THE FOUNDERS AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Both the teabaggers and the Religious Rightists (the RR) want to talk about the Founding Fathers continually. While the baggers make them out to have been anarchists, which they were not, the RRs make them into narrow, intolerant Christians like themselves, which they also were not.

This is hypocrisy. From the RR's standpoint, those of the Founders who were Christians (which was most of them) were pretty bad ones. Their advocacy of religious freedom is sufficient to establish that, because the RRs constantly attack other religions, using reasoning and invective; a free and unassailed choice in matters of religion is an ideal that is alien to their mentality.

Whenever Christians as such have wielded power, they have carried out religious persecution. The Founders believed more in the benefits of religion in general than they did in emphasizing the differentiating characteristics of the Christian religion.

Whom do we mean by the Founding Fathers? I think primarily Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin.

Jefferson was expressly not a Christian but a Deist. Madison, who made a major deal of the separation of church and state, was presumably a Christian but refused to discuss his religious beliefs; this is not exactly Witnessing for Christ. Washington was a Christian, but he made a practice of walking out of church before communion was served; evidently he was one of those who saw such things as superstition. Freemasonry was also a major component of his thinking, which does not correspond to the RR view of the world. Franklin was not a Christian; he was, at least in his later years, an independent theist rather than a Deist, as he believed God to be active in the world. Adams was a Christian but was very impatient with some facets of Christianity; his religious thinking fairly bristled with independent-mindedness.

These leaders were the liberals of their day, and they were religious liberals. The attempt to represent them as Christian supremacists is a direct attack on their beliefs and their work and our legacy from them. Every one of us should know that and not one of us should be fooled by the RR's self-serving claims, because it has nothing in common with them even when it can point to identical words and affiliations.