During the era of McCarthyism, Red-baiters fed upon the image of "godless" Communists infiltrating our educational system in order to brainwash the youth of America. As it turned out, that image was largely imaginary. Ironically, though, we now really do have a coterie of Christian evangelicals who are attempting to infiltrate our educational system in order to brainwash the youth of America. They are in Texas.
For reasons peculiar to the textbook industry and the Texas educational system, the Texas Board of Education has enormous influence on the content of textbooks used throughout the United States. Conservatives and Christian evangelicals have taken over the Texas Board of Education and they are right now in the process of rewriting the American history our children will learn.
Among the propositions the Texas Board of Education is attempting to impose upon the next generation of Americans is that the United States was founded as "a Christian nation." What follows from this, of course, is that our Constitution and laws must be understood through the prism of this perspective. Although evangelicals have been pushing this line for two centuries, it is simply, factually, and historically false. But the members of the Texas Board of Education, who are not themselves historians, nonetheless persist in this effort to propagandize the youth of America. This is dangerous. It must be contested.
Christianity played a central role in the promulgation of early colonial legal codes. The Bible was the rock and foundation of early colonial law, and the Puritans, in particular, injected a fierce religious fervor into their laws. In 1636, for example, only sixteen years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they adopted the "judicials of Moses," which provided that any person "shall be put to death" who "shall have or worship any other God, but the Lord God." Similarly, the 1656 "Lawes of Government" of New Haven colony expressly declared that "the Supreme power of making Lawes belongs to God only" and that "Civill courts are the Ministers of God."
By the late seventeenth century, however, the strict religious foundations of colonial law had crumbled. With the influx of large numbers of immigrants from widely diverse religious, ethnic and social backgrounds, the old Puritan beliefs and institutions faded, and as the new Enlightenment ideals of personal liberty, the "pursuit of happiness," and the power of reason spread through the New World, traditional sources of authority were increasingly called into question.
With fresh energy and bold new ideas, eighteenth-century Americans sought to achieve a profound transformation in their society, their government, their politics, and their religion. The great American experiment was born in the full illumination of the Enlightenment. In an Enlightened Age, -- an age dedicated to reason rather than revelation -- even the authority of Christianity was open to challenge.
The Framers of the American system of government were often quite critical of what they saw as Christianity's excesses and superstitions. They fervently believed that people should be free to seek truth through the use of reason and they concluded that a secular state, establishing no religion but tolerating all, best served that end.
Unlike the later French Revolution, the American Revolution was not a revolution against Christianity itself. But as men of the Enlightenment, most of the Framers did not put much stock in traditional Christianity. As broad-minded intellectuals and skeptics, they viewed much of religious doctrine as divisive, dangerous and irrational, and they challenged, both publicly and privately, the dogmas of conventional Christianity.
Benjamin Franklin, for example, dismissed much of Christian doctrine as "unintelligible." Franklin believed in a Creator, but not in the Judeo-Christian version. He dismissed Christian revelation and described himself as "a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine." Franklin regarded all religions as more or less interchangeable in their most fundamental tenets, which he believed called upon men to treat others with kindness and respect. He regarded Jesus as a wise moral philosopher, but had no use for Christian doctrine insofar as it had "corrupted" the original teachings of Jesus. A long-time friend, who was more wedded to Christianity than Franklin, lamented that a man of Franklin's "general good character and great influence" was such "an unbeliever in Christianity."
Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that no member of the founding generation "embodied America's ideals more than Thomas Jefferson." A thoroughgoing skeptic, Jefferson subjected every religious tradition, including his own, to rigorous scrutiny. He had little patience for talk of miracles, revelation, or resurrection. Like Franklin, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral philosopher, but he believed that Jesus' teachings had been "distorted out of all recognition." He condemned the details of Christian dogma as "dross," "abracadabra," "insanity," "a hocus-pocus phantasm," and a "deliria of crazy imaginations." Jefferson expressed his hope to John Adams that "the human mind will someday get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago."
Adams himself rejected the rigid dogmas he had inherited from his Puritan forebears. The Creator, he declared, "has given us Reason, to find out the Truth, and the real Design and true End of our Existence." Adams rejected all religious doctrines "that could not be verified independently by human reason." He wrote Jefferson that his religion could be "contained in four short Words, 'Be just and good.'" When Adams was President, he signed the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which had been unanimously approved by the Senate, in which the United States unambiguously affirmed that "the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
Tom Paine's works -- Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason -- were the most widely read political tracts of the eighteenth century. Paine was merciless in his challenge to Christianity. He characterized Christianity as a "fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." He decried Christianity's acceptance of miracles as ignorant superstition and charged that the postulation of miraculous interventions by God degrades Him to the "character of a showman" who "plays tricks to amuse" and to make "the people stare and wonder." Paine maintained that by insisting that believers accept superstition as truth, Christianity had fundamentally undermined the freedom of conscience and incited intolerance and persecution. The "age of ignorance," Paine declared, had "commenced with the Christian system."
