[I highly recommend this book based on what I have read of it so far. To
me it seems that he worked hard and probably pretty much achieved a
balanced portrayal of the times and events
I would question some things and some of his conclusions, but I am sure
those on the Radical Religious Right would also.
My one really big problem with this book lies in his defense of the myth
that G. Washington said "So help me God" when sworn in as Prez the first
time.
It is possible I will find other things as I read along , perhaps not.
At any rate I do recommend the book. I think most who have an interest in
the time period and the topic of church state would benefit from reading
the book]
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The clerics who grace this tale are as central to its drama as are the
statesmen they aspired to influence or leapt to defame. You will meet
Baptist, Congregational, Episcopalian, Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist,
Unitarian, Jewish, and Roman Catholic clergy members and lay people whose
faith instructed their politics and whose politics, in several instances,
helped turn the tide in crucial national elections. The father of American
geography, Jedidiah Morse; the "pope" of Connecticut, Timothy Dwight; the
Quaker moralist and self-appointed ambassador, George Logan; the mad
Jeffersonian millennialist, David Austin; and the Baptist pit bull, John
Leland, are but five of the many divines who, endowed with political and
spiritual heft in equal measure, competed for American votes as vigorously
as they did for American souls. To highlight but a few of the tantalizing
facts that jump from the colorful pages of early American pulpit politics:
• Virginia's Baptists, not a reluctant James Madison, spearheaded
the drive to supplement the Constitution with a Bill of Rights. The Baptist
passion for freedom of conscience led directly to the First Amendment.
• In the early Republic, even as most Baptists stood on the
religious left as champions for church-state separation, an equal majority
of Unitarians lined up on the religious right to demand a seat for God in
government.
• Most politically active Presbyterians and Congregationalists
rejected the Declaration of Independence as subversive to Christian values.
They wore black rosettes ("the American cockade") on the Fourth of July,
while defaming as sacrilegious the red, white, and blue brandished by an
equal majority of Baptists, Methodists, and Deists.
• Congress subcontracted Christian denominations to aid in educating
Native Americans, the first instance of today's "faith-based initiatives."
• When the government moved to Washington, D.C., Christian worship
took place not only in the House of Representatives but also in the Supreme
Court, War, and Treasury Buildings (where Scots Presbyterians served
Communion). American clergymen were taken to court by partisan state and
federal prosecutors on both sides of the aisle and occasionally jailed for
their politically charged preaching.
• Early in Jefferson's tenure, Alexander Hamilton (a nonpracticing
Christian and lukewarm fan of the Constitution) dreamed of establishing a
"Christian Constitutional Society" to lobby for a Constitutional ban
prohibiting non-Christians from standing for national office.
• The Second Great Awakening, an evangelical wildfire that swept the
country during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, was
powered, in part, by the political collapse of New England's Congregational
Church establishment, inspiring a new, more democratic mission to redeem
the nation from the grass roots up, not the presidency down.
• The Monroe Doctrine was above all a moral manifesto, designed to
frustrate the ambitions of the "Holy Alliance," a European royal cabal
founded ostensibly to establish Christ as the cornerstone of international
governance. To halt the drift of Christian imperialism .into the Western
Hemisphere, Monroe invoked the republican ideals of self-determination and
sacred liberty.
From the moment the new government opened for business, the question of
whether the young country should take on the cultural trappings of its
English past or fashion itself on the French Enlightenment model spurred
heated debate. Initial discussions exploded into fierce animosities,
pitching absolutists on both sides into a war of conflicting ideals that
threatened to tear the country in two. At the presidential level, these
contests took on the character of religious crusades. The apostles of
divine order were victorious first, then the champions of sacred liberty.
Competing claims by today's secular humanists on the left and Christian
activists on the right that the U.S. government was erected on a secular or
Christian foundation are, in a sense, both correct. John Adams presided
over a Christian federal authority, Jefferson over a secular one. From the
first contested national election onward, avatars of sacred liberty and
defenders of divine order hurled imprecations at each other that would make
a modern talk-show host blush
SOURCE: So Help Me God, The Founding Fathers and the First Great
Battle Over Church and State. Forrest Church. Harcourt Inc. (2007) pp 4-6
***************************************************************
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Historical Reality SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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