Opinion
Are we a Christian Nation?
By Richard J. Bishirjian
Apr 7, 2009, 10:28

Yesterday our BASP President told the Turkish People that America is not a Christian nation.  What is a BASP and is America a Christian nation?

In the early days of William F. Buckley’s editorship of National Review that journal featured essays by a delightful group of intellectuals that Buckley collected from the cream of the conservative crop.  One of them was an Austrian Catholic, Erik Ritter von Kuehnnelt Leddihn.  In addition to writing books and regular columns in National Review, Erik von Kuehnnelt Leddihn would tour America giving lectures on college campuses.  I attended one of his lectures during a time of racial turbulence in the United States in which he observed that America doesn’t have a race problem, America has a Black Anglo Saxon Problem. (BASP)

He perceived that the clamor for equal rights of Black Americans had a uniquely Christian and Anglo Saxon cast reflecting the religious and legal traditions of Anglo Saxon England.  Yes, when the Constitution was framed the Founders decided against having an Established Church like the Church of England, but virtually all were shaped by the Protestant Reformation, the religious impulse that motivated the early English settlers, and the Founders understood that the American people reflected Protestant Christianity in all its many forms.  America was—and is—a Christian nation, and when Americans of any race express their grievances, we do so in terms of that tradition and the English political and philosophic tradition.  The majority of Americans are white and black Anglo Saxon Protestants.

It was curious, therefore, to watch the President of the United States—a true Black Anglo Saxon Protestant—lecture the Turkish Parliament on how similar secular Turkey is to the secular United States and how Kemal Attaturk is Turkey’s George Washington.  And In an unnecessary appropriation of dominion over the rest of the world, the President went on to say he championed Turkey’s admission into the European Union.  Moreover, the impulse to make Turkey secular was grounded in the problems of Islamic extremism with which we are dealing today.  To equate the secularization of a Muslim nation to the Founding of the United States is simply bad history, perhaps even intentional distortion of the historical record.

However we interpret the President’s remarks in Turkey, it is breathtaking, to say the least, to listen to this unique self-interpretation of the American political order by an American head of state since it is false to its core. 

Americans share the values and traditions of Western culture and particularly the political, legal and philosophic heritage of the English people and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  As such, we are a community shaped by Christianity and we are a uniquely Christian nation.

The President’s interpretation of the nation as an amalgam of “citizens” barely touches the surface of understanding what we, the American people, are. We “citizens” carry the cultural values of Christianity and thus are not individual blank tablets on which anything may be written.  And, especially, it may not be written that America is not a Christian nation.

Yes, we are persons of all faiths, mostly concentrated in the faith of Catholics, Protestants and Jews.  We share with our Jewish neighbors a reverence for the word of God and, for the most part, we read the same works that explain God’s covenant with Israel.  That covenant lives today in the memory of American history beginning with the Mayflower Compact and we live in a community of persons whose citizenship is informed by our experience of God.  The word “person” reflects the admonition of the Commandment of God that Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me and the Biblical truth that we are made in God’s image.  Our personhood reflects the face of God in whose image we are made, and that reflection in every human soul gives meaning and value to all our “rights” as citizens.

Stripping all this from our understanding of who we are as American citizens and what that citizenship means in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is unacceptable by any President of the United States or any other state or local elected official.  The President should realize that and issue an apology to the American people and humbly admit that he is more than a citizen of the United States, he is a Black Anglo Saxon Protestant.