OPINION: It's dangerous to think our founders sought a Christian nation

Sol Wachtler is a former chief judge of New York State and is a professor of constitutional law at Touro Law School. David Gould is a practicing attorney and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

At the massive Restoring Honor rally in Washington last weekend, the words that hung heaviest in the air were "constitutional conservative," "Christian nation" and "our savior Jesus Christ." All were wrapped around a theme of bringing back the true American values of the founding generation of our country. Glenn Beck sounded the call when he said, "America today begins to turn back to God."

In his version of America, the Constitution created a "Christian nation" and a return to those roots is vital if the country is to survive. Of course, this ignores the Constitution itself - which does not contain a single reference to God. It also ignores the fact that this nation was not, as implied by Beck, inspired by the Bible. A reading of the minutes of the Constitutional Convention reveals that it was the city states of Greece, and the writings of Locke, Hobbes and, yes, the pagan Aristotle, who inspired that wonderful charter.

It was not as if the drafters of the Constitution didn't have the religious templates before them. They could easily have infused religion into our civic and governmental lives. But "the Christian nation" he envisions was not one created by our founders. And this is actually fortunate for Beck, as such a nation would have excluded a Mormon like him.

Several of the state-founding constitutions specifically barred anyone but Protestants from holding public office. Others required an oath to be taken that the officeholder believed in Jesus Christ. At the time of the Revolution, every colony had a state-established religion that was favored in some manner by the government, usually Congregationalist or Episcopalian. It wasn't until the mid-19th century that all states abolished official religions. Fortunately, our wise founders abolished them in the national realm when the Constitution was enacted in 1787.

The Christian nation of yore considered the Protestant-Catholic divide to be more than a matter of same-church-different-pew. The Suffolk Resolves of 1774 - the Precursor to the Declaration of Independence - listed as grievance No. 10 that the British had allowed the Catholic religion to be established in Canada, which its drafters considered extremely dangerous to the Protestant religion. We are lucky that our constitutional framers took the exact opposite approach, explicitly stating there should be no religious test for public office or citizenship.

But Beck seems to wish to impose a religious test for having true American values. Just think of that rally: We heard about the restoration of American values, and we heard that meant being a Christian nation and believing in Jesus Christ.

Once you proclaim that we are and always should be a Christian nation, you unleash two whirlwinds. You are implicitly stating that any nonbeliever in the divinity of Christ is not an equal citizen of this country. More ominously for Beck, you make it essential to peel back the onion on the word "Christian."

From their faith's founding in the 1830, the Mormons were patriotic and nationalist members of this country. Mormonism's founding prophet, Joseph Smith, even contemplated a run for president. But everywhere the Mormons moved, they were hounded and vilified. Eventually even Joseph Smith himself was dragged from a jail and murdered by a lynch mob.

What was the problem? Mormonism was founded on the belief that God, speaking through an angel, told Joseph Smith that the Christian scripture and Jesus' message had been corrupted by the present Christian religions, and that a new religion and holy scripture should supplant them. In other words, Mormonism was founded on the belief that Catholicism and Protestantism did not represent the true Christ.

None of our nation's founding fathers would have considered the history and beliefs reflected in the Book of Mormon to be Christian. Indeed, even today, many Christians - especially evangelical groups - think of Mormonism as a cult and not a true branch of Christianity.

So, when Beck yearns for a return to the founders' Christian nation, he appears to forget that the courageous followers of his own religion were forced to flee this country to foreign soil - the Spanish territory near the great Salt Lake of present day Utah.

If we are and always have been a Christian nation, then who and what is a Christian suddenly becomes relevant. If this country's ideals and honor sprang from Christian scripture, as Beck erroneously claims, it is important to know if, for example, the Bible is correct that the Garden of Eden was bordered by several rivers, including the still-present Euphrates River in Iraq - or actually was located in Independence, Mo., as the Book of Mormon claims. If our country was inspired by and should by guided by Christian beliefs, it's necessary to ask, which Christian beliefs?

When the Mormon Mitt Romney ran for president in 2008, he personally experienced the parlous nature of trying to demand that we need to restore religion and God into our civic and governmental life, while at the same time claiming that his personal religious beliefs were nobody's concerns. It was quite remarkable for him to give a speech on the subject of religion without once mentioning the beliefs of his own religion. He soon found out that if you live by the Christian nation sword, you can die by it, too. Many Christian groups, especially the evangelicals, attacked Romney's Mormon beliefs.

There have always been two streams of thought about the role of God and religion in this land. The Beckian stream holds that religion should be inclusive of everything in our lives, from home to government. The other holds that belief or nonbelief of any kind should be protected at all costs, but should remain a personal, not governmental or civic concern.

From the time the Pilgrims first put their boots on the apocryphal Plymouth Rock, these two streams have been fighting each other. The Puritans and Pilgrims came to this land for two reasons: to obtain religious freedom for themselves and to deny it to everyone else. Any dissenter was punished, exiled or even executed. One of the exiled dissenters was Roger Williams, who fled to present-day Rhode Island and founded a colony that became the precursor of the second stream of thought - that of religious pluralism and of keeping religious matters out of governmental matters.

We are fortunate that our American scriptures, the Declaration of Independence and, more important, the Constitution, were written by those who chose the road of governmental secularism. By trying to wrench us onto the road not taken by the founders, the Beckian movement threatens not only to blow back on Mormons like himself, but it is doing much to fracture this country at the exact time it is in desperate need of unifying forces.

The ascendancy of those wishing to demolish what Thomas Jefferson praised as the wall of separation between church and state is radically hurting us as a country that prides itself on not being a theocracy.

The seeds that are being sown by putting religious tests to Americanism and American values may well reap a whirlwind that will consume many of its progenitors. Beck has cynically defined the American Christian nation so that he falls inside the line of inclusion. But he should be careful what he wishes for. His followers may follow his road to its inevitable endpoint, and he may find himself outside the line of that American Christian nation, along with the rest of us who didn't make the cut.