I heard some idiots talking on the radio over the weekend, probably about some non-Mosque which some brown people want to build on not-Ground Zero. One caller brought out the big guns, citing how America is a Christian nation founded on Christian values and it says so right in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

Apparently he has never read either of those documents, but unfortunately these are widely-held (and patently false) beliefs.

The word “God” is entirely absent from the Constitution. So is the synonym “Creator”. And the word “Lord” only appears where the document is dated “in the year of our Lord…”

In the Declaration of Independence, the word “Lord” does not appear, and the words “God” and “Creator” appear only once, respectively:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights

I do not know who is responsible for starting this myth which stands in direct contravention to the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution — so even if the Constitution contained numerous references to the Christian God (it doesn’t), the First Amendment would render those impotent.