Attorney Says USA's Founding Fathers Planted 'Christian Nation'
by Chad Groening and Jody Brown

(AgapePress) - A constitutional law expert says the Founding Fathers did not envision religious pluralism when they framed the Constitution in order to guarantee freedom of religion. He says they believed in one God - Jesus Christ.

Steve Crampton is chief counsel for the American Family Association's Center for Law & Policy. He says the framers of the Constitution originally intended for individual states to determine what kind of religious practices they should tolerate.

"Almost uniformly they prohibited things like blasphemy against the One True God - namely Jesus Christ, the God of the Bible," Crampton says. "There's a very famous case [that] went to the U.S. Supreme Court [Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892] which dealt with some of these very same issues."

In that case, the court ruled that "no purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people.... This is a Christian nation." Crampton says the landmark case reiterated what former Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story observed earlier that century was almost the universal sentiment at the time of the founding - that there is a religion of America and that religion is the religion of Jesus Christ.

Crampton says the Founding Fathers created a system that did not recognize Islam or any other false religions. And consequently, he says, they understood that God's law was supreme and that attacks against that law could not be tolerated. "I think the laws were in place then [to enforce that] - maybe not in the Constitution specifically, but in the support of the state laws that existed then," Crampton says.

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