Was Tailgunner Joe McCarthy the Founding Father of Our Country?

The founding fathers proclaimed a national motto, E Pluribus Unum. From many, one. The fundo zealot loves to proclaim the Christian heritage of the nation by pointing to In God We Trust, stamped on every coin and printed on every bill. They exalt the linking of God and the nation in the pledge of allegiance, recited by every school child, every day.

The heritage of neither comes from the founding fathers. It was during the Civil War, in the first term of Abraham Lincoln that the Secretary of the Treasury first directed that In God We Trust be stamped on the penny. He was convinced to do this by his protestant minister. The motto was used intermittently on a few other coins for the next century. It wasn't until the hysterics of the Red Scare in 1955, that In God We Trust was required to be inscribed on all money.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Protestant minister in 1892. At that time it was a generic patriotic utterance with no reference to either the United States of America, or God. It was a couple of decades before the United States of America was Specifically added. The pledge itself, while commonly recited from the 1920s on, was not officially sanctioned by the government until the patriotic fervor of World War II, in 1942. The reference to God in the pledge was, like the In God We Trust Motto on Money, not added until the height of the Red Scare, in 1955.

The founding fathers, while they had nothing against religion, were leery of it, having seen how much war, suffering, death and division it had caused in other societies. They were by no means all devoted Christians themselves. Indeed, the greatest among them, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and many others could well be classified as secular humanists, by today's Rightist agitators. There is no heritage of Christian nationhood that was passed down from them and they would be sorely disappointed to think that anyone in the future would claim it to be so.

The strict separation of Church and State is one of the most important building blocks of any free society. That we have largely subverted this principle tells us about the extent of the freedom that we currently enjoy.

Take Back the Freedoms that were once Ours. The Church has Its Prescribed Place and Must Be Returned to It.