It is no accident that the U.S. Constitution does not mention God or the Bible. It does not mention the Ten Commandments. It says that there will be no religious test to hold public office. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, meaning every person is free to practice their religion or no religion at all. And it assures that Congress will never establish a state religion, that imposes one religion on everyone.
A commentator who uses the nom de plume “Quikwrit” offered this analysis:
AS WE celebrate the 250 anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, it is well to remember that the man who almost single-handedly wrote the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was a Deist, as was George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and many other of our Founding Fathers who also created and signed our Constitution. The ideas of personal freedom in our Constitution come not from the Bible, but come from the philosophy of The Enlightenment which so many of our Founding Fathers were adherents to.
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and all the other Deists among our Founding Fathers hated that they were forced to enroll as members of England’s official government Christian Church, and that’s why they wrote the First Amendment that not only gives We the People freedom OF religion but also freedom FROM religion.
The First Amendment forbids government from “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In other words, in America there can’t be any government “respecting” of any religion in any way, and the government can’t prohibit people from practicing whatever religion they want to practice.
Our Founding Fathers also wrote into Article VI of our Constitution that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Our Founding Fathers didn’t want anyone to have to belong to any religion in order to hold public office.
Our Founding Fathers made it unconstitutional for our government and public schools to support or teach any religion or to require any religious affiliation for anyone to hold public office, and THEY CAREFULLY AND DELIBERATELY LEFT ANY MENTION OF GOD ENTIRELY OUT OF OUR CONSTITUTION.
Our Founding Fathers left God entirely out of the Constitution so that Americans could define God in whatever way they wanted, or to hold that there is no God, because, as the history of the world shows time and again, whenever there is an official government religion, there is conflict and suppression of someone’s rights. And such fighting is about to break out in America as states like Texas begin to require teaching “the Bible” in schools — but WHOSE BIBLE? Catholics use the septuagint version of the Bible that includes Old Testament books that were used by the Apostles in their teaching and that are referred to in the New Testament by Jesus and in the Epistles. The Protestant Bible eliminated those OT books. Whose Bible will be taught in public schools? And whose Ten Commandments will be taught? Different Christian religions, as well as the Jewish religion, have different Ten Commandments.
Europe tore itself apart in bloody religious wars of Christian versus Christian that went on so long they are called “The Hundred Year War” in our history textbooks. The ancestral families of our Founding Fathers suffered in those wars, and that kind of bloody and ruinous religious conflict is what our Founding Fathers wanted to avoid by leaving any mention of God entirely out of our Constitution and forbidding any government involvement in any religion.
I’m a life-long practicing Christian, but I don’t want my religion unconstitutionally imposed on anyone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Europe tore itself apart in bloody religious wars of Christian versus Christian that went on so long they are called “The Hundred Year War” in our history textbooks.”
This essay is largely correct, but there is no text I have ever read suggesting the the Hundred Years War was based on religion. The author likely was thinking of the Thirty Years War that erupted when Hapsburg rulers tried to impose a particular book of prayer on the Moravian provinces and a rebellion followed. Sweden got involved under Gustavus Adolphus and the stalemate saw whole towns destroyed is a war that was nominally religious, but was really territorial and generally concerning hegemony, not theology (sound familiar?).
The important connection to make here is the effect this had on English Puritans. Largely literate, they read printed stories about Catholic (actually Hapsburg) atrocities in the various German principalities. This was vitally important to the fear that fanned the embers of conflict in the 1640s Puritan revolt, which took the head of Charles I and installed Oliver Cromwell only to give way in 1660 to the restoration of Charles II, who took more revenge than history generally acknowledges. In 1688, parliament reasserted control in what was called the Glorious Revolution, but it was not really as glorious as all that for opposition figures to William of Orange, who was imported to rule as king.
All this history was well known to Enlightenment thinkers, and that 150 year period affected their thinking largely as the time since the American Civil War and its effects, the huge European wars after that, and the Cold War still haunts our own body politic.
It was fear of religious conflict that led people like Madison and Jefferson to fear the effects of marrying political leadership to an established government sponsored church. Since many of the founding fathers were church going people, and since they valued that, they feared a repetition of the century and a half before them. Many of them feared others churches more than they feared Jefferson’s quirky deism.
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Thanks for your knowledgeable commentary, Roy. Ofc, after Luther and Calvin, the rivers of Europe ran red with blood in the struggles between Catholics and Protestants.