I could go on, but you get the point. The leaders of the revolutionary generation were not atheists. Almost all of them believed in a Creator who had set in motion the laws of nature and given man the power of reason. But they most certainly did not intend to establish the United States as "a Christian nation." To the contrary, they were careful both in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution to avoid any such inference.
The notion that the United States is "a Christian nation" came later, in the nineteenth century, during the Second Great Awakening. It was during that fervent evangelical upheaval that the myth that the United States is "a Christian nation" first came to the fore -- to the utter dismay of men like Adams and Jefferson, who sharply contested it.
This is the truth of our history, and this is the history our children should learn. The truth may be upsetting to those who wish for a different history, but we cannot change what was. In our history textbooks, at least, the truth should count for something. The fables and crazy imaginings of the Texas Board of Education do a profound injustice to our Framers, our history, and our nation.
Chris Rodda: David Barton Keeps Up His Lies At Glenn Beck Event
A featured speaker at Glenn Beck's American Revival event was none other than the star of the "Texas Textbook Massacre," Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton.
Patriotic pamphlets and speeches during the period of the struggle for independence were often infused with Biblical motifs and references to the Bible. Thus Benjamin Rush, in denouncing the Tea Act, wrote: "What shining examples of patriotism do we behold in Joshua, Samuel, Maccabees and all the illustrious princes, captains and prophets… referring to the scriptures.
These are just a small sample of the proof that the fingerprint of Christianity and its tenets are all over our heritage… and those concepts certainly have secured our freedoms and served us well. There is no shame or wrong doing in admitting this! Hiding these facts from our children does a great disservice to their education.
Benjamin Franklin addressed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on Thursday June 28, 1787 and implored the members to seek God’s guidance when they were unable to make progress.
You can read the the address here:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/benfranklin.htm
The words of Franklin's address are hardly the words of a deist, for a deistic God would not be concerned with the daily government of men. Rather, these are the words of a man who believed in and sought God regularly. This type of language is used liberally and by many authors of the period. The founding fathers were most certainly not deists!
in the spirit of the Enlightenment, he made the following recommendation to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear
from the Monticello website
That does not change the reality that Christianity played a large and vital role in the colonization and founding of America. Any statement that contradicts this, or any curriculum that omits this, would be the definition of "revisionist".
The importance of the Establishment clause and the debate the "wall" between church and state was a raging one 250 years ago and it continues today. It should be understood as a debate, with full disclosure of the motivations of both sides.
It is incorrect to make no disctinction between the colonies and the new democratic republic birthed in the Revolution. Colonial charters were given by god's rep on earth- the king, and many had Christian proselytization as a requirement of their charter; we have none of that in our democratic republic. Too, there is an important distinction made between the framers and the subsequent signers in the founding period, where the dedicated christian view fell by the wayside in favor of secularity based on private conscience distinctions and limitations. To imply most framers/writers were "as influenced by xianity as by Enlightment" is completely false; to say some subsequent signers were is completely true. You need to answer for yourself why the believers were able to agree with the non-believers in the creation of the new nation. To protect your freedom of conscience, you must protect it for all others; each is individually responsible for the content of that conscience, and not responsible for his neighbors conscience. This is why abortion is a personal conscience issue with individual freedom the hallmark. We are not responsible for what we deem the sins of others, and we cannot be constrained by beliefs of others.
While it is true that several of the "founders" were very free thinkers and questioned the formal Christianity of their time, it is also true that most of the founders, and most Americans, were active and committed church-going Christians who saw the world through this lens. It was the fact that they questioned the traditional churches, and sought religious freedom, that drew them to America in the first place.
The more important truth is that the ideas of the founders, the Declaration, the source of authority in the Constitution, was inspired by Christian ideals. The belief that the only real authority was given by the Creator to individuals - and not to a King supported by a religious bureaucracy - was based on the very basic Christian ideals in which they all believed.
It is also worth noting that the US was also a "Christian Nation" in a political sense of being part of the Christian world. We were part of the European tradition, and not a Muslim nation, or an Oriental nation.
The truth, both academically and logically, is that we were born a Christian nation and any failure to recognize that reality - and the impact it has had on our history, laws, and culture - is a dishonest effort based on destructive motives.
Rome wasn't transformed because it's foundations were not truly Democratic. America is different specifically because it was founded on Christian principles of freedom.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Bertrand_Russell/Fate_Thomas_Paine_WIANAC.html
Another great book is "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong"