Posted on 08/02/2006 2:38:55 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Interesting. Would the explicit exclusion of a religious test for holding public office in the Constitution make secularism the foundation of the American Republic?
A very interesting historical view. Thank you for it. While what you have offered is largly true, it is also true that Puritan settlements were often harsh and even cruel in their treatment of both sinners and non-comformists. Some of their punishments for transgressions were, in truth, closer to those of the taliban than to our modern system of legal remedies. I do not intend to diminish the remarkable contributions of the Puritans, but only to add that Theocracies or any governments too closely tied to religion are dangerous to both freedom and to progress.
It is indeed interesting, but the main influences on the Constitution, Monroe, Hamilton, Morris and others hardly fit the mode of the New England patriots like Adams. We have a whole seperate set of circumstances when we look at Pennsylvania (with the most populus city), Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, none of which historically mimiced the New England Congreagionalist/Puritan/Presbyter history of New England.
Since the Massachusetts Bay Company was not founded until 1630, why are the Pilgrims lumped with the Puritans? The Pilgrims got here in 1620, ten years before the Puritans arrived in Boston. Were the Pilgrims members of the Congregational Church? The Pilgrims did go to Holland, but did they go as Puritans? The members of my family who descended from Gov. Bradford were members of the Church of England, or in this country, the Episcopal Church.
Good post. Congregational Churches were the origin of American concepts of democratic self-government.
I read a good article(sermon)on why congregationalism is biblical and so is democracy and not monarchy (rule by one), oligarchy (rule by a few), aristocracy (rule by the fittest), or anarchy (rule by no one), because of freedom in Christ.
It never ceases to amaze me why some people prefer tyranny (leftism), dictatorship (fascism) and try to have control over democracy (freedom). Maybe that because there are three kind of people, those who have a need to control, those who have the need to be controlled. Then there is the third kind. The people who are free and insist that others are likewise and that this is Biblical Congregationalism.
So we've actually misunderstood the Constitution all these years, and the federal government is supposed to be a theocracy?
I disagree. I believe the federal government was originally intended to be secular, and the "secular" ACLU zealots have corrupted it through the implementation of "secular hunanism" into public policy. What they call "secular humanism" is intentionally indistinguishable from "theocratic humanism". They have not corrupted the system by making it secular, they have corrupted it by making it theocratic, using a theism that is intentionally misrepresented as secular.
Good find!
> Secular ACLU zealots have reversed the meaning of the Constitution 180 degrees, by claiming that the office-holder has no right to express any religious beliefs
Reference, please.
The answer is actually slightly more subtle. Plymount was homogenous. The founding fathers, 150 laters, were too pluralistic to assert any theocracy of that nature, but they had a bolder plan, still, a bold combination of the Natural Law of St. Thomas of Aquinas, the congregationalism of John Calvin, and (okay, somewhat anachronistic) an understanding of the invisible hand of John Locke:
All religions would have access to the public forum, in degrees equivalent to the passion of their people and prevalence of their notions. The prohibition of a religious test is not opposed to the expression of religion, but for the explicit purpose of preventing any given religion, once having a temporary electoral advantage, from dismantling the very free exchange of ideas from which it emerged; the promotion of religion in the public forum requires an absence of government regulation as surely as the promotion of commerce does; a religious test would be just as harmful to religion as government subsidies are to free markets.
later =, oddly, years later.
ARGH! TYPOS ARE INVADING!!!
Plymount = Plymouth. Laters= years later.
The prohibition of a religious test is not meant to prevent the influence of religion over government, but rather to limit the influence of government over religion.
What that would do is undermine the basis for any Constitution or any meaning at all, since in its denial of God it denies the starting point for all truth.
And you'd be left with a "living document" with no fixed meaning at all, only what is politically opportunistic at the moment.
The restriction on Congress passing laws respecting an establishment of religion does that. If that's all there was to it the prohibition on a religious test for holding public office would not be there.
Sounds rather familiar...
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