- John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United
States, recently repeated an old chestnut about America being a
Christian nation whose founders were Christian gentlemen.
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- The claim is common among the country's
fundamentalist Christians, but it is so ignorant of actual history one
wonders whether it should not be taken as another serious indictment
of American public education. Some readers may not be aware that Mr.
Ashcroft's background includes familiarity with such arcane subjects
as speaking in tongues. As for Mr. Bush, who touched the same theme in
China, perhaps no comment on his grasp of history is required. The
late eighteenth century, following on the Enlightenment and waves of
reaction to the violent excesses of the Reformation and
counter-Reformation over the previous two centuries, was perhaps the
lowest point for Christian influence ever. Virtually all educated
people in Europe were deists and many were open skeptics.
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- America was not free of this influence despite its
many Puritan immigrants. Indeed, many of the best educated citizens at
this time were educated in Europe, and the small number of good
libraries owned by educated people often contained the works of
Enlightenment authors. Virtually all the ideas in the Declaration of
Independence and even some of the words of the Constitution derive
from these European sources. It is due precisely to the unique
qualities of the period that we owe America's early embrace of
religious tolerance. The immigrant Puritans had displayed no religious
tolerance, and in fact were some of the worst fanatics from
Europe.
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- George Washington was a deist. He was a member of
the Masons, a then comparatively-new, secretive fraternal organization
widely regarded as unfriendly to traditional Christianity and
reflecting European secular attitudes. He did attend church regularly,
but this was done with the aristocratic notion that it set an example
for the lower classes, Washington being very much a planter-aristocrat
(he used to refer to the independent-minded Yankee recruits in the
revolution, who had had the practice of electing their officers before
he was appointed as commander, as "a dirty and nasty people."). This
was a time when there was an established church in Virginia, and it
functioned as an important quasi-political organization.
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- Washington always used deistic terms like Great
Providence. His writings, other than one brief note as a very young
man, do not speak of Jesus, and he died, knowing he was dying, without
ever calling for prayer, Bible, or minister. There is a story given by
some of his best biographers shedding light on his church-going. He
apparently never kneeled for prayer nor would he take communion. When
one parson brought this to his attention after the service, Washington
gave him the icy stare for which this aloof, emotionally-cold man was
famous and never returned to that church.
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- Thomas Jefferson was accused publicly of being an
atheist. More than any other founder, Jefferson was under the spell of
European (and particularly French) thought. His writings, and
references to him by friends, certainly make him sound like a private
skeptic. He belonged to no church. He explicitly denied the divinity
of Jesus, viewing him as a great teacher of human values. At best he
was a deist referring in his private writings to God as "our
god."
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- Jefferson who, despite high-sounding words, was
something of a hypocrite on many aspects of civil liberties and
particularly on slavery, was at his best on the need for religious
liberty. Despite his free-thinking reputation, he formed alliances
with groups like the Baptists, who deeply resented paying taxes to the
established church in Virginia and won a long battle for a statute of
religious liberty.
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- Thomas Paine, whose stirring words in Common Sense
contributed greatly to the revolution, was often accused of atheism
because of his religious writing, but deism is closer to the truth.
His later writing done in Europe, "The Age of Reason," was regarded as
scandalous by establishment-types. France, during the terror under
Robespierre, turned to a new kind of state religion. This, the very
brave Paine, living in Paris, also rejected, writing,
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- "I do not believe in the creed professedby the Roman
church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the protestant
church, nor any church that I know of. My own mind is my own
church."
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- The great Dr. Franklin, who incidentally lived about
a quarter of his life on diplomatic missions in Europe and who as a
very young man had run away >from a home where rigid religious
principles were imposed, was a typical deist of the period. He was an
active member of the first Masonic temple in America. His attitudes
were so amicable to French intellectuals and society, he was embraced,
as no other American has ever been, as a national figure in that
country.
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- Alexander Hamilton, undoubtedly the most
intellectually gifted of the founders other than Franklin, paid lip
service to religion, but he was known during the Revolution as a rake.
Later, his distinguished career in Washington's cabinet was marred by
a great sexual scandal. Generally, Hamilton used religion to promote
his political aims, ignoring it whenever it was convenient. In this
respect, perhaps he qualifies as a thoroughly modern American version
of a Christian.
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- Gouveneur Morris, who wrote the draft of the
Constitution we all recognize >from the notes of others, was an
extremely worldly and aristocratic man. He was also one of
Washington's most trusted confidants. He was perhaps the most rakish,
womanizing diplomat America ever sent to Europe, sharing at one point
a mistress with Talleyrand, the most amoral ex-cleric who ever
practiced statecraft. In general, Europeans were astonished that a man
so worldly and so arrogantly patrician in temperament represented the
young republic for a period in France.
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- Abraham Lincoln, while not a founder, is the most
beloved of American presidents. Lincoln's closest friend and most
interesting biographer, Herndon, said flatly that Lincoln was a
religious skeptic. This has always so upset America's establishment
historians that Herndon has been accused of writing a distorted book,
a rather ridiculous charge in view of a close friendship with his
subject and twenty years spent collecting materials.
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- Lincoln never attended church and when he refers to
God in speeches during the Civil War, it is always with words
acceptable to secular, educated people who regarded the King James
Bible as an important cultural and literary document apart from any
claims for its sacredness.
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- There is reason to believe that as the bloody war
continued, Lincoln, who suffered from severe depressions, turned to
the Bible for consolation, especially to the story of the struggle of
the Hebrews.
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- Lincoln was also an extremely astute politician who
used every means at his command in the great battle with secession,
and his references to the Almighty may well have been part of his
psychological artillery. He certainly did not invoke the name of
Jesus.
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- Patrick Henry, who incidentally opposed ratification
of the Constitution, was a Christian, but he was once described by
Jefferson as "an emotional volcano with little guiding
intelligence."
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- Just a little brush up on history
- ___
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- John Chuckman encourages your comments:
jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
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