More Deceit From Chris Rodda and Dispatches From The Culture Wars

Chris Rodda is at it again! She re-hashes the same "lies" about David Barton, oblivious to the fact, she is guilty of spreading the same junk. Here is a post she did June 7, 2010.  In this diatribe on Barton and the Christian Nationalists, she misses the trees for the forest. As I will show, Congress supported "a neat Edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools."

On January 21, 1781, Robert Aitken presented a "memorial" [petition] to Congress offering to print "a neat Edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools."

Here is what Rodda writes:

There are many versions of this story floating around, all worded to mislead that Congress either requested the printing of the Bibles, granted Aitken permission to print them, contracted him to print them, paid for the printing, or had Bibles printed for the use of schools. Congress did none of these things. All they did was grant one of several requests made by Aitken by having their chaplains examine his work, and allowing him to publish their resolution stating that, based on the chaplains' report, they were satisfied that his edition was accurate.

On the contrary, Congress recommended Aitken's Bible to ALL the people, thus, the Congress is not promoting any religion, but specifically Christianity, as well as indirectly promoting the Bible's use in schools.

Here, is what the Congress wrote:

Honble James Duane, Esq. Chairman, and the other Honble Gentlemen of the Committee of Congress on
Mr. Aitken's Memorial."

Whereupon,

RESOLVED,

THAT the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied from the above report of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this Recommendation in the manner he shall think proper. [italics mine]

CHA. THOMSON, Sec'ry.

Yet, Evangelical Christians buy-in to Rodda's revisionism. Could you imagine today's Congress forming a committee to check spelling for a Bible translation? That is what Bible Societies do! Remember, unless specifically enumerated, religion always refers to Christianity. Was Congress referring to Buddhism to Christians?

Also, besides at home, "progression of the arts" was done at Schools. Reading, writing, literature, architecture, painting, music, etc. Bible reading was not taken out of schools until 1963. Can the Congress not approve the Bible for schools, when the Arts are practiced at schools? Maybe someone could give their idea of "progress of arts?"

Glenn Becks Claims The God Of The Declaration Is Not Jesus Christ

Glenn Beck, who, quite often has Evangelical David Barton on his program, most likely believes Mormonism is Christianity. Despite how blasphemous that association is, Beck obviously rejects Jesus Christ as the God of the Declaration of Independence. Here, Beck promotes the same distortion regarding our Founding as anyone on the secular left:

"It's not religion..to make sure it wasn't the Christian God, or Jesus, or Moses, or anybody else. It was nature's god and nature's law..to make it as broad as you could..it has nothing to do with faith, God, or anything else." 

Beck is just as deceived as the other elites. The God of the DOI is not the universal god of George Bush (There is one mediator between God and men; the man Christ Jesus. I Tim 2:5). Then he makes the arrogant statement, "Look all of this up..please I beg you..know it to be true" It is you, Glenn Beck, who need to look this up. History, and the framers' writings refute what you and secularism believe:

From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American union, and of its constituent states, were associated bodies of civilized men and christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. They were bound by the principles which they themselves had proclaimed in the declaration..They were bound by all the beneficent laws and institutions, which their forefathers had brought with them from their mother country, not as servitudes but as rights..[T]he same Congress which issued the Declaration..recommended to the several states to form civil governments for themselves..The states organized their governments, all in republican forms, all on the principles of the Declaration. The confederation was unanimously accepted by the thirteen states: and treaties of commerce were concluded with France and the Netherlands, in which, for the first time, the same just and magnanimous principles, consigned in the Declaration of Independence, were, so far as they could be applicable to the intercourse between nation and nation, solemnly recognized..In the progress of forty years since the acknowledgment of our Independence, we have gone through many modifications of internal government, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war, with other mighty nations. But never, never for a moment have the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration of this day, been renounced or abandoned.

-John Q. Adams, 6th President of the United States, The Hellhound of Slavery, Founder of our Foreign Policy, Our Greatest Diplomat. An address, delivered at the request of the committee of arrangements for celebrating the anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the occasion of reading The Declaration of Independence.
 
