Those who want to prove that the United States is not and
was not intended to be a Christian nation often cite The Treaty of
Tripoli. This was a treaty with the
Muslim nations bordering the western Mediterranean Sea in the late 1700s. Tripoli later declared war on the United
States shortly after this treaty was ratified.
The one sentence in this treaty that is offered as proof of
this reads: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any
sense founded on the Christian religion, . . . it is declared by the parties
that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption
of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
Muslim nations along the Mediterranean were seizing merchant
ships for ransom. They were particularly
focused on the Christian nations as retribution for past grievances going back even
hundreds of years. This had been going
on for a while, and at that time our leaders had resigned themselves to simply
paying the ransom, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Under Jefferson’s Presidency, we finally sent
our navy there and ended this nonsense.
In making this treaty, our government wanted to assure these
countries that we did not and would not in the future use religion as a pretext
for hostilities between the countries.
When you consider the parties to this treaty, you can understand better
the wording of this treaty.
The Christian religion or the Bible do not teach or describe
a representative government. The only
government in the Bible with instructions as to how it should work was a
theocracy, where God directly ruled the nation.
Some instructions were also given for the time when the people would
choose to have a king over them. But
there is nothing in the Bible or any Church teaching that showed what a
Republic should look like or how it would work, unlike the Muslim nations where
the Koran was the guide for their government.
However, the United States government, while not based on the
Christian religion is certainly dependent on it. How? A
limited government, as the Federalist Papers described and explained our
government, requires a citizenry self-motivated for good. As John Adams put it: “. . . we have no government armed with power
capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion.
Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of
our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only
for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of
any other.”
When people vote for their leaders, they soon learn that they
can vote themselves money and benefits. When given the choice, people often
find they would rather have the government take care of them than taking care
of themselves.
Political leaders are tempted to use their power for
personal gain, especially getting and staying in office by promising and
providing goodies for people.
A limited government needs a moral, independent, and caring
citizenry.
A moral people doesn’t need or want an ever expanding
government to keep making more rules, regulations, and laws that require more
police and courts and prisons to keep everybody in line, safe, and compliant.
An independent people doesn’t need or want government
assistance, financial or otherwise, people who believe in hard work and
self-reliance.
And a caring people willingly and eagerly seeks to provide
for the needs of others, eliminating the need for government programs, and
since these are all at the grass roots level, eliminating waste and fraud. Christians are taught to love their neighbors
and not merely to tolerate (put up with, ignore) them. There used to be hundreds of Christian
societies devoted to every kind of social problem in the land, all run without
public money.
People who try so hard to defend and promote a secular
country want to remove the very things that made our country great in the first
place. The only alternative is a
government that keeps taking more and more money from those who have it to
support more and more people who have become dependent on it. And as Margaret Thatcher said: it doesn’t
work, because “you always run out of other people’s money.”
