What Did You Say?

This Independence Day weekend, let’s envision millions of Americans hazarding a peek at the actual history of their nation — original source documents and all. Their jaws might hit the floor like a burnt out firework.

You see, what they’d find is not the fun-house-mirror portraits of our Founders which have been foisted imperiously on the culture for decades: a collection of rigid, prickly secularists who might tolerate the notion of a god, but certainly have little use for him in any official capacity. What they’d discover, instead? A company of philosophical giants composed uniformly of red-blooded Christians or, at least, individuals for whom a thoroughgoingly “Christianized” take on the world was a given.

As Gary Demar succinctly put it recently: “The Constitution was written against the moral background of a religious worldview that was rooted in the Bible.”

These founding luminaries’ explicit statements, the way they lived, the manner in which they formulated our republican system – – all confirm: not only did they NOT demand the U.S. government cultivate sterile neutrality toward “religion”; they consistently hoped conscientious leaders and public institutions would actively fortify faith and piety within American society.

I won’t enumerate elected officials’ specific calls– easily dozens of them — for periods of public prayer, fasting and/or thanksgiving issued during the Revolutionary era. Authorities local, state and Federal regularly rolled out these summons in the run up to “the Contest with Great Britain”, during that protracted and perilous conflict and throughout the newborn United States’ dicey early days. The infant nation was struggling to get on her feet, our Founders recognized the persistent need for Divine Assistance and they plainly said as much. Period.

I don’t recall colonial versions of the ACLU or Barry Lynn’s bunch crashing the party to make a separation-of-church-and-state stink.

Our Lions of Liberty — Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Henry, even the spiritually contrarian Paine, among multiple others — traced the revolutionary enterprise’s success directly to God’s hands-on intervention. Their forceful professions of same are abundantly on the record.

Literally, or by their devotion to the cause, these signed on to a tradition-defying proposition: “all men are created equal”. They assumed the involvement of a “Creator” Who “endowed” every man with “certain, inalienable rights”. Their flaming passion for liberty was largely stirred to life from the embers of biblical revelation: “In the beginning … God created Man in His own image”.

Figuring hugely in our Founders’ reasoning regarding freedom and irrevocable rights? The Judeo-Christian belief in a personal God Who made all things.

Says who? Patriots John Adams and cousin Sam for two. Benjamin Rush and John Hancock for a couple others.

And: “Natural liberty” and “civil liberty” “is a gift of the Beneficent Creator, to the whole human race.” — Alexander Hamilton.

“The Christian Religion … is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty,” — Thomas Jefferson.

Another counter-balancing, Divinely imparted heads-up urged these statesmen to be wary of their fellow man — because mankind, having become corrupted and alienated from the ways of its Maker, could not be guilelessly trusted. Individuals and nations, left unconstrained, would predictably choose evil, abuse power, conduct themselves short-sightedly, destructively.

Scripture’s accounts of man’s fallenness served meaningfully as backbone to that conviction. And it resulted in the emergence of this country’s birthing covenants and subsequent model of government. Pure democracy? Too combustible in a world stocked with iniquitously flawed individuals. A constitutional republic, composed of three off-setting branches and self-interested states, was the optimum, if imperfect, way they chose.

“The only foundation for … a republic is to be laid in Religion.” — Benjamin Rush

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. … [W]hat is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” –James Madison

Their treasured nations’ ongoing “happiness and prosperity”? These 18th-century colossi insistently pegged that to its people’s and leaders’ fealty to a holy God and His precepts.

“We have no government … capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” admonished John Adams. “Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”

In his renowned September 1796 Farewell Address, President Washington echoed Adams’ cautionary counsel (“Religion and morality are indispensable supports … to political prosperity”); as did Adams’ eventual successor Jefferson (“Liberty to worship our Creator … [is] proved by our experience to be [good government’s] best support”); as did, some years later, Chief Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries (Paraphrase: Religion and public worship neglected? Government imperiled.)

Puzzled to spy Franklin and Jefferson among this religion-esteeming assembly? Don’t be. The revisionist academics have sloppily (mendaciously?) caricatured them as anti-Gospel skeptics, the platonic ideal of pre-modern “Deists”. Hardly on target.

The inexcusable distortion of these men and their peers as bewigged versions of today’s “Freedom From Religion Foundation” has never been historically defensible. Yes, they abhorred the prospect of a National Church. Clearly, several of them hypocritically fell short of the very Bible-saturated standards they espoused — as did the nation, from the get-go.

But table-pounding pronouncements that Washington, Madison, Jefferson, et. al., would have snarled at prayer offered before a football game or a Bible passage read in a classroom or Christmas songs caroled on the town green? Fact-challenged, historically insupportable preposterosities, all of them.

It’s not all that complicated: God played the central role in the universe’s founding – so He played the central role in America’s. Our genius Founding Fathers got that point, even if so many of our contemporary “geniuses” don’t.

Image: US Postage Stamp, Washington at Prayer, 1929 Issue, 2c; source US Post Office / Gwillhickers: public domain