The Founding Fathers WERE NOT Devout Christians!

We live in terrifying times. The Roman Catholic Church is about to denounce the theory of evolution. Can the Inquisition be far behind? In this country, the Religious Right is seeking to overthrow the secular institutions that hold them at bay. Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine — Deist author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man — "that dirty, little atheist." Recently, we have the sight of Jeb Bush pandering to the Religious Right in Florida by ordering a criminal investigation of Michael Schiavo. According to Governor Bush, the husband of the late vegetable — Terri Schiavo — should be investigated for criminal behavior or negligence in the events surrounding the poor woman's stroke. This morning's fishwrap contained a small item that the Florida Attorney General found no untoward behavior on Michael Schiavo's part. Damn, there could have been a good lynchin' in the Sunshine State. If this is (fair & balanced) religiosity, so be it.

[x Palm Beach Post]
Founders sought freedom of faith in new nation
By Steve Gushée

The great majority of Americans today embrace Christianity. Nevertheless, Independence Day that we celebrate on Monday did not give birth to a Christian nation. The founders created an experiment in heretofore unheard-of religious freedom.

Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, was not Christian. He and many of the founding fathers were 18th-century rationalists who embraced a kind of deism, at best a natural, nonsupernatural Christian heresy.

Rather than endorse a religion, the founders sought to protect their fledgling nation from all religious influence. They were painfully aware of the wicked role Christianity played for centuries in Europe. They knew their forefathers had come to this country in the 17th century to escape the religious-political complex of the Old Country that persecuted those who did not conform to the established faith; Catholic in some countries, Protestant in others.

Jefferson and many of his contemporaries did believe in God, but few of today's Christians would recognize their deist deity. Deists believe in one Supreme Being who set creation in motion and then made himself scarce. They are skeptical of miracles. They reject any idea of a God who is involved with his creation. They deny the revelation of Scripture, eyeing that book simply as a superb moral document.

Jefferson did not accept the orthodox teaching of the role of Jesus as savior in Christianity. He wrote his own Bible and threw out what Christians call the Old Testament. He deleted from the New Testament all verses that referred to the supernatural. His Bible is a simple moral code filled with the teaching and parables of Jesus. It ends with Jesus' burial. He included no account of the resurrection, the formative event of Christianity.

James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen and others insisted that God was a pillar of the new nation, but they understood God in a vastly different way than most people do today.

The founders believed in a God that neither Jews, Christians nor Muslims would today recognize. Their understanding of Jesus was skewed from both that of the early church and contemporary faith.

Those extraordinary men fashioned a remarkable nation that acknowledged God, without name, definition, limit or identity, as the creator, the author of human rights and the source of all good things.

The result is not so much a Christian nation as a marvelous opportunity for the unfettered practice of any and all religious faith. That's worth celebrating.

Steve Gushée has been an Episcopal clergyman for more than 35 years. He was born and raised in Detroit, served churches in Connecticut from 1966 to 1991 including ministry as the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford.

Gushée graduated from Kent School in Connecticut, Brown University and The Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was the full-time religion writer for The Palm Beach Post until 1999, and his column continues to appear there weekly.

He is married and lives in West Palm Beach. He has three children and five grandchildren.

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