"nature's god"

At Pat Robertson's Regent's University--or is it in his office?--hang three portraits to greet the visitor: the Mason and deist George Washington, Pat Robertson himself, and deistic rationalist Thomas Jefferson.

The Christian Right is forever claiming that our nation was founded on biblical principles to be a Christian nation. That this myth persists in the face of the stark reality that many of the nation's Founders were not Christians themselves, is testimony to the aggressiveness with which the Christian Right's leaders have spread falsehoods successfully blinding millions of Americans.

Pat Robertson, on The 700 Club, December 30, 1981:

The Constitution of the United States...is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.

Pat Robertson, New York Magazine, August 18, 1986:

[T]he great builders of our nation almost to a man have been Christians...

Numerous books by experts, preachers, academics, brilliant historians, and Constitutional scholars have been written dispelling the myth of Christianity being a significant inspiration for our nation's founding. The evidence is overwhelming and demands a verdict.

But, for today, I want to enter a lone exhibit--not in and of itself as compelling as, say, the Treaty of Tripoli (see Article 11), but I think it profound in its tangibility:

Jefferson's own hand.... Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence.

In the final version of the Declaration, which is devoid of all mention of Christianity, Jesus, the Bible, etc., there is a reference to "Nature's God."

Not "the Christian God," not "Jesus' Father," not "Our Heavenly Father," not event "mankind's God," or "our God"  -- the words used are, and the concept is, "Nature's God." The words appeal to and evoke neither Christianity nor the Bible. So un-Christian is it that if we playfully, anachronistically, view the terminology "Nature's God" through the lens of American culture today, we'd likely see (dismiss?) the term as "New Age."

It's little wonder then that the Christian Right of Jefferson's era went after him as today they go after everyone from President Clinton to Gov. Howard Dean.

*On July 4th, 1798, President of Yale, Rev. Timothy Dwight, preached that religious people can't support in the coming election "the philosophers, the atheists and the deists" like Thomas Jefferson, who was running for President. He worried that "our churches may become temples of reason" should Jefferson win the election.

*Rev. William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister, authored an anti-Jefferson tract in 1800 complaining about Jefferson's "disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or...his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism."

*Dr. John Mason preached that Jefferson was "a confirmed infidel."

*The New England Palladium wrote: "Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion...some infamous prostitute, under the title of Reason will preside...."

What did Jefferson say of these attackers? He had harsh words that resonate as strongly today as they did in his own lifetime. He wrote that the religious conservatives of his day were

"most tyrannical and ambitious.... They pant to re-establish by law, that holy inquisition, which they can now only infuse into public opinion."

Jefferson foresaw a day when all rational Americans would be Unitarians. He seemed unable to imagine a future in which "public opinion" infused with the spirit of "inquisition" would seek to subvert the Constitution (even as so many conservative Christian Americans attempt shamefully to claim it and all of its authors, including Jefferson, as their own), and subvert the Enlightenment concepts of deists like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams. Those concepts Jefferson must have thought secure--untouchable ultimately, and self-evident. After all, the governing document of the United States, our Constitution, nowhere mentions God. The Constitution demands that there will never be religious tests for public office, and Jefferson's ideals of the separation of Church and State were embraced by the day's thinkers.

But this is no longer the case. These concepts dear to Jefferson are not self-evident any longer. They are not embraced by the majority of our nation's Congressmembers, our President, or many judges. They are in danger of being forgotten and replaced by something altogether different, something anathema to the rational citizen.

(Source for the above quotes: The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, by Isaac Kramnick & R. Laurance Moore.)

Comments

[Brian]

Thank you for this article and this website.

[a]

Infidel

[Julie]

Wow! Great article. I assume because you mentioned "President" Clinton that you wrote this some time ago but it rings even truer today.