Christianity has more blood on it's hands than any other human construct in history. Our founders knew this. That's why they decided to be the first western nation without a state church. Preachers don't care about rights. Their first impulse is to ban "sin" putting the lie to the free will argument.
Another excerpt:
With the religiopolitical background of natural law established, I want to make several critical observations regarding the most prominent Deists of Great Britain and America before concentrating on the historical development of the Anglo-American tradition.
To the best of my knowledge, all of them, except David Hume and Thomas Paine, ardently embraced the moral teachings of Judeo- Christianity, especially their sociopolitical implications. Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian whose philosophy had no significant impact on American culture until the 20th Century.6 Paine (1737 – 1809) excoriated the doctrines of Christian eschatology and soteriology. He regarded them and, particularly, the doctrines of the Trinity and Christ’s virginally immaculate conception as superstitious hokum. He hated the Bible with a passion, but then he hated the formal trappings and doctrines of all religions, so much so that many mistakenly believed he was an atheist.
He wasn’t. He was a Deist.
Despite his undeniable rhetorical skills, which he wielded to fire up Americans’ desire for independence like no other, Paine was a fool who assailed the fundamental requirement of a body politic fit for a republican form of government. In his work The Age of Reason (published in three parts from 1794 to 1804), Paine opined that all religions are “human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind,” which is akin to the Marxian view that “religion is the opiate of the masses” (the expression’s earliest translation).7 Ironically, the atheist Marx looked on religion less disdainfully than Paine. While Marx held that religious sentiment was the stuff of false consciousness, he deemed religion to be the instinctive expression of human distress in a pitiless world. Still, for all his apatheism, Marx was a drama queen.
The other prominent Deists among the American Revolutionists were Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. George Washington’s Christianity was quasi-Deistic, while John Adams was a Unitarian. The Anglo-American Unitarianism of the Enlightenment has been described as Christian Deism, religious Deism, or ethical monotheism. Except for the Deism of Hume and Paine, these terms may be applied to the Deism of all of the above.
They regarded God’s hand in human affairs and believed in the power of prayer. Most of them attended church regularly as religious fellowship refreshed them. They deemed it a necessary good for the body politic and their civic duty to set an example of religious observance. While some confided their reservations about Christianity’s mystical teachings in letters to friends, they did so respectfully. They revered the Bible’s incomparable store of wisdom and emphasized its moral imperatives relative to private conduct and the conduct of the affairs of the state. Like their Christian countrymen, they held that an irreligious people couldn’t maintain the Republic for long, let alone defend it against its enemies. (The very best article I’ve read on that point is
What America’s Founders Really Thought About the Bible (thegospelcoalition.org). I saved a copy of it to my files a few years ago.)
In his widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), in which he feigned a biblical justification for independence,8 Paine recommended a democratic form of government akin to that of the erratically unstable and short- lived Greek city-states of classical paganism. In matters of political philosophy and governance, Paine was a mediocrity of common nonsense. John Adams became especially exasperated with Paine’s jejune understanding of things and publicly denounced it as being “so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.”9
On the Internet, one may encounter the revisionist nonsense that Adams, Washington, and others openly criticized Paine to disassociate themselves from a man with whom they secretly agreed. In other words, they supposedly pandered to public sentiment.
That’s risible.
In the first place, these men didn’t pander to anyone. In the second place, they criticized Paine at the height of his popularity. They understood that democracies were mobocracies. Further, it was never Paine’s discrete political convictions that endeared him to Americans in general, but his stance against monarchism and his passionate advocacy of American independence.
Though a naturally gifted writer, Paine was not comparatively well versed in the history of ideas and events, and was seemingly bereft of the political instincts of self-preservation. At a glance, the Founders understood this about him from his opinions on matters of government, but they didn’t hold it against him. Instead, they admired his natural talent, his passion, and his initial contributions to the cause. They supported his efforts and coaxed him to consider the formative works of republicanism—to read Locke, Montesquieu, Cicero, and others.
In a letter to Jefferson, Adams allowed that Paine’s prose was that of a virtuoso despite the shortcomings of his political thought. He expected that in due time Paine would grow, politically, under their mentorship. But Paine’s political thought never matured. Over the years, it became all the more radically democratic and collectivistic. His forte was strictly that of a skilled communicator. The simplicity and quiet eloquence of his prose made it readily accessible to the common man. He was a master of the polemic—often vehemently pejorative but always magically clever. He was at his best when he inspired. In that case, his style was the hushed expectancy of wondrous things to come.
