If you ask many Christians about the faith of our founding fathers, they will tell you that they were Christian, and they will likely conjure quotes by some of them about God.
This is a foundational idea to the perception of America as a “Christian nation”.
The problem, of course, is that it is wholly untrue.
Our founding fathers were a religiously diverse group of men, and some of them (ahem, Washington) even performed the process that we would now label as “deconstruction” from the Protestantism they were born into.
Several of them were Diests, including Jefferson, who denied anything miraculous, including Christ’s birth, and believed that Jesus gave us good principles to live by but that logic and reason were of upmost importance.
In quoting the founding fathers, and pointing to evidences of their own religious faith, I don’t see many Christians pointing out that we have in our possession Jefferson’s own Bible in which he (literally, physically) cut out the passages he didn’t believe in (anything deemed illogical), or quoting Paine when he stated that the Bible would be better called the “word of a demon” than the word of God.
When looking beyond the Constitution to the words of our founding fathers to attempt to establish an argument for this being a Christian nation, I don’t see many references to Adams stating in a treaty that “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Our Constitution crystallizes the fact that secularism was the goal of our founders. Having witnessed the reality of religious persecution, they (even the Christians among them) rejected the influence of overt Christian principles upon government.
The First Amendment established religious freedom as a protection for *both* religious and governmental practice.
Although we certainly can’t look to our founders as our moral or ethical compass, their establishment of a secular government has to be our political one.
The separation of Church and State was a religiously neutral position, and not a specifically Christian one.
➡️ swipe for how we should respond to this fact.
This is a foundational idea to the perception of America as a “Christian nation”.
The problem, of course, is that it is wholly untrue.
Our founding fathers were a religiously diverse group of men, and some of them (ahem, Washington) even performed the process that we would now label as “deconstruction” from the Protestantism they were born into.
Several of them were Diests, including Jefferson, who denied anything miraculous, including Christ’s birth, and believed that Jesus gave us good principles to live by but that logic and reason were of upmost importance.
In quoting the founding fathers, and pointing to evidences of their own religious faith, I don’t see many Christians pointing out that we have in our possession Jefferson’s own Bible in which he (literally, physically) cut out the passages he didn’t believe in (anything deemed illogical), or quoting Paine when he stated that the Bible would be better called the “word of a demon” than the word of God.
When looking beyond the Constitution to the words of our founding fathers to attempt to establish an argument for this being a Christian nation, I don’t see many references to Adams stating in a treaty that “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Our Constitution crystallizes the fact that secularism was the goal of our founders. Having witnessed the reality of religious persecution, they (even the Christians among them) rejected the influence of overt Christian principles upon government.
The First Amendment established religious freedom as a protection for *both* religious and governmental practice.
Although we certainly can’t look to our founders as our moral or ethical compass, their establishment of a secular government has to be our political one.
The separation of Church and State was a religiously neutral position, and not a specifically Christian one.
➡️ swipe for how we should respond to this fact.
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