I’m thoroughly sick of the historical revisionism of the secular separationists. Not only is their position manifestly absurd in light of the congressional prayers, inscriptions on the various Federal buildings and the wording of many historical speeches and documents, but they’ve twisted the concept of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” wherein “Congress” means “anyone” and “make no law….” means “shall neither speak nor write any word in public relating positively in any way to the Christian faith.”
Among their cornucopia of errors, they insist that the Founding Fathers were mostly Deist. That’s true, if you cherry-pick from amidst the most famous names and ignore all those men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and were heavily involved in the Revolution from the start. The known Unitarian/Deists were: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The known Christians were: George Washington, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Governor Morris and John Jay. And Deist is not atheist anyhow, as the Paris debates between Thomas Paine and French atheists should suffice to show.
In fact, there were more Christian Bible translators signing the Declaration of Independence than there were Deists. Charles Thompson translated the Greek Septuagint into English, Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the first Bible Society and Francis Hopkinson put together the first American hymnbook. The religious affiliation of the Signers was as follows: 34 Anglicans, 13 Congregationalists, 6 Presbyterians, 1 Baptist, 1 Roman Catholic, and 1 Quaker.
Now, the mere fact of church membership is not certain proof of an individual’s Christian faith, but as no one but God can judge the heart, it is the only reasonable method of determination available to us. One thing that is absolutely certain, however, is that none of them were godless secularists pledged to moral relativism. On this subject, as always, the Left resorts to the perversion of language in order to attempt to build a weak case from nothing. It is amusing that they should uphold the Deists while simultaneously attempting to strike out all references to the Deity.
I am a Christian and a libertarian. I, too, do not wish to see the State create a Church, but not because I care what it would do to the godless. (Nothing, most likely, considering the English example.) Instead, I fear what has happened in England, where the State has corrupted the Anglican church and sucked nearly all the Christianity out of it. If the Church is to thrive, it must never allow itself to be polluted by compromise with the State. But really, in the long term, the entire debate is almost irrelevant. When the American Republic is as dead and dimly remembered as its Roman predecessor, the Christian faith will still be strong, as implacable, inexorable and ineradicable as ever.