Originally Posted by
5stringJeff
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"
How is this a Christian-specific text?
Like the rights of man being self evident, Christianity was the established dominate religion, it was self evident. The American colonies populations were made up of Christians that for the most part had fled Western Europe due to religious persecution. There were Christians and those of Jewish faith, but the dominate religion was Judeo-based Christianity and nothing else.
The history of Europe during the colonization of America that resulted in the Christians fleeing to the New World was based on the break up of the Holy Roman Empire, see article, map and picture of crown here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Ro..._of_the_Romans . It fell apart with a war that ended with the Peace of Westphalia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia that created a break up of the Catholic-Roman control. With the treaty new nations maps were drawn and religion remained entangled with the new governments in the form of denominations of Christianity that resulted. Keep in mind that the Holy Roman Empire ended in the 1800's so that means there were revolutions across Europe and ours in the US. The revolutions base was the control of the Catholic and later Christian denominations Church in combination with KINGS over the people.
The American Revolution was followed by the French Revolution and then it took England another thirty years to fully transition into a representative government it is today.
The Founding Fathers didn't want a particular denomination of Christianity to dominate politics or cloud the government with religion; it wanted to be neutral towards the differing denominations to protect religion from government.
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."
---Thomas Jefferson (or as Al Sharpton calls him: Grandpappy)
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