As We Enter Our Own 1776 Moment, Christian Leaders Must Make a Stand

Christianity, and its various sects, have attempted to dominate every society that has allowed it to exist. the current evangelical "dominionists" are but the latest example.

Dominion theology - Wikipedia

 

Pride and humility are available to all, great and small, believer and unbeliever. What the unbeliever may lack in "gratitude" he/she may possess in humility.

This and your conversation with Bluesguy remind me that the first rights doctrine was developed by a Franciscan monk (William of Ockham) during a dispute (the Franciscan Poverty Controversy) with a pope (John XXII) who had the arrogance not only to declare the accepted belief in the Absolute Poverty of Christ (and the Apostles) heretical, but to burn the members of the Friars Minor at the stake for refusing to renounce it. All of this happened occurred on account of an obscure argument John made over the nature and rights of property ownership that he thought was infallible, but lost to an insignificant friar from a small village in Surrey, England who turned out to be one of the greatest minds in Western Civilization.

Whoops!

It during his disputes with John and his successors that William of Ockham developed the social contract theory that Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were later credited with developing.

It's shame that about all most of us know about this great man is the principle of parsimony that bears his name - Ockham's Razor - for it was his contributions in the struggle for individual freedom and sovereignty that were by far the most important.

 

Yes, I can, in the Bill of Rights.

Many if not most of them, particularly the lofty ideals expressed in the Preamble of the DOI.

I don't know what was noted above but the DOI is about all of them.

Not quite:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

Agreed....

I agree that "they all came together in this great experiment of FREEDOM and LIBERTY and a government of the people" but I'm not sure what you mean by "not the other way around".

 

Which are the Christian parts of the Bill of Rights?

I already cited the preamble of the DOI which is the only time in it a god is mentioned, then when the reasons for the revolt are given it says nothing about Christianity.

Yes I defend your right to practice a religious faith if you so choose, that's not what this is about. It restricts religious involvement or requirements in the government.

 

We were/are talking about Christian influence.

My point is that many principles of American government, and more broadly the liberalism and individualism that are the hallmarks of Western Civilization, are a product, in part or whole, of Christianity's philosophical and institutional influences. Our rights doctrines are largely a byproduct of Christian ethics and were developed by churchmen going back to the work of the canon lawyers at University of Bologna in the 11th and 12th Centuries, to the development of the first rights doctrine and social contract theory by the Franciscan monk William of Ockham in the early 14th Century, which would be further developed by rights theorists such as Jean Gerson and the theologians & jurists at the School of Salamanca, et al. All of these things didn't just spring out of the ether with the Enlightenment. Nothing Locke asserted in his Two Treatises was anything new, and if you've read the book, and I presume that you have, you know that it is immersed in religion and Christian ethics.

Full disclosure, I'm an Agnostic. I'm not a theocrat. I'm not arguing that Christianity is the sole source of the principles expressed in the DOI and COTUS and I'm not claiming that the COTUS isn't a secular document.

I have neither the time nor the space to adequately address this subject here, but if you're really interested in studying it at length, I would recommend reading Brian Tierney's The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150-1625, of which you can get a glimpse here:

The Idea of Natural Rights-Origins and Persistence
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=njihr

and Larry Siedentrop's Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, which is summed up here by the Harvard University Press:

Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism—another of Christianity’s gifts to the West.

Inventing the Individual tells how a new, equal social role, the individual, arose and gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe, and caste as the basis of social organization. Asking us to rethink the evolution of ideas on which Western societies and government are built, Siedentop contends that the core of what is now the West’s system of beliefs emerged earlier than we commonly think. The roots of liberalism—belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people—all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979888

Of course, the Renaissance humanists, Enlightenment philosophers and our Founding Fathers played an important role in the advancement of all these things.

Again, we're talking about influences here.

True, and when you look at the grievances expressed prior to the Declaration they concern things like taxes, representation, general writs of assistance, the quartering of troops, the sticking point in the Declaratory Act of 1766 that both sides refused to compromise on, etc., etc.. But when you dig beneath the surface to the broader underlying principles that concerned the ancient rights of Englishmen then we're dealing with philosophical matters that transcend the shenanigans in the Townshend Acts that John Dickinson exposed in his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer.

