On the Fourth of July, in newspapers across the country, including here in the San Antonio Express-News, Hobby Lobby ran an ad selling the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

It wasn’t. In fact, this viewpoint — that the United States was founded as a Christian nation — is at best a myth and at worst, fake history peddled by charlatans.

It goes completely against the intent, words and actions of the founders. And, most important, it goes against what it means to be an American.

In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

And in a 1799 letter to El-bridge Gerry, Jefferson wrote, “I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.”

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution and a primary author of the Bill of Rights, in 1785 observed, “Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion.”

I could go on with quote after quote from the founders on church-state separation, as well as point out that there is no mention of a god or gods in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and that these documents created a government that was to remain neutral when it came to religion. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that we will be a Christian nation or that we will become a Christian nation. This was and remains exactly what the founders intended.

What made and makes the United States exceptional from a historical point of view is that, for the first time in history, a nation was created with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that protected individual liberty of conscience. And for each citizen to follow the dictates of their own conscience, the founders understood that church and state needed to be separated. Without this separation, freedom could not exist.

Those on the religious right are not necessarily bad people. They believe they know “the truth.” And like examples throughout recorded history, they believe that if only everyone else will believe as they do, we will all be saved. They are unable to grasp that forcing their religious views on others leads only to persecution, and evil and immoral religious wars. The founders understood this. That’s why they separated church and state, and why we haven’t had a religious war in this nation since its founding.

What we see happening on the religious right is a widening disconnect from historical truth and fact. They have created an alternative reality that not only makes it acceptable to attack separation of church and state, the public school system, government and other institutions but makes it their religious duty.

The Hobby Lobby ad is a warning sign that our individual freedoms are at risk. When the religious right imposes its views through legislation, we know what will happen: discrimination, suppression and persecution, all leading to the death of those who believe differently, the unbeliever and the foreign.

The founders knew this all too well. That is why they created our Constitution and Bill of Rights, which separated church and state. That’s what we were celebrating on the Fourth. And that’s what we need to protect from those who want to force their beliefs on the rest of us.

Eric Lane is the president of the San Antonio Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church & State. Contact him at ausa.president@americansunited sa.org