freethinkers are, I suspect, sometimes suckers for the big lie that the U.S. really was founded as a Christian nation. We've heard it so often that we tend to doubt our allies who dispute it as maybe just over-zealous, over-eager, well-intentioned-but-wrong atheists out to prove what they want to believe rather than to understand the truth.

But careful research into the facts, accompanied by honest presentation of those facts, leads to important support for the thesis that the Constitutional framers intended this nation to have a government strictly neutral regarding religion.

From our perspective these men may be heroes, but in truth the vote they cast was ordinary, routine, normal. It was, in other words, quite well accepted,

that "the Government of the United States of America was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

After a bloody and costly civil war and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment

religious liberty for all was established.