In the first pamphlet of The American Crisis series, written on December 23, 1776, during the early months of the Revolutionary War, on the heels of a string of devastating setbacks for the Continental Army—Paine penned the most famous and, arguably, the most stirring passage of his career. Its warmth and persuasive confidence, its lyrical resonance, attests to his literary genius:
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Initially, Washington was especially fond of Paine and grateful for his unwavering support during a bleak period in the New York and New Jersey campaigns of 1776. From the onset of the war to the third week of December, Washington lost the Battle of Long Island (August 27), the Battle of White Plains (October 28), and the Battle of Fort Washington (November 16). During that same period, he lost all but one of the minor skirmishes, which was of little consolation as his one victory was the result of a deft maneuver that enabled him to withdraw to Pennsylvania to avoid the capture or annihilation of his beleaguered army. While others harshly criticized him—groused about his inexperience, his indecisiveness—Paine extolled the general’s pragmatism, his physical courage, and his steadfast resolve.
Paine’s confidence in Washington’s abilities was vindicated even sooner than he expected. From the first winter encampment at Valley Forge, the general led his troops across the Delaware River and destroyed a formidable garrison of Hessian mercenaries at Trenton on December 26. Knowing that General William Howe would counter with a greater force, Washington withdrew with a bounty of Hessian munitions in tow, but only to spring another surprise just eight days later. In a ruse to lure the bulk of Howe’s army south, Washington ordered a contingent of his forces to make a series of feints at the Trenton garrison and then quickly withdraw when Howe countered. Meanwhile, he executed a daring night march to capture Princeton. He destroyed a significant contingent of British regulars and seized their stockpile of munitions (January 3). After that, Howe had to withdraw from New Jersey altogether and fall back to his fortifications in New York. These feats silenced the voices demanding that Washington be relieved of command.
Washington routinely read Paine’s rousing pamphlets to his troops to bolster morale, and the unlikely pair remained close friends throughout the war. But later, after the war, Paine sailed back and forth across the English Channel to advise and help organize cells of working-class revolutionaries. He openly aligned himself with the increasingly notorious London Corresponding Society. In 1792, Paine published his two-volume manifesto entitled The Rights of Man, which, in part, was an apologia of the French Revolution. He dignified the hyper-democratic egalitarianism of its misguided assault on the principle of private property itself. He mitigated the implacable vindictiveness of its Reign of Terror. He gratuitously lambasted the British Crown, which embraced inherent rights and their attending reforms.
He even dedicated his manifesto to President Washington.
The House of Lords impelled the Royal Bench to issue an indictment against Paine on the charge of seditious libel, a hanging offense. Paine fled to France, where he received a hero's welcome. He was awarded French citizenship and elected to the National Convention of the French parliament.
Washington had to distance himself from Paine as the latter’s dedication complicated diplomatic relations with Great Britain. It also emboldened the foreign minister of the newly minted French Republic to demand that the United States accede to a formal alliance, an expectation the administration had adroitly rebuffed for months. Besides, Washington had already wearied of the incessant notoriety of Paine’s political activities abroad, of his ongoing crusade to promote antimonarchist rebellions everywhere he traveled. Worse, Paine obtusely assumed to have the president’s full support, as if the fledgling Republic’s position amid the ongoing hostilities between the leading powers of Europe was not already precarious enough. On the president’s behalf, members of his administration pleaded with Paine to cool it, telling him that he had gone too far, that his activism was causing severe problems for the president in his conduct of foreign relations. Paine called them reactionaries, insisting that he needn’t regard the opinions of other men. With that, Washington closed the door on his affections for Paine and ignored his letters. He would no longer humor Paine’s grandiose schemes.
Moreover, Washington had his hands full with the Whiskey Rebellion at home. Farmers were all het up over the federal government’s first excise tax. They were accustomed to distilling their surplus rye, barley, corn, wheat, and fermented grain mixtures to make whiskey. They believed the government had unfairly targeted them, insisting that duties and imports, not excises, were levied to provide for the nation’s general welfare. In other words, the revenue collected via excises, they argued, was to be used to provide for the infrastructural needs of the regions taxed.
Further, large producers could pay the lower annual rate and benefit from the additional tax breaks based on production volume. Most farmers were small producers. They relied on the western frontier’s barter system but were still required to pay the total rate per gallon in cash. In the beginning, the latter merely refused to pay; however, as the months passed, as the protest spread, as the ranks of the protesters swelled—they became increasingly belligerent. They began using intimidation and violence against the farmers willing to pay the tax and the federal agents tasked to collect it. Matters came to a head when riots and several armed skirmishes erupted in Allegany County, Pennsylvania, the movement’s epicenter.
