George Will, reviewing Brooke Allen's Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, in the NYT: "Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early — very early — church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a 'Christian nation.'"

Comments

[Doug H]

Nothing to worry about, though. I've been reassured by Charles Davenport's editorial in the N&R today.

[PotatoStew]

Good to see Will talking sense. Jefferson took a pair of scissors to the Bible, for goodness sake.

[Lex]

Such an attempt is "NOW in progress"? Please. David Barton's "America's Godly Heritage" came out in what, '94?

But don't expect the Reconstructionists to be dissuaded by such minor things as facts.

[David Wharton]

I'd also recommend Gertrude Himmelfarb's Roads to Modernity.

[Joel Gillespie]

Ed,

I think that the amount of books trying to describe the United States as a Christian nation, and its founders as devout Christians, reflects to some degree the hyper secularization of our culture today, and what appears to many to be a high handed removal of God from the public square. I try to remind myself of that as I see and hear and listen to all the Christian writers and speakers about our founders. My sense of things was impacted a lot years back when I read Daniel Boorstin's books, particularly "The Americans: The Colonial Experience." This work just verified most of what I had read and been properly taught up to that time. There were many devout Christians in the mix of those who came and established settlements here. But to say that the goal of the various British governments, and various British companies (the early multi nationals) was the founding of any sort of New Eden is mostly just silly. The various colonies were founded for diverse and disparate reasons. Most of them, at least in terms of their financial backers, were founded as a way to make money, and to win in the global competition with the French, Spanish, and Dutch. Without question many devout Christians came over, to escape persecution, to seek opportunities to live in a way they couldn't live in the Old World. But many of the great thinkers of the later Colonial era who were theists were indeed not Christians at all. A great many of them were deists. I am an Evangelical Christian. I hope it is true that I am devout. I treasure living in a secular nation where I can worship freely, and converse with people of different faiths and backgrounds. America is not the center of the Christian faith. It was not founded to be a "Christian" colony or nation. Nor did it rebel against Britian in order to become a "Christian" nation. Had it been truly Christian it would not have rebelled anyway. It rings as a blashpemy against "true and faultless" Christian religion to equate the Christian understanding of the kingdom of God with the United States of America, past, present, or future. But again, perhaps we as a nation have gone too far in our secularization, and are excluding too much the Christian, and other, religions, from the public square, and from the schools, and from the culture at large. Again, I think some of the recent stuff to which George Will alludes is a backlash against that hyper secularization.