An editorial came out this weekend which just bothered me to read, and I felt the need to discuss his arguments. I’m going to use the inline-quoting style which I prefer to use for many emails and blog entries, since that way I can quote the whole text under fair-use and also provide context to the reader.<--!break-->
America’s Christian principles
By Jim Ludington
Ludington is executive director of Arise America Ministries and an adjunct professor of history at Liberty University.
There appears to be an ongoing discussion of late regarding the principles upon which America was established. Was our form of government a purely secular idea, sparked by the Enlightenment that influenced Europe and America in the century leading up to our independence? Or was it inspired by the principles of Christianity?
Ludington is setting up a straw-man of secularism right from the start. In addition, he has created a false dichotomy of choosing exclusively between Christianity and secularism, ignoring Deism and a host of other religious beliefs which do not match his evangelical outlook.
I submit there are few enterprises of mankind which are “purely” motivated by any single thing. Human beings have surprisingly complex motivations, which they are often likely to extol to you at length if you ask politely. Any argument which attempts to pigeonhole someone’s motivation as “purely” one thing or another immediately sets off the alarm bells on my internal BS-O-Meter.
Also, principles are often common to many causes. Most humans — secularists and Christians included — try to follow the “golden rule” in their dealings with other people. There is no need to choose between the two, as they have this principle in common. I will show in the coming paragraphs that, in those cases where Christian and Secular principles conflict, the Founding Fathers studiously avoided those choices which would favor a particular religion.
I’m a historian, whose graduate studies focused on the American colonies and the events and ideas that led to our independence and our success as a free people. In addition to teaching history, I’ve spent years investigating the concepts that developed into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — documents under which we still live.
Ludington here sets up an “appeal to authority”. The author is assuring his readers that he is competent enough with the topic at hand that they do not need to do the thinking for themselves on it. This has the added benefit of giving apologists another club with which to attack the character of those who disagree with Ludington’s bias. After all, if you are not a “historian”, or if your graduate studies did not include American colonial history, how can you possibly have any standing to argue his assertions?
To know what influenced the Founders, we need only to study the historical record. America’s history is extremely well documented, with many of the Founders’ speeches and letters carefully preserved. Books and online sources give us easy access to accurate information, yet there are some who seem determined to twist the facts to suit their own agenda.
Here is another cool little factoid: If you accuse your opponent of doing that of which you yourself are guilty, his rebuttals will sound hollow. It’s the grown-up version of the same “who started it?” blame-game played at first-grade recess around the world.
Rather than doing that, I will take the moderate approach. I maintain the founding fathers were strongly influenced both by their Christian upbringing, and by the wave of secular ethics which were gaining prominence at the time. They were not a homogeneous group, but a bunch of testy landowners with widely varying ideals some of whom could barely tolerate one another. It is possible to get a reasonably clear picture of the belief systems of the Founders, and that by focusing on just a few, you can create an extremely biased picture.
Some Founders were in favor of a kingdom. Some of state-supported religion. Some wanted an anarchy. Thomas Jefferson was clearly a Christian in name only, as he despised the Christian god and wrote privately regarding his distaste for religion as a whole. The only reliable resources we have here with such widely diverse opinions are the documents they crafted together. These best represent the final opinion, amidst such conflict and diversity, of basic ground rules they could agree on. Those ground rules were bitterly debated and hotly opposed by some factions. We are lucky that the solution we have works as well as it does today.
A recent letter to the editor, for example, told us that America’s founders wanted religion to be completely separate from government. The writer quoted James Madison as saying, “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.” The quote is accurate, but out of context and misinterpreted.
Madison was arguing against the establishment of a state church mandating one Christian denomination over the others, as Virginia had experienced under English law. He argued, “Religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction.” In other words, not by law. And Madison did believe that Christian principles were a necessary foundation for a self-governing people, writing in 1785, “Religion is the basis and foundation of government.”
