NFBW: It’s no bother to me as an agnostic secular humanist to see “In God We Trust” on money because it is not a reference to Jesus Christ or the alleged anthropomorphic white bearded author of the Judeo Christian Bible. As Trump-Jesus-Reiligion accelerates the decline in white wing Christian ideology - that silly slogan like that will eventually be taken off our money,
The first five Presidents didn’t openly embrace the Christian teaching that Jesus was a divine being, but they believed in ‘Natures’ God. - So when I see “In God We Trust” I see a reference to what WASHINGTON Adams Jefferson Madison and Monroe likely believed God not to be Jesus Christ.
Monroe was the last founding father who became President, the fifth one who did not partake in the Christian ritual of Communion perhaps the only exception would be Madison , but Madison is my greatest hero among founders who built the wall of separation between conscience and state.
Monroe was raised in a family that belonged to the Church of England when it was the state church in Virginia before the Revolution. As an adult, he frequently attended Episcopal churches, though there is no record he ever took communion. Some historians see "deistic tendencies" in his few references to an impersonal God. Unlike Jefferson, Monroe was rarely attacked as an atheist and infidel for his deistic views. In 1832 James Renwick Willson, a Reformed Presbyterian minister in Albany, New York, criticized Monroe for having "lived and died like a second-rate Athenian philosopher."
The true question, James Nafudon wrote, was not whether religion was necessary. It was whether religious establishments were necessary for religion. The answer to that, he scribbled, was simple—“no.”
The state cannot actually support religion, because religion’s strength depends on men’s mind, their reason, and their conscience alone.