Is This God's Country? Religion and Democracy in America

"Our founding documents are one source of this idea-they certainly reinforce the idea that God has a special mission for America. "America the Beautiful," as the song calls it, is often conceived as a great representative of democracy, a citadel on a divinely blessed hill. The Declaration of Independence says we are "endowed by our Creator" with "unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1864 announces, "It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year... and vouchsafing to us in His mercy many and signal victories over the enemy, who is of our own household." In line with the divine endowment view, our currency displays "In God We Trust," and the Pledge of Allegiance calls us "one nation, under God." Many Americans also have a sense of America as having a mission, a kind of evangelism for democracy that is reminiscent of the Biblical commandment to make disciples of all nations. Our "founders"-authors of the Declaration and the Constitution-were mainly theists, and they considered the Bible the paradigm of divinely inspired writing and America the exemplar of an enduring union of Biblical ideals and democratic practices"--