I believe you answered your own question in that this country was unquestionably established based upon Judeo-Christian principles of faith and is what you refer to as 'grounded' by such. As the Founders so clearly defined, we are not just a nation but a nation founded upon that heritage.
It is by that authority we created this country, so to diminish it by entailing equal appreciation of other than that credo is incongruous to our establishment.
It is a similar concept as saying all other countries are similar to America. They are not.
I've had to think about this a lot
@IsailedawayfromFR. I am particularly struck by your argument that we diminish our own tradition when we respect another's. First of all, I simply don't believe that's true. It would not diminish my Christian faith to put on a hat to enter a synagogue, or take off my shoes to enter a mosque. Now granted I would not join in rites or rituals of worship in either place, so maybe that's what you mean by "
equal appreciation."
So the larger issue might be what sort of "appreciation", if any, does our government owe to our founding Judeo-Christian tradition, and does it owe some lesser appreciation, if any, for other traditions? I'm sure we both agree that someone can be a Moslem or Buddhist or Hindu or atheist and still be an American, and that every American should be treated equally by the law. So whatever appreciation the government might owe to the founding tradition cannot manifest itself as treating law-abiding citizens differently from one another.
In fact I would argue that the whole idea of individual liberty and equality before the law arose distinctly within the Judeo-Christian tradition; the New Testament expression of those ideas is found very clearly in the third chapter of Galatians. By vigilantly insisting on those principles we respect that tradition, by practicing them casually or paying them mere lip service we disrespect it.
And not only equality before the law, but the starting point of this thread, unalienable rights, and necessarily with those rights an understanding of the relationship of citizen to government, I think comes distinctly from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Citizens have rights, government has authority; the former should keep the latter in check. Just as the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath, so governments and philosophies are the tools and servants of men, not their masters. From that part of the Judeo-Christian tradition I have to believe that you posed the issue backward - the question is not whether we might diminish our philosophy or government, but whether our philosophy or government might diminish us.
When government does pay some symbolic respect to the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example with a Ten Commandments monument outside a courthouse or a Cross memorial on public land, people say they are offended by that. Does it matter that people are offended by that? Again, citizens have rights, government has authority. As individual citizens we certainly have the right to offend, and no one has the right to live free of being offended. But here the question is whether government has the authority to offend its citizens. Can government, the servant, legitimately offend tax-paying, law abiding citizens, the masters? People are always going to claim to be offended by something, so as a practical matter I don't think we can require government, even as our servant, to give absolutely no offense to anyone. There has to be some practical approach to distinguishing legitimate offense from self-righteousness and self-indulgence. But if we're going to argue for limited government because that preserves individual liberty, which is itself our Judeo-Christian inheritance, we ought to be careful here.
Are there some tangible, specific ways that government might demonstrate its debt to Judeo-Christian culture? I bet you and I agree it's absurd for the Federal Courts to forbid monuments to the Ten Commandments outside courthouses. That's a specific way that I think our government could respect and uphold the Judeo-Christian heritage. And I would argue that those monuments could be created at government expense, so long as that total expense were a small proportion of an overall budget. Some will screw themselves into high dudgeon over the idea, but "snowflakism" is *not* part of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
But this is a slippery slope. I was happy to see recently that a court in Maryland ruled that a memorial Cross could remain on public property. But that Cross doesn't fit into the "Judeo" part of our founding tradition. So this can get pretty tricky pretty fast. And obviously, what if tax-paying, law abiding citizens who come from a different faith tradition want to see some of their tax dollars paying respect to their faith? What if a group of Somalis in Minneapolis wanted to raise some sort of Moslem monument in a public park? Should they be able to? And at whose expense? Honestly I don't think it would bother me to see monuments to other faiths on public land, but my personal sensitivities are not the basis of public policy here. And again it's a slippery slope. "Pastafarians" practice a farce faith where they wear collanders on their heads and worship "the flying spaghetti monster"; I want no such monuments on public land where I pay any share of the taxes. So the best way I can distinguish that is to say that our Judeo-Christian heritage includes sincere respect for sincere faiths, but does not compel us to participate in farce.
My bottom line is that I would like to see greater open acknowledgement of the philosophical debt everyone in this country owes to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Expressing that debt through the actions of government is going to be difficult; not impossible, but fraught with peril. And while the philosophical principles we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition obviously are powerful and legitimate bases for specific laws, the Scriptures themselves cannot be.