Washington believed that the ideas of French radicalism had stirred up the otherwise tractable citizens of the region. Similar rumblings of discontent were heard in Kentucky and throughout the Northwest Territories. The protest seemed to be spiraling into the madness of a full-blown civil war. Determined to nip it in the bud, Washington himself led the force of 14,000 militiamen called up to quail the rash of violence. The fomenters of the insurgency had managed to rally the support of nearly 7,000 protesters. Armed with muskets, pitchforks, and scythes, they marched down the streets of Pittsburg—vowing to tar and feather federal agents, threatening secession. It was as if they’d materialized from the pages of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities at the behest of Madame Defarge herself. However, the news of Washington’s impending arrival, the superior strength of his forces, and his willingness to crack heads to safeguard the stability of the Republic sobered them. The leaders of the disturbance skipped town. The mob scattered. The uprising collapsed before he arrived.
After the first two parts of The Age of Reason were published, Adams called Paine a “blackguard” whose vile contempt for biblical religion “arose from the depths of a malignant heart.”10 And in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, Adams roared:
There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a ***** wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief.11
Oh, snap!
While Paine’s Age of Reason was well received in continental Europe and caused a minor stir in America, which briefly revitalized interest in Deism, it was widely scorned in Great Britain. Also, it ultimately destroyed Paine’s reputation in America. After its publication, his influence precipitously declined, and Washington hammered the nails into its coffin.12
Washington’s Farewell Address (1796) and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) are the classic presidential proclamations of the American ethos. Washington’s was a warning against the dangers of foreign entanglements and assaults on religious observance, by which he meant assaults on the observance of Christian ethics. Washington castigated Paine without mentioning him by name, but everyone knew to whom Washington referred. Washington was deeply concerned about the adverse influence Paine’s harebrained politics and antireligious tirades might have on the body politic.
The Founders had their foibles. They weren’t above political ploys when, right or wrong, they deemed them necessary for the sake of the Republic. But they were genuinely furious with Paine. They and many others had shed blood, sweat, and tears to establish the Republic—the religiopolitical foundation of which Paine heedlessly undermined as the indispensable prerequisite of republicanism flew right over his head.
Why the dramatic difference in religiopolitical outlook between the Deists of continental Europe and the Deists of Great Britain and America? Well, it’s due to a complex web of cultural and political influences on the development of their respective nations’ histories, but I can succinctly summarize the matter.
It ultimately comes down to the fact that, as a general rule, the people of Great Britain were always more biblically Christian than the people of continental Europe. Though there were significant Protestant communities in Southern France, Holland, and parts of Germany, the people of continental Europe never fully extricated themselves from the mire of paganism, and the earliest American colonies were predominantly settled by devout British Protestants and, to a lesser extent, by devout Dutch and German Protestants. The Catholic Church pretty much wiped out the Protestants of Southern France during the Inquisition.
The other primary reason was political but obtained for religious reasons as well. Because the British monarchy was always more biblically Christian than the others of Europe, it was more open to sharing power early on. The British monarchy established the Royal Bench, accepted the Magna Carta of Rights, eventually ceded the practical authority of governance to the British Parliament, and embraced Blackstonian jurisprudence. Of course, the British monarchy also saw the writing on the wall in the age of revolutionary natural law. British monarchs had always been comparatively wiser than their continental counterparts.
In contrast, the monarchies of continental Europe, especially that of France, were corrupt and under the thumb of the Roman Catholic Church. Whereas British commoners generally extolled their monarchy, French commoners bitterly seethed under theirs. Also, the French intelligentsia of revolutionary sentiment was generally derisive of Christianity and loathed Catholicism most especially. Ironically, they were paternalistic in their political thought. They didn’t so much have a problem with control freaks as they had a problem with being the controlled.
American leftists tend to make a big deal out of the fact that some of the most prominent Founders were Deists. Their wont is to downplay Christianity’s influence on the exemplar of the Anglo-American tradition. They only show their ignorance. Unfortunately, some Christians counter this foolishness by insisting that these luminaries, who were indeed Deists, were Christians. Both of these views stem from a fundamental misapprehension of things.
As for the supposed influence of Deism, this is a mountain of rubbish made out of a molehill of a distinction that makes no difference. The philosophical and governing principles of the Anglo-American tradition are not predicated on the mystical teachings of Christianity (i.e., those of its eschatology and soteriology). They’re predicated on the moral teachings of Christianity. In other words, it’s the sociopolitical implications of Christianity’s ethical system of thought that matter. In that regard, the Christians and Deists of the Anglo-American tradition were of one accord. Deists like Franklin, Adams, and others routinely quoted the Bible as the justification for their sociopolitical values and even encouraged the propagation of the Gospel; while they didn’t believe that Jesus was divine, they believed that His moral teachings were divinely inspired. Ours is a secular government, not a theocracy. The sense in which America is a Christian nation goes to its founding culture, its sociopolitical philosophy, and its governing principles. Deism doesn’t espouse any ethical system as such. It simply holds that the laws of morality are apprehensible.