The God (Supreme Being) of the Christians, the Continental Congress declared, was the Redeemer; Jesus Christ, in a clear Calvinist context, with Christ in complete sovereignty of earth history. The Congress clearly proclaim unalienable rights are granted by the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Congress agreed to the following Proclamation:

The goodness of the Supreme Being to all his rational creatures, demands their acknowledgments of gratitude and love; his absolute government of this world dictates, that it is the interest of every nation and people ardently to supplicate his mercy favor and implore his protection.When the lust of dominion or lawless ambition excites arbitrary power to invade the rights, or endeavor to wrench wrest from a people their sacred and unalienable invaluable privileges, and compels them, in defence of the same, to encounter all the horrors and calamities of a bloody and vindictive war; then is that people loudly called upon to fly unto that God for protection..that He would incline the hearts of all men to peace, and fill them with universal charity and benevolence, and that the religion of our Divine Redeemer, with all its benign influences, may cover the earth as the waters cover the seas .

-Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 1782

Our unalienable rights, as mentioned above, is strictly from the Bible:

II. The Rights of the Colonists as Christians..
These may be best understood by reading and carefully studying the institutes of the great Law Giver and Head of the Christian Church, which are to be found clearly written and promulgated in the New Testament

-Samuel Adams, The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting. November 20, 1772.

It is the Christian religion only, that secures unalienable rights; not Deism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedism, et al:

[T]he Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children under a free government ought to be instructed. No truth is more evident than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

-Noah Webster, REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIER; JUDGE; LEGISLATOR; EDUCATOR; “SCHOOLMASTER TO AMERICA” A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary, and Moral Subjects (New York: Webster and Clark, 1843), p. 291, from his “Reply to a Letter of David McClure on the Subject of the Proper Course of Study in the Girard College, Philadelphia. New Haven, October 25, 1836.”

Beck believes as George Bush mistakenly does; that God is the same god in all religions, and not the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. This makes sense, given that Beck is not a Christian, but a Mormon.

"Civil Religion" by Robert N. Bellah

Mr.Bellah is one of the most famous expositors of the Founding and Religion. He invented the term "Civil Religion." However, he is not without his errors with respect to the Founding. Here is one of many:

And yet at the beginning of our history we were that mutually exclusive thing, a Christian Republic. (Samuel Adams even called us a Christian Sparta.) Or were we? Christianity was never our state religion, nor did we have in Rousseau’s strict sense a civil religion, a simple set of religious dogmas to which every citizen must subscribe on pain of exile.

Did not the State Constitutions proclaim Christianity? Was not the penalty for violating the Ten Commandments prison time, and a fine? Bellah claims the Christian Constitutions evaporated by the early 18th century. What kind of revisionism is this? The State Constitutions were Christian the entire 18th century, and into the 19th and 20th centuries:

Even more to the point, the New England colonies in the seventeenth century were Christian republics in a comparable sense. In Massachusetts, for example, only Christians could be citizens, though the church did not control the state and both church and state were governed by their members. Even though the reality of this experiment had evaporated by the early eighteenth century, the memory was still strong in the minds of the founders of the republic.

In spite of his errors above, he does understand James Madison was a Calvinist. Below, Bellah highlights Madison's duty to the sovereignty of God before he can be a member of civil society, illustrating his Calvinism:

In the early republic religion had two vital locations: in the superstructure and in the infrastructure of the new political regime. It is to the superstructural location of religion that the Declaration of Independence points. By superstructural I mean a locus of sovereignty taken to be above the sovereignty of the state. Perhaps the most striking recognition of this superordinate sovereignty comes from the hand of Madison in 1785 during the debate on the bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia: "It such only, as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the general authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign."

Below, Bellah explains who is the God of the Declaration of Independence, and debunking the Deists:

The Declaration of Independence points to the sovereignty of God over the collective political society itself when it refers in its opening lines to "the laws of nature and of nature’s God" that stand above and judge the laws of men. It is often asserted that the God of nature is specifically not the God of the Bible. That raises problems of the relation of natural religion to biblical religion in eighteenth-century thought that I do not want to get into here, but Jefferson goes on to say, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it." We have here a distinctly biblical God who is much more than a first principle of nature, who creates individual human beings and endows them with equality and fundamental rights.

