- 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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