Would Ludington agree that Mormonism is a form of Christianity? What about the Bahá’à Faith? If the bar for prevention of interference in religious affairs by government is drawn at Christianity, who, then, is the final arbiter of who is and is not a Christian? That’s right, the US government. In an age of $5,000 hammers and $1bn airplanes, do we really want a government functionary or political appointee made the guardian of Christian values?
Ludington appears to be purposefully conflating “religion” and “Christianity”, then asserting that those principles espoused by Madison are for Christianity and Christianity alone. One of the most common — but deeply flawed — forms of argument by someone desperate to support his position is to use a word in one sense when defining it, then to use it in another sense when supporting it in an argument. Ludington is attempting to rely on the very assertion he’s attempting to prove. He’s “begging the question” by shifting the meaning of a word.
I reject Ludington’s assertion that religion and Christianity were synonymous terms to Madison. While they may have only been tangentially aware of non-Christian religions, their words have far more universal application than the carefully neutered, qualified usage given above. Without implicit acceptance of Ludington’s assumption, the quote from the letter to the editor is entirely in context and correctly used.
Other founders, including those who had parsed and debated every phrase of the Constitution, held similar opinions. George Washington was a devout Christian who spoke so often about the need for our government to publicly honor God that many liberal-controlled public schools won’t allow students to read his speeches.
This paragraph is amazingly dense with unsupported assertions:
- that public schools are controlled by “liberals”.
- that “other founders” — unnamed — thought that “religion” and “Christianity” were synonyms
- that unnamed public schools won’t let students read George Washington’s speeches
I think Ludington would be surprised to learn, if the took the time to become familiar with a few, how conservative most school boards in the nation are. Without doing a district-by-district comparison, I think we’d find most are composed of fairly-elected, concerned parents who want to be involved in the education of their children, and they are very representative of the population as a whole. In many districts you’ll find several seats running uncontested. If Ludington disagrees with the Board composition, there’s a way to show it: at the polls. If school boards nationwide are overwhelmingly “liberal”, resulting in “liberal control” of schools, doesn’t that say that this is what we, as a nation, want from our schools?
I challenge Ludington to come up with two examples of public schools within the last year which have forbidden a child from reading George Washington’s speeches. If found to be true, I would then think that some investigation should be made into this phenomenon. Weird, isolated incidents happen occasionally which are held up as gold-standards of how our public schools are going to hell in a handbasket, but usually are overblown media frenzies, and I suspect this Liberty University professor fabricated this particular urban legend — that students are forbidden to read the speeches or writings of George Washington — out of whole cloth.
As I have already successfully fielded the assertion that Madison did not necessarily consider “religion” and “Christianity” to be synonymous, I see no need to address that myth, repeated again here in an attempt at persuasion ad nauseum.
Statements like “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible,” or “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” are now considered “unconstitutional.” But Washington’s views agreed with many of the founders, who often indicated that self-government would not be possible without a Christian-based citizenry and culture.
This is a patently false allegation. Those statements are not unconstitutional, and never have been! Nor is it unconstitutional to believe such a thing. What is unconstitutional, however is to force those opinions on other people. Your right to believe and say what you wish is not abridged.
It’s useful to say that these are banned behaviors, though, if his purpose is to prop up the straw man at the heart of this essay. Beware the scary Secularists who would take away your right to say what you want! Why not start telling us atheists will kidnap your babies and eat them? That would be just as accurate as telling people that atheists would deny your right to free speech… when history has demonstrated that Secularists have the opposite goal in mind.
If one wants to point out public schools as an exception to that trend, think upon the fact that we coerce parents into forcing their children to attend public school, with associated jail time if a parent does not comply*. If there a public school teacher is given license to teach his religion as fact, we have in fact created a state-sanctioned religion in violation of the clear instructions of the Founding Fathers for government neutrality among religions.
(*Yes, I’m aware of the option of private and charter schools, and that if your child is enrolled in one of them, you will not go to jail for their truancy. The principle holds true for public schools: education through coercion.)
