FFRF corrects Eric Trump’s mistaken beliefs

I mean, they [congressional Democrats] didn't stand for anything. When he said "In God We Trust" — when my father mentioned "In God We Trust," the guiding principle of this country — no one stood. ... I think it's sad. There are things as Americans we should be united on and if we can't be united on God ...

Trump didn't complete this thought, which is perhaps just as well. Americans are not now, nor have we even been, "united on God." Religion is divisive. It may unite believers of the same stripe, but it deliberately excludes all others — and often calls for worse. An early Wisconsin Supreme Court justice put it eloquently: "There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter our civil affairs, our government would soon be destroyed."

When "under God" was added to our Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, religion literally divided "one nation, indivisible." The idea that we "trust" in a god is not a founding principle, rather, like "under God," it is an unfortunate recent addition to the national vernacular. It was affixed to coins in 1863 and paper currency in 1956, both times of national peril when people were more concerned with the country tearing itself apart and less focused on a few zealots putting their god on our money.

The U.S. Constitution is far more instructive than the trite motto Eric Trump and his father revere. Our godless Constitution only mentions religion three times — all exclusionary. In other words, the Constitution keeps gods out of the business of government and government out of the business of worshipping gods.