2 John Adams, Works of John Adams, vol. 3.
3 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query 17.
4 The Declaration of Rights of the Stamp Act Congress, October 19, 1765, in Bruce Frohnen, The American Republic: Primary Sources, ed. Bruce Frohnen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).
5 See Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, 97–100.
6 Ibid., 79–80.
7 For instance, Gary DeMar has argued that the American “nation begins not in 1776, but more than one hundred fifty years earlier.” Gary DeMar, America’s Christian Heritage (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), 13. See also DeMar, God and Government: A Biblical and Historical Study, vol. 1 (1982; Atlanta: American Vision Press, 2001), 128 (citing prayer at Continental Congress), 121 (“this lesson will present historical documentation establishing the thesis that America was founded as a Christian nation. Our study will begin with the coming of the Pilgrims in 1620 and continue through”); Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution, ch. 1; D. James Kennedy, Jerry Newcombe, What If America Were a Christian Nation Again? , 12–36, 207–8; Kirk Cameron, speech at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, September 14, 2012, http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/308198-1 around 39:15–40:40.
8 See Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983).
9 John Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 12, 1812, in Old Family Letters: Copied from the Originals for Alexander Biddle, series A, ed. Alexander Biddle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1892), 392–93.
10 John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 16, 1774, in Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive (Massachusetts Historical Society), http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17740916ja. Original manuscript from the Adams Family Papers, Mass. Historical Soc. Source of transcription: ed. L. H. Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1963).
11 Christopher C. Lund, “The Congressional Chaplaincies,” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 17, no. 4 (2009): 1171. See also Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 57 (“Myles Cooper was not the only Anglican clergyman in New York to rail against the Continental Congress. He formed part of a Loyalist literary clique that included Charles Inglis, later rector of Trinity Church, and Samuel Seabury, the Anglican rector of the town of Westchester.”)
12 John Adams’s September 10, 1774, diary entry in Works of John Adams, vol. 2. 377–78.
13 The prayer motion was so unimportant that the Constitutional Convention did not even bring it to a vote; “after several unsuccessful attempts for silently postponing the matter by adjourning,” it failed. Franklin himself wrote that “the [Constitutional] Convention, except three or four persons, thought Prayers unnecessary.” The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol 1., ed. Max Farrand, (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1911), 452 n.15.
14 John Adams to Abigail Adams, September 16, 1774 (emph. added), FO-NA.
15 John Adams to Abigail Adams, October 25, 1777, FO-NA.
16 Edward Duffield Neill, “Rev. Jacob Duché, the First Chaplain of Congress,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 2, no. 1 (1878): 58–73, at 69, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084327.
17 Rev. Mr. Jacob Duché to General Washington, October 8, 1777, held by the LOC, see http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.04001300.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Washington to John Hancock, October 16, 1777, FO-NA.
21 Duché to Washington, October 8, 1777.
22 Journal of the Continental Congress, vol. 2, 1775, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington, DC: LOC, 1904–37): 13 records the next prayer on May 11, 1775. The Articles of Confederation Congress heard sporadic prayers between 1781 and 1789.
23 Brief for the Freedom From Religion Foundation as amicus curiae supporting respondents. Town of Greece v. Galloway, 572 U.S. 565 (2014) (No. 12-696).
24 Marsh, 463 U.S. at 791 n.12
25 Elizabeth Fleet, “Madison’s ‘Detached Memoranda,’” William & Mary Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1946): 534.
26 Marsh, 463 U.S. at 787 n.8.
27 Act of September 22, 1789, ch. 17, 1 Stat. 70.
28 Marsh, 791.
29 Stokes, Church and State in the United States, vol. 1, 457.
30 Ibid.
31 Madison to Livingston, July 10, 1822.
32 Annals of Congress 950, Sept. 25, 1789.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., “precedents from the late [Continental] Congress.”
35 See Andrew L. Seidel, “Wasteful Spending: Congress Pays Clergy $66,000/Hour to Pray,” Freethought Now!, April 16, 2016, at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/wasteful-spending-congress-pays-clergy-66000hour-to-pray/. As of this writing, Congress spends about $800,000 per year on five staffers and two chaplains. The chaplains’ sole job under the House and Senate rules is to say the opening prayer; each chaplain’s salary is more than $150,000 per year for those prayers. Others at this level on the federal pay schedule include the CFOs of NASA and the EPA, and the CIOs of almost every major federal department and agency. In the House, that prayer duty is farmed out to volunteer guest chaplains 40 percent of the time. The first Congress gave the chaplains $500/year as a salary (about $14,000/year today). Act of September 22, 1789, ch. 17, 1 Stat. 70. § 4.
36 Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin, 2016), 5–6.