You've given me no reason to believe that you don't defend that right, and it's worth repeating that the prohibition of the infringement of the free exercise of religion is a restriction on Congress.

Here in Virginia, the matters concerning Church and State extend beyond the contents of the DOI and COTUS to another document, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and I agree wholeheartedly with the principles expressed therein, particularly the one that asserts "our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry":

82. A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 18 June 1779
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-02-02-0132-0004-0082

Even if one wants to argue that we are a Christian nation, on account of the predomination of its exercise or the enormous influence Christianity has had on our society and government - and I'll leave that argument to others to make - the fact remains that our government is secular, and it is that secularism that enables the free exercise of religion here in America.

(Of course, I'm preaching to the choir there.)

 

And my point being that there were LOTS of influences and not predominately the Bible or Christian faith neither of which you will find in our founding documents, god and nature being mentioned equally in the DOI. These principles are not unique to the Christian faith nor particularly indicative of it. When you read the DOI as you noted above it is about politics and individual liberty and freedom not about establishing a Christian nation of a nation of any religious faith. And of course the blaring fact that the founding fathers insured that religious faith would NOT have a great influence on the government by creating that separation.

As I have stated I support the right of those of religious faith to practice their religious faith as they see fit and government should not interfere in that. And on the other side religious faith should stay out of our government in which we ALL participate and ALL come under.

And going back to the OP and the quote from John Adams provided

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

I do wish the former President were a participant here as I surely would like to debate that with and pose the same question, how is the government "inadequate" to me as a person of no religious faith?

 

“And on the other side religious faith should stay out of our government in which we ALL participate and ALL come under.”



If we all participate in and all come under our government, why is it that you want to exclude those who hold to religious faith and think we should stay out?

 

I'm not sure I can agree with either one of those claims.

First of all, as I mentioned earlier, there are multiple influences, but lots of differences? Out of genuine curiosity I wonder what's on that long list of yours. I can think of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon-English and Enlightenment but that's about it. What am I overlooking?

Secondly, I do think that Christianity is the predominant influence, particularly since so many of the Enlightenment ideals we hold dear are the offspring of Christian philosophy, ethics and law,

You most certainly can find them in the Founding documents. If you're looking only at the text you're not seeing the forest from the trees. You have to look beyond the text to see the philosophical and historical bases from which that text sprang.

They may not be unique to the Christian faith but most of them probably can be traced back to Christian philosophy, ethics and law, such as the Liberalism and Individualism that are the foundation of our country and government and are unique to the West. And why are they unique to the West?

One must keep in mind that when we're talking about "Christianity" we're not talking exclusively about religion and the supernatural. We're talking about a whole host of things, and many of them aren't explicitly articulated in the scriptural texts.

Agreed, and I believe others have pointed out to you that our secularism is a product of Christian teaching where a space is allowed to exist between the worldly and the divine, between secular and religious authority. This further evolved during the Middle Ages when the Church made an effort to carve out its own space and jurisdiction that was separate from secular power, government and law.

We didn't get that from the Ancient Greeks and Romans as some Enlightnment philosophers have erroneously claimed. Religion and government were inextricably intertwined.

Agreed....

Obviously, I'm in no position to climb into John Adams' head, but I would submit that he may not have linked 'moral' and 'religious'. As you know, one can be moral without being religious, and one can be be religious and immoral.

I don't know you personally, but I've been reading your posts for 11 of the 13 years I've been here, and you have never given me any reason to believe that you are an immoral man. Therefore, as a moral man, our Constitution is adequate to you. You subscribe to its underlying, fundamental principles, including the secularism and pluralism that are relevant to our conversation here. As best I can judge, you respect that it is our social contract and it is the common tie that binds all of us together as Americans - E pluribus unum - regardless of our individual differences.

Immoral men and women don't do that. They don't respect what our Constitution is about, in any way shape or form. I suspect that is what Adams had in mind when he made that statement, but of course I could be wrong.