It was Christianity, through Calvin's Republicanism, from the Reformation, that most clearly spurred the American Revolution; by rejecting Divine Right of Kings, etc. yet Bellah appears to ignore or divorce the principles of the Declaration with those of the Constitution, giving the latter a liberal foundation, as though the colonists set aside Divine Law for the French Revolution's Enlightenment rationalism; something he coined "liberal constitutional regime." His theory divorcing the principles of the DOI with the Constitution has been debunked by many, including John Q. Adams:

From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American union, and of its constituent states, were associated bodies of civilized men and christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. They were bound by the principles which they themselves had proclaimed in the declaration..They were bound by all the beneficent laws and institutions, which their forefathers had brought with them from their mother country, not as servitudes but as rights..[T]he same Congress which issued the Declaration..recommended to the several states to form civil governments for themselves; with guarded and cautious deliberation they matured a confederation for the whole Union; and they prepared treaties of commerce, to be offered to the principal maritime nations of the world. All these objects were in a great degree accomplished amid the din of arms, and while every quarter of our country was ransacked by the fury of invasion. The states organized their governments, all in republican forms, all on the principles of the Declaration. The confederation was unanimously accepted by the thirteen states: and treaties of commerce were concluded with France and the Netherlands, in which, for the first time, the same just and magnanimous principles, consigned in the Declaration of Independence, were, so far as they could be applicable to the intercourse between nation and nation, solemnly recognized..In the progress of forty years since the acknowledgment of our Independence, we have gone through many modifications of internal government, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war, with other mighty nations. But never, never for a moment have the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration of this day, been renounced or abandoned.

-Adams, An address, delivered at the request of the committee of arrangements for celebrating the anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the occasion of reading The Declaration of Independence. [bold face mine]

Yet, Bellah says our civil religion is founded on the religion of the Revolution, that wasn't Christianity. Ultimately, Bellah claims our "Civil Religion" was unitarianism:

The God of the civil religion is not only rather "unitarian," he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love. Even though he is somewhat deist in cast, he is by no means simply a watchmaker God. He is actively interested and involved in history, with a special concern for America. Here the analogy has much less to do with natural law than with ancient Israel; the equation of America with Israel in the idea of the "American Israel" is not infrequent.

Bellah considers the civil religion a combination of theories:

The remarkable coherence of the American revolutionary movement and its successful conclusion in the constitution of a new civil order are due in considerable part to the convergence of the Puritan covenant pattern and the Montesquieuan republican pattern. The former was represented above all by New England, the latter by Virginia, but both were widely diffused in the consciousness of the colonial population. Both patterns saw society resting on the deep inner commitment of its members, the former through conversion, the latter through republican virtue..When Jefferson evoked at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence the "laws of nature and of nature’s God" he was able to fuse the ultimate legitimating principles of both traditions. And when in concluding it he wrote, "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," he was not only invoking a republican formula for the establishment of a civil compact but echoing the formula of the Puritan covenant. Only the confluence of these two patterns can help us understand the fusion of passion and reason that, with such consistency, seems to have motivated the major actors in the revolutionary drama.

This blog has clearly refuted unitarianism as the civil religion of the Revolution. A cursory examination of fast and prayer proclamations show the colonists were clearly Trinitarian Christians. What a contradiction to claim the DOI founded on Puritan Covenant Theology, and the same time, claim He is a unitarian God. The Puritans were Trinitarian. Should not these principles be consistent with one another? How could the Puritans claim their God was unitarian?

Did The Founding Fathers Execute Homosexuals?

What a paradox it would be if the framers executed homosexuals, given that today, the people want to legalize it. I have no doubt our people would persecute Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and the other framers for their views on homosexual sin. The answer is yes, the framers did execute at least one person for homosexuality. It was done in Pennsylvania, December, 1785. Guess who was President of Pennsylvania? Benjamin Franklin. Although Franklin wasn't present that day, his VP, Charles Biddell and Founding Father Peter Muhlenburg were there, and offered no pardon.

This narrative must start at the definition of terms; buggery, sodomy, and rape. All three terms were used in 18th century America. All three are defined by Webster's 1828, yet, buggery and sodomy were interchangable terms, and buggery included bestiality. Yet Sodomy and Buggery clearly referred to man on man, while rape referred to a woman.

Regarding this subject, expert John Murrin indicates Bestiality was basically non-existent due to the horror of the crime. Bestiality was synonimous to witchcraft, especially among women. Prior to the Revolution, no one was executed for bestiality in New England, mainly from lack of evidence. Bestiality is clearly from the 17th century, and not part of the founding milieu.

The Founding Fathers did execute one man for bestiality; Connecticut hanged Gideon Washburn the third friday, in January, 1800.

As to States, the Framers in Virginia, kept the Death Penalty for Buggery:

That if any do commit the detestable and abominable vice of Buggery, with man or beast, he or she so offending, shall be adjudged a felon, and shall suffer death, in the case of felony, without the benefit of Clergy.