37 See, generally, Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, 64; Kennedy, Newcombe, What if America Were a Christian Nation Again?, 6–11; Dale Summitt, “The United States of America Was Founded As, and Historically Has Been, a Christian Nation,” EagleRising.com, January 27, 2015, (since removed); Leon G. Stevens, One Nation under God: A Factual History of America’s Religious Heritage (New York: Morgan James, 2013), xv (“The Puritans and Pilgrims came to the New World to escape religious persecution in Europe to found a land that they thought could be the new Garden of Eden [and] build a ‘new Jerusalem.’ Their legacy was one of religious freedom for all…. For the past forty-five years our country has taken away the very foundation upon which our country was built. When I heard our national leaders state ‘we are not a Christian nation,’ I was determined to set the story straight”).
38 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query 17.
39 Madison to Jasper Adams, September 1833 in Daniel L. Dreisbach, Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate, 117–21 (Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996).
40 William Bradford, History of Plimouth Plantation (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1898; repr. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2010), 15. According to Bradford, “seeing them selves thus molested, and that ther was no hope of their continuance ther, by a joynte consente they resolved to goe into the Low Countries, wher they heard was freedome of Religion for all men.”
41 Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. and ed. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), § 133, 165.
42 Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 95.
43 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 559.
44 John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of Their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston: S. Kneeland & T. Green, 1736), 8, electronic text ed. Paul Royster, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=etas.
45 Ibid., 9.
46 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, in Encyclopædia Britannica online (2014), http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/374916/Pedro-Menendez-de-Aviles.
47 Pope Pius V to Menéndez de Avilés, on “The Expulsion of the French Colonists, in 1565, from Florida, on His Return to Spain” in Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida… 2nd ser., ed. B. F. French (New York: Albert Mason, 1975), 222–23.
48 Shorto, Island at the Center of the World, 45–46.
49 John Adams, “Memorial to Their High
Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries,” Leyden, April 19, 1781, in Works of John Adams, vol. 7, 400.
50 Ibid., 3.
51 Shorto, Island at the Center of the World, 107.
52 Ibid., 276–77, citing Thomas Dongan, Report to the Committee of Trade & Plantations (London) on the Province of New York, February 22, 1687, https://perma.cc/WE3C-7K8N.
53 J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, letter 3, repr., (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904), 54, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/crev/letter03.html.
54 Ibid., 64.
55 Religion and Public Life in the Middle Atlantic Region: The Fount of Diversity, ed. Randall Herbert Balmer and Mark Silk (Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2006), 74.
56 Shorto, Island at the Center of the World, 273.
57 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Founders’ Constitution online, vol. 5, Amendment I (Religion), doc. 57, quoting The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, ed. William M. Van der Weyde, Patriots’ ed. (New Rochelle, NY: Thomas Paine National Historical Assoc., 1925).
58 Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790, in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 6, July 1, 1790 – November 30, 1790, ed. Mark A. Mastromarino (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996), 284–86.
59 Shorto, Island at the Center of the World, 85.
60 Ibid., 274.
61 Ibid., 275.
62 Ibid., citing Urian Oakes, in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 33.
63 Ibid. See also Jeremiah Chaplin, Samuel Dunster, and Edward Swift Dunster, Life of Henry Dunster: First President of Harvard College (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872), 185.
64 This is how Thomas Shepard Jr., a Puritan preacher and contemporary of Cotton, characterized John Cotton’s sentiments in The Bloudy Tenent Washed in his own work, Eye-Salve. See Alan Heimert, The Puritans in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 258.
65 Christian nationalist David Lane uses this language to argue forbible readings and school-organized prayer back in public schools: “America was a Christian nation. The Mayflower Compact declared…” Lane, “The Plan to Put Bible, Prayer Back into Schools,” WND.com, December 19, 2012, https://perma.cc/N8PD-SPEX.
66 Mayflower Compact, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mayflower.asp.
67 Shorto, Island at the Center of the World, 159. See also Documents Relating to New Netherland, 1624–1626, vol. 1, trans. A. J. F. Van Laer, (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, 1924), 305. See also Adrian van der Donck, Remonstrance of New Netherland (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), 37.
68 See Juliet Haines Mofford, The Devil Made Me Do It!: Crime and Punishment in Early New England (Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2011).
69 Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance,” par. 11.
70 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query 17.
71 Hamilton (as Publius), Federalist, no. 1.
72 Ibid.
73
74
75 Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, in The Inaugural Addresses of President Thomas Jefferson, 1801 and 1805, ed. Noble E. Cunningham (Colombia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2001), 4.
PART II: UNITED STATES V. THE BIBLE
1 Paine to Mr. Erskine, in The Age of Reason, in Paine’s Complete Works (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1878), 3:179.
2 John Adams, letter to Thomas Brand Hollis, April 5, 1788, FO-NA.
Chapter 6 • Biblical Influence
3 Jefferson to William Short, Monticello, April 13, 1820; original at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib023789.
4 Paine, The Age of Reason, in The Complete Religious and Theological Works of Thomas Paine, vol. 1 (New York: Peter Eckler, 1922), footnote at 178.
5 William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Act 5, Scene 6; Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3.
