Whoa, you think there were theocrats trying to hijack the US during the constitutional convention?
LOL
Paine and Jefferson were highly critical of the Church and what had been done in the name of Jesus
Of those two, Paine was one of you anti-Christians. He was a propagandist during the Revolutionary War, but wasn't a delegate to any of the conventions that created our founding documents.
Jefferson thought he was a Christian and was a church-goer, both in office and after. Pretty much all Protestants of the time were critical of what had been done in the name of Jesus in past centuries.
There were plenty of prominent Unitarians in the early US (though they considered themselves Christians unlike most of those today) and I'm sure the language used was chosen to unite people, not divide them. That doesn't make the founders secular humanists.
I'm convinced that the majority of the founders would have fought the exclusionary words "In God We Trust" to became a virtual pledge to slap atheism, socialism or other isms that FREEDOM rang in.
You might like to think so, but there's no evidence they were hostile to Christianity. The early Presidents attended church services each Sunday in the Capital building. They all issued proclamations calling for national days of prayer. And they wrote they considered the new system of government would need a high standard of public morality which they counted on private religious organizations (ie churches) to support and maintain.
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What Makes America Different?
All Things Examined
By: Regis Nicoll|Published: July 2, 2010 11:37 AM
Topics: History, Politics & Government, Religion & Society
Five decades after America gained independence, French political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on its exceptional character.
Unlike other nations that were defined by ethnicity, geography, common heritage, social class, or hierarchal structures, America was a nation of immigrants bond together by a shared commitment to the democratic principles of liberty, equality, individualism and laissez faire economics.
Those principles comprise the “America creed,” which, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.” There, the theological pegs of our Union are established in four explicit references to the Judeo-Christian God.
A religious foundation
The Declaration of Independence opens by acknowledging “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.” It goes on to refer to the “Creator” who endows man with “certain unalienable rights.” It makes an appeal to the “Supreme Judge of the world,” and closes with an expression of trust in the “protection of Divine Providence.”
The last reference is particularly striking, considering the deistic leanings of the Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson. In deism, God is a neither a Protector nor Provider; He is a distant, detached Creator who refrains from interfering in the affairs of men.
Nevertheless, in the dust-up to the Revolutionary War, Jefferson wrote, “We devoutly implore assistance of Almighty God to conduct us happily through this great conflict.” And near the end of that conflict, he warned, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God?”
Forty years after Jefferson penned the Declaration, he made note to a friend: “We are not in a world ungoverned by the laws and the power of a Superior Agent. Our efforts are in His hand, and directed by it; and He will give them their effect in His own time.” And this from the man who is considered one of the least religious of the Founders.
Although Jefferson is the patron saint of secular elites for his famous “wall of separation,” it was never his, or any of the Founders’, intention to denude the public square of religious influence. It is quite telling that over 30 years after Jefferson coined that phrase, the keen political observer de Tocqueville remarked: “Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions.”
Even the least religious of the Founders, Ben Franklin, issued this stirring appeal during an arduous debate in the Constitutional Congress:
In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for Divine protection.... All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of Superintending Providence in our favor...have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? or do we imagine we no longer need His assistance?.... God Governs in the affairs of men [Daniel 4:17]. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice [Matthew 10:29], is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
The Founders, and the founding document they authored, gave testimony to the religious, and uniquely Judeo-Christian, character of our nation. Today, numerous religious symbols on edifices in and around our nation’s capital add their voices to that testimony.
Images and representations of the Bible, the crucifix, Moses, and the Ten Commandments exist in engravings and sculptures at the Washington Monument, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, the White House, the World War II Memorial, and the Arlington National Cemetery. At the Supreme Court, the Ten Commandments are displayed in no less than three places: over the East portico, on the Court doors, and over the Chief Justice’s chair. But there is one witness to America’s religious heritage that many people carry in their purses and wallets: the one-dollar bill.