-A Collection of All Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia 1802, (Richmond:Pleasance and Price, 1803), page 179, ch. C [50], enacted Dec. 10, 1792.

The other states emphasized the Biblical laws contained in the Common Law of England:

The first reported sodomy case in Maryland also was the first known reported case in the United States. In 1810, the Court of Appeals decided Davis v. State. By a vote of 4-1, the Court upheld an indictment that charged that Davis, "not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, on &c. with forms and arms at, &c. in and upon one W C, a youth of the age of 19 years, in the peace of God, and the state of Maryland, then and there being, did make an assault, and him the said W C, then and there did beat, would, and ill-treat, with an intent that most horrid and detestable crime (among christians not to be named,) called Sodomy, with him the said W C, and against the order of nature, then and there feloniously, wickedly and devilishly, to commit and do, to the great displeasure of Almighty God, contrary to the act of assembly in such case made and provided, and against the peace, government, and dignity of the state." [Emphasis the Court’s].

The word Buggery was eventually forgotten, "sodomy" took its place, evidence that the issue of buggery in the 18th century, unless specifically enumerated, was homosexuality. Furthermore, besides Gideon Washburn, there were no bestiality crimes in the founding generation, thus the execution of Joseph Ross of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, had to be for homosexuality, approved by Benamin Franklin. The history of buggery sentences show the other partner was also punished; usually whipped.

Cracking the American Civil Religion

I did it in a comment at FirstThings.com here. I wrote:

"Joseph,

Our civil religion may be watered-down Christianity, but it wasn’t in 1790. Liberal elite Robert N. Bellah of Berkeley, claims Puritanism is our “Civil Religion” which is Trinitarianism.

The vast majority of Founding Fathers, including James Madison, were Trinitarian, who made it clear Christianity was the only true religion for salvation:

"Because the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation..Because the policy of the Bill is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity. The first wish of those who enjoy this precious gift ought to be that it may be imparted to the whole race of mankind. Compare the number of those who have as yet received it with the number still remaining under the dominion of false Religions; and how small is the former! Does the policy of the Bill tend to lessen the disproportion? No; it at once discourages those who are strangers to the light of revelation from coming into the Region of it; and countenances by example the nations who continue in darkness, in shutting out those who might convey it to them."

-Memorial and Remonstrance, June 20, 1785.

Madison made it very clear to succeeding generations, salvation was only in faith in Christ. He believed other religions had some validity for other aspects of life, as he implied in 1833, but not for salvation. JM affirmed the Trinity.

The Congress used Trinitarian language:

"The goodness of the Supreme Being to all his rational creatures, demands their acknowledgments of gratitude and love; his absolute government of this world dictates, that it is the interest of every nation and people ardently to supplicate his mercy favor and implore his protection.When the lust of dominion or lawless ambition excites arbitrary power to invade the rights, or endeavor to wrench wrest from a people their sacred and unalienable invaluable privileges, and compels them, in defence of the same, to encounter all the horrors and calamities of a bloody and vindictive war; then is that people loudly called upon to fly unto that God for protection..that He would incline the hearts of all men to peace, and fill them with universal charity and benevolence, and that the religion of our Divine Redeemer, with all its benign influences, may cover the earth as the waters cover the seas."

-Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 TUESDAY, MARCH 19, 1782

Is Jesus Christ In the Declaration of Independence?

Liberal secularists, and nearly every historian alive, would never, for a minute, claim Jesus Christ is in the Declaration of Independence. The vast majority of Founding Fathers, and citizens of the new nation, would disagree with that assertion. I came across a quote from John Quincy Adams explaining who our God is. It is not how secularists would like it, but, written in a way citizens of the 18th century understood; in classical terms. The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, written in the Declaration of Independence, is the contraction for, The Laws of Nature and The Law's of Nature's God. Adams, who, was one of the most important Founding Fathers, whom, George Washington called, "our best diplomat" clarify's who this God is, previously enumerated by the framers. However, in this quote, Speaking of the DOI, Adams shortens the exact phrase. LONANG is not a repetition of the same thing:

That committee reported on the twelfth of July, eight days after the Declaration of Independence had been issued..There was thus no congeniality of principle between the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. The foundation of the former was a superintending Providence-the rights of man, and the constituent revolutionary power of the people. That of the latter was the sovereignty of organized power, and the independence of the separate or dis-united States. The fabric of the Declaration and that of the Confederation were each consistent with its own foundation, but they could not form one consistent, symmetrical edifice. They were the productions of different minds and of adverse passions; one, ascending for the foundation of human government to the laws of nature and of God...

