Donald Trump is making a pitch for the God Bless the USA Bible. This bible is a mix of the King James version of the Christian Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance and the lyrics to Lee Greenwood's song God Bless the USA, which Greenwood wrote at the start of the First Gulf War.
On Trump's Truth Social platform he wrote, "Happy Holy week! Let's Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible."
His video sales pitch for the Bible is up on the God Bless the USA Bible site. In it he makes the false statement that claims America's Founders built the American nation "on Judeo-Christian values." This is a common falsehood the theocrats of the religious right use frequently. It's interesting to note that three documents added to the King James Bible in the God Bless the USA Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights all teach us that America was not based on Judeo-Christian values. None of these documents even mention Judaism or Christianity. None of them even mention Abraham, Moses or Jesus. If America's Founders created the US to be based on Judeo-Christian values, they most certainly would have said so in at least one of these three important documents.
Most Deists and other freethinkers are aware that many of America's key Founders were not Christians or Jews, they were Deists. The Deism of these Founders is ignored by the theocrats who are working tirelessly to turn the US into a Bible-based Christian theocracy where they will actually be able to "make America pray." This is why it's very important for Deists to do all we can to educate people about America's true history. This will help people to realize not only that America was never intended by the Founders to be a Christian nation, but also that the theocrats in the religious right today are promoting lies and falsehoods. If we really do value knowing what is true and what is false, we must confront all falsehoods, including the falsehoods of the theocrats. As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, "...it is an affront to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance."
A good source of knowledge about the Deism of America's key Founders and the importance they put on having complete separation of religion from government is our page The Deistic Roots of the United States of America. One key point from that page is the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. This treaty originated during the administration of George Washington, and it was unanimously ratified during the administration of John Adams. Article XI states:
"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion . . ."
America's Founders made it very clear that they never intended the US to be based on Judeo-Christian values and that they in fact did all they could to ensure the separation of religion from government. This is seen in the Deist Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists who wrote to Jefferson regarding the persecution they experienced at the hands of other Christian sects. Jefferson wrote,
"...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
The famous Christian apologist C.S. Lewis' described in his best-seller Mere Christianity what a Christian society would be like. I first learned of this when I wrote An Answer to C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (for PDF click here). Lewis wrote,
"...the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no 'swank' or 'side,' no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience - obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls 'busybodies.'"
This would be a horrible and terrible place to live in. The lives of everyone would be similar to the lives of the people currently living/suffering in Communist North Korea. Yet, this is what the Christian theocrats are working to impose upon us.
The more we DO to get the word out about Deism, the more we are moving away from the nightmare of the theocrats and the religious right.
