Founding Fathers Confront and Confound Religious Right

An Easter Lemming digest of another history lesson from Thom Hartmann. The religious right is again spreading falsehoods on the history of our country. The founding father's wanted a clear separation between political power and religion. All religions and even no religion was to be equally respected but none recognized as superior or funded in any way.

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The Founders Confront Judge Moore

The Founders clearly divided power into four categories: military, religious, wealth/corporate, and political. The interaction of these types of power produced the three historic types of tyranny - warlord kings; theocratic popes; and wealthy feudal lords or monopolistic corporations like the East India Company.

Every past tyrannical government in the history of civilization, our Founders realized, had oppressed its citizens because it had combined political power with one or more of the other three categories. This, they believed, was the fatal flaw of past forms of governance, and they were determined to isolate political power from each and all of the other three to prevent America from repeating the mistakes of previous nations.

Thus, political power would only be held by "We the People," and never again shared with military, corporate, or religious agencies.

el - I am a seperationofpowersacrat.

Ben Franklin fled Boston when he was a teenager in part to escape the oppressive environment created by politically powerful preachers, and for the rest of his life was openly hostile to the idea of secular political power being wielded by those who also hold religious power. Although he was enthralled by the "mystery" of the spiritual experience, Franklin had little use for the organized religions of the day. In his autobiographical "Toward The Mystery," he wrote, "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."

Franklin - like most of the more well-known Founders - was a Deist, a philosophy made popular by early Unitarians who held that the Creator made the universe long ago and has since chosen not to interfere in any way, that neither Jesus nor anybody else was divine (or, alternatively, that we are all divine and shall all do as Jesus did and said we would), and that there is only one God and not three.

Another founding Deist who resisted giving political power to those with religious power was George Washington.

President George Washington supervised the language of a treaty with African Muslims that explicitly stated that the United States was a secular nation.

The Treaty With Tripoli, worked out under Washington's guidance and then signed into law by John Adams in 1797, reads: "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

On February 21, 1811, President James Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor. Faith-based initiatives were a clear violation, in Madison's mind, of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and could lead to a dangerous transfer of political power to religious leaders.

In Madison's mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty - a function of government - and must not be allowed to become a hole through which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer's purse.

Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most outspoken of the Founders who saw religious leaders seizing political power as a naked threat to American democracy. One of his most well known quotes is carved into the stone of the awe-inspiring Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny imposed upon the mind of man."

el - He made this quote in a letter in opposition to preachers hoping to establish some recognized American Christian religion.

In later years, Jefferson would put together what is now called "The Jefferson Bible," in which he deleted all the miracles from the New Testament and presented Jesus to readers as an inspired philosopher. His Jefferson Bible is still in print, and well received, if amazon.com sales and readers' comments are any indication.

But it wasn't just religious tolerance that was the issue for Jefferson - it was preventing any one religion from claiming it was uniquely the American religion, and then using that claim to grasp at political power. Thus, secular government must allow even pagans and pantheists to coexist, while at the same time rigorously preventing any of them from gaining power over it. In his "Notes On Virginia," Jefferson laid it out clearly: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Because our system of laws was founded on the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments, the religious leaders said, they and their Commandments should play a large and powerful role in government and be able to both take from the public purse and influence the courts and laws.

This assertion - that British common law and American law derived from the Ten Commandments - was particularly infuriating to the Founders.

First, there's the simple fact that there isn't that much overlap. Our laws don't specify a single god who must be worshipped, ban graven images, require us to take a day off work every week, mandate that we "honor" our parents, make it illegal for men to "covet" other men's wives or sleep with unmarried women, or make it illegal to lie (in fact, corporations have recently asserted the explicit "right to lie" under the First Amendment). The only things in common between the Commandments and most state or federal laws are prohibitions on killing and stealing, which most people figure have always been pretty obvious.

In a January 24, 1814 letter to John Adams, Jefferson went through a detailed lawyer's brief to show that the entire idea that the laws of both England and the United States came from Judaism, Christianity, or the Ten Commandments rests on a single man's mistranslation in 1658, often repeated, and totally false.

In a modern revival of religious leaders seeking political power, emails fly around the internet saying that Founders like Madison claimed the United States was founded on either Christianity or the Ten Commandments. Many originate in the writings of a right-wing group whose president helped prepare the History and Social Studies standards for Texas and California schoolchildren, and are so badly taken out of context that they can only be called deliberate attempts to fool people. Others are simple fabrications, quotes created from nothing.

The United States and our laws were not founded on the Bible, or even on biblical principles. Moral precepts against killing or stealing are found not only in the Bible, but exist among every tribe on earth, some of whose cultures and languages date back over 60,000 years. They're part of the social code of animals ranging from prairie dogs to gorillas. They're rooted in the biological imperative of survival.