 

Are the Ten Commandments the cornerstone of Judeo Christian principles? And what is the very first one? It doesn't allow for much space and I hear Christians of these times still insist that Christianity should play a more important roll in our government but thankfully the founding fathers saw fit, because of the recent history they knew, that religious faith and government should be separate matters. These principles upon which we were founded transcend Christianity into lots of philosophies. I learned of this when I studied Eastern Philosophy in college and the similar moral and ethical principles and how Eastern Philosophy influenced European moral and ethical principles. Here is an interesting article if you care to go further http://www.chinahumanrights.org/html/2020/MAGAZINES_0731/15417.html

Our civil protections are not bibilical, they were quite different than what existed in Europe where the Christian church and Christianity had more influence than here. Same with how our government was designed, the separation of powers, federal versus state, that it would be a government of the people. That's not a matter of a religious faith. And read Adam's quote he doesn't say moral or of religious faith, he speaks of it as ONE. As much as I admire Adams I have to disagree.

And when I talk about Christianity yes I am talking about the religious faith which separates it from me. For as I often ask Christians what moral beliefs and ethics do they hold that they do not believe I hold. None ever come up with anything because those are COMMON moral beliefs and ethics not unique or solely indicative of Christians.

Or country's greatest is not because it was founded as a Christian nation and the government embodies Christianity it is because as you agreed with what I have previous said, "e pluribus unum". We are equal in our beliefs and principles and more we come together as one, leaving our differences aside, the stronger country we are. The first European settlers did not come here seeking Christianity they came here seeking more freedom and liberty than their former countries, predominately of the Christian faith, offered them and TRADE and COMMERCE, that ability to make a better economic life for themselves. Even on the Mayflower only about 40 of the passengers were the Pilgrims who hitched a ride. It was an economic endeavor. Same with Jamestown and the vast majority of other settlements. The more economic freedom the better life they believed they could enjoy. And more and more the colonist wanted to completely cut ties with the mother country for economic and political reasons nothing to do with religious faith.

So I think we agree more than not. I'll give you the last word.

 

We do agree more than not, so I'm content to agree to disagree on the degree of influence Christian philosophy, ethics, law and institutions have had on the COTUS/BOR and our nation's Founding principles {and more broadly Western Liberalism and Individualism).

However returning to John Adams' comment, I'm not convinced that he spoke of 'moral' and 'religious' as one, and I say that because he has separated the two in other observations he has made:

Founding Fathers Quotes: Virtue
https://www.foundingfatherquotes.com/founders_search.v2.php?q=virtue&s=5

As for an explanation of what he meant, let's turn to his fellow Founders:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.
--Federalist 55

Perhaps Robert George, the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, explained it more clearly:

People lacking in virtue could be counted on to trade liberty for protection, for financial or personal security, for comfort … for having their problems solved quickly. And there will always be people occupying or standing for public office who will be happy to offer the deal.

(And needless to say, there are men devoid of all virtue and scruples who will trample on the rights of others, by any means necessary - including violence - for their own self-aggrandizement.)

Thus, I believe that when Adams said "moral and religious" he was speaking of two things and including both, which is why I don't believe that Adams said our Constitution was inadequate to you, or me for that matter. If the Founders thought morality and/or virtue necessitated religion then they would have created a theocracy and framed the Constitution accordingly.

Food for thought/something to consider....

 

There is where you lose all credibility.... Show me exactly where I even "implied" these precepts are unique to myself? Perhaps that Could be the case if I took the position you seem to take and that is, all morality is dispensed between your own to ears because there is no higher authority. When imperfect human beings, and there are a great many, point to a power far higher than themselves and say "this is what I aspire to" that in no way implies "they have arrived!" On the other hand a humanist looks in the mirror and says "this is as good as it gets!"

 

I agree completely that "believers" are fallen creatures only to be redeemed at a future time but they do have an advantage in conscious in that, when no one is watching, Someone is! I am not of course speaking of those that pledge to a fraternity of "religion". I am speaking of those who truly walk in faith. To deny that "he who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it" is to deny the faith.

 

Your problem seems to be you always look to men and what they do. You need to look to Jesus and see what he does. Without faith, you can't do that so you may continue.

 

On an aside note, John Rogers, a descendent of mine, the first martyr in Foxes Book of Martyrs, was burned at the stake for promoting scripture translation for the common man. I don't delve much into the religiosity of the past. He died so we can reflect personally. Foxes Book of Martyrs was the most popular text brought to our shores by the Pilgrims next to that Word of God.

