Posted on 11/29/2004 7:24:42 AM PST by Pitiricus
After George W Bush's re-election, few people doubt that the United States is a Christian nation. But who are American Christians, where do they come from, and what do they want? Discontinuity makes American Christianity a baffling quantity to outsiders; only a small minority of American Protestants can point to a direct link to spiritual ancestors a century ago.
Little remains of the membership of the traditional Protestant denominations who formed what Samuel P Huntington calls "Anglo-Protestant culture" a century ago, and virtually nothing remains of their religious doctrines. Most of the descendants of the Puritans who colonized New England had become Unitarians by the turn of the 19th century, and the remnants of Puritan "Congregationalism" now find themselves in the vanguard of permissiveness.
More than any other people in the industrial world, Americans change denominations freely. During the past generation, the 10 largest born-again denominations have doubled their membership, while the six largest mainstream Protestant denominations have lost 30%:
This suggests an enormous rate of defection from the mainstream denominations, whose history dates back to the 16th century (in the case of Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians) or the 18th century (in the case of Methodists), in favor of evangelical churches that existed in seed-crystal form at best at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Catholic historian Paul Johnson argues that "America had been founded primarily for religious purposes, and the Great Awakening [of the 1740s] had been the original dynamic of the continental movement for independence". But he struggles to explain in his History of the American People why not a single traditional Christian can be found among the leading names of the American Revolution. Neither George Washington, nor John Adams, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor Benjamin Franklin, nor Alexander Hamilton professed traditional Christian belief, although most of them expressed an idiosyncratic personal faith of some sort. The same applies to Abraham Lincoln, who attended no church, although his later speeches are hewn out of the same rock as the Scriptures.
Johnson's less-than-convincing explanation is that "by an historical accident", the US constitution "was actually drawn up at the high tide of 18th-century secularism, which was as yet unpolluted by the fanatical atheism and the bloody excesses of its culminating storm, the French Revolution". Despite the French Revolution, Harvard College became Unitarian in 1805, and all but one major church in Boston had embraced Unitarianism, a quasi-Christian doctrine that denies the Christian Trinity. John Calvin had one of its founders, the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553.
The New England elite ceased for all practical purposes to be Christian. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister, abandoned the pulpit in 1831 for a career as a "Transcendentalist" philosopher, admixing Eastern religious and German philosophy with scripture. But a grassroots revival, the so-called "Second Great Awakening", made Methodism the largest American sect by 1844. Just as the First Great Awakening a century earlier gave impetus to the American Revolution, evangelicals led the movement to abolish slavery.
Different people than the original Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were swept up in the First Great Awakening, and yet another group of Americans, largely Westerners, joined the Second Great Awakening during the 19th century. Yet another group of Americans joined what the late William G McLoughlin (in his 1978 book Revivals, Awakenings and Reforms) called a "Third Great Awakening" of 1890. If the rapid growth of born-again denominations constitutes yet another "Great Awakening", as some historians suppose, the United States is repeating a pattern of behavior that is all the more remarkable for its discontinuity.
Few of the Americans who joined the Second Great Awakening knew much about the first; even fewer of today's evangelical Christians have heard of Jonathan Edwards, the fiery sermonist of the 1740s. Without organizational continuity, doctrinal cohesion, popular memory, or any evident connection to the past, Americans are repeating the behavior of preceding generations - not of their forebears, for many of the Americans engaged in today's evangelical movement descend from immigrants who arrived well after the preceding Great Awakenings.
This sort of thing confounds the Europeans, whose clerics are conversant with centuries of doctrine. They should be, for the state has paid them to be clerics, and the continuity of their confessions is of one flesh with the uninterrupted character of their subsidies. Americans leave a church when it suits them, build a new one when the whim strikes them, and reach into their own pockets to pay for it.
Christianity, if I may be so bold, does not fare well as a doctrine for the elites. Original sin cannot be reconciled with free will, as Martin Luther famously instructed Desiderius Erasmus, which led the Protestant reformers to invent the doctrine of predestination, and their Unitarian opponents to abandon original sin. The Catholic Church refused to admit the contradiction, which explains why philosophy became a virtual Protestant monopoly for the next four centuries. The Unitarian path, which stretches from Servetus to Emerson, leads to doubt and agnosticism, for one throws out original sin, the personal God Who died on the cross for man's sins becomes nothing more than another rabbi with a knack for parables.
Intellectual elites keep turning away from faith and toward philosophy - something that Franz Rosenzweig defined as a small child sticking his fingers in his ears while shouting "I can't hear you!" in the face of the fear of death. But one cannot expect the people to become philosophers (or, for that matter, Jews).
My correspondents point out frequently that one can trace no obvious connection between the religion of America's founders and today's American evangelicals. For that matter, observes one critic, there is no direct connection between the 14th-century English reformer and Bible translator John Wycliffe and the 16th-century Lutheran Bible translator John Tyndale - none, I would add, except for the Bible.
Two combustible elements unite every century or so to re-create American Christianity from its ashes. The first is America's peculiar sociology: it has no culture of its own, that is, no set of purely terrestrial associations with places, traditions, ghosts, and whatnot, passed from generation to generation as a popular heritage. Americans leave their cultures behind on the pier when they make the decision to immigrate. The second is the quantity that unites Wycliffe with Tyndale, Tyndale with the pilgrim leader John Winthrop, and Winthrop with the leaders of the Great Awakenings - and that is the Bible itself. The startling assertion that the Creator of Heaven and Earth loves mankind and suffers with it, and hears the cry of innocent blood and the complaint of the poor and downtrodden, is a seed that falls upon prepared ground in the United States.
