So much effort by the Religious Right has gone to trying to prove that this country of ours is God’s divine creation and holds a special place in His heart and in His plans – akin to the way the Hebrew Nation was/is considered within the spectrum of the Hebrew Scriptures. This causes so much twisting of history and the writings of our Founders. This also fuels the demand that the geo-political and sociopolitical world of Neo-Conservative is actually what Christianity is all about. As I have often said, this harms the cause of Christ in the United States.

Here is a book that may well bring perspective to such claims by the Religious Right.  Christianity Today has a review of “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction” by John Fea (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011)

Fea also sketches a helpful history of the Christian
nation narrative, showing how feuding factions–northern abolitionists
and southern slaveholders, fundamentalists and Social Gospellers,
contemporary conservatives and progressives–have defined and
appropriated America’s contested religious heritage.

In presenting the past disinterestedly, Fea rebukes the
habit of “cherry-picking from the past as a means of promoting a
political or cultural agenda in the present.” Washington’s Farewell
Address doesn’t validate the Religious Right’s blueprint for society,
any more than Jefferson’s bowdlerized Bible validates the Left’s
alternative.

Read the entire article, here.