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May 24, 2019 - January 24, 2021
Samuel Adams wrote a famed circular on behalf of Massachusetts to other colonial citizens that discussed natural rights in 1768. Sam Adams was one of the more orthodox founders, but he still rested rights on nature and not the Christian god.
Thomas Paine agreed: “As to that which is called nature, it is no other than the laws by which motion and action of every kind, with respect to unintelligible matter, are regulated. And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature’s God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.”38
Natural law centered on humanity was so foreign and antithetical to Christianity that the church considered it atheism.
If the theological scholars of Jefferson’s generation thought invoking “Nature’s God” was “arrant atheism,” we can safely conclude that Jefferson’s usage was not Judeo-Christian.
Second Reference: “their Creator”
But the founders’ choice of language in the second reference is telling. The clause refers not to our Creator or even to the Creator, but to their Creator.
First, they could have written “Men are endowed by the Creator.” The is a definite article with specifying effect, which says that there is one view on the subject, ours, and we’re right.
Second, they could have expressed a shared view, choosing “our Creator” as some might say “our savior.” Choosing “their” over “our” diminishes the possibility of a shared view of a creator, though not excluding it altogether.
And of course, the best option for referring to a specific god would be to specify a particular “creator” by name—Jesus, Yahweh, YHWH, Our Christian Lord and Savior.
They could have named a specific creator, but these deists did not name Christ. Any generic creator god to whom they referred was beyond organized religion.
Readers are meant to interpret this phrase as referring to whichever creator—god or otherwise—they believe in.
This clause is either invoking a concept that is not Judeo-Christian or, with the simple and elegant use of the word “their,” recognizing the right to freedom of thought and belief that Jefferson protected in the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.58
Claiming that a god plays a role in human equality lets people who claim to know god’s will be “more equal than others,”62 to borrow from George Orwell.
Rights are agreed on by humans and enforced by society. This is the social contract the founders enshrined in the Constitution.
The bible neglects to note that “the people” are the source of power, instead placing that firmly in the divine plan. It has no mention of “consent of the governed.”
THE DECLARATION WAS NOT WRITTEN IN A VACUUM.
In 2011, a mere 30 percent of white evangelicals thought that an elected official who committed an immoral act in their personal life could still behave ethically and fulfill their public duties. Things had changed by the 2016 presidential race and no group had shifted more than those moral absolutists, the white evangelicals, who swung 42 points, with 72 percent believing that an immoral person could be a moral public figure.
This conception of morality and of human rights is dangerous. God-given rights are not sacred, self-evident, or inherent: they are fragile, exclusive, and used to favor the chosen few. That was not the intent or legacy of the Declaration.
Third and Fourth References: “Supreme Judge of the world” and “divine Providence”
“We promise we’re telling the truth” is all it amounts to. It’s strategic piety calibrated to appeal to a candid, credulous world and a pious king.
But they did not pledge to that god—they pledged to each other. They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
The strength of fifty-six of the most brilliant minds on a continent were bent toward one object: self-government. Their honor—their word—was sacred, not their religion.
If the Declaration they authored is at all theological, its theology is anti-biblical and anti-Christian.
The genius of the document and its poetic language is that readers may read into it what they will. Christians will see the religious references as being about their god, and atheists like me will think “divine Providence” simply means luck. In psychological terms, the founders were playing to people’s confirmation bias—our innate selection and interpretation of evidence to support our existing beliefs.
Franklin, a pragmatic persuader, would later serve as an ambassador to France to win its support for America’s war of independence. To play upon the French people’s romantic ideas about Americans, Franklin wore a coonskin cap around France.89 He would do anything to win support, even play a little dress-up. And he succeeded in soliciting French aid, which eventually helped win the war. To the extent that these four references are religious, they are the coonskin cap of the Declaration.
5
Christian Settlements: Colonizing the Continent, Not Building a Nation
Stating that the Continental Congress prayed is like stating that part of the British empire prayed: unremarkable.
As legal scholar Christopher C. Lund has explained: “The Continental Congress desperately needed help ingratiating the revolutionary movement with the Anglican clergy and laity (who would be overwhelmingly Loyalist when the Revolutionary War came). Duché’s selection thus was a way to move Anglican clergy into supporting the cause for liberty—or at least not opposing it so vigilantly.”11
When writing the US Constitution, the founding document, strategic piety was not necessary to score political points, and the founders shunned religious political theater. They did not pray during the Constitutional Convention. The delegates thought the sole motion for prayer so “unnecessary” that they didn’t even bother to vote on it.13
When the British took Philadelphia in 1777 and threw Duché in jail, he switched sides, pledging his allegiance to the Crown. He spent only one night in jail because of this apostasy.
After defecting to the British, Duché wrote George Washington a letter condemning American independence, explaining that the only reason he accepted the chaplaincy was self-interest.
Duché told Washington that independence was impious, a form of idol worship, and asked, “Are the dregs of Congress then still to influence a mind like yours?”
Duché is the man Christian nationalists choose as a standard bearer for claiming that our country belongs to their god—a man who abandoned American independence, labeled our soldiers cowards, and slandered the founders. But to the Christian nationalist, facts matter less than being able to claim that at one time, when the colonies were still colonies, an Anglican preacher was selected for political reasons to say a prayer for the same men he would later denigrate.
A scholar sympathetic to the Christian nationalist perspective wrote in 1950, “One of the chaplains for eight years from 1792 on, complained of the thin attendance of members of Congress at prayers. He attributed the usual two-thirds absences to the prevalence of freethinking.”
Currently, Congress pays close to a million dollars a year for two clergymen and their staff, whose only job is to pray once a day over their proceedings.
The Plymouth Pilgrims and the Massachusetts Puritans were not seeking religious freedom. They were seeking the ability to form a government and a society dedicated to their particular brand of religion.
The Mayflower settlers were looking for a place to practice their religion and force others to practice it too.
The Pilgrims had religious freedom when they settled in the Netherlands after fleeing persecution in England.
The Puritans executed Mary Dyer, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra on Boston Common for the terrible crime of being Quakers.
The Puritans also waged a holy war on the Pequots, setting fire to a village on the Mystic River, killing 700 Native men, women, and children. The survivors were sold into slavery.
A tendency toward theocracy is also a tendency toward violence.
In 1565, Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, founder of St. Augustine, Florida, and his zealous Catholic missionaries slaughtered 111 French Huguenots on the Florida coast for refusing to convert to Catholicism.
Two weeks later, Menéndez slaughtered another 134 Huguenots, again for refusing to convert.
Pope Pius V personally commended Menéndez for doing “all that was requisite” to extend “our Holy Catholic faith, and the gaining of souls for God” and also for converting “the Indian idolaters.”
Pride in American diversity was enshrined in America’s de facto original motto, E pluribus unum, “from many, one” or “out of many, one” (see page 274). From many people, one nation; from many colonies, one country. That melting pot became an American ideal.
True religious freedom comes only when state and church are completely separate, when the government has no power over the human mind at all, neither to prohibit nor to allow thought.
Religion at its heart is a claim to hold the ultimate truth. Christianity holds that truth to the exclusion of all others, with an eternal reward if you accept the truth, and eternal punishment if you do not. Such a worldview can never coexist with true freedom. It will always use its power to promote its truth claim either by the stick (Paine’s “fire and faggot”) or the carrot (Paine’s “traffic” or indulgences).
One Puritan preacher, Urian Oakes, later president of Harvard, called toleration the “first-born of all abominations.”
The Mayflower Compact is often used to show America’s Christian principles, but it actually shows Christian intolerance.