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what about the pledge of allegiance, isn’t there the “one nation under God…”??? That’s, contradictory, don’t you think? The U.S. Constitution “preached” about the freedom of religion, and yet, another important “document” in U.S. history preaches the exact, opposite, that the U.S. is “one nation under God”…the U.S. deemed itself to have religious freedom, because there are the various places of worship (temples, mosques, cathedrals, churches, etc., etc., etc.) all across the country, but, when it comes down to it, if you’re NOT a believer of Christianity (of Christ), then, you’re basically, unaccepted, it’s just not yet, overtly observed, but with Trump, all of that became, more, apparent.
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I believe the “under God” came in 1954?
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and i’m reading the sources, that this is Eisenhower’s way of differentiating the U.S. from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and wouldn’t that mean, that God is only, “used” as a sort of opposing view from the enemies of the U.S. then? And in this case, what would, God’s function be, but for the sakes of separating “us’ and them? And isn’t God supposed to love ALL races of man?
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Yes, to fight the “Godless Communists.” Funny how that is back in the light. In the film “Separate but Equal”. highlighting Brown v. Board of education (my students loved this film) I pointed out what did they notice? The kids recited the pledge without “under God” in it. Sidney Poitier was excellent.
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Amen, spot on!
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there is, NO mentions of any religion in the U.S. Constitution, but the Pilgrims came to America to ESCAPE religious persecution from England, and I think, that’s what the first amendment is based off of, the original thought of how the Pilgrims are seeking a place where their differences in religious beliefs is not, persecuted by those who have a different belief systems, but Trump is ow, making the U.S. into an ALL-CHRISTIAN nation, and that completely goes against the origins of how the U.S. was set up.
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The Deist Founders aside, a majority of the Founders were practicing Christians, which makes the absence of “God” or “State religion” even more glaring. The Christians who poo-poo the deist argument are actually making their position worse.
These “christian nationalists” (they don’t deserve capital letters) need to be smacked down and smacked down hard every time they speak. Their lies need to be met with calls of “Liar!” each and every time they make such ridiculous claims.
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Excellent commentary, as always, from Quickwrit. Which Bible, indeed!!!
There are four widely used translations/versions of the Catholic Bible, and these contain quite a few books and sections of books not found in the literally hundreds (thousands?) of translations/versions of Protestant Bibles.
Found in the Catholic Bibles (which contain 73 books) but not the Protestant ones (which contain 66 books) are the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (aka Sirach or Ben Sira), 1–2 Maccabees, Baruch, and some added sections of the books of Daniel and Esther.
The Ethiopian Christian bible contains 81 books, including material found neither in Catholic nor Protestant Bibles: 1 Enoch, Jubilees, 1-3 Meqabyan, and some additional material. 1 Enoch contains a fascinating extended version of the story of the Nephilim–giants born of “sons of God” and mortal, human women (See Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 in Protestant and Catholic Bibles).
But that’s only the beginning.
The now canonical Catholic and Protestant Bibles contain 27 New Testament chapters. But there was no final, definitive list of canonical New Testament books until hundreds of years after Christ, and we have, today, literally HUNDREDS of gospels, acts, epistles, apocrypha, liturgical texts, and so on from the first three centuries after Christ that were at various times and by various Christian groups considered central sacred texts, some of the most astonishing of which include the mind-blowingly important and fascinating Coptic Gospel of Thomas, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which tells stories of the childhood of Jesus), and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene–all of which I HIGHLY recommend that you search out and read.
There were so many different Christian sects with differing beliefs in the first couple centuries after Christ that the great Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman says we should speak not of “Early Christianity” but of “Early Christianities.” For my take on all this, see series of Youtube talks I created on this subject, “Christian Existentialism.” Here’ the first of those talks:
Christian Existentialism, Episode 1, Intro, Rev – YouTube
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The Youtube series Christian Existentialism, referenced above, contains numbered talks, Episodes 1, 2, 3, etc. These are cumulative and are best viewed in order, if you care to do so.
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So, there are many Bibles, and each one IS NOT A BOOK BUT A LIBRARY of many books written at many times by many different people and often recombined with one another and retold before reaching one of the many forms that were the basis for the many different contemporary translations.
When people speak of THE Bible, they are speaking from ignorance.
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