The Faith of the Founders, How Christian Were They

BreakPoint via CDS ^ | 2/23/2010 | Gary Scott Smith

[ezfindit]

One of today’s most contentious culture wars is over the religious commitments of our nation’s founders.

Were most of them orthodox Christians, deists, or agnostics? Scholarly books, college classes, radio talk shows, and blogs all debate this issue, and the Texas Board of Education recently joined the fray. Because of Texas’ large number of students, its huge educational fund, and its statewide curriculum guidelines, this board strongly influences what textbooks are published in the United States. Last month the board reviewed the state’s social studies curriculum, and its conservative Christian members injected more analysis of religion into the guidelines, including assessment of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation and how Christian were the founders.

This issue is so heated that it was the subject of an extensive article in the most recent New York Times Magazine, titled, “How Christian Were the Founders?”

[ezfindit]

Despite their theological differences, virtually all the founders maintained that morality depended on religion (which for them meant Christianity).

[Ripliancum]

I hope this doesn’t turn into another anti Masonic thread.

[ilovesarah2012]

It doesn’t matter now. The liberals have been pretty successful in kicking God out of America.

[bgill]

I don’t recall a single founder being muslim.

[Oberon]

The Founders were mostly Christians. The big exceptions among the Founders were Franklin (a lifelong agnostic) and Jefferson (a confirmed Deist until late in life).

Washington, Madison, and Monroe were active in their Episcopal congregations. One of the signers of the Declaration was the Reverend Doctor John Witherspoon, an influential minister in the Presbyterian church, president of Princeton university (then the College of New Jersey), and descendant of John Knox. John Adams attended United First Parish Church in Braintree, where he and his son John Quincy are buried.

[qwertypie]

The country wasn’t as nearly Christian as most moderns think. There was quite a bit of skepticism about establishment clerics among the country folk, and a lot of negative humor thrown their way. Read something like James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Spy.” He portrayed a lot the commoners as religious cynics.

[meandog]

Well, they were certainly all Godly men. But I don't know about calling all of them ALL "Christian" in the sense of the noun's definition with respect to some here who might believe that the Bible must be interpreted as the literal word of God. Jefferson was a deist, Adams was a Unitarian, and the rest up, until Presbyterian Andrew Jackson took office, were all Episcopalians. I'm an Episcopalian and I will tell you that most of my fellow churchmen and women have a fairly liberal interpretation of Scripture (in seeking shades of gray, rather than black and white).

That in no way means that the Founding Fathers were atheistic or agnostic; quite the contrary. They had a rock-solid belief in God; the creator and judge of all men.

[Lurking Libertarian]

You can play dueling quotes with the Founders all day. (I expect that to start on this thread any minute now.) The main reason is that the Founders were (gasp!) politicians. Their public statements, particularly when they were running for office, were full of Christian piety. Their private letters and diaries were much more skeptical, particularly of the supernatural events in the Bible.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

We know that the Founders had a variety of religious beliefs. We also know that they wanted to have an arrangement different from what was in Europe — no national, official church — even though official churches existed in some of the states until the 1820’s.

I think a question vastly more important than the personal religious beliefs of the Founders is the religious beliefs of the people of the nation they were founding. They were overwhelmingly Christian, products of European civilization, which was also (then) Christian. So although the Founders departed from the European model of church-state relations, to say that they were setting up a government that was purely secularist and in contradition to the religious principles of the people, is absurd. This wasn’t the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution. Many of the Founders wrote favorably of religious belief, and assumed that the success of the Republic depended on the virtue of the people. Religion, and Christianity in particular, was a given.

[MrRobertPlant2009]

I think this kind of conversation does the Founders a disservice, because it inevitably leads us to guessing about what was truly in their hearts. Basically, the question is “Did George Washington go to Heaven?” And my answer to that is, “I dunno.”

For our purposes, we need to look at the Founders as political philosophers and not gods. And what was their philosophy?

Well...obviously it varied from man to man. Generally speaking, I think there was a belief that a country needed a bedrock religious belief because that led to community, charity, etc. At the same time, they knew what religious disputes had done to Europe in the previous centuries.

So, they seemed to both welcome religion and fear it. They saw its benefits for individuals and how poisonous it could be to a free society.

