> Your paranoia is showing. "...this is a Christian nation"? I said
> nothing of the sort. It had been argued that "The judge and his
> supporters are quite explicit that the point of the monument was to
> underscore what they perceive as a fact -- that US law is founded upon
> the
> will of God; that sure sounds like theocratic thinking." I meant to
> point
> out that other Americans of some prominence (Jefferson surely being a
> founder if not a framer) who would never be accused of being theocrats,
> also thought that American law was founded on the will of God. And
> that's
> true even if one tries to construe the founders' deism as pantheism,
> which
> seems to me difficult; the Declaration's concluding expression (probably
> not by Jefferson) -- an appeal "to the supreme judge of the world for
> the
> rectitude of our intentions" -- is rather far from pantheism...
Call it paranoia, but the "this is a Christian nation" wing concerns me a lot, and I would hate to have left-wingers abetting them.
The deism folks like Jefferson professed was the 18th-century version of secularism. Out-and-out atheists of the sort we are used to today were very rare (mostly in France in those days); American intellectuals, especially, needed to use "God-talk" for camouflage.
A look through their writings shows that they tended to use "nature" and "God" rather interchangeably. Many of them accepted a kind of design argument for the existence of God, but this God was only an architect who set up the world system and retired to let it run by itself, not a fire-and-brimstone guy who punished people who "sinned" by throwing them into hell. Thus, to the extent that they believed in any religion, it was a far cry from the evangelical/fundamentalist kind espoused by the "this is a Christian nation" folks. (When they were writing documents meant to sway public opinion, like the Declaration of Independence, they tended to turn up the religious tone of their language, but they still would have disagreed profoundly with today's fundies.)
They argued that "natural religion," which was strongly corrupted and distorted by traditional Christianity (especially the Roman Catholic variety of it), was a simple, rational set of moral principles, which would be considered a purely secular moral theory today.
The principle of religious freedom they expounded in the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 and the First Amendment to the Constitution basically states that everyone who wants to believe in a religion is perfectly free to do so, but when they try to enlist the power of government to enforce their religious beliefs on others, the results are disastrous. I think that this is still a vital principle today, and needs to be clearly stated and defended against all attacks on it. Simply put, "your right to swing your religion around ends at the tip of my nose."
It should be noted, though, that most of the deists in North America at the end of the 18th century were intellectuals like Jefferson. The "Great Awakening" earlier in the century, in which Jonathan Edwards was a prominent leader, and the second Great Awakening in the 1790s, were more representative of popular culture, and this tug-of-war between left-intellectual enlightenment/secularism and populist religious fervor has continued throughout U.S. history.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ____________________________ Eliminate "holiness"; discard "wisdom"; the people will benefit a hundred-fold. -- Lao Tsu