6 Mark Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776–1865,” 39–58, in The Bible in America, ed. Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 43.
7 Abraham Lincoln, “A House Divided Speech,” Springfield, IL, June 16, 1858, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953), 461–69.
8 Henry Herndon, The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Paul M. Angle (1888; New York: World Publishing, 1965), 325. Lincoln read the address to his friend and law partner, Henry Herndon, who retells the story and confirms that Lincoln’s biblical allusions were less a product of piety than a desire to communicate. See Mark 3:25, Matt. 12:25, Luke 11:17.
9 John Langdon Kaine, Lincoln as a Boy Knew Him (New York: Century, 1913), 5; see also Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Don Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996) 273.
10 Michael Burlingame, At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings, (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2006), 137.
11 Stewart, Nature’s God, 47.
12 US Religious Knowledge Survey, Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, September 28, 2010, https://perma.cc/YV5Y-AT7M, finding that atheists and agnostics outscore every other group on religious knowledge. See also Barna Group survey, “The Books Americans are Reading” (2013) at https://perma.cc/99DX-RPYL showing that only 1 in 5 Americans claim to have read the bible start to finish and that about 40 percent of Christians have not. This number may be skewed heavily by a self-reporting bias.
13 Isaac Asimov was correct when he observed that, “properly read, [the Bible] is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” Janet Asimov, Notes for a Memoir: On Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2006), 58.
14 Herndon, History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 325.
15 David Barton remarks on his WallBuilders Live radio program on May 4, 2017. See Kyle Mantyla, “David Barton: There is a ‘One-to-One Correlation’ Between Clauses in the Constitution and the Language in the Bible,” Right Wing Watch online, May 4, 2017, https://perma.cc/Y2VS-R4NR
16 See, e.g., David Barton, The Myth of Separation (Aledo, TX: WallBuilder Press, 1989), 196; William Federer, America’s God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations (St. Louis, MO: Amerisearch, 2000), 453; William Graves, “Evolution, the Supreme Court, and the Destruction of Constitutional Jurisprudence,” Regent Univ. Law Rev 13 (Spring 2001): 513, n. 144.
17 The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version, 4th ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), 966.
18 Kurland and Lerner put it best: “Without separation of persons there cannot be a meaningful separation of powers.” The Founders’ Constitution, vol. 1, Major Themes, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 312.
19 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query 13 (1784), in Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4, 20.
20 Madison, Federalist, no. 47.
21 See Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Book 11.
22 Madison, Federalist, no. 47.
23 Thomas Jefferson to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, July 30, 1816, FO-NA. See also Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels: The Philosophy of Jesus and The Life and Morals of Jesus, ed. Dickinson W. Adams (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 374–75 at 375.
24 For Jefferson’s thoughts on the trinity, see Ibid. For John Adams’s thoughts on the trinity, see John Adams to Jefferson, September 14, 1813, FO-NA. For those advancing the argument that the trinity is the source of the separation of powers, see, e.g., Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011); Nadirsyah Hosen and Richard Mohr, Law and Religion in Public Life: The Contemporary Debate (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 45–49; and Mark Riffle, The Miracle of Independence, 237–38 (self-published, Xulon Pres
s, 2009).
25 Franklin to the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787, in Records of the Federal Convention, vol. 2, ed. Farrand, 641–43, at 643.
26 John Adams to Richard Price April 19, 1790, in Works of John Adams, vol. 9, 564.
27 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (London: W. Lewis, 1711), 30.
28 2 Tim. 3:16. See also Rev. 22:19.
29 John Wesley, sermon, “The Means of Grace,” 1872, https://perma.cc/M5P6-WU4Y.
30 More than 200 evangelical Christian leaders, including Christian broadcaster and Coral Ridge Ministries founder D. James Kennedy, signed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) recognizing “the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture” and affirming its inerrancy. See https://perma.cc/Y3ZM-RAPH.
31 Frank Newport, “One-Third of Americans Believe the Bible Is Literally True,” Gallup (May 25, 2007), http://www.gallup.com/poll/27682/onethird-americans-believe-bible-literally-true.aspx; Jeffrey M. Jones, “In U.S., 3 in 10 Say They Take the Bible Literally,” Gallup, July 8, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/148427/say-bible-literally.aspx.
32 Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (1984): 189–97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1961257.
33 Dr. James Hanley, a political science professor at Adrian College and a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Dr. Hanley did some quick math with Lutz’s numbers. His work, “How Much Did the Founders Quote the Bible?,” July 9, 2008, on the Uncommon Liberty blog, https://perma.cc/SK5V-Y2T4, was important to understanding the issues and flaws with Lutz’s study. Hanley explains that “the non-sermon publications contained less than 1 citation each, on average. In fact because the mean number of citations per non-sermon is less than .5, the likelihood of a non-sermon political publication from the founding era containing a biblical citation is not even random! The political writings were more likely than not to have no biblical references at all.”
The Founding Myth Page 38