At the same time, I don’t any of them could imagine a city like New York where they might be ten thousand different religious beliefs within one square mile. So trying to think how they would feel about a mosque sharing a building with a kosher deli that employs Rasftefarians and is owned by an atheist seems like wondering about their thoughts on space travel.

[riverdawg]

“Jefferson was a deist, ...”

Jefferson considered himself a Christian, in the literal sense of being a follower of the teachings of Christ.

[meandog]

Jefferson considered himself a Christian, in the literal sense of being a follower of the teachings of Christ.

I don't dispute that...there are/have been a lot of deists that follow the teaching of Christ and consider themselves to be Christians.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The critical argument about the founding fathers is contextual to their times. That is, at the time, most nations in the world proclaimed that they were created by “heaven” (I say heaven, because many were not monotheistic).

On top of this were two severe problems. The first was that their leaders, as such, were *also* appointed by heaven, and the second was that their *laws* were written in heaven. Just 60 years before the American Revolution, England’s Queen Anne was still thought to have a heavenly “healing touch”, because she was queen. And the belief lasted through Louis XVI in France.

The founding fathers wanted none of that nonsense. Thus, while they were respectful of God, they wanted to be very clear that, as much later Abraham Lincoln wrote, America is “...of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

What this says is that the American constitution was written by men, which means that as such, it is an imperfect document, and can be changed by other men. The same with American laws.

Our leaders do not get power because some religious leader says so, but because the people vote to give them power. This does not mean that they are irreverent, only that they have no claim to office, “because heaven has decreed I am to be your leader.”

This *does not* mean that as religious people, our leaders cannot look to their faith for answers. But it *does* mean that our law does not have the credibility of heaven. Even if the Koran says “Jews are bad”, and some congressman manages to insert that into an appropriations bill, we are perfectly able to remove it, and none may claim that we *have* to keep it in the law, because it says so in the Koran.

[meandog]

The Founders were mostly Christians. The big exceptions among the Founders were Franklin (a lifelong agnostic) and Jefferson (a confirmed Deist until late in life).

I do not believe I would term Franklin a lifelong "agnostic." He was baptised and grew up a Congregationalist and one of his most famous acts was to call for a day of prayer the day the Constitutional drafting was most at peril, June 28, 1787. The text of the Franklin's motion reads:

" I therefore beg leave to move, That henceforth Prayers, imploring the Assistance of Heaven and its Blessing on our Deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to Business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that Service. "

As for Jefferson's Deistism, such religious philosophy does not make him less a Christian.

[Ripliancum]

Jefferson considered himself a Christian, in the literal sense of being a follower of the teachings of Christ.

_________________________________________

Agreed. Jefferson’s beef was with what modern Christianity had become, though he still adhered to Christian values, he longed for what he described as a “restoration of primitive Christianity”.

“The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers...Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.” (Thomas Jefferson, The writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, H.A. Washington, ed., pp210, 257).

[LomanBill]

WoW ! Got Morals and Dogma?

A nation of many Christians, perhaps - but a Christian nation?

Think again:

 

The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom

Thomas Jefferson, 1786

Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporal rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labors for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that, therefore, the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to the offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles, on the supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency, will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

And though we well know this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no powers equal to our own and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.

========================

 

"Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion [of Jesus Christ] was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination."
-Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom

 

http://www.history1700s.com/etext/html/texts/jefferson/jeff1.txt

 

 

 

"The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true."
--Albert Einstein

 

[Jacquerie]

I’m late to this thread and column. Yet, I will amazingly be the first to recall that according to our Declaration of Independence the purpose of government is to secure our unalienable, Natural Rights given to us by God. The ratio of Deists to Evangelicals to Episcopalians, etc among our framers is irrelevant. The Declaration set forth the philosophy of our founding, the Constitution put it into practice. No other nation has taken 2,000 years of evolving thought regarding a citizen’s relationship to government and put it into practice. We are a unique nation founded on the principle of man’s Natural Rights.

[MrB]

Everyone read “5000 year leap”.
It lays out the underlying principles on which this country and our Constitution were created.

[Live Wire Conserv]

Basically by today’s standards they would all be considered far more extreme than the religious right of today.

[Live Wire Conserv]

I don’t believe anyone debates if we’re a Christian theocracy. The very thing what the majority of Protestants yearned for 250 years leading up to the Revolution.