The United States is not a Christian nation.

The framework upon which I will be operating is that of transcendental morality. Morality is not a subjective judgment of personal preference; rather, it is an overarching theory of truth that applies to everyone, a la Kant's categorical imperative. Thus it is the proactive burden for my side of this debate to prove that Christianity and the transcendental moral codes of nations such as the US are inherently intertwined; moreover, it is the proactive burden for the negative to prove that transcendental moral codes are independent of Christianity. In response to your contention, I will make two of my own: First, I contend that the United States was founded upon Christian principles. This is historically and empirically true. It is hard to believe that "one nation, under GOD" was arbitrarily thrown into the Declaration of Independence to appease Christian citizens of the US. Rather, this statement signifies something important about the nature of American democracy; that is, America is under the divine rule of God himself (notice the capitalization of God-this means that this is the Christian, capital G God) and thus his laws will naturally follow from Democratic leadership. Moreover, I will grant that many of the founding fathers were Deists, but Deists still recognize a) God and b) the transcendental morality that stems from that God. Even if it is granted that all of the founding fathers weren't necessarily Christian but Deist, the argument can be ignored. Christian morals and Deist morals have much in common, seeing as they both stem from the same source. My second argument takes a bit of a presuppositional approach. Even if the affirmative of this resolution wins that the founding fathers did not intend or plan for the US to be a Christian nation, it would end up being Christian regardless of that fact; this is so because of transcendental morality. Because the Christian God is the only explanation for transcendental morality, any attempt to construct social laws is an inherent affirmation of Christian moral codes. As the late Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen once spoke in a debate against Gordon Stein, an atheist; "The laws of logic are not conventional or sociological. I would say the laws of logic have a transcendental necessity about them. They are universal; they are invariant, and they are not material in nature. And if they are not that, then I'd like to know, in an atheist universe, how it is possible to have laws in the first place. And secondly, how it is possible to justify those laws?" Christianity can only fully explain law. Law is an ethereal, transcendental concept; this sense of right and wrong is inherent within human nature. Law is not arbitrarily defined into existence through a fiedist framework; rather, we derive law from an innate, intangible sense of right and wrong. In other words, there are universal principles that humankind recognizes independent of their own personal thoughts. Late Christian apologist C.S. Lewis elaborates, "EVERY ONE HAS HEARD people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"--‘That's my seat, I was there first"--"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"--"Why should you shove in first?"--"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"--"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that some thing has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football." Insofar as standards of morality are independent from human opinion and societal consensus, morality is thus transcendental. This brings me to the final stage of my argument. If morality is transcendental, this means that morality and law are not merely agreed upon by a group of legislators. Everyone recognizes that brutally murdering someone is wrong; when this is done, people are not stating their opinion; they are appealing to a sense of innate right and wrong. As such, any society that upholds law is, whether it wants to do so or not, following Christian principles. Only God can account for transcendental morality. Since morality cannot merely stem from agreement, there must be an intangible, ethereal, transcendental source and only the God of Christianity can explain it. Things like stealing, murder, lusting, and many of the major crimes that society regards as bad all stem from God's moral commands in the Bible. From a transcendental God comes transcendental principles. Greg Bahnsen 2 furthers, "As invariant, they don't fit into what most materialists would tell us about the constantly changing nature of the world. And so, you see, we have a real problem on our hands. Dr. Stein wants to use the laws of logic tonight. I maintain that by so doing he's borrowing my world view. For you see, in the theistic world view the laws of logic makes sense, because in the theistic world view there can be abstract, universal, invariant entities such as the laws of logic. Within the theistic world view you cannot contradict yourself, because to do so you're engaging in the nature of lying, and that's contrary to the character of God as we perceive it. And so, the laws of logic are something Dr. Stein is going to have to explain as an atheist or else relinquish using them. The transcendental argument for the existence of God, then, which Dr. Stein has yet to touch, and which I don't believe he can surmount, is that without the existence of God it is impossible to prove anything. And that's because in the atheistic world you cannot justify, you cannot account for, laws in general: the laws of thought in particular, laws of nature, cannot account for human life, from the fact that it's more than electrochemical complexes in depth, and the fact that it's more than an accident. That is to say, in the atheist conception of the world, there's really no reason to debate; because in the end, as Dr. Stein has said, all these laws are conventional. All these laws are not really law-like in their nature, they're just, well, if you're an atheist and materialist, you'd have to say they're just something that happens inside the brain." Thus it is clear that whether or not the founding fathers WANTED or INTENDED the US to be Christian, when they made value judgments like "oppression is bad" and "we need laws," they are being inherently Christian. Thus the vote should be negativ