 

Creflo Dollar/Joel Osteen 2024 ...

 

There is where you lose all credibility, the entity(s) to whom you aspire to do not have to be a supernatural beings of the imagination. Were it not for this supernatural being you believe will punish you if you do not live a moral and ethical life would not live such a life? If aliens arrived on earth and gave us the secret to the universe and how it began and evolved and proved there are no supernatural beings out there would you just say to yourself that now you can be immoral and unethical?

 

You just showed your total lack of understanding of the condition of humankind and the regeneration made possible by a Loving Creator. Thence goes the credibility in your attempt;

 

That’s a comforting thought.

As for what I believe, I submit to you that we are all fallen creatures, incapable of perfection, and while I know some would disagree, I suspect you might agree with me that it was in this knowledge that the Founders created a Constitution and system of limited government that restrained our imperfections, most particularly the lusts for power and wealth.

I will also submit that this is the product of both the possession and the exercise of a faculty that we have yet to address but the good friar William of Ockham discussed at great length in his philosophical and political tracts, and that is the faculty and exercise of right reason. The possession and exercise of this faculty is what enables the unbeliever to be virtuous and the believer to likewise walk in his or her faith. Without it we cannot discern good from evil, right from wrong, virtue from vice, and it also happens to be, as William pointed out 700 years ago, the faculty that enables us to discern the inherent natural rights that our ours by our Nature and not mere privileges tossed to us like scraps from the tables of men and governments.

 

Time and statistics would seem to indicate this entire debate is well on the way to becoming academic.

https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

 

Like you. I believe every unbeliever has the propensity to be virtuous. As far as leadership and governing, I would prefer the majority recognizing a sovereign power that solidifies goodness in those who seek after Him. I just hate to see what happens when mankind becomes saturated with what they feel as their "own goodness". A lot of that is evident right now.

 

Actually as a Christian I agree with that wholeheartedly. Don't take that to believe Christian thought or precepts have no place in the marketplace of ideas. I know some do however. The clapping is overdone and childish.

 

I fully understand the condition of humanity and no we don't regenerate. Now try again.

Were it not for this supernatural being you believe will punish you if you do not live a moral and ethical life would not live such a life? If aliens arrived on earth and gave us the secret to the universe and how it began and evolved and proved there are no supernatural beings out there would you just say to yourself that now you can be immoral and unethical? Would you then go out an commit rape or murder or larceny since there would no longer be a supernatural being to punish you for doing so or for basing any laws on?

 

Again I will refute this statement and stop you right there! You and I are entirely incapable of living what you call a "moral and ethical life". You have standards by which you think you can succeed, but there are standards that would be like you trying to hit the moon with a dart....and you just couldn't do it.
This is the condition of humanity....we are all doomed to death both physically and spiritually. When we recognize that fact we are suddenly open to receiving a gift that we do not deserve, we did not earn and could not earn. I do not prod you to learn about that "gift". Just know it is there. I believe you are a "good person" by worldly standards and as far as I know, you haven't murdered anybody. It's just not good enough and you and I are in the same boat. I am prodded on to do better works because I receive this gift and it reflects the love I must show others. While in my imperfection, Christ died for me.

 

And I BELIEVE, I believe you could just like all us who don't subscribe to religious faith in such supernatural beings looking over us. And once we BOTH accept that it opens up a world of agreement. I don't prod you to learn more about that "gift" because then I think you might come to my reasoning. I wouldn't take it upon my self to place my beliefs above yours. And that's the difference. I don't need to be prodded by a supernatural power. I know all about this "gift" I grew up going to a Christian church. I studied other philosophies and came to my own internal beliefs. I believe in the here and now, what you do good NOW leads to good things in your life in the future and what you do bad NOW leads to bad things in your life in the future. There is no redemption at the end so that you can be a bad person and yet somehow redeem yourself at that end. You'll die either a good person or a bad person based on your entire life. Therefore I believe in living a moral and ethical life. I don't have to fear someone in order to do that.

And again I support and encourage you in following YOUR beliefs which in end aren't much different at all on the moral or ethical side of them.