Christian Nation?

The other week I saw this on Facebook:

Now, I don’t have a particular dog i this fight. Whether the United States was founded on Christian values doesn’t make an iota of difference as to whether Christianity is true. Having said that, I was rather dubious about the claims of this meme, so I did a bit of a googling…

John Adams

I went and looked up the John Adams quotation and it looks like it’s been rather taken out of context. It comes from a letter which he sent to Thomas Jefferson:

Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion at all!!!” But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell

Letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (April 19, 1817)

Thomas Jefferson

One could also get a little picky about Jefferson’s quotation too. He’s not making any assertions about the foundation of the country. Additionally, the quotation is compressed so that the meaning of “perverted” is, well, perverted! Jefferson believed that Christianity was “perverted” in the sense that it had been corrupted from its original form. In the same letter he describes the teaching of Jesus as “the most sublime & benevolent”. In a letter to Benjamin Rush, he wrote:

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush

Benjamin Franklin

I went looking for the Franklin quotation and couldn’t find it. Does anyone know the source?

Concluding Thoughts

So, from ten minutes of googling, it was clear that several of these quotations were ripped out of context and don’t really represent the thought of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

However, the more salient point is that the final statement in the meme hasn’t even been remotely justified: “The U.S. was founded on secular values”. Not only are “secular values” not defined, it would open up an interesting conversation about the grounding of such values.

However, to finish, I think it’s sufficient to simply point out that the Declaration of Independence of the United States grounds all human rights in… God.

[A]ll men are created equal…[and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence