The Founding Fathers: Not just God-fearing but, horrors, out-and-out Christians

The invaluable American Spectator has as its cover story in the February issue a special by M. Stanton Evans on the subject of the religious orientation of our Founding Fathers. You will have to buy the magazine because the article is not available online. It's well worth the price.

The non-stop secularist propaganda may have convinced us that these lamentably male and pasty non-ethnics were, thankfully, hard-headed rationalists and secularists as well if one could strip away the temporal cultural trappings of the day (which modern historians have).

Evans offers inconvenient facts and quotes that should be common knowledge:

George Washington's 1778 directive [What if the following had been said by our current George W.?]: "The commander in chief directs that Divine service be performed every Sunday at 11 o'clock, in each brigade which has a Chaplain . . . . While we are duly performing the duty of good soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of a patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of a Christian."

And this from Washington's successor John Adams, a decade after the First Amendment was adopted: "[Citizens should] acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable . . . beseeching Him at the same time of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the world, freely to remit all offenses and to incline us by his holy spirit to repentance and reformation."

Evans cites similarly shocking utterances by Jefferson and Madison as well as the following description of a key framer of the First Amendment, Roger Sherman:

"He objected to traveling on Sunday, was a leader in the ecclesiatical doings of New Haven, and engaged in theological correspondence even while tending to his worldly oblications. One of his writings is entitled, A Short Sermon on the Duty of Self-Examination Preparatory to Receiving the Lord's Supper."

Nor does Evans overlook that enlightened Benjamin Franklin, a Unitarian (the modern versions of which are well known to believe in absolutely nothing). But, Evans notes:

"[I]t was Franklin who at the Constitutional Convention called for prayer to aid the drafters in their efforts, saying that, the longer he lived the more he was convinced 'God governs in the affairs of men'."

Could such men be elected to public office today?



Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com