Church and state shouldn't date

The legal effort in our state to enshrine the term “Judeo-Christian values inherent in our nation’s founding” in an official county document uses a false premise.

These values are not unique to people of faith. Compared to Christians, non-theists have lower rates of divorce, criminality, and domestic abuse. They are also more educated, make higher incomes and accordingly pay more taxes that serve a major Christian initiative of helping the poor.

In 1785, James Madison as co-author of the Federalist Papers and primary author of the U.S. Constitution wrote “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

In the presidential campaign of 1800, Thomas Jefferson was widely attacked as an atheist.

As mature adults, Washington and Franklin did not practice their religion in any notable institutional way. Thomas Paine relentlessly attacked the Bible. Jefferson literally cut and pasted it to his own liking, removing what he considered superstition.

All the founders including Adams - perhaps the most pious among them - had a disdain for churchmen that they considered examples of self-aggrandizement and generally unworthy of their vaulted status.

The 1805 Treaty of Tripoli negotiated by an appointee of Washington and signed by Adams states, “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Though they were mostly deists, the founders did not have the information privy to modern scholars of Christianity that would have likely further moderated any religious views they held.

Even the Puritans fled their perceived Judeo-Christian oppression from the Church of England to pursue their own heightened brand of Christian exclusivity and persecution.

Several state ratifying committees tried to amend the preamble of the Constitution suggesting that government power came from God or Jesus Christ, but the economic need to establish the federal union influenced many states to drop their own restrictive religious requirements as Jefferson and Madison had hoped.

The most beneficial legislation that also serves the highest moral good is based on data and not religious doctrine. According to Madison, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise …”

Oak Ridge resident William Culbert is a retired physician.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Church and state shouldn't date