"The time has come for separationists to focus their arguments on what’s best for society, not only what’s Constitutional or what “the Founders” believed."

100% agree. Not that defending the legal turf of SoCaS isn't important in the meantime, but the most important issue is simply promoting the idea that government governs best when it is not given authority over matters such as religion in the first place. Everything the government does is done on borrowed authority. But in the case of religion, the people have no need at all to cede anything to government direction, instruction, or anything else.

Posted at March 13, 2008 2:29 PM in response to What Did the Founders Believe About Church and State?

Speaking of which, I hope you've read some of Jefferson's published private journals. One choice part is found on page 572 of Volume 4 in which Jefferson discusses what he knows of Washington's Christianity, or lack of it, from Gouverneur Morris.

Posted at March 13, 2008 3:38 AM in response to Militant Unitarians

Fair enough: so that's two statements that do seem off, or, at least, maybe two. After all, the second of those statements is comparative, so it's a little harder to judge.

Compared to what some expect and compared to many of his peers, religion DID play a remarkably small part in Washington's life: he was, in fact, so amazingly coy about it that to this day we don't really know what he really believed or didn't. And it's particularly important to highlight that all sorts of myths cropped up about Washington's great piety: Parson Weems' fabrications about prayers at Valley Forge, the supposed story about Washington being caught praying in private, and so on.

And again, it's still important to note that it was religious conservatives that back in the day that primarily labeled the founders as being deists and atheists: because as far as they were concerned, they were that far from what they considered properly religious men. If anyone is to blame for the simple picture of the founders as rationally chaste deists, it's people like Bird Wilson, hardly a progressive.

Posted at March 13, 2008 3:32 AM in response to Militant Unitarians

In the end, calling Western values "Judeo-Christian" values is just an incredibly weak description. The core values of the enlightenment do not appear in the Bible. Most of the Ten Commandments would be decidedly unconstitutional. And so on. If there were such a simple thing as "Judeo-Christian" values that was responsible for everything good about a society (and never anything bad about it!) then every society from Christian Rome to modern America would have had the same set of values: and this is very very much not the case. There would be no sensible explanation as to why the U.S. embarked on a direction first and unique from other countries.

The reality is that other cultural forces, and other ideas than simply that religious tradition, all played big roles in shaping our culture, and in many cases they changed "Judeo-Christian" values far more than they were informed by them.

Posted at March 12, 2008 12:02 PM in response to Fallacy #1: The Founders Weren't Deists

Yeah, I have to say that the lack of any substantive response to points that people raised in the comments is rather unfortunate for this forum. It seems as if you've written the bulk of these posts all prior to posting them one by one, which makes talking about them being "provocative" a little silly. I would like to see specific examples of "liberals" misunderstanding the religious beliefs of the founders: not that there aren't any (there are several in the comment thread of the original post!) but by and large, I'm not sure this sin is as widespread as "unmanly centrism" needs it to be to chastise liberals and conservatives equally. Most of the major writers I know of on the pro-SoCaS issue have given far more detailed and comprehensive discussions on the religious beliefs of the founders than you've offered here, and have debunked "founders were all Deists" claims themselves.

So name names. Speaking in generalities allows you to cheat your way to an implication of equality in the sins of liberals/conservatives on this issue.

Posted at March 12, 2008 11:55 AM in response to Militant Unitarians

"Ok, so explain to me why the Constitution makes no mention of god or ghosts or superstition?"

Waldman is right to point out that the reason for this is not any simple one answer, and certainly not "because the founders were not religious." The primary reasons, if you read the debates at the time, were that:

a) the founders did not see their task at the time as being of quite the cosmological import some ascribe to it: they were getting together to hammer out a power-sharing scheme, essentially
b) most had a different conception of how religion and politics interacted: i.e. politics was a sort of base worldly struggle, while religion was really unavoidably something that wasn't under at least this new federal government's purview (remember, many states at the time had their own state religious affiliations, and not always the same ones)

Posted at March 10, 2008 3:24 PM in response to Fallacy #1: The Founders Weren't Deists

Just some comments on the sorts of things Waldman is rightly worried about:

"However, the majority were Deists or athiests, and your post shows nothing to the contrary. T"

Cite? I'm not aware of any prominent atheists amongst the founders, secret or open. Certainly many were accused of atheism, but none were that I know of.

