Throughout
our lives we have heard the story of why the Founding Fathers came to America. The
story we were told was that the Founding Fathers came here because of religious
persecution in England. They escaped and formed this nation to have ‘Freedom of
Religion.’ We are currently in a very big religion push in politics so there is
a lot of mention that America was established as ‘Christian Nation.’ Which
story is true and which one is false? Or perhaps they are both false? Was the
government formed as a secular nation like the stories we were told in school;
was America formed as a Theocracy like the ‘Religious Right’ are saying; or is
the truth somewhere in the middle? Have we become more religious or less since
the colonial times?
We
have this image formed in our head of America being established on secularism
but there were many religious groups, particularly the Puritans, who were a
part of the formation of the 13 original colonies. These Puritans were
responsible for a great amount of persecution.
The
Puritan Beliefs are: Humans are born sinful since Adam’s fall; God only saves a
select few; Jesus died for the chosen ones, not for everyone; God’s grace is
freely given, cannot be earned or denied; and those elected by God have full
power to interpret the will of God (Morison, 1972). The last belief is the most
substantial. Due to the religious experience, most Puritans believe that they
are one of the chosen and, in turn, believe they have to ability to interpret
the Bible. This led to their acts of persecution. They wanted everyone to
worship their way and because they were the dominating force in the colonies,
they had the power to punish nonconformists with fines, banishment,
imprisonment, and torture.
Mary
Dyer was an English-born immigrant who came to Massachusetts in 1635. Mary
became a Quaker and quickly became the target for persecution. Quakers were
banished from Massachusetts, so she moved to Rhode Island after threats of
death. Mary did not heed these warnings, however and returned to Massachusetts
periodically. On June 1, she was walked out of her prison house towards a tree
to be hanged. She had been here before. Seven months earlier, she had been
caught and was facing execution. She was walked to that tree in the same
fashion but that time she was with two fellow compatriots. Those two young men
were strung up to that tree and murdered. When it was her turn, things were
different. They only went through the ordeal as a charade—an attempt to get her
to repent. They wanted her to repent, be set free, and then be an example for
the other Quakers. However, that was not the case – she did not repent. Luckily, they realized how bad it would look
if the news of them killing a mother reached England and she was let go. On
that June day, seven months later, she was not so lucky. Despite pleads by
Mary’s husband, she was hanged. Mary was murder for simply being a Quaker.
Another
example of these despicable acts was the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem witch
trials were a series of hearings, as well as prosecutions, of people accused of
witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. In that time, the
belief in the supernatural was common. Witchcraft had become synonymous with
the devil, demons, and evil spirits. In fact, it was expected for people to
believe in evil spirits. 17th century philosopher and writer Joseph
Glanvill said, “If they doubted
the reality of spirits, they not only denied demons, but also the almighty God”
(Glanvill, 1676, p. 2). In Salem, it was believed that good came from God and
any misfortunes were the work of the devil. Infant deaths, illness, and crop
failures were blamed on the evil spirits and were attributed to witchcraft. Because
you cannot prove a negative, once an accusation of witchcraft was placed upon
someone, it stuck. Those who maintained their innocence were executed and those
who confessed to be witches were not executed. Over 200 were accused and not
one was cleared (Drake, 1968).
Their original intent was not to be so violent. They set
out to form what Plato called the Good
City or, as John Winthrop called it, the City upon a Hill. In 1630 while
aboard the Arbella John Winthrop said:
Now
the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to
follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with
our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We
must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge
ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must
uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and
liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own;
rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together; always having
before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the
same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The
Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and
will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more
of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted
with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be
able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and
glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it
like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city
upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal
falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to
withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word
through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the
ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of
many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses
upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going. And to
shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of
the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now
set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded
this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways
and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles
of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord
our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts
shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship
other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us
this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this
vast sea to possess it. Therefore let us choose life that we and our seed may
live, by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our
prosperity.
Their
goals were noble; their results were not.
