The United States Constitution, you may be surprised to learn, mentions religion only twice: Once, in Article VI, where it states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” and again, in the First Amendment, where it states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That’s it; you’ve now just read everything there is to read about religion in America’s most significant founding document.

This turns out to be an awkward revelation for the Christian nationalist; if the founders were, as Christian nationalists maintain, creating a “Christian nation,” it is quite odd that the words, God, Jesus, Christianity, and the like are entirely absent from the “supreme law of the land,” and that religion is only mentioned twice and in an entirely negative sense. Clearly, the US was established as a religiously neutral secular government—the first of its kind in the history of the world.

Frankly, I’m not sure how the founders could have been any clearer in their intentions without literally writing the words “THE U.S. IS NOT A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY.” Of course, some of the founders actually did write these words in the Treaty of Tripoli, which in 1797 was signed by President John Adams with the unanimous consent of the US Senate, and which says that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

We can keep going. While Thomas Jefferson’s exhortation for a “wall of separation” between church and state is well-known, what may be less well-known is that James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights and father of the Constitution, was equally vociferous against the idea of mixing religion with government. On the issue of congressional chaplains, for example, Madison wrote, in the Detached Memoranda, “the establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles.” He noted that minority religions would likely never achieve chaplainship, and, therefore, that the promotion of one religion above all others using government resources was a clear violation of constitutional principles—principles, keep in mind, that he would be very familiar with on account of the fact that he drafted them.

Further, note that the Constitution opens with the words “We the people,” which is a direct philosophical declaration that the government draws its power from the consent of the governed, not from a deity. Additionally, the idea that all persons are created equal, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, is fundamentally at odds with the idea of Christian supremacy. As one Supreme Court decision put it (before it was overtaken by conservative Christians), “A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”

Therefore, under no reasonable interpretation of the founding documents—not even and especially under the flawed, conservative interpretive scheme of originalism—can we possibly conclude that the country was founded as a “Christian nation.”

And yet that is exactly what the Supreme Court is attempting to turn the nation into, as constitutional attorney Andrew Seidel masterfully explains in his latest book, American Crusade: How the Supreme Court Is Weaponizing Religious Freedom. By analyzing several key Supreme Court cases over the last thirty years, Seidel shows us how these cases are being increasingly decided against the principles and sentiments of the founders—and against the best interests as a country.