By Bill Ellis
Special to ASSIST News Service
SCOTT
DEPOT, WV – (ANS)- One of the lead stories on ABC-TV evening news,
April 20, 2010, raised questions about our early leader’s plan for America to
be a Christian nation. We can debate this issue endlessly. My suggestion is to
look at the record.
There was no attempt in the
separation of church and state question to ever remove religion from its
rightful place. That whole debate was to make sure that the state had no
authority over the church.
There is every indication that our
leaders expected Christianity to be the leading religion of this new nation.
Harvard University, founded in 1636,
was the first college in America. The purpose of the college was “To train
a literate clergy.”
The Rules and Precepts observed at
Harvard included this statement: “Let every Student be plainly instructed,
and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies
is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3 and therefore
to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and
Learning.”
I wonder how much better our nation
would be if the requirements at the beginning of our oldest college were still
practiced today. Admission requirements then were probably too high for today’s
students.
July 9, 1776, General George Washington
issued this order to his troops. “The General hopes and trusts that every
officer and man, will endeavor so to live, and act, as becomes a Christian
Soldier defending the dearest Rights and Liberties of his country.”
John Adams (1735-1826), our 2nd
President was also a man of strong belief in the Christian religion, its Holy
Bible and Jesus Christ. He responsed to Thomas Paine’s writing: “The
Christian religion is, above all the Religions that ever prevailed or existed
in ancient or modern times, the religion of Wisdom, Virtue, Equity and
Humanity.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the
nation’s 3rd President, was a man of unusual intelligence and faith in God.
When commenting on the Constitution, whose primary writer was our 4th
President, James Madison (1751-1836), a godly man and devout Christian,
Jefferson spoke these words: “A more beautiful or precious morsel of
ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian;
that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one
of America’s greatest leaders, wrote to the French ministry, March 1778:
“Whoever shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive
Christianity will change the face of the world.”
March 9, 1790, Franklin wrote to
Ezra Stiles, President of Yale University: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my
Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his
Religion, as he left them to us, is the best the World ever saw, or is likely
to see.”
How have we drifted so far from our
birthing purpose? Will we ever again have leaders of the intelligence, wisdom
and moral decency of our founders?
The Holy Bible, honored, believed
and lived out in the lives of our founders, makes this promise: “Blessed
is the nation whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 33:12). And warned: “The
wicked shall be turned into hell and all the nations that forget God”
(Psalm 9:17).
To the extent that the United States
forgets God and turns its back on His Son, Jesus Christ, this nation will be
moving toward an annihilation.
President Ronald Reagan, at a Prayer
Breakfast in Dallas, Texas, August 23, 1984, declared, “If we ever forget
that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a Nation gone under.” We
are dangerously close to that point of eternal destruction.
If our nation is worth saving, we
must act quickly to save it.
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Bill Ellis is a syndicated The Cypress Times welcomes your opinion. You may leave a comment below this article or send your own Op/Ed to Editor@TheCypressTimes.com |
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There’s a lot that Bill Ellis leaves out here.
First, Thomas Paine was quite as much a Founding Father as John Adams – and yet, in “The Age Of Reason”, Paine denounced all revealed religion and preached a simple deistical worship of the God of Nature, shorn of what he saw as the superstitious mummeries of the Christian sects of his day.
John Adams was himself a Unitarian Christian. His respect for Christianity ran deep, but his beliefs were not such that someone holding them nowadays would generally be thought of by Christians as being Christian.
Note carefully what Thomas Jefferson says. He respects, he says, the ethics of Jesus. He did not believe that Jesus was divine, and he went so far as to write his own version of the Gospels, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”, which I have read. It omits all supernatural and miraculous elements.
Franklin’s approach is similar: to praise the ethics of the founder of Christianity, but to dislike the organized religions he saw around him.
Such people were common in eighteenth-century America. They weren’t atheists or Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or any such thing. They believed in a Creator God, and refer to him in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. They were Enlightenment-era deists, profoundly influenced by Christian thought and ideas, but in their different ways often highly unorthodox in their beliefs.
Therefore, it is willfully anti-historical to take their every mention of a God and to presume that they mean the Christian Trinitarian God as worshipped in the Protestant or Catholic churches of today. It’s also anti-historical to take their genuine respect for Christian ethics, and turn it into a professed desire to create a Christian republic. That’s just self-serving, because it’s what you want them to have wanted. They didn’t.
After all, they had a clear example before them, in Britain, of a democracy that commingled church and state. Until a few years ago in Britain, Anglican bishops and token representatives of the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu faiths sat by right in the House of Lords. The Prime Minister still selects the shortlist for the bishops of the Church of England, and the Queen is still Supreme Governor of the Church. Till a few years ago, blasphemy was still illegal.
If the Founders had wanted an explicitly Christian country, they would surely have duplicated those arrangements, making senior priests senators by right, and giving the President power to appoint bishops in the Christian churches. But they consciously did not. Instead, they set up a federal republic that consciously had no religious element in its design – the first such republic till the French Revolution nine years later.
You are right that till the 1830s the states had the power to set up an established church. But this is the first I have heard of anyone wanting to go back to that. I grew up in Britain under an established church, and I can tell you that nothing is more of a poison to heartfelt Christian belief than the notion that your government wants you to worship in one certain way and no other.
In Britain and in all of these countries that commingle church and state, real religious belief has slowly withered, till in many countries only a minority believe in God. Only in the United States were religions set free from the dead hand of government to compete freely for believers, and here real religious belief still thrives. The best way to have a country that remains religious, is to keep our government’s hands off religious matters.
One consequence of the people forgetting the Founder’s division of federal and state government powers is this. The people no longer understand that the Founders trusted the states with the power to cultivate religious expression, regardless that the Founders made the 1st A. in part to prohibit the federal government from doing so.
In fact, regardless what the USSC wants people to believe about Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” the real Jefferson wrote the following about freedom of religion.
“3. Resolved that it is true as a general principle and is also expressly declared by one of the amendments to the constitution that ‘the powers not delegated to the US. by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people’: and that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press being delegated to the US. by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, all lawful powers respecting the same did of right remain, & were reserved, to the states or the people…” –Thomas Jefferson, Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. http://tinyurl.com/oozoo
Although state power to cultivate religion may sound evil to some people, this is actually the power by which states can authorize public schools to teach creationism, for example, power now limited by the honest interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
The reason that people no longer understand state power to cultivate religion is because of perversions of the 14th A. by anti-religious expression justices.