The
Jamestown settlement was filled with a different type of people. Unlike the
Puritans, they did not set out to for the purity of their settlement. These
particular immigrants came to America for economic reasons. To these early
Virginians, they were less interested in the intangibles and much more
interested in material wealth. These secularists were not anti-religion; they
were just predisposed with things they valued more. This is very similar to the
people of today. There is a small amount of extremely religious people that hold
God and religion above everything else and have the Bible play a role in their
everyday decisions. The majority of people, however, are more concerned with
the tangibles – the things that help them meet their everyday human needs (Ahlstrom,
2004).
Because
the church was not their primary concern, they were less forceful when it came
to conversion than the Puritans. They were more concerned with survival and
prosperity than the church, so they were more willing to accept those that
could be deemed as outsiders. They recruited Presbyterians and other German and
Swiss Protestants to move to Virginia. These newly moved settlers could be used
as a form of protection against the Native Americans and the French. If an
attack occurred, they knew they could be trusted to alert the rest of the
English settlements. Allowing people from different churches was a small price
to pay in order to have a little extra security (Olmstead, 1960).
Ironically,
the Puritans were the ones who sought out to form The City Upon the Hill, but
the secularists were the ones who brought this idea to fruition. They were able
to look past differences and “delighted in each other; made
others’ conditions their own; rejoiced together, mourned together, labored and
suffered together, always having before their eyes their commission and
community in the work, as members of the same body” (Winthrop, 1630).
If we jump ahead to 1750, “there
were about 1,300 churches (chapels, meeting house, and parish buildings) in the
colonies, or about one church per 800 of population” (Nellis, 2007, p. 33). Even
if all the churches were completely full every Sunday, this still shows that
the majority of people no longer attended church regularly. Numerous Founding
Fathers have been quoted declaring the secularist views:
Ben
Franklin said, “In the affairs of the world, men are saved not by faith, but by the
lack of it.” Thomas Jefferson said, “There is not one redeeming
feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world
fools, and the other half hypocrites.” John Adams said, “This would be
the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.” Thomas Paine
said, “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the
Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant
Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. Each of
those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve
them all;” George Washington said, “Religious controversies are always
productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring
from any other cause. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind,
those which are caused by the difference of sentiments in religion appear to be
the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be depreciated. I was in
hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present
age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far
that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch
as to endanger the peace of society.” Abraham Lincoln said, “The Bible
is not my book, nor Christianity my profession.” James Madison
said, “Religious bondage shackles and
debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise” (Sobel, 2011).
These are just a few of many
quotes by our founders and they paint a very clear picture of a secularist view
of the country they envisioned.
If we fast forward again to 1789, we
can skim through the proposed Bill of Rights to see again that secularism was
the dominating view of that time. The First Amendment insures that never again
will the United States be a theocracy by printing the words “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof” (Bill of Rights, Amendment I). In fact, throughout the whole
Constitution, the only mention of God or religion is the forbiddances of
religious tests for public office and the establishment of religion.
If we jump ahead yet again to today,
we can analyze just how religious we are to get a clearer picture of the 18th
century. Although it is difficult to be precise, Hartford Institute for
Religious Research estimates that there are about 350 thousand religious
congregations in the United States (Hartford Institute). There are about 314
million citizens in the US which calculates to about 900 people per church.
That is very similar to the church/population ratio of the late 18th
century. According to the National Congregations Study, the amount of weekly
worshipers is about 56 million people, or 17.8% of the population. This more
closely resembles Jamestown settlement secularists, as opposed to the Puritan
settlements. The majority of US citizens label themselves as religious while
only 17.8% of the entire population lists their religion as their top priority.
Like Jamestown, today’s America is more concerned with fulfilling their needs and
less concerned with religion.
Was the government formed as a
secular nation like we were told in school, or was America formed as a Theocracy?
The evidence shows that both sides are correct. There were the Theocrats and
the Secularists. Both played a positive and negative role in American history.
The evidence also shows however, that what started more as a Theocracy shifted
towards being more secular; it was at that time that the United States was
formed. History is said to repeat itself and it is repeating again. We shifted
from religious to secular over the course of the 17th and 18th
centuries and we are going through a similar shift now. We are in a scientific
push and science is answering the questions that were once declared as God. The
majority of the world is becoming radically less religious and America is
slowly following. We will hit a point in the near future where religion will
lose the last strand of the rope it has tied around our government --
secularism will rise in its place.
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