Posted on 10/22/2006 4:28:56 PM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early — very early — church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a “Christian nation.”
This irritates Brooke Allen, an author and critic who has distilled her annoyance into “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.” It is a wonderfully high-spirited and informative polemic that, as polemics often do, occasionally goes too far. Her thesis is that the six most important founders — Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton — subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. That doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting: it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Allen succumbs to what her six heroes rightly feared — zeal — in her prosecution of today’s religious zealots. In a grating anachronism unworthy of her serious argument, she calls the founders “the very prototypes, in fact, of the East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today’s religious right.” (Madison, an NPR listener? Maybe not.) When she says “Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, among other recent American statesmen,” have subscribed to the “philosophy” that there should be legal impediments to an atheist becoming president, she is simply daft. And when she says that Bible study sessions in the White House and Justice Department today are “a form of potential religious harassment that should be considered as unacceptable as the sexual variety,” she is exhibiting the sort of hostility to the free exercise of religion that has energized religious voters, to her sorrow.
That first sentence proclaims, about five ways from Sunday, that George Will is a jerk.
I don't know anything about the medieval church's attempted hijacking of Aristotle, and I'm receptive to the idea that George Will doesn't either.
I don't know, George Will is a pretty smart guy. Even when I don't agree with him, I always give his pov a serious thought.
susie
I don't know, George Will is a pretty smart guy. Even when I don't agree with him, I always give his pov a serious thought.
susie
Franklin probably was a Deist. Jefferson and Washington were both Anglican. Both served on the vestry of their parish. Adams came close to a deist; he was a Unitarian. I have no clue about Madison.
Jefferson attended church services in the rotunda of the capital. He did have problems with his faith after he left office and the death of his daughters.
It seems to me that if you are going to compare the Founders to modern "east coast intellectuals" then you ought to not only compare their supposed kindred philosophy, but also compare their words and actions.
I'm sure many FReepers can give many examples, but there were certainly many references to "providence", and not in an abstract, euphemism for "luck" sort of way, but an active, participatory deity/spirit/whatever. That many of the founders eschewed or were suspicous of the organized religions of the time, doesn't necessarily put them into the same camp as atheists or anti-Christians, which IMHO is an apt generalization of most "east coast intellectuals".
I believe it is also well-known that the Founders had no problem utlizing public buildings for religious services. Somehow, I don't think the "east coast intellectuals" would let that slide.
I missed this paragraph the first time through. It's intellectually dishonest not to point out that, while the Constitution forbids the establishment of a federal religion, it makes no such rule for the various States, most of which had established religions at the time.
That is so hilarious!
Thanks for saying it twice.
Glad to make you laugh. It's good for what ails ya!
susie
It would seem to me that, regardless of their personal religious views, they had no problem with at least some intermingling of religion and the state.
I am sure I have read quotes from most of them tho, that would lead me to conclude that they were more or less Christian.
susie
George Will is no conservative.
He is though, quite a pussy in a roomful of sharp elbows called politics.
We need real men like Limbaugh to take back the media from the Socialist propagandists, and George Will is no friend in that fight.
Freepers on the other hand can take on enemy by any means necessary.
FREEPER WARRIORS RULE THE EARTH
Well they used to have Sunday church services at the Capitol, the Treasury building, etc....Thomas Jefferson even recorded going in his diary...
"Will's journalistic ethics, along with those of the newspaper that syndicates his column, The Washington Post, have also been questioned by conservative critics at Accuracy in Media (AIM). In their Media Monitor, AIM revealed that in December of 2004 The Post, in an article related to the Indian Ocean tsunami, claimed that, after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, Catholic priests "roamed the streets" hanging suspected heretics, whom they blamed for the quake. Such a charge appears nowhere in the historical record, and The Post was duly informed of that fact. Not only did The Post fail to retract the calumny, but its columnist, Will, quoted as fact the same charge as it appeared in the 2005 book A Crack in the Edge of the World, by the English author Simon Winchester. Though notified of the complete falsity of the charge, neither Will nor Winchester, unlike others who mistakenly made the claim, have taken any steps to correct his error."
I don't think we want a state religion. Why? Invariably, someone will get the idea to forcibly convert others. Then we will have a rebirth of the Inquisition (an American version, but an inquisition, nonetheless).
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