In a movie whose name escapes me, there is a moment where the good guy lawyers are deciding their strategy for trial. They recognize that there is an argument that they can win, but that the other side may argue that that argument is the wrong argument to be making, and then the bad guys win. So part of their strategy in court is to trick the bad guys into trying to rebut their argument. Which they do, because it’s Hollywood.

But this happens in real life, too. Some propaganda is simply making an argument that is not relevant to the question it thinks it is answering.

In law, when a question hinges on a document, the first rule of deciding the meaning of the document is to look only at the document: the “four corners” of the document. If meaning is still in doubt, then you can look at what the people were saying when they wrote it.

The founders of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights wrote a lot of their own opinions in personal papers. For originalists who rely heavily on the founders’ wishes, they have a lot of different choices when they want to argue what the founders’ wishes were. It’s likely they can find something somewhere to agree with them.

But here’s the thing. That can be a trick argument. When it comes to the establishment clause, which is now under discussion again because of Mike Johnson, the meaning within the four corners of the document is not a bit ambiguous.

The government is to have nothing to do with religion. It can’t recommend one, endorse one, ban one, or prevent anyone from practicing any religion. There are some subtleties within this. But here’s what is not subtle. The United States was never meant to be a Christian nation.

If it were, the founders would have said so. Many of them were Christian and wrote of their faith in their personal writings. Christian nationalists use this as evidence of the intent to make the nation Christian. But it shows just the opposite.

The founders included Christian men, and those Christian men deliberately chose not to attach any religion to the government. In fact, they didn’t just omit mention of a state religion; they said there shall be no state religion. That’s pretty clear.

So just know that when Christian nationalists talk about things the founders wrote or said about religion outside of the establishment clause, they are trying to trick you into legitimizing their argument. They are trying to get you to argue about the wrong thing.  We, the ones who want a secular government, already won that argument.