For Man Alone

In the course of their constant efforts to erase the line between Church and State, conservatives in the US often argue that the founding fathers were Christian, and intended America to be a Christian country.

This mythical nonsense can be proven false in a number of ways: by remembering that the founding fathers were deists, not Christians; by recognizing that Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison disliked Christian dogma for the simple reason that it held a tyranny over the mind, just as King George had held a tyranny over the colonies; or by acknowledging the emphasis the fathers placed on Enlightenment rationalism as the guiding light through the darkness of superstition.

But nowhere is the founding father's secular humanism more evident, and their desire for a separation of Church and State more obvious, than in the Constitution itself. The US Constitution makes no mention of God - a conspicuous omission in an age when kings still derived their legitimacy from the blessing of the Lord.

Why this omission? Robert Ingersoll, the great 19th-century agnostic orator, explained why the founders insisted on leaving God out of the Constitution - and therefore out of politics:

They knew that to put God in the Constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.