A Glimmer of Light

Sometimes I fear the Phil Spector Wall of Rightwing Sound will drown out reason. Can a bunch of well-funded bullies get America to capitulate to their warped views? Apparently, in some cases, not. The New York Times Sunday Magazine piece "How Christian were the Founders?", a straight reporting of the Texas textbook issues brought out the best in the lay readers. Letters to the editors ranged from retired ambassadors, history professors and lay people who all shared more historical information on how the Founding Fathers did not create a "Christian nation". The piece also generated more comments in the blogosphere from another army of amateur historians, who remember their American history rather well.

And better yet--yesterday Texan voters tossed the extreme rightists off the state school board.

If you are for democracy, tolerance, pluralism and free-thinking, the Founding Fathers do not disappoint and they will remain like hidden depth charges to sink the efforts of Christian revisionists and the white nationalist efforts to rewrite American history. I guess Americans still respect the Founding Fathers and will not let just anyone coopt them to their subversive cause.

I have been reading a book The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David Holmes ( Oxford, 2006), which details at great length the religious views of our Founding Fathers. If the right continues their assault, we may actually see a revival of Deism in the country. Holmes, a professor at the College of William and Mary, warns his reader that the Christianity of presidents Gerald Ford through George W. Bush would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers. Even Gerald Ford, an Anglican, was heavily influenced by evangelicals. As Holmes warns, "The past is a foreign country--people did things different there."

The Holmes' book is about 200 pages of concise writing on the religious attitudes of our Founding Fathers. His explanation of Deism and its influence on all the major founders is really worth the read. I actually may be one. Deism also explains why our founding fathers were keen on science, something our religious right wants to abandon. Since the first Great Awakening happened between 1730 and 1740, you would imagine the founding fathers would be heavily influenced by this upsurge of piety. Apparently, just the opposite.

The Christian Revisionists are right about one thing--Thomas Jefferson was , indeed, the most theologically inclined of his peers and his collegues thought so as well. His writings on religion are voluminous. He warned his friends never to disclose his thoughts to the public. One such leak generated attacks on him as an "atheist".

Holmes calls Thomas Jefferson, a "Christian Restorationist", which means that he sought to get rid of the corrupt effects of priests and monarchs on the original, pristine teachings of Jesus. He took scissors and razors to the New Testament to excise the corruptions he believed were placed by writers upon the original teachings. He removed from the New Testament all of Paul's letters and --this will kill the fundamentalists--the Book of Revelations. When he submitted The Life and Morals of Jesus to his secretary, he described Jesus of Nazareth as "no imposter himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion." He said he disagreed with Jesus on some matters: It is not to be understood that I am with him in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance towards forgiveness of sins,etc. I require a counter-poise of good works to redeem it,etc.,etc."

The other rock, George Washington, poses a few interesting historical challenges. Having attended church all his life and creating military chaplains for the Revolutionary Army, historians have been puzzled by one striking fact--George Washington never took communion ever again after the Revolutionary War. There are a host of guesses about this but it has been shown to be an historical truth and one not resolved.

Glen Beck's hero Thomas Paine was called a "filthy atheist" by Theodore Roosevelt, someone Beck despises. Thomas Paine was a radical non-Christian Deist, who tended to like revolution. During his years in prison during the French Revolution and recuperating at Monroe's house where the future president was ambassador, he wrote The Age of Reason, which lost him some support from his American friends and got him labelled an "infidel" by orthodox Christians. Using a King James version of the Bible provided him by the Monroes, he mercilessly assaulted and lampooned Judeo-Christian beliefs, finally concluding that Christianity had been a negative influence on world history. This is who Glenn Beck , a born-again Morman, thinks he is.

James Madison is another person the Christian revisionists would like to downgrade. It's no wonder because Madison actually stayed at Princeton a year after graduating to learn Hebrew from Rev. John Witherspoon to compliment his Greek so he could read the scriptures in the original. Once he graduated, he became a fierce defender of religious liberty and a key proponent of the separation of church and state. He rarely wrote or publically commented on religion. But Thomas Jefferson thought so highly of his expertise on the subject that he asked him for a bibliography of religious books for the University of Virginia.

Ethan Allen, whom I erroneously labeled an "atheist" in a prior post, simply had such a dangerous and angry reaction to his Presbyterian upbringing that he spent enormous energy denouncing the clergy and the churches in America. He would be more accurately labeled a 'radical Deist".

As Holmes writes, the average Founding Father had a vast amount of knowledge about religion as anyone today and they studied it like other forms of government. They were not for political or religious despotism in any way shape or form. Let's not allow people to get away with thinking they were.