Our Secular Foundation

July 2005

The Religious Right is overtly crusading to transform the United States into what they would call a “Christian” nation. Politically active fundamentalists contend that school curriculums, environmental priorities, foreign policy, and all other matters of state can best be solved by relying on their interpretation of their version of scripture.

Almost all of these religious zealots contend that they are not extremists, that they are merely restoring America to the divinely inspired path laid out by the Founding Fathers. Indeed, their websites, broadcasts, and mailings are full of appeals to “return America” to the faith on which it was built, often with accompanying images of the Founders, sometimes with quotes wrenched from context to make the framers of the Declaration and Constitution appear to be fervently religious.

But such claims are not true. Any sort of evangelical Christian zeal is completely absent from the Founders’ sensibility. Some like Washington and Adams were virtually silent on religious particulars. But they all articulated a wariness of organized religion, and some were unabashed in their contempt for the churches and preacher/politicians of their day.

Ben Franklin captured the enlightenment spirit of the time. He noted that were he a more religious man, his salvation from a shipwreck and near-drowning might have led him to build a chapel; he, though, preferred constructing a lighthouse to prevent future disasters. Franklin did contribute to the building of every church and synagogue in Philadelphia, and he suggested that if the followers of Mohammed wanted to declaim in the city, he would support them, too. Franklin advocated the benefits of religious toleration, but did not promote one religion as “truer” than others.

Being a vociferous defender of religious liberty, James Madison often gets quoted by today’s fundamentalists. But they never cite that for which Madison is best known, his insistence on complete separation of Church and State: “An alliance or coalition between government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against.” Madison was not promoting religion; he wanted it and government spared from each other, and the people from a collusion between the two.

The Declaration’s author Thomas Jefferson often penned contempt for organized religion in private correspondence. He called the New Testament a “dungheap” from which diamonds could nonetheless be found; he, in fact, used scissors to excise the portions of the Bible he thought the product of Pharisees to create his own version of a book of remaining wisdom. Imagine a President doing that today!

Other Revolutionary figures were even more disparaging of churchly influence on governmental affairs. Thomas Paine, for example, branded all organized religion a “human invention set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.”

Today’s Religious Right presents us with twin ironies. First, they pervert Jesus’s teachings of compassion, tolerance, and the unity of humankind into a manifesto of judgment, punishment, and war. And secondly, they would appropriate as their own the very Founders who worked diligently to keep religious zealotry at bay. America was not conceived as a Christian nation, no matter how many times the Religious Right claims such.

Watching today’s Bible-thumpers pull the levers of state power to execute prisoners, enrich the already wealthy, and make war on non-Christians halfway around the world, one is reminded of James Madison’s note that “religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.” Amen, James, amen.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=164C9355-38DB-4EB2-AD0441461A01799A>