Centered on the back of the dollar bill are not the words, “In man we trust,” “In science we trust,” or “In the state we trust”; but “IN GOD WE TRUST,” flanked on both sides by The Great Seal, an American emblem rich in religious symbolism.
The Great Seal
Professor and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute Thomas G. West notes that the theological significance of The Great Seal has been largely lost because of the common misconception that its symbols are rooted in Freemasonry.
In the spring 2010 issue of the journal The City, Dr. West references a 1782 document written by the Seal’s creator, Charles Thomson, explaining its various symbols.
On the reverse side of the Seal, there is an unfinished pyramid with 13 rows of bricks, representing the 13 original colonies. Engraved on the bottom row are the Roman numerals, MDCCLXXVI, to signify the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, as the foundation upon which the country is built. The pyramid is unfinished because “America is a work in progress.”
Underneath the pyramid the words, “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” are literally rendered “a new order of the ages.” It is “new,” writes West, because “no nation has ever grounded itself on a principle, discovered by reason, affirmed by God, and shared by all human beings: ‘that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”
In the words of Charles Thomson, the motto signifies “the beginning of the New American Era,” not the beginning of a new world order, as is commonly reported today.
Raised above the pyramid, an omniscient eye, enclosed in a triangle, represents the triune God who is associated with the nation in three ways: 1) as a Protector and Guide—the glory emanating from the eye suggests the pillar of fire guiding the Israelites of Exodus. Similar imagery is on the obverse side of the Seal with glory radiating from a pillar of cloud surrounding 13 stars; 2) as a Standard to which the incomplete pyramid below points and aspires to conform; and 3) as a Judge—the motto above the eye, “Annuit Coeptis,” translated “He favors our beginnings,” carries the converse implication that if the foundation of our beginnings is abandoned, His favor will turn to judgment.
The Great Seal, created after the Declaration of Independence and before the U.S. Constitution, reflects a religious heritage that the country’s Founders believed integral to the common weal of the nation. Thus, de Tocqueville, whose own country was marked by great tension between faith and freedom, was taken aback by integration of those ideals he found in the social and political life across the sea.
In America, the church was not an arm of the state, nor the state an arm of the church; still, biblical faith was a sort of DNA that informed the colonists’ sense of themselves as a nation, and of the principles of liberty, justice, law, and governance that became institutionalized as uniquely American.
In the formation of the “more perfect union,” no hardened barrier was erected, or intended, to prevent the intrusion of religion into public spaces, Jefferson’s “wall of separation” notwithstanding. To the contrary, an Establishment Clause was crafted to secure the free exercise of religion and to prevent the intrusion of the state into the affairs of the church, specifically prohibiting the legislation of a national religion.
Operating within its biblical sphere of sovereignty, the church provides the moral framework for a just society. It acts as the conscience of the state, reminding Caesar of the high calling of his office, and its limits, and exhorting citizens to the duty owed Caesar. The state, in turn, protects the church by defending, encouraging and supporting religious expression, without preference to any particular sect. The positive benefits of that association have been acknowledged in some surprising precincts of late.
John D. Steinrucken, an avowed secularist and atheist, gives air to the feckless fantasies of secularism. In the recent article “Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity,” Steinrucken bristles over the long history of failures of rationally based ideologies to make good on their utopian promises, or to provide a viable substitute for religion, in general, and Christianity, in particular.
Steinrucken makes the astonishing admission that Christianity is the “guarantor of our political and legal system” because it is “a moral force independent of and transcendent to the political” (emphasis in original). Even more astonishingly, he warns that the country that “loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism” will lose “that which holds all else together.”
John Steinrucken would find common ground with our country’s founding fathers and, in particular, George Washington. It was Washington who gave voice to what many of his colleagues and countrymen recognized over two centuries ago: "Religion and liberty must flourish or fall together in America.”
