Is America a Christian Nation?: The Founders’ Intentions

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Keith A. Kelso in Articles

Is America a Christian nation? It’s a somewhat controversial question we often hear in American society and politics. During his election, Barack Obama was criticized for a pre-presidential speech in which he said America was not just a Christian nation, but also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, etc., etc. Ok, I get it. Multiculturalism is what all the cool kids are doing these days. I won’t expound upon my opinion on that particular point. But many still wonder what the correct answer to this question is.

To conservatives, an important part of this debate should be whether or not the founding fathers intended us to be a Christian nation. Some contend that our founders were all devout Christians and describe their intended form of government as a borderline theocracy. Others harp on the popularity of deism in the late eighteenth century, claiming that it was the majority theological opinion among the founders. Both of these positions cite some credible evidence, but willingly ignore some as well. So were the founders Christians? And did they intend the United States to be a Christian nation?

We certainly know that some of the founders were Christians; Roger Sherman, the only signer of the four major documents of America’s founding (the Articles of Association of 1774, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution), was an active lay worker in his church and was spoken highly of by his pastor, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., son of the famed theologian. Gouverneur Morris, whose leadership of the Committee on Style gave him an important role in the wording of the Constitution, was an Episcopal who believed in a God who took an active role in the affairs of men. John Jay, a contributor to the Federalist Papers and the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, served as president of the American Bible Society after retiring from government and politics. These three are just a sampling of the Christians involved in every aspect of the founding of our nation.

However, we also know that some of the founders did not quite hold to the orthodox definition of Christianity. Benjamin Franklin’s deism is well documented; the aged statesman put his faith in human reason rather than Christ, believing he could achieve moral perfection on his own. Thomas Jefferson described himself as a Christian only in the sense that he adhered to the moral teachings of Christ. He rejected anything supernatural, including the deity of Jesus, and even called the Book of Revelation “the ravings of a Maniac.” And John Adams rejected the faith of his youth, turning instead to the Unitarian church.

So we certainly cannot say that the founders, as a whole, were devout Christians, but many of them certainly were. So did they envision a biblical foundation for the new nation? Many founders acknowledged the advantage that Christian morality brought to society. Adams cited the advantages of Christianity in that it “brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations . . . to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women and men are all professors in the science of public morality. . . . The duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy.” Jefferson, who was devoted to the ethical teachings of classical philosophers, realized that republican government needed a stronger moral structure, which he realized could only be found in Christianity.

A generation after the founding era, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the role that Christianity played in American society and government: “in France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other: but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.” “Religion,” he said, “must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.”

So why, if Christian morality was so essential to republican government, was religion not enforced? Because, as James Madison said, “Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.” So while the founders clearly intended the United States to be a nation of religious morality, the basis of which was certainly the Christian Bible, they knew that the people could not be forced into being Christian, but rather must choose it for themselves.

Can You Handle the Truth?

Posted on January 3, 2011 by EWillers in Opinion

Some will call me a RINO.  Some will call me a wet blanket.  Some will call me a hack.

All of these might just be correct.

I’m a writer and lawyer, and I’ve seen politics from both sides.  I’ve been part of the screaming masses demanding the politicians listen to us.  I’ve worked on and run campaigns, so I like to think I know a little bit about how things actually work.

I’m a libertarian-ish Republican who thinks the only real home for “little l” libertarians, conservatives, constitutionalists, etc. is the GOP.  Of course by “real home” I mean way for us like-minded folks to win elections.

My purpose here isn’t to blow smoke up your ass.  Nor is it to see how high I can drive up your blood pressure.

My purpose is to provide what I see as some much needed realism to the Tea Party movement.  I’m going to talk about the people and ideas we should or shouldn’t get behind.  I’m going to take our discussion from talking points to wonkily-delicious policy statements.

I think for the sake of our nation, the Tea Party movement needs to be not only successful, but sustained.  In order to make that happen, we’re going to have to make some real decisions about people and policy.  We’re also going to have to show that we can deliver voters to the polls and money to the coffers.

Can we do it?  We sure as hell can if we put our collective realist caps and big boy pants on.

Some may call me a pain in the ass.

But all of you can just call me Eddie.

Feel like sparring with Eddie?  Catch him on Twitter at twitter.com/ewillers or by email at ewillers.thegraph@gmail.com.

Updates to the “Current Buzz” Service at The Graph and Other News

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Brooks Bayne in Articles

photo by brian solis at the standard in west hollywood, ca

Some of you may not know that, in addition to being an outspoken political person, co-founder (along with about a dozen others on the first organizing call February 20 2009) of the modern Tea Party movement, foodie, musician, deuce thrower (as evidenced by my pic here) and entrepreneur, I’m also a software coding freak (when I can sneak in some time to do it) who loves the social web. After my tenure as CTO of Withoutabox, when we were acquired by Amazon in 2008, I became focused on how to merge the social, technical and political worlds. The Graph is the latest iteration for my movement in this direction.

In 2009, after we started that little Tea Party ruckus,  I created my own URL shortener, grf.me,  that I still use personally, and corporate  customers (that’s right, those little pet projects generate revenue) use for their companies’ business objectives in the social web. Then I created a Twitter news aggregator, the first of its kind, called Newds (because nothing should come between you and the news, not even clothes), that pulled data from Twitter’s hashtag streams and created a nice little daily/weekly/monthly summary of what was going on in each stream. The Newds application processed over 4.5 million tweets in the #tcot stream alone in the first 8 months of 2010! With 65% of those tweets containing links. It’s obvious that conservatives like to share news.

When I started The Graph last month, I decided to kill the Newds project and roll that functionality into The Graph. No worries. It also gave me an excuse to learn how to deploy apps on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services Platform. Too nerdy? Anyway, you can now access this service by clicking the “Current Buzz” link in the menu. This weekend I’ve been busy updating the “Current Buzz” section. I’m still collecting the links from conservative social web streams then I group them by url so I can rank them by how many times they’ve been shared. But now, and here’s the cool part of new feature set, once the application gets all those links that it aggregates, it searches the web for additional stories that are related and lists them below the original url as “Related stories”. That way you have more stories to read if something really catches your eye. The best part of this service is that it constantly updates automatically.

Think of “Current Buzz” as a crowd-sourced, social, and more relevant “Drudge Report”. I contend that Current Buzz is more relevant than any other conservative news source because it’s your activity that generates this content – rather than some college intern at the Drudge Report slogging through newswire feeds to paste on their homepage. After all, who knows more about what sort of content you want to read than you? I’ll be making more enhancements to the Current Buzz feature over the coming weeks – consider this feature to be an Alpha.

What else? We’ve got new bloggers joining our team – Jeff just finished his first banking story at The Graph for y’all. We’ve got our first series of political audiobooks due in a couple weeks, we’ve got new video editors cranking out content, and we’ll soon be creating curriculum for homeschoolers. 2011 is gonna be a great year! Stay tuned.

I welcome your feedback, so get at me on Twitter. I’m @brooksbayne.