c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Voters will soon decide whether Sen. John McCain will make history as the next president. But, it’s clear the Arizona Republican needs a refresher course on American constitutional history _ especially how and why our Republic was founded.

In a recent interview with Beliefnet, McCain said he would “prefer someone (a candidate) who I know has a solid grounding in my faith” since “the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation.”

Wrong.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution do not mention “God,” “Jesus,” “Christianity” or any other specific religion.

McCain needs to reread the unambiguous words of Article Six, Section Three in the Constitution: “ … no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

There is general agreement that at least 50 of the 55 white men who drafted the Constitution in 1787 were professing or believing Christians, but those same men made a deliberate and momentous decision to keep religious language out of the document.

The Founders feared what they termed the dangers of religious “enthusiasms,” and they remembered the persecution of minority religions in Britain _ Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists and Quakers. The memory of those horrid events was a warning to prevent similar excesses in the new nation.

The drafters of the Constitution were also aware of the religious intolerance that infected the 13 colonies. By 1787, America was home to many different Christian groups and a small Jewish community. No church body _ indeed, no single religion _ was or could be the “established” faith in the emerging Republic.

But the failure to mention of Christianity in the Constitution did not go unnoticed. One prominent Massachusetts leader warned: “A Turk (Muslim), a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universalist, may be President of the United States.”

He was right. Two sons of Massachusetts, John Adams, a Unitarian/Universalist, and John Kennedy, a Catholic, were both elected president.

A New York minister, John M. Mason, said that not mentioning God in the Constitution was “… an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate … We have every reason to tremble … .”

The absence of religious terminology in the Constitution was not an oversight or an accident. The Founders knew precisely what they were doing, and so did the Constitution’s critics.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson sparred with Patrick Henry in the Virginia Legislature. The outcome decisively shaped American history. As governor, Henry sought state support of religion, including a “church tax’ levied on Virginians. His supporters wanted Virginia and the new nation to become officially and legally a “Christian Nation,” similar to Britain, Spain, France and Portugal.

But Jefferson, James Madison and attorney George Mason fought Henry and pressed for passage of the Statute of Religious Freedom for Virginia. Jefferson and his colleagues prevailed by a 47-32 vote.

Jefferson considered the statute one of his proudest achievements; he had it listed on his grave along with his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his founding of the University of Virginia. There is no mention that he served eight years as president.

McCain’s wildly inaccurate statement about a “Christian nation” comes as every religion known to the human family is represented among America’s 300 million citizens. Our population is increasingly multi-religious and multi-ethnic, a trend not likely to change.

The Dallas Cowboys may claim they are “America’s team,” but there is no such thing as “America’s religion.”

One hopes that when McCain completes his refresher course, he will withdraw his dangerous and inaccurate remarks. Such a history course will also help him better fulfill the oath he took as a senator to “support and defend the Constitution.”

That is, the real Constitution, not the one that some religious and political leaders would like to falsely create today.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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