U.S. not founded as Christian nation

I must point out that P.J. Bertrand's letter of Jan. 12 was incorrect in stating that our country's founders clearly believed they were establishing a Christian nation. During George Washington's administration, the U.S. and Tripoli signed a treaty declaring in no uncertain terms that "The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."

On June 10, 1797, the Senate unanimously ratified that treaty, and President Adams signed it. There can be no stronger proof that the U.S. was not founded as a Christian nation.

After Thomas Jefferson completed his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he referred it to his friend Benjamin Franklin for review. Jefferson had written that "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," but that was not acceptable to Benjamin Franklin who took his stick pen, drew diagonal strikeouts through the words "sacred and undeniable," and wrote above them the words "self-evident." That is how the Declaration came to be worded that "We hold these truths to be self-evident," and the religious connotation is gone.

Finally, most of our founders were either Unitarians or deists, and we have serious questions if there was any Christian orientation on their part. Thus Thomas Jefferson wrote the following in a letter to his friend John Adams: "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

We are simply not taught in school about these personal beliefs of our founders, but they do bear out, contrary to P.J. Bertrand's position, that the U.S. was not founded as a Christian nation. Even then government and religion were to be kept separate.

Theodore M. Utchen

Wheaton