re: #83 Quoth the raven, Covfefe.

In Mrs. Fish’s argument with her hyper-wingnut relative last night, the lady tried to claim that the Pilgrims founded this country as a Christian nation. I reminded Mrs. Fish to point out that the first North American immigrants weren’t the Pilgrims, they were business people who settled in Virginia.

I just read through a section in Jill Lepore’s These Truths where she argues that church-going was at its lowest in the last half of the 18th century and first 20 years of the 19th and that few “Americans” would have cared much about the idea of America as a Christian nation; and as we all know, the founders worked very hard to keep religion out of the Constitution. The idea that America is a Christian nation was cooked up during the Second Great Awakening in the 1820s and 1830s, something the founders would have abhorred.