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"Why not another?" would be a better response.
Of course, the problem is that the US itself wasn't founded on the Xian religion. I don't know of hardly anybody that claims that. Those that do, when pressed, will explain that it wasn't founded on the Xian religion but founded on "principles" derived from or compatible with Islam. Those better informed would simply chuckle.
Then again, it doesn't mean what you probably want it to mean, either, since it says nothing about states' religions or the American population or the laws. Just the proximal basis of the federal government. That's the problem with this kind of historical flotsam and jetsam, it's easily excerpted from context and made to speak with other voices. That all context is to be explicitly and joyously excluded from the discussion makes it even more flexible. Protean, even.
It doesn't matter what the Arabic version says. Or anything about the negotiator. However, it does matter why we wanted the treaty with the Barbary States--a Muslim nation. The lie is cute and by decontextualizing the blip you hide the lie. This treaty, this passage, preserves the bey's face, so to speak, by saying it wasn't him or his nation that was humiliated when, in fact, it was precisely him and his nation. In so doing, their jihad was thwarted, crushed, and so Islam was shamed and shown to be less. Nominally still part of the caliphate, this could be very bad for the pasha. This is a very important point. Utterly false, of course, but so much of this kind of blather is.
However, it probably saved lives, since it meant that the Xians held could be released. It didn't provide a pretext for killing the Xian slaves that the Muslims had kept. Sixty years later a setback for Muslims in a war perceived as overtly religious led to pogroms against Xians. Communalism--something that many think is such a great idea this days--really sucks. Still, it was patently true that we didn't attack them for religious reasons--we were tired of a group of pirates taking ships, stealing the property, demanding ransom lest they make the crew and passengers into slaves. It doesn't matter that their internal dialog called it jihad and the blood of Americans was permitted.
However, it makes no sense to call this the "law of the land." It's rather like having a law saying that pi = 3.000. You can jump up and down and say it's so, but since it's not anything that's enforceable, it's not an instruction, it's not really a law. It's more a statement of (non-)fact. Note that a pretext arising from religious opinions did rather produce an interruption of the harmony between the two nations in short order.
The facile reply would be that given the Congress approved two falsehoods in that one paragraph, what's to keep the third from being a falsehood. As I said, this would be facile.
Actually, a very nice rebuttal would simply be that to speak of "a" Xian religion in 1797 would provoke cries of derision. Each sect would know what was entailed, being familiar with their own histories; there'd be some general idea of what "a Xian religion" would be; but to speak of "the" Xian religion is rather like speaking of "the" Christian doctrine in 2010. My church was Xian. It kept Passover and a Saturday Sabbath, was non-Trinitarian and believed that Jesus, formerly known as Yahweh, was dead for 72 hours. Try reconciling that with Episcopalian Easter and Sunday, Trinitarian and Jesus was killed Friday afternoon and resurrected Sunday morning. Remember--there's only one Christian religion. Which one are you going to exclude?
For anything to be founded on "the" Christian religion, on the one hand, would be ludicrous. Esp. the federal government of the United States, lording it over, as it were, states with several different official "Christian religions."
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