Actually, conservative Christians all too commonly distort and misrepresent what the Founding Fathers believed. This is NOT a personal remark aimed at you or a reference to your views.
What was unique about the U.S. was the very clear and deliberate decision to separate church and state, a decision that has been threatened during various "Red scares" by putting the name of God onto our money, in our courtrooms and into our Pledge of Allegiance.
But all such decisions are relatively recent and were not the decisions of the Founding Fathers.
I think Europeans understand all this quite well. And thanks to their history of religious wars, many European nations now offer more freedom of and from religion than the U.S. does.
Thanks for the consideration.
Not surprisingly, we differ on this too.
Religious persecution drove the pilgrims to our shores. They sought freedom from governmental dominance of faith. Our Founding Fathers took great care to craft our founding documents. They did not create a "separation of church and state" as many refer to it today - that exists in exactly zero of our founding documents. There is, however, a First Amendment within the Bill of Rights, which states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
They could have included that phrase had they wanted to. There are numerous quotes about the role God played in their lives, yet they chose to codify very specific God-given rights and freedom of religion.
Instead, the phrase "separation of church and state" comes from Jefferson's Danbury letter.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
The preceding election had been particularly bitter, and people were burying their Bibles in fear that they'd be confiscated. The letter was designed to calm those fears that government could quash faith/eliminate religion.
This is important because:
The very nature of a wall further reconceptualizes First Amendment principles. A wall is a bilateral barrier that inhibits the activities of both the civil state and religion, unlike the First Amendment, which imposes restrictions on civil government only. The First Amendment, with all its guarantees, was entirely a check or restraint on civil government, specifically Congress...
Link
I do agree that the US does not have freedom from religion.
In fact, both the First Amendment and Jefferson's statement above are completely in keeping with this teacher's right to post his statement of faith.
Moo
