In 1797, the Senate of the United States ratified “without protest” a treaty with Tripoli stipulating that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” The treaty was approved “without a single dissenting vote” and signed by President John Adams.

Gregg L. Frazer, The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution, 234.

Note: I first learned about the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli in Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution by Joseph S. Moore. William J. Edgar also mentions Treaty of Tripoli in History of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America 1871-1920. Mark David Hall in Did America Have A Christian Founding? discusses the treaty in its international context (to his credit), but his comment — “even though the treaty was published in several newspapers, I am unaware of anyone objecting to it at the time” (116) — is misleading. Hall clarifies in an endnote that within four years a US Secretary of War opposed that section of the treaty, and that subsequent treaties dropped that section. Also, in the book mentioned above by Joseph S. Moore, he highlights a Covenanter minister who opposed the Treaty in a book published in 1803.