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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Krowbar who wrote (13846)11/25/1997 10:02:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
They have publicly stated that they want to get this country back to it's "Judeo-Christian roots as our founders had intended". You are well-read enough to know that our founders did not intend that.

M E Bradford did the definitive work on the founders, reading all of the extant writings of all the Signers of the Constitution as well as the 250 or so men who ratified the document. Only five, maybe seven of these men can be called anything but conventional Christians of that time. A Protestant Christian world was a given in that day; even Catholicism was suspect. Joseph Story's A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution remarks on the Christian assumptions of the law in that time; Story was on the Supreme Court from 1810 to 1845. Alexis de Toqueville in Democracy in America remarks on the pervasive religiosity of the Americans in his travels of 1835. The Revolution itself was bracketed by the Great Awakening and the Second Awakening. Many of the firebrands for Revolution were the ministers of the day, and Liberty Press has a thick volume Political Sermons of the Founding Era. Virginia had debated whether or not to have an official State Church, Governor Patrick Henry arguing in favor of one; but suspicion of The Church of England, and strong opposition by Baptists and other dissenting congregations who had fled the New England Colonies helped win the argument against a State Church. The resulting Virginia Bill of Rights became the Ten Amendments of the Constitution. The idea that the religion clause of the First Amendment reflects a strong secular impulse at the founding is a useful fantasy for today's lawyers, but it ain't history. However, the founders did wisely decide and intend to keep the spheres of religion and government from being combined. But there wasn't the hostility to religion that marks the last 40 years of American law.
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