and State” (September 20, 1984), 1.
[5] Paul F. Boller, Jr., George Washington and Religion (Dallas, TX: Methodist University Press, 1962), 87. Quoted in M. Kimberly Roberts, The Tripoli Treaty of 1797: Its Use as a Precedent for Separation of Church and State, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Public Policy, CBN University, Virginia Beach, VA, 1986, 7.
[6] Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 129.
[7] Christopher Hitchens, “Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates,” City Journal (April 20, 2007).
[8] Hitchens, “Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates.”