America was NOT founded as a christian nation

[wnylib]

19. I have some familiarity with the various events and cultural changes that took place

between the Pilgrims of 1620 and and the DOI of 1776. On one side of one grandparent's family, my ancestry goes back to 1636 in Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not quite Plymouth, but not far behind.

Nothing quite like following the events in each generation to get a good view of history and the developments that transformed people over a century and a half to the point of Independence. Of course that involved other parts of the colonies besides New England, but the point is that it took those decades of events and cultural, economic, and political transformation and evolution to produce a new, independent nation with a separate identity in people's minds from the mother country.

There is no separate nation without the concept of one. And it does not occur until the concept is acted on, successfully.

So I don't view the Pilgrims or 1619 as the founding or start of the nation. The beginning of nationhood, of a unified identity as one independent body, was not inevitable, even with all those years of events and changes. So the people of the late 18th century were the crafters and founders of the nation. The one they produced was quite different from the Plymouth Colony because of all the influences that developed later, not because of a single charter in a single location in North America.