Creation Myths: Founding Fathers

Do American Christians idolize their country? Do we worship the nation’s founders more than our true Creator? Many in the United States look to the ‘Christian nation’ that once was, and decry our modern wandering ways. We long to return to the ‘morals of our founders’ two centuries ago. Some think that if we were only as pious as those who came before us, perhaps our country wouldn’t be facing its current crises. 

But it turns out that the founding fathers were not at all what we would co-opt them to be. Jesus is absent from almost all important documents of our founding. He’s not in the Declaration of Independence, not in the Constitution, not in the Federalist Papers, nor the Articles of the Confederation. Moreover, the second president of the United States, John Adams, states in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.” While it’s true that some founders believed in God, many were Deist and highly influenced by Enlightenment-era thought that espoused a powerful, but distant and uninvolved God (ie. no divine Son of God).

Read the rest here