The United States is not a Christian Nation; however, our policies, principles, and moral high ground are all informed by our societal roots in Rome and their subjugated nation-states. The disavowing of all other beliefs is woven into the Naturalization Act of 1975, which federally requires all naturalized citizens to swear an oath to the United States, officially renouncing any allegiance to "pre-American" life (Longley, 2021).
Religion is a funny thing. To identify with something is to incorporate it into one's own ego. As the individualist culture that we are, the ego can become a real problem sometimes. We attach so much meaning to these external things and believe them to be a reflection of ourselves, that we are willing to be co-opted into a moral order which demands certain concessions and withholding of emotions and behaviors that are uniquely and unequivocally human. It's like when we were kids and our parents told us that we ought to love our parents. But we shouldn't do it because we were told to, but because we were supposed to. It was assumed. Well, who said it was assumed? On what authority did it come? Love is spontaneous and therefore requires no calling into order or expectation for reciprocation. Nor does not establish a hierarchy of weights and measures to that creates conditions of worth.
When you do something because you are expected to, it takes the flavor out of the whole enterprise. It becomes a chore, castigated by the burden of shame from its failure to comes the burden of shame. Alan Watts (1966) said of being driven by the changing winds of the moral order:
The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and assistance to the starving of the earth - urgent as they are - will destroy rather than help if made in the present spirit... No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Were we to recognize what is (not what isn't or what could be) in the present moment; and disregard the establishment of good or bad and the hierarchy of rules, expectations, and rewards attached to dogma, we may yet find peace. Beliefs struggle with the changing tide of the present and as anyone who has attempted to go against the current of the river knows, more often this leads to calamity. Pride goeth before the fallen. Identifying with the ethos of any ideology that goes against the current of what is (constancy) contradicts that which calls humanity into existence. Beliefs require our fidelity to things we might not always agree with and this internal conflict is at its core, defined by religious identity.
Chris Rock fleshed this thought out so well in the film Dogma, in which he played Rufus: the black 13th Apostle, sent to the present to help rewrite history after the teachings of Jesus (kindness, altruism, love of the poor and sick, questioning of establishment) had been turned into a belief structure. As the storyline went, because Rufus was a black man, he was written out of the bible and subsequently stoned to death.
Christ loved to sit around the fire, listen to me and the other guys. You know, whenever we were going on about unimportant shit he always had a smile on his face. His only real beef with mankind is the shit that gets carried out in his name. Wars, bigotry, televangelism. The big one though... is the factioning of all the religions. He said, "mankind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it." I just think it's better to have ideas. I mean, you can change an idea. Changin' a belief is trickier. People died for it. People kill for it... all over a belief.
This is not to say that all Christians identify with their religion (or other religions for that matter) in a way that directly commands strict adherence to biblical hierarchy. Jesus was a deep subversion of those structures. It would be helpful to remember that Jesus was not a Christain, nor was Buddha a Buddhist or Mohammed a Muslim. These are all things that came after. The message of Christ was this: the world is inherently good and that which comes from it should be met with kindness. To love thy enemy for he is the opposite end of the pole that binds us in unity. This message of Tao, or The Way, is present at the core of the world’s religions and in their sages whose examples, diverse and innumerable, speak the one message.