Thursday, May 13, 2010

The Myth of a Christian nation

Our Founders were a mixture of, yes, Christians, but also Deists and Masons. One thing we do know for certain, there were no Fundamentalists. Dominionism (the belief that the US is a Christian nation) is a1970s offshoot of Fundamentalism which is a late 1800s, early 1900s (named for a set of pamphlets published by an industrialist in 1910) offshoot of Dispensationalism which arose in the early 1800s – all too late to be considered “Founders.”


If we were to declare a national religion based on the Founders’ beliefs, the closest we would have would be Episcopalian and Unitarian Universalist.

It is Deism that gave us the concept of “inalienable rights. Individual political liberty is never proposed nor advocated in the Bible, rather the New Testament teaches self-subjugation of individual liberty in service of others.

Finally, “Christian” means “Christ-like.” If America were a Christian nation, when was that? When we gave pox-infected blankets to Native Americans? when we enslaved Africans? When we denied women the right to vote? When we forced children to work in factories? When?

No comments:

Post a Comment