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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Krowbar who wrote (13895)	12/1/1997 2:22:00 AM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Bradford described his research in the forward to his book. He spent some ten years assembling and reading everything written by the signers and ratifiers of the Constitution. I've read reviews of his work by other historians of his particular field, and they stress the uniqueness of Bradford's research. James McClellan and Forrest MacDonald are two commentators that come to mind. MacDonald is a professor of history at Alabama, and has written a number of books on that era, Requiem, E Pluribus Unum, Novus Ordo Seclorum being a few. McClellan is a legal scholar who used to publish the journal Benchmark. I don't know what the Christian Coalition claims, so I can't comment on them. The relation of the government to religion in the founding era can be drawn from a number of sources. The debates on the Virginia Bill of Rights, which became the Constitution's Bill of Rights, the early laws passed by the first Congresses. The Treaty of Paris, 1783, opens with the phrase "In the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity"; Jay, Franklin and Adams at least didn't object to the language. There is no doubt that there was a desire to prevent the establishment of one national church, or to allow any one denomination to be regarded as such. But the same Congress that passed the First Amendment proceeded to authorize a Chaplain to open the sessions of Congress. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinances, which includes "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government, and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." A number of the states had official state churches, financed out of taxes. Massachussetts had a state church up to 1833. The view of New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Virginia was to tolerate all while preferring none. A variety of Europe's churches were transplanted to America, and here they learned to get along with each other in order to survive, especially along the frontier. The idea of a sharp break between government and religion comes out of this century, especially post-WWII. In the late 1800s the US government forced the Mormons to abandon polygamy, mostly because it violated the generic Protestantism that was taken for granted as a basis for law. Today the case might go the other way.