Religious leaders sometimes point to the U.S. Constitution as Christian inspired, written by Christian men for governing a Christian nation. This is a mistaken view. The Constitution specifically omits any sort of God, and is an entirely secular document.
The preamble of the Constitution invokes the people of the United States. It does not invoke any sort of God.
The Constitution forbids any religious test to hold office. A godless person is just as eligible as a godly one! (Article 6, Paragraph 3)
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin strongly suggested on June 28 that the convention have prayers said there. Evangelists take this as proof that the convention then went on with prayers. But, in fact, the convention did not accept the suggestion, and the convention went on without prayers. (See 1787: The Grand Convention by Clinton Rossiter [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966] p 185)
Evangelists claim that the form of government in the Constitution is in the Bible, for example, as in Moses' division of the peoples of Israel into smaller groups for ease of governance. But the founders didn't get the ideas for representative government or federalism or other governmental concepts from the Bible, but from other sources. The Federalist papers, written by three founding fathers, cites ancient Greece and Rome, and European examples, but does not invoke the Bible. "Nature's God" (not necessarily the Christian one) is vaguely mentioned in The Federalist #43, as in the "Almighty" in #38, and "Heaven" in #20.
The early U.S. Government, manned by the Founding Fathers, wrote and ratified a treaty with the north African country of Tripoli, (present day Libya) that said the United States is not in any sense a Christian nation.
The writings of two Founding Fathers, who though they were not at the Constitutional Convention, reflect the non-Christian (but not anti-Christian) viewpoints of the founders. Thomas Paine wrote a book called The Age of Reason that specifically denied the divine inspiration of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson edited a version of the Four Gospels that entirely omitted all references to the divinity of Jesus, retaining only His philosophical teachings.
It should be noted that the Constitution of the Confederate States of America - which specifically protected slavery (in Art. IV, Sec. 2, Par. 1, and Art. IV, Sec. 3, Par 3) - does mention and invoke God (in its preamble)! (see Ordeal by Fire by James M. McPherson, 2nd ed., [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992] pp. 613,615.)
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