Doug Indeap said:

I see from your extensive response that you have drunk deeply from David Barton's well.

 Before I ever heard of Barton, I had read over a thousand law review articles and court cases on church-state separation. Barton's book Myth of Separation came out in the early 1990's; I did my studies during the 1980's. At the time, homeschooling was illegal in California, and I wanted to become an attorney to help homeschoolers. I discovered the 1892 Supreme Court case of Holy Trinity Church vs. U.S., which declared that America was "a Christian nation" in a lengthy unanimous opinion which also documented its long Christian legal history. I also discovered that in the 20th century the Supreme Court ditched that case and declared that we are now a God-free zone. I passed the California Bar Exam in 1988, but was denied a license to practice because my allegiance to God is greater than my allegiance to the now-secular government. I appreciate Barton's research and compilatios, but I became a Theocrat before Barton started writing. (I was the first to put the full Holy Trinity opinion on the Internet for free public viewing, beating Cornell and Findlaw.com by several years.)
You might more usefully and justifiably direct your claims of educational malpractice at him and undertake the difficult task of "unlearning" his teachings. This would mean unlearning the teachings of the U.S. Supreme Court in the first 100 years of U.S. Constitutional history. To say nothing of American history in the 200 years before that.
As revealed by the meticulous analysis of Chris Rodda and many others, zealotry more than fact shapes his work, which is riddled with shoddy scholarship and downright dishonesty. See Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History (2006) (available free on line http://www.liarsforjesus.com); LINK. Rodda presents Barton's claims, reviews the evidence and explanations he offers, and then shines a bright light on the evidence omitted, misinterpreted, or even made up by Barton, all with documentation and references so complete one can readily assess the facts for one's self without the need to take either Barton's or Rodda's word for it. The irony is that, by knowingly resorting to lies, this would-be champion of a religious right version of history reveals his fears that the real facts fall short of making his case. I've read Rodda's book. Have you read Barton's book? I'm betting you haven't. Rodda spins. Barton and the Holy Trinity Court give a massive catalog of proof that America's institutions were created by Christians, presuppose Christianity, and are designed to promote Christianity. What Rodda comes up with are occasional incidents of hypocrisy or inconsistency. And I'm sure Barton would not deny that there were little tiny secularist forces at work in a dominantly Christian nation, 1776-1800. Plus, anti-Bartonites are constantly latching on to anti-clerical statements made by those who were opposed to government-funded clergy but not in favor of an atheistic regime empowered to secularize America from the top down. (I am anti-ecclesiastical, and not a member of any church.)

It's like Barton claiming that a goldfish has always been in a bowl of water, surrounded by water, breathing water, and Rodda tries to give the impression that the goldfish is not in water, and was never intended to live in water, by showing that every now and then, when the fish grabs some goldfish food from the surface of the water, it grabs a little bubble of air. America's Founders believed the fish would die if it weren't in the water. The evidence is overwhelmingly on Barton's side.

Barton doesn't "knowingly" resort to lies. I admit on occasion he gets it wrong, but Rodda's entire quest is wrong, even if she does find a bubble of air now and then.

You can sometimes find a copy of Barton's book on Amazon for a penny. Buy a copy, read it line by line, including the 1500 or so footnotes, underline every deliberate falsehood you think you find, and mail it to me. I'll pay your shipping and respond to your accusations. Barton summarizes the massive and ubiquitous evidence that the American fish was intended to be in Theocratic water, the fish was always in Theocratic water up until the mid-20th century, and Chris Rodda and the ACLU is a hungry cat staring at the fishbowl.
Much of your response is predicated on profound misunderstandings of what I said and what the courts have ruled. What Courts ruled in the first century after the Constitution was ratified is completely different from what Courts have ruled since the mid-20th century. For a century after the Constitution was ratified, the Courts repeatedly affirmed that America was a Christian nation. Legislatures continued the long-established practice of basing laws on the Bible. Secularization is only recent and unconstitutional.
For example, contrary to your apparent supposition, the Constitution's separation of government and religion does not, in the least, conflict with the fact that, at the time of the founding, the several states had established religions of one sort or another. If by "the founding" you mean the ratification of the Constitution, not a single state had an "established religion" at that time, if by "religion" you mean "church" or "denomination." All states disestablished from the Church of England during the Revolution. The quest by some to re-establish under a different denomination failed everywhere. Nobody wanted one denomination tax-funded or state-favored over the others.

If by "religion" you speak of "Christianity," "Buddhism," "Islam," or the religion of Secular Humanism, then America had an established religion at least until 1892, when the Supreme Court said our nation was a Christian nation, and even in the early 1950's the Court admitted that our legal institutions were based on Christianity rather than secularism.

It is impossible to separate government from religion, whether Christianity or the religion of Secular Humanism. Governments always impose someone's morality, and morality springs from religion. There are false religions, and then there is the true religion. America has always been a nation "under God," that is, the God of the Bible.
Indeed, some founders were motivated to separate the federal government from religion in order to preserve the states' purview over such matters. That changed when the 14th Amendment guaranteed individual rights against infringement by states, including equal protection and due process of law and the rights and privileges of citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled that among the rights so protected are freedom of religion and freedom from government established religion. While the founders drafted the First Amendment to constrain the federal government, they certainly understood that later amendments, e.g., the 14th, could extend that Amendment's constraints to state and local governments. The 14th Amendment was about slavery, not religion. There was an amendment proposed to include religion, but it was defeated.

The 14th Amendment was totally unconstitutional, and was imposed on the South at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives. As a Christian and libertarian, I oppose slavery, and believe God judged the South using the North as His pawn, but God also used Assyria to judge Israel, and then judged Assyria for her lawless invasion and plunder of Israel.

Lincoln was a lawless, racist dictator.
Moreover, you seem to read much more into the term "secular" than I meant in using it. I used the term in the sense that

the founders established the federal government on the power of "We the People," not on god(s),

 

gave that government no powers or duties with respect to religion or god(s),

 

and adopted other measures to assure that that government did not stray into matters of religion or god(s), i.e., the no-religious-test clause and the First Amendment.

 "We the People" does not prove "not on god(s)" The two are not antithetical. The idea of popular representation, or "consent of the governed," came from the Bible.

The Constitution was the product of 13 Christian Theocracies, who gave no power over religion to the federal government. The United States were still Theocratic after the Constitution was ratified.

The Tenth Amendment shows that the 13 Christian Theocracies gave only limited and enumerated powers to the newly-created Federal government. Changing the character of the United States from Christian to secular was not one of those powers, as the Court reminded us in 1892.

The Constitution was not secular, as its own history and reception prove.
Wake Forest University recently published a short, objective Q&A primer on the current law of separation of church and state–as applied by the courts rather than as caricatured in the blogosphere. I commend it to you. http://tiny.cc/6nnnx Thank you for this link. I have to admit I don't keep up-to-date on developments in this area. I've sort of burned-out on church-state jurisprudence.