-The Jubilee of the Constitution, delivered at New York, April 30, 1839, before the New York Historical Society. [bold face mine]

Adams differentiates LONANG; one is Natural Law, God's Law in the heart of man, then God Himself. Who did the vast majority of Colonists believe was God? Jesus Christ:

Contrary to publicized orthodox opinion, the great majority of Jeffersonians were in fact Trinitarian Protestants.

-Stephen E. Berk, Calvinism Versus Democracy. Anchron Books, 1974, p.150

Unitarians were limited to the Boston area:

Unitarians, who are principally confined to Boston and its vicinity.

-Boston Patriot, May 13, 1815. [A Jeffersonian publication in a Federalist Stronghold, predisposed against the politics of Unitarians]

Pelagianism was grounded by Timothy Dwight and the New Divinity Calvinists:

By the 1830's, evangelicals had successfully contained Unitarianism within the Boston area and the West had become the new battleground for Orthodoxy.

-Stephen E. Berk, Calvinism Versus Democracy. Anchron Books, 1974, p. 199.

Adams goes so far as to affirm what the other Founding Fathers understood and David Barton promotes; that the principles in the Declaration are carried out in the Constitution, and were to be carried out in the Articles of Confederation, but failed. The DOI is Organic Law of this Republic, and legal foundation for any Constitution:

Its incurable disease [Articles of Confederation] was an apostasy from the principles of the Declaration of Independence..The Constitution [Articles] of the United States was the work of this Convention. But in its construction the Convention immediately perceived that they must retrace their steps, and fall back from a league of friendship between sovereign States to the constituent sovereignty of the people; from power to right--from the irresponsible despotism of State sovereignty to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence..The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are parts of one consistent whole, founded upon one and the same theory of government.

-The Jubilee of the Constitution

Adams was a staunch conservative among conservatives, who did not flinch to confront the "so called" philosophers of the day. Now he speaks to secularists of today. "There are yet, even at this day, many speculative objections to this theory. Even in our own country there are still philosophers who deny the principles asserted in the Declaration, as self-evident truths."

He was excellent at distinguishing "State sovereignty against the constituent sovereignty of the people." He made other statements affirming we were founded a Christian Nation, that Puritanism interspersed throughout the Colonies, and the Declaration founded on the Gospel, and the Laws of Nature's God. Adams also reiterates that of his cousin Samuel Adams; that the Articles of Confederation ratified the Declaration of Independence:

From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American union, and of its constituent states, were associated bodies of civilized men and christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct. They were bound by the principles which they themselves had proclaimed in the declaration..They were bound by all the beneficent laws and institutions, which their forefathers had brought with them from their mother country, not as servitudes but as rights..[T]he same Congress which issued the Declaration..recommended to the several states to form civil governments for themselves; with guarded and cautious deliberation they matured a confederation for the whole Union; and they prepared treaties of commerce, to be offered to the principal maritime nations of the world. All these objects were in a great degree accomplished amid the din of arms, and while every quarter of our country was ransacked by the fury of invasion. The states organized their governments, all in republican forms, all on the principles of the Declaration. The confederation was unanimously accepted by the thirteen states: and treaties of commerce were concluded with France and the Netherlands, in which, for the first time, the same just and magnanimous principles, consigned in the Declaration of Independence, were, so far as they could be applicable to the intercourse between nation and nation, solemnly recognized..In the progress of forty years since the acknowledgment of our Independence, we have gone through many modifications of internal government, and through all the vicissitudes of peace and war, with other mighty nations. But never, never for a moment have the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration of this day, been renounced or abandoned.

-Adams, An address, delivered at the request of the committee of arrangements for celebrating the anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington on the Fourth of July 1821 upon the occasion of reading The Declaration of Independence. [bold face mine]

App Store Pulls Manhattan Declaration

Apple's iTunes App Store has removed a program for the Manhattan Declaration after critics decried the declaration as "anti-gay" and "anti-woman."

Observers have long puzzled over Apple's criteria for accepting and rejecting apps; in fact many people accused Apple of a double standard when they rejected a number of apps designed specifically for the gay community. The company said they rejected the apps for objectionable content, though many say that the cited content was no worse than that available in apps the company has accepted (like the one promoting the recent movie Bruno).

Many Christians are decrying the union of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals for the Manhattan Declaration. Despite the difference in theology, I believe there is strength in numbers, as this is an evangelical document.