First things First
As a Political Science Major, in my study of Constitutional Law, I have found that if there is one important principle for understanding American government, history, law and politics, it is that the Founders of the nation; the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; never did anything accidentally. There are no superfluous words in any of those documents. Every word means something, as does the order in which they are written. The principle is that the Founders always placed whatever they deemed to be most important first and foremost. The Colonies had just won a long and bloody Revolutionary War against the Monarchy of the British Empire, and so the Founders not only placed the representative branch of government, the legislative branch, in Article I of the Constitution, but went further even than that in placing the people’s house, the United States House of Representatives, in Article I Section II, before the less proportional representative body; the United States Senate, in Section III.
One need only grasp this one very simple principle in order to resoundingly refute any assertion ever made that the United States of America was founded on a “Judeo-Christian” code or system. This can be demonstrated as easily as turning to what is by far and away the most widely-recognizable code in any Abrahamic faith: The Ten Commandments. The First Commandment, found in the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible in chapter 20, verses 2-3 of the Book of Exodus and chapter 5 verses 6-7 of the Book of Deuteronomy, reads as follows:
“I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
Two chapters later, in chapter 22, verse 20 of the Book of Exodus, and again in chapters 13 and 17 of the Book of Deuteronomy, this same “Judeo-Christian code” upon which it is claimed America was founded provides the prescribed penalty for worshipping gods other than the Abrahamic Judeo-Christian god of the Bible: Death.
Now let us compare and contrast this with America’s own ten-part code: The Bill of Rights. As has been stated, the Founders, that authors of these documents, placed what they considered to of utmost importance in the forefront. So what is in the first clause of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights? What did the Founders consider more important than anything else to, in the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence “effect their safety and happiness” and “provide new guards for their future security”?
Amendment I, Clause I of the Bill of Rights reads as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
In the words of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in the February 10, 1947 case of “Arch R. Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing”:
“The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance.”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/330/1
In the June 27, 1994 case of “Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Louis Grumet”, Supreme Court Justice David Souter concurred that the “principle at the heart of the Establishment Clause” was “that government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion.”
Both of these establish what Thomas Jefferson referred to in 1802 as “a wall of separation between Church and State”.
The Judeo-Christian code in the Bible not only mandates that people believe in and worship a god, but prescribes precisely which god they must believe in and worship, under pain of torture and death. The American code not only strictly forbids the mandating of religious belief or worship of any kind, but declares everyone “inalienably” free to believe in and/or worship whatever and/or whomever they want, and guarantees them the right to do so free from fear of punishment or retribution of any form.
These two, the First Amendment and the First Commandment, are not merely divergent, but mutually exclusive and therefore incompatible with one another. So not only are those who claim that America was founded on the Judeo-Christian code wrong in every imaginable way, but indeed they could not possibly be any more wrong if they tried. Not only is America not founded on the Judeo Christian code, but indeed that code has no place in America.
The Creatively Maladjusted 