The perseverance of that association, despite the fevered efforts of secularists in recent decades to sever it, has made the United States a beacon of democratic freedom and human rights around the globe.
breakpoint.org
The Founding Fathers Were Not Deists
There were more Christians than deists among the founding fathers, and even those who identified as deist often affirmed an active God who governed history.
By John Fea, February 02, 2011
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"The founding fathers were deists."
I have probably heard this statement affirmed just as much as I have heard claims that the founders were Christians. It is one of the many pieces of ammunition used by the opponents of the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. If the founders were indeed deists, the argument goes, they could not have founded a uniquely Christian republic.
In actuality, there were a lot more founders who were Christians than deists. And of those founders who did not identify with the doctrines of historic Christianity, few could be called deists.
Deism was the belief that God created the world and then let it operate according to natural laws. Eighteenth-century deists of the truest stripe believed that God did not intervene in the lives of his human creation. He did not perform miracles, answer prayer, or sustain the world by his providence. True religion, according to the deist, was based on reason rather than divine revelation.
One would be hard-pressed to find many people in colonial America who upheld all of these beliefs. Take Benjamin Franklin, for example. As a young boy Franklin read a series of lectures, published by the estate of British scientist Robert Boyle, designed to counter the influence of deism in English religious life. Franklin wrote in his Autobiography that these lectures "wrought an Effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them: For the Arguments of the Deists which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much Stronger than the Refutations." By reading the Boyle Lectures, Franklin claimed to have become a "thorough Deist."
Franklin's early commitment to deism, however, did not last very long. Some historians see his flirtation with deism as little more than a form of youthful rebellion against the strict Calvinism of his Puritan upbringing. As he grew older, Franklin came to believe in a Creator-God who possessed great wisdom, goodness, and power. God not only created this world, but he also sustained it. Franklin was amazed at the way God created the stars and the planets, but he was even more amazed that God continued "to govern them in their greatest Velocity as they shall not flie off out of their appointed Bounds nor dash against another, to their mutual Destruction." It was not laws of science that held the universe together, it was the sustaining power of an active God.
Franklin even believed that God could, on occasion, intervene in the lives of his human creation. Thirty-six years after he claimed to have embraced deism, Franklin sounded like anything but an adherent to this religious system: "Without the Belief of a Providence that takes Cognizance of, guards and guides and may favour particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its Protection." Franklin believed that God required worship, answers prayer, and intervenes in history to meet the needs of "particular Persons." By 1787, Franklin was requesting that the Constitutional Convention pause for prayer to seek guidance and reconciliation in the midst of one of its most heated debates.
Similarly, Thomas Jefferson believed in an active God who sustained the world by his providence. Jefferson wrote about God's "superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order." According to Jefferson, God kept the stars, sun, and planets in place. He called this Creator and Sustainer of the universe "Nature's God"—a God who he believed was best portrayed in Psalm 148:
Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise him in the heights!
Praise him all his angels, praise him, all his hosts!
Praise him, sun, and moon, praise him, all you shining stars!
Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!
Let them praise the name of the Lord!
For he commanded and they were created.
And he established them for ever and ever;
He set a law which cannot pass away.
I have chosen to focus on Franklin and Jefferson in this column because they are often presented as the most skeptical of the major founding fathers. Yet similar things could be said about George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and a host of other signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
While few of these major founders could be considered "Christian," and probably did not set out to establish a uniquely "Christian nation," neither were they deists. They all believed in an active God who, to various degrees, governed the world by his providence and, at times, might even enter into the affairs of humankind.
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patheos.com
A Proclamation Signed in Script Type by George Washington
Appearing in The Massachusetts Centinel of October 14, 1789 Abstract This historic proclamation was issued by George Washington during his first year as President. It sets aside Thursday, November 26 as "A Day of Publick Thanksgiving and Prayer."
Signed by Washington on October 3, 1789 and entitled "General Thanksgiving," the decree appointed the day "to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God."
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earlyamerica.com |
