Rowe Fisks Another Bad Anti-Separation Article

Jon Rowe has a new post hammering yet another badly reasoned article against church/state separation. The article in question is written by Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. As is very common for such articles, it includes a number of quotes that have been falsely attributed to the founding fathers. Such quotes are passed around among the religious right like fruitcakes at Christmas, and most of them simply do not exist. Of the four quotations he has in his article, 3 are completely fictitious, but traced to William Fedderer and, more recently, to David Barton.

Barton is the founder of Wallbuilders, a religious right group that pushes the Christian Nation meme around the country. He's also the deputy chairman of the Texas Republican party and was hired by the Republican National Committee as a campaign consultant to work on behalf of the Bush campaign in reaching out to evangelical ministers. He is also the primary modern source for a long list of such fraudulent quotations, as his books and videos have been widely distributed among the religious right and in churches nationwide. When he was confronted by scholars who showed him that they were frauds, he put out a sheet of "questionable quotes" and admitted that they could not be found in the writings of the men they were attributed to. But the damage had already been done, a fact easily shown by how often they show up to this day despite his admission. Millions and millions of people got the fake quotes; only a small percentage of them have seen the retraction. Hence, they continue to show up on a daily basis in op-ed pieces and letters to the editor and in articles like the one Rowe demolishes.

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Thanks. Sandefur has a good post on Jefferson. That Jefferson quote is almost certainly false. However, I didn't see it on the "debunked" list in my sources that refute David Barton. I think a lot of Barton's phony quotes he got from that Federer book.

Anyone arguing for that side, would do well to throw that book in the trash.

It's amazing how early on and still today, fundamentalists just couldn't deal with the fact that just about all of the important founders, with a prominent exception here and there (John Witherspoon) weren't orthodox Christians, so they had to rewrite history.

A lot of the fradulence about Washington came from a fundamentalist revisionist named, I do believe Mason Weems.

Thanks. Sandefur has a good post on Jefferson. That Jefferson quote is almost certainly false. However, I didn't see it on the "debunked" list in my sources that refute David Barton. I think a lot of Barton's phony quotes he got from that Federer book.
That's the first I've ever seen that Jefferson quote. Like you and Sandefur, I've read an enormous amount of material from Jefferson. I've read hundreds, probably thousands, of his private letters and virtually every major document that he wrote and speech that he gave. I'd bet a year's salary that no one can find any original documentation of that quote. It is completely contradictory to virtually everything else that he said, and as you said, it's from a source that has been shown again and again to be fabricating quotes.
It's amazing how early on and still today, fundamentalists just couldn't deal with the fact that just about all of the important founders, with a prominent exception here and there (John Witherspoon) weren't orthodox Christians, so they had to rewrite history.
What I find even more interesting is the change in approaches. The religious right of that day had no illusions about the Constitution. They correctly called it a Godless document and predicted that it would bring down the wrath of God upon the nation. They attempted to amend it in the state ratifying conventions and with proposed national amendments a dozen times over the next few decades after it was passed. All of those attempts failed. Then sometime in the early 20th century, all of a sudden their ideological descendants "discovered" that the Constitution was intended to establish a "Christian Nation" all along. It's all quite Orwellian.

"Jefferson:
No nation has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I, as Chief Magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it the sanction of my example."

"I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented..."

From Jefferson's first Inaugural address:

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter--with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

and from his secound:

QUOTE
In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the General Government. I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it, but have left them, as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of the church or state authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies.

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Jefferson:
No nation has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I, as Chief Magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it the sanction of my example. [16]

In an 1803 federal Indian treaty, Jefferson willingly agreed to provide $300 to "assist the said Kaskaskia tribe in the erection of a church" and to provide "annually for seven years $100 towards the support of a Catholic priest." He also signed three separate acts setting aside government lands for the sole use of religious groups and setting aside government lands so that Moravian missionaries might be assisted in "promoting Christianity." [6]

â¢When Washington D. C. became the national capital in 1800, Congress voted that the Capitol building would also serve as a church building. [7] President Jefferson chose to attend church each Sunday at the Capitol [8] and even provided the service with paid government musicians to assist in its worship. [9] Jefferson also began similar Christian services in his own Executive Branch, both at the Treasury Building and at the War Office. [10]

Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict a story from the Bible and include the word "God" in its motto; [13]
********************************************

A group of mostly Christian founders founded a secular government to protect church from state and state from Clerics.
Lying about history is not the providence of the religious right alone.

teresa wrote:

"Jefferson:
No nation has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I, as Chief Magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it the sanction of my example."

Another fictitious quote. The only source for it is the diary of Rev. Ethan Allen, who claims he overheard Jefferson say this to a friend on the streets of Washington. But the Reverend was born in 1797, meaning he was 4 years old when Jefferson took office and 12 when he left office. Since it contradicts volumes of Jefferson's thoughts on religion, no reputable Jefferson scholar considers it a genuine quote. That does not, of course, stop Christian nation apologists from passing it around. The rest is just a cut and paste from David Barton, the primary purveyor of false quotes from the founders, and none of it contradicts anything I said in this post, making it entirely pointless. I fully agree that most of the founders were Christians.

Yes most of the founders were Christians including Jefferson and whether they were "orthodox" or not is meaningless. I am not an orthodox Christian, but I consider myself a Christian none the less. I am also a liberal and I support the separation of Church and state. But I am sick to death of the secular left manipulating history just like the religious right does.

Funny that you focus on one quote and ignore all the others.

Teresa wrote:

Yes most of the founders were Christians including Jefferson and whether they were "orthodox" or not is meaningless. I am not an orthodox Christian, but I consider myself a Christian none the less. I am also a liberal and I support the separation of Church and state. But I am sick to death of the secular left manipulating history just like the religious right does.

Jefferson was not a Christian in any sense that a real Christian would accept. Your quote from Jefferson about being a "real Christian" was completely out of context. He denied that Jesus had ever claimed to be divine at all and viewed him only as an ethical philosopher. And yes, he said that the ethical system of Jesus was the most sublime ever invented. But when he spoke of "corruptions", he included all of the religious aspects of Christianity - all claims of miracles, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the ascension, the notion of atonement for sin, and, again, any claim that Jesus was divine or anything more than a man. That is not a Christian by any reasonable definition. He wrote that he was a Christian in the same sense that he was an Epicurian - he believed that both Jesus and Epicurus had come up with true ideas and he gave ascent to the truth of those ideas. But that has nothing to do with the religious faith called Christianity.

John Adams, Ben Franklin and George Washington also rejected the divinity of Jesus. All of them could be accurately described as "theistic rationalists", as Jon Rowe has written in the link cited above.

Funny that you focus on one quote and ignore all the others.

Because none of the others contradicted anything I've said. I think you're replying to a straw man of what you think my position is rather than to my actual position. The fact that Jefferson signed a treaty that included a small amount of money to build a church for an Indian tribe is no surprise to me whatsoever, nor does it change any position I hold on the subject. So there's nothing to respond to.