Religion in America and the Declaration of Independence

There are any number of historical facts about the history of the United States that have gotten twisted or forgotten over the years and as the old saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. If it were just that we had forgotten something that would be one thing, but when I hear people who want to represent us saying things that are blatantly false then I think we as a people need to say, “Hey, wait a minute.”

I’ll deal with one topic today - religion. Let’s start at the end.

Conclusions:

The United States was founded on the principle of separation of religion from politics because to do otherwise would sully any religion. That is to say if you mix religion and politics it becomes only politics.

The Declaration of Independence is based on principles of rational self evident claims not religious beliefs.

The two men who were most responsible for writing that document were not Christians.

Although most people of that time believed in a creator of the universe and most were probably Christian the principle founding fathers, the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence, went out of their way to remove religion and principles based on beliefs in god from the declaration they were making and government they were creating.

They did make it a tenet of this government that it should have its foundation in the people: not in god, and not in a monarch. I’m sure if the concept of a company was better known at the time they would have made sure to eliminate that too, but who would have thought in the late 18th century that what they started would have drifted so far afield by the twenty-first century?

They espoused a new idea of the time and one that was pretty much untested, the idea of democracy, the will of the people.

All this was scary new territory. But a new nation was being formed and it was not by narrow minded people but well educated thinkers who were willing to face various problems and devise strategies and words to meet them.

Three interesting tidbits about The Declaration of Independence:

The Declaration of Independence is not called that in the document itself. It is titled “A DECLARATION”.

The original document has been lost. What everyone sees is a copy supposedly made from the original and it is not certain who made the copy.

The rough draft has the word “god” with a small “g”. It says “nature’s god.” The copy that everyone sees has both of these words capitalized: “Nature’s God”.

Religion and the United States - Part I:

The idea of democracy in the Americas and the idea of the separation of church and state came from the same man. These ideas became intertwined and not at all in the mainstream of religious or political thought. Most of us know about the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving and The Plymouth Rock and all that. Some may recall that the Pilgrims left England so they could practice their religion as they saw fit and once they got to Massachusetts they set up the same kind of political religious system as they had left in England. It was a solitary religion with no alternatives allowed, and consequences for those who might have wanted to do differently. In short, it was the same system as there was in England but with a different religious belief system as the sanctioned one by the state; in this case the state was The Massachusetts Bay Colony. They breeched no alternative views to their religious beliefs. Those who tried were dealt with severely as we’ll see shortly.

The other thing to know was that at this time in Europe the prevailing belief of the basis for government was what is known as The Divine Right of Kings. This is the idea that the monarch was given the right to rule by god not the people; pretty good gig if you could get it. In England the people had gotten tired of this arrangement and there was a rebellion, a civil war going on, between the people - led by Oliver Cromwell and the King, Charles I.

Now picture if you will in the middle of this a favored son shows up from America. He’s got a problem. He doesn’t like the way the Pilgrims are praying and he set up his own little deal. He started preaching his ideas. The establishment didn’t like it and they went after him. They were going to send him back to England in chains and let him live out his days in jail, which given English jails at the time would be extremely short lived. This man, Roger Williams, managed to stuff some food in his pockets and sneak out of Pilgrim town just before the constabulary came for him and he spent the winter outside, in Massachusetts! Fortunately, the Narraganset Indians took him in and kept him alive. He moved south set up his own little settlement and named it Providence. The Bay Colonists weren’t happy with this and sent an armed squad down to take over. Mr. Williams went to England to plead his case. If he could convince the English to grant him his own charter, his own colony, then the Bay Colony could not claim authority over him and the area he settled in.

Imagine this if you’re in England. There’s a civil war going on between the king and the people. There’s religious strife between Protestant and Catholic. The king is claiming he has a divine right to rule and he gets this right from god. The people are sick and tired of being taxed and abused by the government. Everyone wants their religion to be the sanctioned religion of the state, and in the middle of this a fellow comes along and says, “Excuse me, but would you grant me a colony?”

“Why should we?” is of course a logical question. Here’s where it gets really interesting. What he wants is not a colony set up in the traditional fashion. He doesn’t want a state religion and an almighty political authority blessed by god. He wants a colony where people can practice any religion they want and have any political system they choose.

Do you realize how radical these two ideas are? He’s in a place where two things are givens: there is a state religion and that’s it, and the king is the ruler and his word is divine. This is accepted by the man on the street. Everyone accepts it. They argue about what is fair and how much the king has province to do; but they are arguing about who should be at the top of the heap, not is this the right kind of heap to have.

So what can Mr. Williams do to convince those in parliament to go along with this?

There are three parts to his argument:

One - you want to keep religion and politics separate because politics sullies religion. In other words, if you mix religion and politics it becomes all politics. You keep them separate to keep the religion pure. Rick Santorem take note!

Two - The idea of democracy, i.e. letting the people decide, is a very strange idea and the folks in England are wary. Can’t you hear the arguments? It’s not the way we do things. You can’t trust the people. The king is divine (and even if he isn’t I as lord have a pretty good deal going.)

