Posted on 02/26/2010 9:09:08 AM PST by ezfindit
One of todays most contentious culture wars is over the religious commitments of our nations 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 states 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?
(Excerpt) Read more at conservativedatingsite.com ...
It doesn’t matter now. The liberals have been pretty successful in kicking God out of America.
I don’t recall a single founder being muslim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Jefferson was a deist, ...”
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.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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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.
Everyone read “5000 year leap”.
It lays out the underlying principles on which this country and our Constitution were created.
Basically by today’s standards they would all be considered far more extreme than the religious right of today.
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.
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