ATHEIST DEBATE ON AC-T

Public spaces were "very open, very welcoming" to religion in the early republic, Mr. Morrison says. "Now there's a militant hostility to every public expression of faith. I don't see any support among the Founders for that."

What strikes Professor Wolfe as remarkable is the degree to which academic historians have entered the fray in an attempt to referee this ideological tug-of-war. Among them is Gordon Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Brown University and author of "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different." He says their public square was far more saturated with expressions of faith than is today's.

"They didn't anticipate religion retreating as much from the public square as we've done in the 20th and 21st centuries," Wood says. "The modern notion that we're being overtaken by a theocracy and that evangelical Christians are running amok - I think that's just kind of a madness that comes from people who have no historical perspective."
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First off...History is eloquent in declaring that American democracy was born of Christianity and that that Christianity was Calvinism. The great Revolutionary conflict which resulted in the formation of the American nation, was carried out mainly by Calvinists, many of whom had been trained in the rigidly Presbyterian College at Princeton, and this nation is their gift to all liberty loving people.

J. R. Sizoo tells us: "When Cornwallis was driven back to ultimate retreat and surrender at Yorktown, all of the colonels of the Colonial Army but one were Presbyterian elders. More than one-half of all the soldiers and officers of the American Army during the Revolution were Presbyterians."

Saying that all Presbyterians (which are Calvinists) supported the crown is not factual. I'm sure there were some that did, but the overwhelming evidence is that most did not.

So Jefferson had thologocal disagreements on Calvinism? LOL! That went on all the time. There was an on going debate on the Calvinist theology of Predestination. And it's still going today. LOL

The influence of Calvin can be traced in every New England village
George Bancroft, History of the United States, Vol.2, p.138 - p.139

Calvinism has had more impact politically than theologically (when "theologically" is defined merely in terms of "predestination" and who goes where when they die.)

The doctrine of Calvinism which holds that men are sinful and that a government of checks and balances is required. This distinguishes him from the French Revolutionaries of his day.

Politically speaking, which is what this Message Board is all about. A person can be an atheist and have political views which are staunchly Calvinist, especially if he was raised a staunch Calvinist and moved toward deism only in theological terms. And Jefferson and many others were steeped in Calvinist thoughts of liberty, and freedom of conscience.


H. Henry Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism, 1939, writes:
Calvinism does not restrict itself to theology; but it is an all-comprehensive system of thought, including within its scope views on politics, society, science, and art as well as theology. It presents a view of life and of the universe as a whole -- a world- and life-view.

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p. 236
Politically, the tendency of Protestantism was toward democracy. Luther preached obedience to legitimate princes; Calvin established at Geneva a kind of aristocratic republic of virtue, governed in effect by presbyters (ministers and elders of the church). Yet the idea of the priesthood of all believers gradually would be transferred from the realm of religion to the realm of politics. The presbyterian form of Calvinism especially would become a forerunner of democratic institutions, even though in the beginning it had more nearly resembled the ancient Hebrew concept of theocracy.

Alain Besançon, "The Church Embraces Democracy,"
Crisis Magazine, Vol. 13, No. 8, September 1995, p. 34
Madison's point of view is doubtless connected with the idea of tolerance as it had been developed by Locke and the Anglo-French Enlightenment. But it also contains a trace of biblical influence. American Calvinism retained, against the optimism of the European Enlightenment, the consciousness of original sin. Madison did not seek to render man good, nor did he count on his goodness. He knew man's corruption and, thus, deployed what I will call the strategy of Babel. Following the Eternal, who had dispersed men so that they could not unite in the project of a fatally bad goal, Madison dispersed citizens into innumerable interest groups and religious denominations, in order to render them incapable of building the totalitarian city, of persecuting and oppressing one another, which would happen if a denomination became powerful enough to impose its will politically. Since men, because of original sin, see their most sublime enterprises (and especially those) turn to disaster and to crime, let us divide them so that they will only be capable of partial and localized evils.

Paul Gottfried, "Concepts of Government."
Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 37, No. 3, p.267
To me it seems remarkable that one can discuss European and American republicanism without analyzing its Calvinist roots. The one reference by Rahe to Calvin is to the Protestant reformer's critical opinion of classical virtue. More important from a political and theoretical standpoint, how did the Calvinist ideas of Covenant and the right to rebellion influence English Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and New England Congregationalists? Such a question is still asked in history classes, and for good reason.

Russell Kirk, speaking of Fisher Ames, the author of the First Amendment, in The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot, p.84:
Of all the terrors of democracy, the worst is its destruction of moral habits. "A democratick society will soon find its morals the encumbrance of its race, the surly companion of its licentious joys….In a word, there will not be morals without justice; and though justice might possibly support a democracy, yet a democracy cannot possibly support justice." Here speaks the old Calvinism which finds milder expression in John Adams.

A Short Treatise on Political Power, John Ponet, D.D. (1556) President John Adams credited this Calvinist document as being at the root of the theory of government adopted by the the Americans. According to Adams, Ponet's work contained "all the essential principles of liberty, which were afterward dilated on by Sidney and Locke" including the idea of a three-branched government. (Adams, Works, vol. 6, pg. 4). Published in Strassbourg in 1556, it is one of the first works out of the Reformation to advocate active resistance to tyrannical magistrates, with the exception of the Magdeburg Bekkentis (the Magdeburg Confession).
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Another important factor in the independence movement was what is now known as the "Mecklenburg Declaration," proclaimed by the Scots-Irish Presbyterians of North Carolina, on May 20, 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed by the Continental Congress.

These North Carolinians had been watching the progress of the Colonists against the Crown. They deemed it was time for the patriots to speak out. Calling their church representatives together, by unanimous resolution they declared the people of the colony free and independent, and all laws and commissions from the king would henceforth be null and void.

The Declaration stated the following: "We do hereby dissolve the political bonds which have connected us with the mother-country, and hereby absolve ourselves from all allegiances to the British Crown. We hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people, under control of no power, other than that of our God and general government of the Congress. To the maintenance of which we solemnly pledge each other our mutual cooperation and our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor."

That assembly was composed of twenty-seven Colonists. One-third of these were ruling Elders in the Presbyterian Church, including the president and secretary and one clergyman. The man who drew up that famous and important document was the secretary--Ephraim Brevard, a ruling Elder and graduate of Princeton. It was sent by a special messenger to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and many of these concepts were obviously incorporated into the Declaration of Independence.

The Presbyterian Church

If the average American citizen were asked, Who was the founder of America? He would undoubtedly hesitate to reply. A Presbyterian, however, and with considerable justification, might point to the answer given by Ranke, the famous German historian: "John Calvin was the virtual founder of America."
To back up this assertion about their famed theologian, Presbyterians might point out that at the time of the American Revolution two thirds of the population were trained in the schools of Calvin, where they learned the immortal principles of the rights of man, of human liberty, equality, and self-government on which they based our republic. Their intense zeal for liberty was so pronounced that the colonists' struggle for freedom was called, in England, "The Presbyterian Rebellion." Presbyterians are proud that one of their ministers, John Witherspoon, was the only clergyman who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Says John Lothrop Motley 1814-77, American historian and diplomat: "In England the seeds of liberty, wrapped up in Calvinism and hoarded through many trying years, were at last destined to float over land and sea, and to bear the largest harvests of temperate freedom for great commonwealths that were still unborn.5 "The Calvinists founded the commonwealths of England, of Holland, and America." And again, "To Calvinists more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of England, Holland and America are due."6
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/calvinism-history/7.htm

And I could go on and on......


I to must run along. I've made my point several times. And submitted the information to back it up.

It's been fun!!!