How did Williams convince them to let him try the democracy idea?

Three - What he argued was this: What I’m setting up is far away and small scale. If it doesn’t work out it’s far enough away from England that it won’t affect you. So if this democracy thing doesn’t work out or this let’s let everyone do their own thing when it comes to religion - so what? I’m far enough away that it won’t matter.

He sold it. He got his charter. He returned to Rhode Island and he got those conservative folks in Massachusetts to back off.

Religion and the United States - Part II:

Let’s move forward about eighty or a hundred years: Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s time. The Age of Enlightenment as it was called. What started this age? Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton was the man who introduced the world to the scientific method. His influence on the world, on the common man and all men, is more profound, more world and earth changing then any other human being - period. If you measure who has had the most influence on people living or dead Mohammed and Christ come in a poor second and third respectively. Life before Newtown was pretty much the same the century before he entered the world stage as it was five, ten, fifteen, or twenty five centuries before. There were peasants, their were rulers, their were a few in between, but by and large that was the set up around the world.

Newton’s scientific method changed all that. By employing reason, logic, and the study of what one could test people began to see their world change for the better. Everyday life improved. This led to philosophies that suggested everything could be explained by these methodologies. Everything was brought into question. Is the king divine? Is there a god? Can we prove either of these widely held beliefs? This is what the Age of Enlightenment was all about. (Some will argue that Williams was dead and gone before Franklin and Jefferson arrived on the scene and therefore he had no influence but his teachings were picked up by John Locke who was read by Jefferson and no doubt Franklin, so the claim does not stand up to scrutiny.)

Now comes the American Revolution, and The Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence with help from Benjamin Franklin and others. It was also hacked up by the Continental Congress but what we got was still pretty good. One of the things I had heard was that in the early versions of the document Jefferson had written “ that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God” and that Franklin had changed the last part to “that they are endowed by their Creator.”

However, in trying to verify this I discovered a more fundamental and subtle change made by Franklin. I do see the “that they are endowed by their Creator” was inserted in an early draft but it did not replace “that they are endowed by God” but rather “ that all men are created equal & independent that from that equal creation they derive...”

“self evident” was inserted instead of “ We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” So that the final version read “ We hold these truths to be self evident.” This is what Franklin changed.

So what’s the big deal? Who cares? Well, a lot of people do; or at least people who care about the principles that our country was founded upon care.

These two changes are important because of the underlying philosophic change this makes in the document. It changes the document from one based on religion and belief to one of reason, science, and logic.

At this time there was considerable discussion from a Scottish philosopher, David Hume, about the idea of two kinds of truths: synthetic and self-evident. The first, synthetic, deals with matters of fact (“John is taller than Peter.”), and the latter, self-evident, deal with reason and definition ( “a right angle is a ninety degree angle”). Self evident truths are as the name implies obvious by looking at them, or true by definition.

To state that something is self evident rather than sacred is to take that thing out of the realm of religion and put it in the realm of reason.

To say that the Declaration of Independence was founded on Christian principles or religious principles or belief in god is just not true; in fact, the opposite is the case. The founding fathers, in this case Jefferson and more importantly Franklin, went out of their way to make sure that document was not founded on any religious principle.

Religion and the United States - Part III:

This brings us to Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and the statement that some people like to utter, which in some form or other states, that our country was founded on Christian beliefs or a Judaeo-Christian tradition; not quite, one could argue, not even close.

Jefferson and Franklin have been described as “deisists” not Christians. What does that mean? Deism is the idea that one can look at the world as the product of an all powerful creator. It is not based on supernatural beliefs or scriptures but rather on observation of the natural world. It would be closest to the ideas of Unitarianism today.

Jefferson even refashioned the bible by literally cutting and pasting. He cut out passages based on fable and belief and threw them out. He named his work “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Jefferson was originally an Episcopalian, a catholic part of the Christian community. Catholic meaning belief that the church was founded from the apostle Paul and descended from him. The Episcopalians did not and do not acknowledge the Pope as the head of the catholic church.

I’d guess that if you were to ask Jefferson or Franklin if they were Christian you’d get a qualified answer. It would probably run along the lines of they were raised in a Christian family so they hold with a lot of the Christian beliefs but as they got older they questioned some parts of it; notably those parts that had no basis in fact but were based on supernatural phenomena, and on fables. They would probably say they were “enlightened” and as such they looked to reason and observation to explain their world and how it came to be. Is their an ultimate authority or being that can be called upon? Who can say for sure? But we can refer to this idea as the creator. Whether the creator exists like an old man with a long white beard who lives in heaven, wherever that is, is probably not true; and what form this creator takes, if he exists at all, is unknown to us at this time because we have no verifiable evidence.

So when you hear a politician say that he let’s his faith guide him in political matters, or he’s a Christian or Mormon, or whatever and this is the reason he is qualified to run for office, you might want to think twice about his fitness for office here in the United States because he in direct conflict with what our founding fathers intended.