"The quotes and beliefs of the founding father that you mention don't, to my mind, conflict with Deism."

Deism, though, at least in a definitional sense that makes it distinct from other theistic ideas, really does carry the connotation that the Creator does not get involved, or isn't even interested in messing with, worldly events. And certainly talking about a "spiritual" world is somewhat contra-deism. Deists were above all else rationalists and rejected things like routine supernatural events on earth and revelations as a source of knowledge about God. While some believed in immortal souls, few would talk about a "spiritual life" in the sense that Christians mean it.

The confusion often comes because many of the founders were, indeed, enlightenment rationalists, which tracks them very closely with deists in that sense. But few of them were actually particularly strict about the "non-intervention" ideas that most people that outright called themselves Deists hold/held. Many rejected supernatural revelation as absurd or stories to help placate the superstitious and foolish common man (yes, many of the founders were elitists in this sense: often embarrassingly so). But their image of God was not quite the passionless above-it-all being.

However, it should be noted that Waldman is again wrong to imply that Deists did not believe in an afterlife or even the judgment of souls.

He needs to read up on Deism a little more here. Deists like William Wollaston and Edward Herbert (the latter often thought of as the father of Deism in England) both believed that souls lived after death--along with rewards/punishment for their morality. Even Paine was basically agnostic on this particular issue.

The core idea of Deism is simply that it is primarily or exclusively by reason that we discover what's right and the natural order of things (including the existence of the highest order: god): revealed supernatural writings are depreciated. With this idea, many of the Founders were very much sympatico, and the fuzzy definition of Deism is really the problem here more than anything else.

Posted at March 10, 2008 3:19 PM in response to Fallacy #1: The Founders Weren't Deists

While I quite agree that the alleged Deism of the founders is vastly overplayed, you really are cherry-picking here Mr. Waldman.

Washington, for instance, is far more complicated a matter than you let on, or that overly interpreted public statements here or there can show. He was extremely secretive about his true beliefs: so much so that the pastor at the church he attended with his wife (though he always slipped out the back or later, didn't come at all for communion) thought he was, indeed, a Deist.

And how can you mention Franklin's request to have a prayer without mentioning that it was REJECTED by the convention?

And so on.

The key to the founders is understanding not what they might be classified in church on Sunday, but understanding that by and large most saw the business of politics as just that: politics. Washington said that the path of piety is clear enough that people do not need the government's instruction or interference to follow it. Others, though deeply religious themselves, saw politics as a base, mundane matter: something whose boundaries were pragmatic, not divine. And indeed, that's why things like the federalist papers cite no religious authority or arguments, but proceed on rational terms.

It also cannot go without mention that the idea that the founders were Deists, heathens, or even atheists (the latter of which none of them, to my knowledge, were) came not from "liberals" but from religious conservatives, who derided the founders for refusing to acknowledge God in major documents. Religious conservatives spent centuries trying to alter the Constitution to pledge fealty to Christianity: by and large they failed. It's only in the last 60 years or so that conservatives have done a 180 and started claiming that the nation is a Christian one after all, right from the start.

So it's also a little historically blinkered to insist that it's a particularly "liberal" failing.

Posted at March 10, 2008 2:21 PM in response to Fallacy #1: The Founders Weren't Deists

Good, let em continue making great ice cream while Foster serves as Congressman. The perfect solution!

Posted at March 6, 2008 9:51 PM in response to Can The GOP Hold Onto Denny Hastert's Seat?

I met Mr. Foster at the close of Patrick Murphy's successful campaign in PA in 2006. He is an amazing fellow: a brilliant guy who up and decided late in life that politics was too important to neglect, put his professional life on indefinite hold, and headed straight off to work for someone he believed in, many states away. Someone like that, who isn't a lifelong politician but rather who jumped into politics late in life because they cared so much about making a difference, is my idea of a perfect candidate. I really hope he wins. We need more Congressman that have some actual expertise in science, as opposed to just blathering on about it without any idea what they are talking about.

For anyone keeping track, the folks the DCC has out there to fight for him are many of the same people that worked on Patrick Murphy's campaign. It's an extremely tough race, demographically, but from what I understand they've really kept pace, and it's anyone's guess at this point how it's all going to play out.

Posted at March 6, 2008 6:26 PM in response to Can The GOP Hold Onto Denny Hastert's Seat?