Most of America's Founding Fathers were Deists, including
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson,
"One of the most
common statements from the "Religious Right" is that they want this
country to "return to the 'Christian principles' on which it was
founded". However, a little research into American history will
show that this statement is at the very least misleading. The men
responsible for building the foundation of the United States had little
use for Christianity, and many were strongly opposed to it. They were
men of The Enlightenment, not men of Christianity. They were
Deists who did not believe the bible was historically true or
scientifically accurate.
"When the Founders
wrote the nation's Constitution, they specified that "no religious
test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public
trust under the United States." (Article 6, section 3) This
provision was radical in its day-- giving equal citizenship to
believers and non-believers alike. They wanted to ensure that no single
religion could make the claim of being the official, national religion,
such as England had. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention
religion, except in exclusionary terms. The words "Jesus Christ,
Christianity, Bible, and God" are never mentioned in the Constitution--
not once.
"The Declaration of
Independence gives us important insight into the opinions of the
Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson wrote that the power of the
government is derived from the governed. Up until that time, it was
claimed that kings ruled nations by the authority of God. The
Declaration was a radical departure from the idea of divine authority.
"The 1796 treaty with
Tripoli states that the United States was "in no sense founded on the
Christian religion" (see below). This was not an idle statement,
meant to satisfy Muslims-- they believed it and meant it. This
treaty was written under the presidency of George Washington and signed
under the presidency of John Adams.
"Most of the Founders
were Deists, which is to say they thought the universe had a creator,
but that he does not concern himself with the daily lives of humans, and
does not directly communicate with humans, either by revelation or by
sacred books. They spoke often of God, (Nature's God or the God of
Nature), but this was not the God of the bible. They did not deny
that there was a person called Jesus, and praised him for his benevolent
teachings, but they flatly denied his divinity. Some people speculate
that if Charles Darwin had lived a century earlier, the Founding Fathers
would have had a basis for accepting naturalistic origins of
life, and they would have been atheists. Most of them were
stoutly opposed to the bible, and the teachings of Christianity in
particular.
"Yes, there were
Christian men among the Founders. Just as Congress removed Thomas
Jefferson's words that condemned the practice of slavery in the
colonies, they also altered his wording regarding equal rights. His
original wording is here in blue italics: "All men are created equal
and independent.
From that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable."
Congress changed that phrase, increasing its religious overtones: "All
men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights."
But we are not
governed by the Declaration of Independence-- it is a historical
document, not a constitutional one.
"If there are some who truly wish to return this
country to its beginnings, so be it... because it was a climate of
Freethought. The Founders were students of the European
Enlightenment. Half a century after the establishment of the United
States, clergymen complained that no president up to that date had been
a Christian. In a sermon that was reported in newspapers, Episcopal
minister Bird Wilson of Albany, New York, protested in October 1831:
"Among all our presidents from Washington
downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of
more than Unitarianism." The attitude of
the age was one of enlightened reason, tolerance, and free thought. The
Founding Fathers would turn in their graves if the Christian Extremists
should have their way with this country." (Borrowed from
http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html)
One of the most
important people in the early days of the Colonies was Thomas Paine. On
January 10, 1776, his 50-page pamphlet advocating independence from
England came off the press; it was called, Common Sense. It is
credited with being the spark that started the fire that led to the
American Revolution. A Royal Proclamation against seditious writings was
issued on May 21, 1792, and on June 8 Pain was charged with sedition and
his trial was set for December 18. Replying to these charges, Paine
wrote:
"If to expose the
fraud and imposition of monarchy and every species of hereditary
government - to lessen the oppression of taxes - to propose plans for
the education of helpless infancy, and the comfortable support of the
aged and distressed - to endeavor to conciliate nations to each other -
to extirpate the horrid practice of war - to promote universal peace,
civilization, and commerce - and to break the chains of political
superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; - if these
things be libellous, let me live the life of a libeller, and let the
name of libeller be engraven on my tomb!"
On December 18
Paine's work, Rights of Man was prosecuted in England and he was
found guilty of seditious libel and labeled an outlaw. He sought refuge
in France.
In a later work,
Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that there were two kinds of
property: "natural property" (the earth in its uncultivated stage) and
"improved" property. Individuals could claim "improved property," but he
proposed that "...the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and
ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race."
The introduction of private property added, through cultivation, a
"tenfold" value to created earth. At the same time, however, it
"dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their
natural inheritance, without providing...an indemnification for that
loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that
did not exist before." To remedy this situation and assist the persons
thus dispossessed, Pain maintained that every proprietor of cultivated
land owed to the community a ground-rent for the land which he held.
With this money Paine proposed that a National Fund be set up out of
which there would be paid to every person, "when arriving at the age of
twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation
in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the system
of landed property," and "the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life,
to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others
as they shall arrive at that age."
Paine believed that
this system would so organize civilization "that the whole weight of
misery can be removed." It would aid the blind, the lame, and the aged
poor, and at the same time guarantee that the new generation would never
become poor. "It is not charity, but a right," he claimed, "not bounty
but justice, that I am pleading for."
