This probably deserves to go into Hijack Haven, but oh well.
The Founders inherited slavery, they didn’t invent it. If you actually read a number of founding-era documents from the prominent men who participated in the founding, they struggle with this question - we have it, it’s been around since time immemorial, how do you get ride of it? How do we do deal with it? It was deeply entrenched in much the culture, and even if you were a rabid abolitionist, there was no easy solution to actually ending the practice. Ending the prractice meant enormous shifts in economy, civil and political rights, logistical problems, etc.
And enough of the nonsense - it’s not as though when the Founders “founded” the nation (which pre-dates the Constitution, by the way), they instituted law that ended history and solved all of mankind’s problems. The Founding was the birth of a constitutional republic built on ordered liberty, and there was no idiotic belief at the time that they had answers to all of humanity’s problems in fell swoop. What was great - and indeed, almost miraculous - was that they founded the nation and so therefore set off the process by which to give life to the protections of Natural Law.
Don’t forget, prior to the founding of the US, most non-slaves weren’t free - not in the sense that we understand it - that is why we had the Revolution in the first place. Once we established (somewhat precariously) the government by which colonists would be free to self-govern, then we could begin the process of approaching the slavery question…but not before.
This buffoonery that we should have simply “made uur-body free!” at the Founding is just that - buffoonery.
Also, the US is in many senses a Christian nation - when the Constitution was ratified, it “formed” a new nation by modifying the old one, but did not modify the place of religion among the populace, and mainly, the states. The Constitution did not declare the US to be a Christian nation in name, but the Constitution didn’t unmake the architecture of the state-church relationship that existed at the state level. If the US was intended to be a “secular” country, the Founders would have used the Constitution to dismantle the marriage between church and state at the state level (such as state support for a church). They didn’t.
But, it’s also clear the Founder had no intention of the nation being governed by outright Christian source of rules. The Founders knew well of the sectarian squabbles and intentionally devised some version of a wall between church and state, as much to protect the church as the state.
In short, the Founders weren’t secularists and had no vision of secular government*, but they did prefer that much of that debate be handled at the more local levels of government out of the (well founded) fear that were the levers of power at the federal level available for competition among the various sects of Christianity, there would be eternal internecine struggle over that control, which would doom the United States to the fate of European countries.
*And by the way, what is it with the “I contend…” arguments these days? There seems to be no shortage of “I contend [ridiculous, unsupported argument]” statements without any sense of irony that just because you say “I contend” doesn’t make an unsupported argument a decent one.
