The Faith Of Our (Founding) Fathers (Part 2)

While researching for the quotes I gave yesterday, I found a very interesting page at the Library of Congress website that talked about the Founders and religion. It debunks a lot of revisionist history about the Founding Fathers - such as this myth "the Founders weren't Christian, they were Deists" and then they point to one or two rather generic quotes from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (specifically to prove their point). Well the truth is..

The first two Presidents of the United States were patrons of religion--George Washington was an Episcopal vestryman, and John Adams described himself as "a church going animal." Both offered strong rhetorical support for religion. In his Farewell Address of September 1796, Washington called religion, as the source of morality, "a necessary spring of popular government," while Adams claimed that statesmen "may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand." Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the third and fourth Presidents, are generally considered less hospitable to religion than their predecessors, but evidence presented in this section shows that, while in office, both offered religion powerful symbolic support.

A vestryman is a member of a local churches governing body - hardly the work of a "deist". As far as Jeffereson goes....

It is no exaggeration to say that on Sundays in Washington during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and of James Madison (1809-1817) the state became the church. Within a year of his inauguration, Jefferson began attending church services in the House of Representatives. Madison followed Jefferson's example...

Emphasis mine.....as a matter of FACT, church services were held in a number of state buildings, including the House of Representatives, the Treasury Building and the Supreme Court Building, through the late 1800's. This idea that state owned buildings (schools or office buildings) can not be used for worship is strictly a tenant of a more secular society that is hostile to religion.

To be fair to Jefferson - he struggled with a lot of the same issues (regarding Christianity) that many do.....

In this letter to his friend Benjamin Rush, Jefferson asserted that he was a "Christian, in the only sense in which [Jesus] wished any one to be."...Jefferson declined to consider the "question of [Jesus] being a member of the god-head, or in direct communication with it, claimed for him by some of his followers, and denied by others."

But when push came to shove.....

Jefferson pronounced Jesus' doctrines, though "disfigured by the corruptions of schismatising followers" far superior to any competing system.

Again - hardly the words of a "deist". Regarding the oft quoted and maligned letter to the Danbury Baptist Church, the Library of Congress lays these FACTS out for our review....

Presented here are both the handwritten, edited draft of the letter and an adjusted facsimile showing the original unedited draft. The draft of the letter reveals that, far from dashing it off as a "short note of courtesy," as some have called it, Jefferson labored over its composition. Jefferson consulted Postmaster General Gideon Granger of Connecticut and Attorney General Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts while drafting the letter. That Jefferson consulted two New England politicians about his messages indicated that he regarded his reply to the Danbury Baptists as a political letter, not as a dispassionate theoretical pronouncement on the relations between government and religion.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers (as shown above) did try to maintain a balance between the political and the religious. It is something that all of us religious practitioners must do. However, the arbitrary wall that is forced between religion and politics in American is a false dichotomy created by post modernists who want to have it all but don't want to suffer the consequences of having it all.

Believe it or not, we can learn from old dead guys. They may have lived in a different time, but the things they experienced are not all that different from the things we experience today. There is much wisdom in George Santayana's saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We need to remember the past - not rewrite it.