Christian Nation

[Angrboda]

this is not a persuasive topic

No truer words were ever spoken.

Every grade-school kid in the country knows the cherry tree story. As a young boy, George Washington, for unknown reasons, took a hatchet to his father’s cherry tree. When his father came home, he saw the tree and asked, “Who chopped down my cherry tree?” Young George answered, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it.” The way the story is normally told, we don’t find out what happened afterwards — was young George taken out to the woodshed? The story ends with George’s one-liner.

We know that this story never happened, because the person who invented the tale later admitted to having done so. He was a Christian minister named Mason Locke Weems, usually known as Parson Weems. As a later biographer of Washington, Parson Weems confessed that he made up the story, even though he once had claimed that he received it from a credible eyewitness (a nice paradox: he “told a lie” in this story about not lying).

— Forged: Writing In The Name Of God, Bart Ehrman

“The tragic poet should thrill and charm his audience for the moment by the verisimilitude of the words he puts into his characters’ mouths,
but it is the task of the historian to instruct and convince for all time serious students by the truth of the facts and the speeches he narrates.”
— Polybius

"The reason a historian such as Polybius had to argue this point so strenuously, of course, is that other historians did precisely what he opposed,
inventing speeches and even narratives as they saw fit for their “historical” accounts. It is certainly true that people in general, not just professional historians,
made up a lot of stories about historical figures. In Christian circles this can be seen for nearly every historical figure of importance we know of: Jesus, Paul,
Peter, and other members of the apostolic band."
— Ehrman

"[Eusebius] often needs to be taken with a pound of salt."
— Ibid.

(Eusebius is one of our main sources for the history of the first 300 years of Christianity.)

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“The proceedings, as published by Thompson, the secretary, and historian of the day, show that the question was gravely
debated whether God should be in the Constitution or not, and after a solemn debate he was deliberately voted out of it. …
There is no recognition of God’s laws and sovereignty.”

— Episcopalian Rev. Bird Wilson, Albany, N.Y., in a sermon in October 1831