To be sure, many of our nation's founders were Deists, but they were Christian Deists who read the Bible, loved Jesus, prayed to the Christian God, and encountered the world on Christian terms. It is as dangerous to try to pretend this history away as it is to pretend away the Christian Right. We may aspire to separation of church and state, but we do not yet live this ideal.

Instead, we are a country of accidental phenomenologists.

In the early 20th century, philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) fathered phenomenology—the study of “the things themselves,” or the attempt to get at a particular experience (often religious in nature) through purely descriptive analysis while “bracketing” all personal judgment.

Phenomenologists try to study their subjects at a distance, separating out prejudices that might obscure understanding. Husserl’s philosophical approach found many followers in the field of religion, including Ninian Smart. In his studies of religious experience, Smart intended to “describe, rather than pass judgment,” and “not to speak on behalf of one faith or to argue for the truth of one or all religions or of none.” Armed with this method for supposedly "impartial" study, Smart and his kin were among the first scholars that drew a line between “unbiased” religious studies and “biased” theology.

In academia, therefore, scholars of religion boast of a kind of “separation of church and subject.”

So perhaps our country’s Founders were ahead of their time—phenomenologist policy- makers of a sort. They wrote a Constitution that trusts its citizens' ability to set aside religion from the public square—to “bracket it”—as if every person born in this nation would grow up a philosopher skilled in this delicate, difficult project of stripping away biases in the name of objectivity. And thus, what today’s postmodern theorists regard as simple naïveté—that we can separate something like the religious (and in our nation’s case, the Christian) from our thinking, voting, and rhetoric, as if separating eggs for meringue—was woven into the fabric of our founding document, and embedded deeply into our American psyches.

Yet, the mere fact that we entertain the question of whether we are a “Christian America” is evidence that we are just that. At least that is how philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer would see it. Consider his discussion of the timelessness and temporality of works of art in Truth and Method. For Gadamer, the “actual being” of a work of art, “can not be detached from its presentation,” and “however much it is transformed and distorted in being presented, it still remains itself.”

In other words, unless we invent a time machine that will allow us to travel back over 200 years to supplant a large majority of our Constitution’s writers with individuals who reflect our nation’s current religious diversity, we must acknowledge however reluctantly, that the words that built our nation were penned by Christians who will forever inform its identity.

Feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen devoted one of her books (Becoming Divine: Towards a Femininist Philosophy of Religion) to arguing that “the secular/religious divide of modernity is misconceived.” For Jantzen and many other postmodernists, it is impossible to overturn societal inequalities regarding race, gender, sexuality, and class, without first attending to Christianity as the umbrella under which we have built our Western lives. While for Gadamer denying America's Christian character might be a matter of simple ignorance, for Jantzen it is a dangerous game indeed, since any honest conversation about moving beyond our Christian biases must begin by acknowledging them.

Unfortunately, my generation and those roaring up behind me—Generations X and Y, and the Millenials—belong in many ways to a Husserlian masterpiece. As a rule, we walk through life blissfully unaware of the gross biases lurking underneath the surface of relations between employer and employee, citizen and representative, teacher and student, woman and man. The naïve ideal of the unbiased opinion is second nature to us. We don’t even have to think about it. It's the way things are.

I am constantly amazed that we can still debate what so obviously is not even a question: The fact that Christianity—its history, values, morals, beliefs, practices, and sacred texts—forms the sacred canopy under which we Americans find shelter, however uncomfortably. We are a Christian nation in the same way that Israel is a Jewish one, and Iraq is (or at least will be) Muslim. Our country’s founders were Christians, as was every single president in our history.

Lest I be misunderstood, I do not deny the aspirations of our First Amendment, the ideal of separation of church and state, and Mr. Jefferson’s desired “wall” between the two. But I know nonetheless that in practice the religious often lays underneath what we mistake as the secular. And in our case that "religious" is Christian.

We can say all we want that America is not a Christian nation. But that doesn’t make it true, any more than saying that racial prejudice is a thing of the past, or that feminism is moot because equal rights have been achieved.