American Gospel Quotes

“Democracy is easy; republicanism is hard. Democracy is fueled by passion; republicanism is founded on moderation. Democracy is loud, raucous, disorderly; republicanism is quiet, cool, judicious – and that we still live in its light is the Founders' most wondrous deed.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Madison struck in 1785, writing a “Memorial and Remonstrance” on the subject of state support for churches. When religious and civil power were intertwined, Madison said, “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“But “the supreme judge of the world” and “divine providence” were no more specific to the God of the Bible than “Creator” and “Nature’s God.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever sect I meet with them. As to Jesus of Nazareth…I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have…some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“When Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being “a scoffer at religion,” wrote the historian William J. Wolf, because he belonged to no church. During the campaign, Lincoln attended a sermon delivered by his opponent in the race, Reverend Peter Cartwright, a Methodist evangelist. At a dramatic moment in his performance, Cartwright said, “All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.” Only Lincoln kept his seat. “May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?” the minister asked, glowering. “I am going to Congress” was the dry reply. When he was president, Lincoln also liked the story of a purported exchange about him and Jefferson Davis between two Quaker women on a train: “I think Jefferson will succeed,” the first said. “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“I hate polemical politics and polemical divinity,” said John Adams. “My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offenses; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as the necessity of [enduring] with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part.” There”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“the Founders were also making another declaration: that Americans respected the idea of God, understood the universe to be governed by moral and religious forces, and prayed for divine protection against the enemies of this world, but were not interested in establishing yet another earthly government with official ties to a state church.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Washington believed that every man was “accountable to God alone for his religious opinions” and “ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The God of the Declaration does not choose nations or peoples to favor, or others to curse.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“If we did a good act merely from the love of god, and a belief that it is pleasing to him, whence arises the morality of the atheist?” Jefferson once asked. “It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists.” Religion, then, could not claim to be the universal source of individual moral conduct.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“all those who conduct themselves worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The right’s contention that we are a “Christian nation” that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, President Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that America “gives…bigotry no sanction.” In a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli initiated by Washington, completed by John Adams, and ratified by the Senate in 1797, the Founders declared that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The founding religion—at least in the Declaration—was based more on a religion of reason than of revelation. But it was still religion.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The author of the document would one day come to believe that it was sacred scripture and that his writing desk was a holy object.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The distinctive feature of that religion lies in the meaning of the verse from Leviticus: that individual liberty for all—all, of any color or creed—is at the very center of the broad faith the Founders nurtured and passed on to us.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his conscience.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“John Adams. “My religion is founded on the love of God and my neighbor; on the hope of pardon for my offenses; upon contrition; upon the duty as well as the necessity of [enduring] with patience the inevitable evils of life; in the duty of doing no wrong, but all the good I can, to the creation of which I am but an infinitesimal part.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“This victory over excessive religious influence and excessive secularism is often lost in the clatter of contemporary cultural and political strife. Looking back to the Founding is neither an exercise in nostalgia nor an attempt to deify the dead, but a bracing lesson in how to make a diverse nation survive and thrive by cherishing freedom and protecting faith. And faith and freedom are inextricably linked: It is not for priests or pastors or presidents or kings to compel belief, for to do so trespasses on each individual’s God-given liberty of mind and heart. If the Lord himself chose not to force obedience from those he created, then who are men to try? There”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Congressman George Andrews of Alabama told The New York Times. A Republican representative from New York, Frank J. Becker, called it “the most tragic decision in the history of the United States,” apparently judging Dred Scott not quite as”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword; that it should be allowed only to exert its moral influence.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“the legislator, forgetting completely the great principles of religious liberty he himself demanded in Europe, forces attendance at divine service by fear of fines, and he goes as far as to strike with severe penalties, and often death, Christians who wish to worship God according to a form other than his.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Religion alone did not spare America, but the Founding Fathers’ belief in the divine origin of human rights fundamentally shaped our national character, and by fits and starts Americans came to see that all people were made in the image of “Nature’s God,” and were thus naturally entitled to dignity and respect”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“The principles of God-given life and God-given human rights are the two wings on which the nation rose, and on which it still depends.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Can we in prudence suppose that national morality can be maintained in exclusion of religious principles? Does it not require the aid of a generally received and divinely authoritative religion?”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“I must own that I have so much faith in the general government of the world by Providence, that I can hardly conceive a transaction of such momentous importance to the welfare of millions now existing, and to exist in the posterity of a great nation, should be suffered to pass without being in some degree influenced, guided, and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent, and beneficent Ruler, in whom all inferior Spirits live, and move, and have their Being.”(”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“Revelation—the often miraculous accounts of God’s interventions in history—is crucial, but for Locke revelation cannot trump reason: “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read,” Jefferson said. “By the same test the world must judge me.” Whatever our doubts, whatever our faith, that is perhaps the supreme test for us all.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“At every significant point in the four centuries since English settlers laid the foundations for the nation we know—at every significant point—American leaders and the great majority of the American people have explicitly said or acted as though they understood history in terms of this public religion. As King George III’s British troops moved toward New York City in the summer of 1776, Gershom Seixas, leader of the first Jewish synagogue in America, Shearith Israel, led his people into what they called their “exile.” Armed with the Torah scrolls, the congregation linked the ancient story of its forbears with the young country’s, referring to the Revolution as “the sacred cause of America.” Once victory was won, the congregation prayed in thanksgiving: “We cried unto the Lord from our straits and from our troubles He brought us forth.” The Lord delivered Israel; now he had delivered the United States.”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

“fulcrum stood the brilliant but fallible”
― Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation