American Values? Jeffersonian Democracy vs. Christian Theocracy

Glenn Beck and those on the Republican Right feel that America is based on Judeo-Christian values and identity. But this is a lack of deep historical understanding. Democracy was birthed in Ancient Athens. Athens not Jerusalem is the city that influenced the American Constitution and its values. Greek democracy and the Roman Republic were the inspiration of American Democracy not the Kings of Israel. George Washington was the Roman leader Cincinnatus not the King of a theocratic State. The Philosophy and Democracy of Greece is much more important to broad American values than the religious tribalism and blood sacrifice of the Bible.

Once Christianity went from a minor cult to the Official Religion of Rome it ushered in an era of the dark ages in Europe where there was no religious freedom and where Theocracy ruled Europe until the force of the renewal of Greek and Roman ideas in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment which influenced the American Revolution and its Constitutional thinkers.
"As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurian. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, Oct. 31, 1819

American Rights come from Ancient Greece/Enlightenment not from Ancient Superstition.