... Johnson quotes John Adams, who wrote in a letter that “Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for government of any other.” He doesn’t note that, in his duties as president, Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which stated quite clearly that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
The first quote, which he leans on heavily, is the private expression of a single man; the second is an official government position in a binding treaty that was launched by Washington, signed by Adams and ratified by a U.S. Senate whose ranks were half-filled with men who crafted the Constitution. Which one is more indicative of “the Founders”?
And that’s a key point here. When the Religious Right tries to engage us in a game of “quote/counterquote,” we should look past the varied and often contradictory words of the Founding Fathers — who were often said contradictory things because they were, you know, arguing with each other — and instead focus on the actual deeds that they accomplished as one.
Don’t listen to a cherry-picked Adams quote about who the Constitution was written for, look at what the Constitution actually says! The only mentions of religion in there are measures that keep religion and government at arm’s length from each other — no religious tests for office holders, no establishment of a national religion, no interference with individuals’ rights to worship or not as they saw fit.
That is what the Founders actually wanted.
But Johnson, selling the same snake oil as David Barton, hand waves past all that to imply that the Founders unanimously agreed that Americans had to be religious and that their common government — so carefully constructed to keep religion out of it, and it out of religion — was actually a religious compact in which “there has to be a consensus on virtue and morality,” a consensus which Mike Johnson would surely think embodied his own personal brand of faith.
[
source]
