Article 11. As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, �as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, �and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

--From the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, �signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796, . . . and at Algiers January 3, 1797, . . . . Original in Arabic. Submitted [in English] to the Senate May 29, 1797. (Message of May 26, 1797.) Resolution of advice and consent June 7, 1797. Ratified by the United States June 10, 1797. . . . Proclaimed June 10, 1797.� (Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Hunter Miller, ed., Vol. 2, p. 349.)

Much has been made of whether or not this is an official U.S. treaty or whether it matters that the Arabic text of the treaty actually omits the language of Article 11. But the facts remain that 1) this treaty was made legitimate through all of the appropriate steps, it being ratified by the U.S. Senate, signed by President John Adams and proclaimed as official; and 2) the Senators, President and other U.S. officials who made the document official could not read Arabic and therefore made into law the only text they could read, which includes Article 11. The statement to which they agreed is clear: �the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.�

The language is clearly added on the American side. Not only does no equivalent text appear in the Arabic, but also the reference to �Mehomitan� nations is offensive to Muslims who would have preferred �Islamic� or any other designation that did not use a variation of the name of the Prophet Mohammed. (Unlike the followers of other religions, Muslims consider it improper to call their religion after its founder.)

It is possible that this language was slipped into the American version of the treaty for two reasons. 1) The United States wanted to hold itself to the principle of non-intervention in Old World politics and wanted particularly to avoid conflicts over religion. 2) Joel Barlow, the American poet who wrote the English-language version of this treaty, was almost surely in the camp that wanted a separation of church and state in the United States. (He had earlier helped Thomas Paine to publish The Age of Reason, Paine�s broadside against organized religion.) The relevant fact is that the U.S. Senate ratified Barlow�s language without any apparent difficulty.

This brings out another point: The early U.S. was divided over whether this country ought to be regarded as a Christian nation, just as it is divided today. There has been no devolution, as some would like to believed, whereby the early founders were fundamentalist Christians and, today, there are disestablishmentarians subverting the original covenant of the nation. Rather, the same spilt existed then as now. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for example, were non-believers in Biblical miracles. John Adams was a dour but humanistic Protestant. Most of the founders wanted to avoid the troubles of European nations that had coerced people to adopt the religion of the king. Instead, they sought to leave such matters to the conscience of each citizen. There were others who had held on to the traditions of religious government, of course. Massachusetts had been founded as a religious society, and many states made office holders swear a religious oath; but with the establishment of a federal, constitutional government, most of the Founders tried to keep religion out of the federal government. So it was that when the U.S. prohibited any religious test for federal office holders, one clergyman objected that under such a policy an office holder could be an atheist or even a Jew�which betrayed that particular minister�s prejudiced priorities.* His bigoted statement was prophetic, however, because Jefferson soon became the first president to appoint a Jew to federal office.

* Incidentally, anti-Semitism, while it existed in mild form among the Founding Fathers, was not virulent among them and certainly was not doctrinaire. It was often ameliorated by genuine acts of charity toward Jews. For example, when a synagogue burned down in Philadelphia, Franklin was prominent among those who raised funds from non-Jews for a new synagogue.