Within the European frame of reference, there is no such thing as American Christendom - no centuries-old schools of theology, no tithes, no livings, no Church taxes, no establishment - there is only Christianity, which revives itself with terrible force in unknowing re-enactment of the past. It does not resemble what Europeans refer to by the word "religion". American Christianity is much closer to what the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in 1944 from his cell in Adolf Hitler's prison, called "religionless Christianity". Soren Kierkegaard, I think, would have been pleased.
From http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Goren_Jerusalem_Syndrome.htm
" The Jerusalem Syndrome is a clinical psychiatric diagnosis first identified in the 1930s by Dr. Heinz Herman, one of the founders of modern psychiatric research in Israel. Subsequent research was made by Dr.Yair Bar El, former director of the Kfar Shaul Psychiatric Hospital in Jerusalem, involving 470 tourists who had been declared temporarily insane. The Jerusalem Syndrome is a temporary state of sudden and intense religious delusions brought on while visiting or living in Jerusalem. Most of the hospitalized visitors were Jews, but many others were Christians. The clinical symptoms usually begin with a vague and extremely intense excitement. The patients often adopt "biblical" or otherwise eccentric clothing, sometimes merging their identity with that of a character from the Bible or having a strong feeling of mission. They typically adopt a lifestyle of religious observance and attach unusual significance to religious relics. The most interesting feature, considering the extreme behaviors associated with the Jerusalem Syndrome, is that the subjects sometimes have no prior history of psychiatric difficulty and exhibit none afterward. These patients, if they recover, are typically embarrassed by behavior they cannot explain...."
Jesus was maybe an early sufferer...
As a child... And as an adult he became Unitarian...
I know it's hard for some to fathom... But most of the Founding fathers were not Christian in the sense you believe... They were at a period where Christianity was seen for what it was... :-)
So tell me, what is a nice Jewish person like you doing on a hate Christian thread?
This is one of the possibilities:
either he didn't exist, or he was insane (sufferer of an early case of Jerusalem syndrome) or he was just a rebel leader and his followers added the whole God mishmash...
What is sure of course is that he wasn't the messiah or even a messiah...
You are going to get a chance to ask him.
You BELIEVE I will... I believe that all trhis is incredible pagan mishmash...
And these are only BELIEFS...
There is no doubt that he attended church (I have visited three churches that he attended with regularity: Christ Church in Alexandria, Christ Church in Philadelphia and St. Paul's in NYC [he couldn't attend Trinity since it burnt by the time of his inauguration]; all Anglican/Episcopal).
I have read about 15 biographies of the General and have a reasonably good understanding of his life. He certainly thought of himself as a "Christian" but his personal devotion to Christ is very hard to document. He believed that proper behavior included regular church attendance.
You should know something else about the General: even though he was a humble man, he believed that he was destined (by Providence) to help found this great country. Because of this belief, he felt that he must do certain things that were consonant with a man of his responsibility (odd as it seems, keeping slaves fell under this heading--he did not like slavery, but as an ambitious politician from Virginia, being an abolitionist would've ended his prospects).
He kept (almost) all of his letters; his journals and diaries and papers add up to 33 large voumes. In NONE of his writing are there devotional messages of the type characterized in the "Prayer Journal" that you would have us believe he wrote (as in your first post on this matter).
The best evidence is that he was a Christian of the Deist variety who believed that Church attendance was a good thing. He was much more a Son of the Enlightenment (his Freemasonry is evidence for that) than a Born Again Christian. I can't remember him EVER mentioning Jesus or Christ in any of his writings.
I can assure you the justice in death is more sure than the mercy you have been shown here on Free Republic.
Jefferson's quote: "a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus".
Jefferson did not exclude "theological doctrines" from this statement.
Well, I stopped in originally to comment on the nonsectarian nature of our constitutional republic. The people are predominantly Christian, but the nation itself is not. I see that as a distinction with a difference.
Keep reading:
"...very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw."
On March 4, 1805, President Jefferson offered a National Prayer for Peace: “Almighty God, Who has given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech Thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of Thy favor and glad to do Thy will. Bless our land with honorable ministry, sound learning and pure manners. Endow with Thy spirit of wisdom those to whom in Thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth. In time of prosperity fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in Thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”
Do you even read what you post? This letter is a prime (and infamous) example of what Jefferson meant when he described himself as Christian yet still rejected the virgin birth, Jesus as the Son of God, etc.
For instance (from your post - bold added by myself):
I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature. If I had time I would add to my little book the Greek, Latin and French texts, in columns side by side. And I wish I could subjoin a translation of Gosindi's Syntagma of the doctrines of Epicurus, which, notwithstanding the calumnies of the Stoics and caricatures of Cicero, is the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence, and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagances of his rival sects.
If you have actually read books about Jefferson, as well as his own writings, you'd know that his views on Jesus Christ are very well known.
Good summation of Mr. Adams faith
I don't disagree, but it is now a hate Christian thread, and no matter how you want to excuse your little God hating abortion loving friend, she said Jesus is insane.
This USED to be a conservative forum.
You obviously discard the FACTS that Texas Songwriter stated.
The Unitarian Church wasn't founded until 1833
You seem willfully deluded. I don't mean that in a perjorative way. It is what you want to believe, but has little to do with history. Read the documents themselves and a resonable person cannot conclude otherwise. In post 100 I tried to lift the information from the pages of an historic document, nonpartisan,sectarian book. That does not convince you. If you look at the colonies at the time of this nations birth, it was dotted with Catholic churches, Baptist churches, Methodist churches, Presbterian chruches, and precious few unitarians. The documents do not ascribe to the fundamentals of unitarianism. It is repleat with references to the God of the Bible. Check out David Barton's book "The Founding Fathers". Good Luck.
Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Or a Christian "hate fest".
It shoots down the theory that Adams was a Unitarian.
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