Devotion for July 13, 2015 – WAS AMERICA FOUNDED AS A CHRISTIAN NATION?

WAS AMERICA FOUNDED AS A CHRISTIAN NATION?

YOU DECIDE

Isaiah 9:6, For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”

There has always been a debate on the subject of whether America is a “Christian” nation or not, or whether it was even founded as a “Christian” nation or not and even more so since the recent Supreme Court rulings.  Before you is some evidence, you decide!

Religious liberty is a right and must be protected; the national government should not create an established church, and states should have them only if they encourage and assist Christianity; and religion belongs in the public square.  In short, while America did not have a Christian Founding in the sense of creating a theocracy, its Founding was deeply shaped by Christian moral truths.

A Constitutional attorney by the name of David Barton started a ministry called Wall Builders.  He has written several books and produced several videos/DVDs on the subject of America’s founding.  In his booklet “America’s Godly Heritage” he lays out a case that America was founded as a “Christian” nation.

In the booklet he talks about a study done by the political science department of a major university that wanted to prove America was not founded as a “Christian” nation or on “Christian” principles.  Barton says they took 15,000 writing of the Founders on the founding of our country and government and then boiled them down to 3,450 of the most pertinent to their research.

Barton claims the finding were as follows.  Of the 3,450 writings included in this project (between 1760 and 1805), 34% of the Founder's quotations were taken directly from the Bible, and 60% were quotes from others quoting from the Bible.  The booklet says the researchers findings concluded that 94% of the writings included in this study were either directly or indirectly from the Bible.  He also claims the three most quoted were men Montesquieu, William Blackstone, and John Locke, and the most quoted book of the Bible was Deuteronomy, the book of the law.

A good many of the Founders were orthodox Christians.  Men like, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Roger Sherman, and John Witherspoon to name a few.  There is abundant evidence that these Founders embraced and articulated strong, orthodox Christian ideas.

In light of the many claims that the Founders were deists, it should be noted that there is virtually no evidence that more than a handful of civic leaders in the Founding era—notably Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and (if we count him as an American) Tom Paine—embraced anything approximating this view.  Moreover, a good argument can be made that even these Founders were influenced by Christianity in significant ways—and it certainly does not follow that they desired the strict separation of church and state.

Some say there is the possibility that the Founders just acted as Christians in their private and or public lives.  Some historians have argued that the Founding cannot be called Christian because some Founders did not join churches, take communion, or remain faithful to their spouses.  Moreover, in their public capacity, they did not act in a Christian manner because they did things such as fight an unjust war against England and did not immediately abolish slavery.

It can be said though, emphatically, that Islam had no influence on our Founders and that there were no Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or the like as Founders!

In some cases, these critiques do not take into account historical context, such as the difficulty of joining Calvinist churches in 18th century America.  In others, they neglect the traditional Christian teaching that even saints sin.  If the standard of being a Christian is moral perfection, no one has ever been a Christian.  It is a terrible injustice and profoundly unhistorical to judge the Founders by specific policy outcomes that seem perfectly clear to 21st century Christians.

This is not to say that biblical principles are not universally related, but their applications to specific issues in particular times and places may vary or be unclear.  To take a contemporary example, a person should be very careful in saying, for instance, that someone is a good Christian politician only if he or she votes for (or against) tax cuts, abortion, selfsame sex issues or national health care, etc.

A final possibility is that the Founders were influenced by Christian ideas.  Scholars have spent a great amount of time attempting to discern influence.  Book after book has been written about whether the Founders were most influenced by John Locke’s liberalism, classical republicanism, the French Enlightenment, etc.

I believe that this is the most reasonable way to approach the question “Did America have a Christian Founding?”  In doing so, it is important to note that nominal Christians might be influenced by Christian ideas, just as it is possible for an orthodox Christian to be influenced by non-Christian ideas.  I believe that an excellent case can be made that Christianity had a profound influence on the Founders and the creation of our nation.

I would like to emphasize that I am not arguing that Christianity was the only significant influence on America’s Founders or that it influenced each Founder in the exact same manner. Clearly there were a variety of different, but often overlapping, intellectual influences in the era.  They were motivated to varying degrees by self, class, or state interests.  My contention is merely that orthodox Christianity had a very significant influence on America’s Founders and that this influence is often overlooked by modern students of the American Founding.

You decide?

 

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