Re: Christian nations?

Recently, a script from Doug Freyburger arrived, in which they said:

: I don't know enough about UK policy to know, but the history of the UK
: does extend back to before Christianity arrived and a fair amount of
: the
: common law does predate the predominance of Christianity.

Technically, neither of these statements are true. The first has never
been true (the Kingdom wasn't anything like United until long after
the Islands were predominantly converted). The second hasn't been true
for quite a long time and for several reasons. Not least being that the
infamous 'common law' does not, in actual fact, have the force of statute
law (viz. the apparently unkillable misconceptions about common-law marriages,
which have not been legal in the way people think they are for over 40 years).

But also, what is usually referred to as the common law dates at the
very earliest to the law-codes of Henry II, well after the Christianisation
of both Britan and most of northern Europe. There is not, and has not been
since the Trailbaston era [1], any legal remnant of Saxon royal law-codes that
holds force in the UK.

: The US founding fathers were explicitly not devout Christians but
: mostly
: Deists.

However, the vast majority of the population they represented were hard-line
Puritan Protestant Christians. The founding fathers were about as non-
representative of their population as they could possibly have been, with
one single shared feature: none of them like being taxed.

And even if they were devout Christians that is absolutely not
: a justification for calling the US a Christian nation. The form of the
: US
: government was consciously drawn from the pre-Christian Roman Republic
: with its Senate and Assembly and system of courts. The starting point
: of US law was the English common law whose roots can be traced to
: before Christianity arrived in England.

All of which is about the state, not about the nation. The USA is most
certainly not (yet!) a Christian *state*. However, it is and has been
for it's entire independent history a nation culturally and politically
dominated by the Chrstian religion.

~R

[1] Fourteenth century: it was Trailbaston assizes that drove Robin Hode
into the greenwood life. If anyone is interested, all of this is to do
with the tidal change of culture and law in Britain from memory to written
record. Examine law on land-holding to see how the move towards writing
and taxation based on written assessments effectively removed the remnants
of the Anglo-Saxon legal paradigm from the laws of the Kingdom.
--
Romauld - romauld at necrotheque dot dcu
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses
or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not
change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
- Giordano Bruno

.

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