Angry over the
exploitation of workingmen by employers, Paine wrote: "...if we examine
the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal
property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the
labor that produced it; the consequence of which is, that the working
hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence." What
might Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin say about employers who use foreign
slave labor to produce their wealth, throwing millions of Americans out
of work and out of their homes, yet complaining that progressive
taxation is unfair to them?
Thomas Paine wrote
The Age of Reason in his fifty-seventh year and was immediately
labeled an atheist by many of his detractors. Paine wrote, "Of all the
tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every
other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this
attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into
eternity."
The following
excerpts from The Age of Reason are taken from a series of lessons
delivered to The Nazarene Communions Group. These excerpts reveal a
great deal about the religious beliefs of Thomas Paine and his fellow
Deist, Benjamin Franklin and Unitarian, Thomas Jefferson.
Part One
Theology of America’s
Founding Fathers
Excerpted from The
Age of Reason,
written by Thomas
Paine in 1794
“True Theology and That
of Superstition”
“As to the Christian
system of faith, it appears to me a species of Atheism – a sort of religious
denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than I God. It is a
compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to
Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker
an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque
self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a
religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit
of reason into shade.
“The effect of this
obscurity has been that of turning everything upside down, and representing
it in reverse, and among the revolutions it has thus magically produced it
has made a revolution in theology.
“That which is now
called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of
which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God,
and of the power and wisdom of God in His works, and is the true theology.
“As to the theology that
is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human
fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God Himself in the works that
He has made, but in the works or writings that man has made; and it is not
among the least of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the
world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology,
like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the
hag of superstition.”
Part Two
“The
Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to
be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book
called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original
system of theology.
“The internal evidence
of those orations proves to a demonstration that the study and contemplation
of the works of creation, and of the power and wisdom of God, revealed and
manifested in those works, made a great part in the religious devotion of
the times in which they were written; and it was this devotional study and
contemplation that led to the discovery of the principles upon
which what are now called sciences are established; and it is to the
discovery of these principles that almost all the arts that contribute to
the convenience of human life owe their existence.
“Every principal art has
some science for its parent, though the person who mechanically performs the
work does not always, and but very seldom, perceive the connection.
“It is a fraud of the
Christian system to call the sciences ‘human invention’; it is only
the application of them that is human. Every science has for its
basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the
universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles, he can only
discover them.”
Part Three
“Every person who looks
at an almanac sees an account when an eclipse will take place, and he sees
also that it never fails to take place according to the account there given.
This shows that man is acquainted with the laws by which the heavenly bodies
move. But it would be something worse than ignorance, were any church on
earth to say that those laws are a “human invention.”
“It would also be
ignorance, or something worse, to say that the scientific principles by the
aid of which man is enabled to calculate and foreknow when an eclipse will
take place are a human invention. Man cannot invent anything that is eternal
and immutable; and the scientific principles he employs for this purpose
must be, and are of necessity, as eternal and immutable as the laws by which
the heavenly bodies move, or they could not be used as they are to ascertain
the time when, and the manner how, an eclipse will take place.
“The scientific
principles that man employs to obtain the foreknowledge of an eclipse, or of
anything else relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained
chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the
properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly
bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a
ship on the ocean it is called navigation; when applied to the
construction of figures drawn by rule and compass it is called geometry;
when applied to the construction of plans or edifices it is called
architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the
surface of the earth it is called land surveying. In fine, it is the
soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical
demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown.”
Part Four
“It may be said that man can make or draw a triangle, and therefore a
triangle is a human invention.
“But the triangle, when drawn, is no other than the image of the
principle; it is a delineation to the eye, and from thence to the mind, of a
principle that would otherwise be imperceptible. The triangle does not make
the principle, any more than a candle taken into a room that was dark makes
the chairs and tables that before were invisible. All the properties of a
triangle exist independently of the figure, and existed before any triangle
was drawn or thought of by man. Man had no more to do in the formation of
these properties or principles than he had to do in making the laws by which
the heavenly bodies move; and therefore the one must have the same divine
origin as the other.
“In the same manner, as it may be said, that man can make a triangle, so
also, may it be said, he can make the mechanical instrument called a lever;
but the principle by which the lever acts is a thing distinct from the
instrument, and would exist if the instrument did not; it attaches itself to
the instrument after it is made; the instrument, therefore, cannot act
otherwise than it does act; neither can all the efforts of human invention
make it act otherwise – that which, in all such cases, man calls the
effect
is no other than the principle itself rendered perceptible to the senses.”
Part Five
“True Theology and That
of Superstition”
“Since…man cannot make principles, from whence did he gain a knowledge of
them, so as to be able to apply them, not only to things on earth, but to
ascertain the motion of the bodies so immensely distant from him as all the
heavenly bodies are? From whence, I ask, could he gain that knowledge
but from the study of the true theology?
