Comments Elsewhere

We left England for the right to worship [not] the right to abstain from it.

Who is “we” here? The Congregationalists who emigrated to Massachussetts? Sure—they left England to create a theocracy. The Episcopalians in Virginia? No; they already had the right to worship in England. The Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania? Well, they left England for the right to worship, but they also made religious tolerance (including tolerance of atheists) part of their basic laws.

Of course, I discussed none of these in my article, because my article wasn’t about the colonists. It was about the Founders, a century and a half later and in a very different climate of thought.

Our Biblical Christian principles need no defending.

Is using force through the government to favor one kind of worship over another a “Biblical Christian principle”? Is there no difference between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s?

You’d have trouble convincing the Danbury Baptists of that—Baptists at the time were the leading advocates of complete separation of Church and State. They created Rhode Island in order to put that into practice and escape the theocracy in Massachussetts.

The men who created this nation were not atheists.

Jefferson and Paine, just to pick two examples, were repeatedly referred to as “atheists” during their own times. It was true of Paine and untrue of Jefferson; but Jefferson wasn’t a Christian either. He was a deist; he did not believe that Jesus was God, or that He performed miracles, or that He died for our sins. (Jefferson infamously published a bowdlerized “Bible” which contained only Jesus’s ethical teachings and none of the mysteries.)

Of course, many other Founders were Christians of various sorts. And now what? What follows from that?