Those Atheist Founding Fathers
The Nation engages in yet another flight of fancy, this time claiming that the United States was founded not on Christian principles, but on Enlightenment ones:
Well, I don't think it would be unfair.
There's been quite a bit of scholarship on the religious beliefs of the Founders, and as complicated and knotty as they get, one cannot claim with a straight face that these men were atheists or agnostics of Voltaire's stripe.
I wish we could claim that the men who sat in the Constitutional Convention were all free-market evangelicals who favored a strong national defense and the flat tax, but such a formulation simply would not comport with 18th-century society.
Neither would the notion of these men as secular humanists and early proponents of the welfare state.
The author should know better, and I suspect she does.
After all, the revolutions her magazine draws its inspiration from occurred in France and Russia, not (thank God) America.
Why, one wonders, does Allen even bother to raise this argument? Why now, after the Left has so manifestly marginalized itself on moral and religious issues? For one thing, like most everything The Nation publishes, her article accuses President Bush of lying — indeed, of lying on an Orwellian scale. But it's remarkable how uninterested she is in proving the point. She offers not one shred of evidence of the president's actually saying what she accuses him of saying. Not one quote. And even if she were to find some example of Bush's asserting that the United States was founded on Christian and not Enlightenment principles, she would have to provide evidence that Bush himself disbelieved the statement. Otherwise Bush wouldn't be lying, he would merely be expressing his historical judgment. That judgment may or may not be wrong, but that possibility doesn't make it a lie. Lying means saying something other than what you yourself think. It means intentional deceit.
Honest mistakes are not lies. Allen makes plenty of mistakes herself, but it would be unfair to call her a liar.
Well, I don't think it would be unfair.
There's been quite a bit of scholarship on the religious beliefs of the Founders, and as complicated and knotty as they get, one cannot claim with a straight face that these men were atheists or agnostics of Voltaire's stripe.
I wish we could claim that the men who sat in the Constitutional Convention were all free-market evangelicals who favored a strong national defense and the flat tax, but such a formulation simply would not comport with 18th-century society.
Neither would the notion of these men as secular humanists and early proponents of the welfare state.
The author should know better, and I suspect she does.
After all, the revolutions her magazine draws its inspiration from occurred in France and Russia, not (thank God) America.
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