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Originally Posted by Jonesy55
Imo it's true that in the initial years the US was seen as somewhere to flee to for persecuted religious minorities from Europe, though whether that's because they wanted somewhere that all religions could live in peace and harmony is more debatable, a lot of them were quite extreme and probably wouldn't have taken too well to living among Muslim sects coming from North Africa and doing the same, coming to live side by side with them in those communities, or even respecting the right of Native Americans to live in those colonies with their indigenous beliefs without telling them they were godless heretics who should convert. I think a lot of them weren't in favour of religious tolerance as we know it today per se but just wanted a place where the rules/beliefs of their own sect could dominate socially.
I guess it was seen as a 'blank slate' where nonconformist (Christian) religious beliefs could each find their own space to live in, but to say that equates to a place of complete religious freedom as we would understand it today is probably a stretch.
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This conversation is way off topic at this point, but let's remember the constitution was written by a bunch of guys who were deists and had basically rejected the notion of a Christian denomination. Anyone who claims the constitution was written with only Christian religions in mind or something stupid like that just doesn't know their history.
Were the ideals of the average American the same in 1776 as they are today? Obviously not, but that's clearly not what I'm arguing. Were Americans in 1776 totally obsessed with a series of ideals that didn't exist in the minds of the common man anywhere else on earth at the time? Absolutely. Was the reason for that "common sense" because of a totally different way of life than the past few centuries of European tradition? Absolutely. The circumstances of the colonies were totally different than anything that had ever happened before and, regardless of where the citizens were from, fostered a totally different world view. Just being "from" a place has nothing to do with it.
You don't just come out of the womb reciting Beowulf in old English just because you are of British ancestory. Culture is transitory and can change rapidly over a generation or two. The second Europeans started making landfall in America their culture rapidly diverged from European culture and resulted in a totally new world view and way of government. Just being from some place doesn't mean shit which is exactly my point, just look at rockstar founding father Hamilton who was a bastard child from half a world away. Meritocracy, liberties, individual rights (not just rights between baron and king), and most importantly just being left the fuck alone by everyone were all new ideas. They were all things that simply couldn't exist in Europe because there were too many people and too many centuries of authoritarian institutions. So no, just having a bunch of people from Europe doesn't make the United States European any more than Detroit having 80% African American population makes it Nairobi.
The US Constitution, while drawing on some British legal traditions, was totally out of left field and a rejection of all prior forms of society. It is not European, not by a mile. To this day it is not European which is why we have a Congress instead of Parliamentarian system.