christian god and forming of United States
Sara Lundberg529270171797-6745 I am responding to a letter written on March 31, in which the author tried to prove the case for a Christian framing of our nation. The idea that our nation was founded on the idea of a Christian god is one that has been pushed for quite some time, although history has proven otherwise. Most of the founders of our nation (Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Allen, Madison, and Monroe) were not Christian, they were Deists. This was a belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. It is the belief in human reason, and a supreme deity who only created the universe to operate on its own and took no further control. This includes the rejection of many Christian beliefs such as prayer, the virgin birth, miracles and divine inspiration of the bible. Only natural law and human reason account for why the world is the way it is. The first presidents elected from Washington to Jackson had never professed a belief in Christianity. There was a tendency at the time to respect religious organizations as part of the social order, which required ministers to visit the sick, bury the dead and perform marriages. These men represented this tendency, and can account for certain religious references. References to “nature’s God” in important documents should not be interpreted as evidence of Christian belief, but in fact are Deistic in origin. Anyone who has read the letters of Thomas Jefferson would know that he was very anti-cleric. One example: “There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Jefferson declared his firm belief in the separation of church and state in another letter: “. . . the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” If the founders had intended this nation to be established as Christian, they would have surely not tried so hard to keep matters of church and state so separate. It is a dangerous thing that so many are trying to undo this, especially when trying to dupe the rest of the nation into thinking this is the way the founding fathers wanted it.