“It is the structure of the universe that has taught this knowledge to man.
That structure is an ever-existing exhibition of every principle upon which
every part of mathematical science is founded. The offspring of this science
is mechanics; for mechanics is no other than the principles of science
applied practically.
“The man who proportions the several parts of a mill uses the same
scientific principles as if he had the power of constructing a universe; but
as he cannot give to matter that invisible agency by which all the component
parts of the immense machine of the universe have influence upon each other
and act in motional unison together, without any apparent contact, and to
which man has given the name of attraction, gravitation and
repulsion, he supplies the place of that agency by the humble imitation
of teeth and cogs.
“All the parts of a man’s microcosm must visibly touch; but could he gain a
knowledge of that agency so as to be able to apply it in practice we might
then say that another canonical book of the Word of God had been
discovered.”
Part Six
“The
Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of sience in the structure
of the Universe, has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He
had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, ‘I have made an
earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible,
to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort,
and learn from my munificence to all, to be kind to each other.”
Part Seven
Deism: Theology of
America’s Founding Fathers
Excerpted from The
Age of Reason,
written by Thomas
Paine in 1794
“Christianity and
Education, in the Light of History”
“…the Christian system of faith could not but foresee that the continually
progressive knowledge that man would gain, by the aid of science, of the
power and wisdom of God, manifested in the structure of the Universe and in
all the works of creation, would militate against, and call into question,
the truth of their system of faith; and therefore it became necessary to
their purpose to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their
project, and this they effected by restricting the idea of learning to the
dead study of dead languages.
“They not only rejected the study of science out of the Christian schools,
but they persecuted it, and it is only within about the last two centuries
that the study has been revived. So late as 1610, Galileo, a Florentine,
discovered and introduced the use of telescopes, and by applying them to
observe the motions and appearances of the heavenly bodies afforded
additional means for ascertaining the true structure of the Universe.
“Instead of being esteemed for those discoveries, he was sentenced to
renounce them, or the opinions resulting from them, as a damnable heresy.
And, prior to that time, Virgilius was condemned to be burned for asserting
the antipodes, or in other words that the earth was a globe, and habitable
in every part where there was land; yet the truth of this is now too well
known even to be told.”
Part Eight
Deism: Theology of
America’s Founding Fathers
Excerpted from The
Age of Reason,
written by Thomas
Paine in 1794
“Comparing Christianism
with Pantheism”
“Any person who has made observations on the state and progress of the human
mind by observing his own cannot but have observed that there are two
distinct classes of what are called thoughts – those that we produce
in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into
the mind of their own accord. I have always made it a rule to treat these
voluntary visitors with civility, taking care to examine, as well as I was
able, if they were worth entertaining, and it is from them I have acquired
almost all the knowledge that I have. As to the learning that any person
gains from school education, it serves only, like a small capital, to put
him in a way of beginning learning for himself afterward.
“Every person of learning is finally his own teacher, the reason of which is
that principles, being a distinct quality to circumstances, cannot be
impressed upon the memory; their place of mental residence is the
understanding and they are never so lasting as when they begin by
conception.”
From Wikipedia: "
"In the
United States, Enlightenment
philosophy (which itself was heavily inspired by deist ideals)
played a major role in creating the principle of separation of
church and state, expressed in Thomas Jefferson's letters, and the
principle of religious freedom expressed in the
First Amendment to the United States
Constitution.
American Founding Fathers, or Framers of the
Constitution, who were especially noted for being
influenced by such philosophy include
Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin,
Cornelius Harnett,
Gouverneur Morris, and
Hugh Williamson. Their political
speeches show distinct deistic influence. Other notable Founding
Fathers may have been more directly deist. These include
James Madison,
John Adams, possibly
Alexander Hamilton,
Ethan Allen and
Thomas Paine (who published
The Age of Reason, a treatise
that helped to popularize deism throughout America and Europe).
Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) wrote the
"Bible" of American deism in his Principles of Nature (1801)
and attempted to organize deism by forming the "Deistical Society of
New York."
"In the United States there is
controversy over whether the Founding Fathers were Christians,
deists, or something in between. Particularly heated is the debate
over the beliefs of
Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson, and
George Washington.
"Benjamin
Franklin wrote in his autobiography, "Some
books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the
substance of sermons preached at Boyle's lectures. It happened that
they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by
them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be
refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in
short, I soon became a thorough Deist. My arguments perverted some
others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but each of them having
afterwards wrong'd me greatly without the least compunction, and
recollecting Keith's conduct towards me (who was another
freethinker) and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times
gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho'
it might be true, was not very useful."
"For his part,
Thomas Jefferson is perhaps one of
the
Founding Fathers with the most
outspoken of Deist tendencies, though he more often referred to
himself as a
Unitarian. In particular, his
treatment of the Biblical gospels which he titled
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
but which subsequently became more commonly known as the
Jefferson Bible, exhibits a
strong deist tendency of stripping away all supernatural and
dogmatic references from the Christ story."
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