In the wake of recent public meetings by the Texas Schoolboard, Russell Shorto has written an extensive piece for the New York Times Magazine. Shorto is the author of Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason (Vintage)
The Christian “truth” about America’s founding has long been taught in Christian schools, but not beyond. Recently, however — perhaps out of ire at what they see as an aggressive, secular, liberal agenda in Washington and perhaps also because they sense an opening in the battle, a sudden weakness in the lines of the secularists — some activists decided that the time was right to try to reshape the history that children in public schools study. Succeeding at this would help them toward their ultimate goal of reshaping American society.
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I’ve been making my way through the NYT article. The real issue is not that the founders were Christian (or not) or that they practiced this or that flavor of Christianity (or not). The issue is that some people insist that if the founders were Christian, then the modern United States of America should be a Christian theocracy. Would-be Christian theocrats end up concentrating on the religiosity of the founders because they know perfectly well that the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, several treaties, and numerous court rulings have made it clear that this country – majority Christian though it may be – is not now, and never was intended to be, a Christian theocracy.
The religion (or lack of) of the founders isn’t all that important. I appreciate that most of the key figures were Deists, but that is secondary to them consciously crafting an Enlightenment government. The US was conceived as an anti-authoritarian experiment, and that rules out any sort of theocratic government.
Put most succinctly, “because I said so” (or because some book says so) is not a valid argument in the public sphere. Full stop.
What’s also interesting (and not fully elaborated in the NYT article) is that the people who might be considered the “Christian conservatives” of a few generations ago were actively trying to put explicit Christian language into the U.S. Constitution. See, for example, what Wikipedia has to say about the Christian amendment.
That strategy failed on multiple occasions. Today’s Christian conservatives have switched gears–they’re now insisting that Christian ideas are already in the Constitution.
In other words, the Christian conservatives have gone from thinking that there’s not enough Christian emphasis in the Constitution to thinking that it’s always been there.
I had seen the bizarre claim that secularists think that Madison was an atheist and that is why we are pushing for protection of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. The claimant disproved Madison’s atheism, rather easily frankly, and said therefore we are a Christian Nation.
I have also had atheists try to tell me that the Founders were Deist and that iis why we should protect the clauses. But, of course, as martin and travc have pointed out, the religions of the Founders are irrelevant. They clearly wanted to move away from the ties between church and state.
I assume that most of the enlightenment era people who were well educated and in power only pretended to be religious. Like now.
The founding fathers were for the most part Deists, not necessarily Christian either. A good many understood the concepts of secularism too.
I get so sick of hearing the religious idiots put forth that this country is a Christian nation. We’re not. We’re a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindu, Sikh, atheist, agnostic, etc.
In reading the book Democracy a history of the Democratic Party 1790-1861, a claim is made that only 10% of the educated population was church going until after 1819 when the second great awakening happend. This revival was about discarding a lot of baggage of old theology and a “personal relationship and being saved” In many respects this shaped the us then and since. (Items like prohibition, Sunday closing laws and the like arose from it). So the problem is we now look at the revolutionary period thru the lens of the 1810-1845 period and the view is distorted.
Most of the founders were probably somewhere either deist or what we might call liberal or moderate Christian. Evangelical Christian fervor was usually avoided by the better-off classes in the late 18th century, and in any case it was at kind of an ebb at that point between the 1st Great Awakening in the mid 1700s and the 2nd Great Awakening in the early 1800s. The general trend was toward a desire to dissociate government from organized religion, but at that time that meant ending the direct support of an established denomination from government tax revenue. Even the First Amendment only forbade the Federal government from supporting an established church – most states stopped the practice too, but a couple continued to have established churches for a while. Massachusetts I think held on the longest, keeping the Congregational Church (descended from the Puritans) as the state’s established church until around 1820(?)
A lot of the founders apparently supported the idea of “Civic Religion” – the government shouldn’t endorse any particular Christian denomination, but that religion in general was vital to a civilized society.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that most of the Founding Father’s would not pass a religious orthodoxy test by the religious right. Jefferson rewrote the bible, which for people who take the bible literally is a big, big no no.
However, even if they all could pass Pat Robertson’s doctrine test, does that really matter? They aren’t infallible. They thought it was okay for people to own other people.
The beauty of the American system is it’s promise of equality and government by the people. The Founding Fathers were good idea guys, but the implementation kind of sucked if you were not a white, male property owner.