AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Wednesday 30 December 2009
Establishing Christian America

Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation.  Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox.  George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion.  His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked.  The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”

Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail.  Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason.  He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress.  Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.”  Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.

A GNT creation ©2007–2011