They are two sides of the same coin. Is it really true that no other country venerates its founders like the United States? How do other countries born out of colonialism in South America, Africa, and Asia remember the leaders of their liberation?
How do American attitudes toward politicians of the late s compare to the personality cult of Mao in China and similar reverence for individuals elsewhere? The sad reality is that for the large majority of former colonies independence was followed either immediately or within a few years by despotism. Far from being venerated, some of these men are widely reviled today. But unlike Americans, who see the Founding Fathers as the men who led the fight for independence and then created a stable political order that fostered liberty and prosperity, many Latin Americans and Africans look at the hopes and dreams of independence, see the authoritarianism, corruption, economic underperformance, and frequent bloodshed that followed, and ask what went wrong.
Meddling by Americans and Europeans is often assigned a portion of the blame, but flawed founders and flawed regimes are frequently cited as well. You mentioned Mao. Though certainly respected by large numbers of Chinese, he is by no means universally loved. It will be interesting to see how Mao is regarded by ordinary Chinese should the censorship ever be lifted. Canada has its Fathers of Confederation.
In they united four British North American colonies, soon to be joined by other provinces and territories, to create a free, stable, and prosperous country. Nor do they get the same respect:. The Fathers of Confederation, on the other hand, should have been horsewhipped. Maybe it was the champagne at Charlottetown, or the rain at Quebec.
Excellent, provocative article! Religious neutrality and a government answerable to the people has been bedrocks of our pluralistic society. As you point out, there are a prodigious number of books and political references to the US founding fathers.
Rightly so we are proud of their courage in breaking away to found a new government, one that has beneficially evolved and prospered. Although the European colonies in the Americas may not be great examples, other countries take pride in their founders including Indians who revere Gandhi, South Africans Mandela and Israelis Ben-Gurion.
These more recent founding leaders will likely stand the test of time and will be venerated by future generations much like American do for their founding fathers. It is a great thing to be proud of those who founded our nations. This frankly seems like a selective evaluation. Politicians in all those countries invoke their early predecessors with the same sort of respect, or perhaps even more, that our American politicians express when alluding to the US Founders.
And other countries, such as Turkmenistan or North Korea, suffer from state-enforced personality cults. The American situation differs from both of those. Does American exceptionalism count? A very fair-minded view of the Declaration and Constitution — a rarity, it seems, in these days of a political agenda-filled society.
Thank you. I agree- an excellent, unbiased view of the two Great State Papers; too often the Fathers are misquoted on religion- Mr. Thanks to allthingsliberty for posting what I think is one of the best, brief, non-academic and non-partisan articles on this subject. Or not. Because drafting the Constitution was headache enough, and the various Christian denominations could never be unified, religion was left to the states.
God is in every state constitution. These godless constitution memes skip over that. Indeed some states, for example Virginia, acted first and served as an example for the federal approach.
With the exception of Connecticut and Massachusetts , disestablishment was complete by the end of Religious restrictions on voting were likewise repealed in every state where they had once existed by Freedom of conscience is guaranteed in every state. Religious tests as a requirement for holding public office were also abolished one by one, beginning in Georgia Constitution of , Delaware Constitution of , and Vermont Constitution of Seven states still have constitutional provisions disqualifying persons who deny the existence of God from holding office, but these provisions by and large ceased to be enforced in the early years of the twentieth century and were unanimously ruled a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments by the US Supreme Court in The references to God In the state constitutions largely imitate the ones made in the Declaration.
These references are almost always found in the Preambles, side by side with an unequivocal expression of popular authorship, and sometimes an enumeration of secular objects, that echoes the Preamble of the federal constitution. Apply market research to generate audience insights.
Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Austin Cline. Atheism Expert. Austin Cline, a former regional director for the Council for Secular Humanism, writes and lectures extensively about atheism and agnosticism. Cite this Article Format. Cline, Austin. Declaration of Independence and the Christianity Myth. Is Christmas a Religious or Secular Holiday? Should "Under god" Be in the Pledge of Allegiance.
God-given and God-willed, freedom must be humanly exercised, defended, and established. In this sense, this is an early form of liberation theology, a sober form, to be sure. Others have noted the political character of the Deity as well.
First, to show what human political leadership should aspire to, whether it be in legislating, executing, or judging; second, to show that because the unity of legislative, executive, and judicial power in the Deity coexists with omniscience and impeccable rectitude, fallible human beings rightly divide political power and do not give all political authority into one set of hands.
Other scholars have emphasized the political character of the document in yet another sense. By this they mean its character as a deliberate compromise, perhaps even obfuscating differences, for the sake of presenting a common front for practical purposes. The estimable scholar of Locke and of the founding, Michael Zuckert, has done the same. It seems that David French was precipitous in the use he made of the passage from the Declaration that evoked the Creator.
He presented it as a norm that a Christian can and should accept, apparently without much further ado. However, the fuller argument from which it is taken, and the fuller portrait of the Deity in the document, should give an orthodox Christian believer pause, precisely because the Deity is so politically—and this-worldly—focused.
As such, it arguably served its purpose at the time and for a long time. But given that from the point of view of consistent liberal thought, its theological attachments are extraneous increments, and from the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, that it has severe theological deficiencies, one cannot be too surprised that, eventually, each would want to strike out on its own. This certainly seems to be the case with liberalism today. It would be fitting for Christian theology to reciprocate.
So the Declaration of Independence refers to God four times. The Constitution does not. However, the Constitution is only valid if the Declaration is valid, and the Declaration affirms the existence of God, so the Constitution requires belief in God.
The people who wrote those words were all Christians and Deists, and they were living in a nation of devout men. So they clearly knew what the Christian God was, and they were aware that they could insert the word Christian instead of Nature.
Yet they did not do so. So the claim that America is a Christian nation is not supported by the Declaration. The Founders assert that men are endowed with rights by their creator. The fact that these rights comes from a god means that man may not overturn them. And the rights, of course, are to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness private property. Now, many people believe that rights come from the government. The founding document of America affirms that rights come from the Creator and, therefore, not from government.
0コメント