The United States is not, and has never officially been, a religious nation.
Seriously.
That quote above from the english-language version of Treaty of Tripoli, from just seven years after the drafting of the Constitution, makes that very, very clear. It’s an explicit statement by the first iteration of the U.S. government, still operating under its first President, that the United States as a formal entity has no religion.
The actual phrase we use today comes from just six years after that, when the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third President wrote of the need for a “wall of separation between Church & State”.
And the concept can be found even before the Constitution, with the founder of Rhode Island having written in 1644 of the need for “a wall or hedge of separation” between “the wilderness of the world” and “the garden of the church”.
So, yeah.
To use the phrase favored by the current coup-friendly Supreme Court, the United States definitely has a very clear “history and tradition” of not being a religious State.
And current-president Trump is not, and has never been, a religious person.
But he does know that many of his supporters are.
Which is how we get, as reported yesterday by The Fucking News, that:
Trump Called for American Theocracy and No One Said Shit
Go read Larson’s piece for the details; it’s gross.
It should definitely kill the idea that Trump and the Republicans are patriots.
They’re not; the vision of the United States that they’re pursuing has very little to do with the visions of its founders or the long-standing principles of its citizens.
They are, frankly, more akin to the theocratic goals of Al Quaeda, the Taliban and ISIS than they are to the founding principles of the United States.
This is not a new observation, I know. Folks have been calling the modern Republican Party “Y’all Quaeda” for almost a decade now.
But it’s important to remember this.
Trump and his supporters are not patriots.
In addition to tearing down the United States that is, and lying constantly about the United States that was, the State they’re trying to build here is fundamentally not consistent with being the United States.
Because the State they’re building is a theocracy; a State controlled by the tenets of dominionist Christianity.
And the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.