John Adams clearly articulated this idea when he wrote, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Note Adams’ careful use of two words here: morality and religion. These terms are not exclusively owned by Christians. Nor is morality the exclusive domain of the religious.
Here’s an interesting fact: Atheists comprise approximately 12% of the U.S. population. Yet they comprise less than 1/2 of 1% of the U.S. prison population. To me, this is a very clear indicator that atheists, on the whole, have come to a system of ethics which is more obedient to the law than that of religionists. It is clear that Adams in his statement above was unaware of the possibility of reliable ethics outside of a religious framework.
Adams knew that men must be able to control their personal lives before they could be free and self-governing. He was convinced that only Christians, who knew their thoughts and actions would be judged by a just God, would have the necessary self-control.
However, he did not impress this point of view on the documents he helped author!
This is the critical difference, and the reason why the modern claim that America is a land of “Judeo-Christian values” is called into question. Yes, several Founders were obviously and publicly Christian. But they were scrupulous about keeping their private religious beliefs out of public governance policy. Our leaders today could learn from their fine example.
Ben Franklin’s beliefs, although not exactly evangelical, were formed by his early biblical training, and were revealed in the darkest hour of the constitutional debates. On June 28, 1787, with the delegates deadlocked and threatening to adjourn and return to their homes, Franklin presented a speech full of biblical references, explaining that “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?… I therefore beg leave to move, that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of heaven and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business… .”
I am an atheist. Yet I, too, pray to nobody in particular during times of stress and need. I believe that I can call upon my innate abilities to help me pull through most crises, and that a form of “prayer” is an effective method of focusing them and bringing them out. It is not superhuman in the least, but instead a worthwhile method of focusing one’s mind on the goal.
Ben Franklin also said “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”. Yet nowhere in the documents he authored related to the Confederation do you find this same view echoed.
The following morning, Congress began with a powerful three-hour prayer meeting that humbled the delegates and made them more open to each other’s ideas. The Constitution was soon approved, and since that day, every session of Congress has begun with prayer.
We could easily find hundreds of additional quotes that support what has been stated above. Suffice it to say that the historical record offers proof that the American founders drew their inspiration and many of their political ideas from the principles found in the Judeo-Christian Bible. It’s there for all to see.
Qualification: the Jewish “Bible” and the Christian “Bible” bear little resemblance to one another. Referring to it as the “Judeo-Christian Bible” is an attempt at establishing common ground where little exists, and rings hollow.
Every man, woman, and child upon the earth is shaped by his or her environment. To deny this fact would be fantasy. Clearly they were a product of their time.
But their time also included powerful secular writings which clearly influenced the thinking of these great men. It is the reason why you find no mention of religion in the Constitution, save in the statement of the date (“year of our Lord” as common a convention as “AD” or “BC” is today) and in the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is clear, concise, and unquestionable. Congress is not allowed to make laws regarding the exercise of religion, nor is it allowed to make laws in such a way that “respects” a particular religion. Victories after victories in the courts and in the public eye have clearly demonstrated the law is on the side of those who wish government to remain impartial respecting religion.
We want government which will not force us to pray, nor force us not to pray. We want government which does not force us to wear sackcloth and ashes, nor do we want one which forbids us to do so. We want government which remains true not to the personal opinions of certain cherry-picked Founding Fathers, but which follows the letter of what they wrote regarding formation of our government.
Ludington and I have some common ground. We both understand that those who attempt to typecast all the Founding Fathers into an agnostic or atheistic mold have missed the mark. Where he has missed the mark, though, is in failing to recognize the profound effect Enlightenment thinking had upon the documents our Founding Fathers crafted together. Whatever their personal opinions, the government they established was clearly secular and impartial to all religious — and non-religious — belief.
(Author’s note: I intend to provide more supplementary links in this article as time goes on. I apologize that I could not do so on short notice, but Ludington’s article was very recent, and I wanted a rebuttal on short notice.)