- ISBN13: 9780812974744
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Product Description
The culture wars have distorted the dramatic story of how Americans came to worship freely. Many activists on the right maintain that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Many on the left contend that the First Amendment was designed to boldly separate church and state. Neither of these claims is true, argues Beliefnet.com editor in chief Steven Waldman. With refreshing objectivity, Waldman narrates the real story of how our nation’s Founders… More >>
Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty
Tags: Approach · Faith · Fathers · Forged · Founding · Liberty · Radical · Religious5 Comments
“Founding Faith” is a tongue in cheek offering of a balanced view of Christianity vs secularization of American history. If one accepts the author’s reasonable premise that a wall was placed between religion and the federal government, one must yet account for the isolation of religion from the marketplace of ideas by intrusion of this wall between local governments and religion.
During The Sixties, federal monies starting coming into the education system dictating content that caused test scores and morality to plummet.
Unfortunately, this is pop history reacting to and fitting in well with current viewpoints. No positive contribution has been made here.
Christ founded America’s ideology beginning not only with the culmination of a constitution, but with those seeking to follow god’s instead of man’s dictates. Just because it took a while to work out the kinks in the systems inherited from thousands of years of error doesnt’ mean that the system of liberty of conscience we take for granted didn’t come at real cost and dedication, and that Christianity doesn’t deserve credit for sponsoring the only system that developed strength and liberty.
Rating: 1 / 5
I just heard Steven Waldman on PBS and intend to buy this book as soon as I can get to a store.
What I heard from him today was a refreshing, unvarnished and honest description of our country’s beginnings. Both liberals and conservatives should listen carefully to what he has to say……they’ve both got it wrong.
I agree with the evangelicals of the day, the Baptists, who thought: if we Americans truly want religious freedom, we must leave religion out of the political realm and protect it from both conservative and liberal political interference.
I can’t wait to read this book
Rating: 5 / 5
Steven Waldman writes a witty, well written book which in my judgement fails in its mission, which seems to be to ‘split the difference’ between the strict separationist Constitutionalists on the left, and the ‘accomodationists’ on the right. On almost all the important issues, Waldman comes down on the side of the strict separationists.
1. Founding Faith over-privileges some of the early founders, especially Jefferson and Madison. But he takes little account of the fact that both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were ultimately group efforts, voted and signed by dozens, and then ratified by thousands. Their ‘original meaning and intent’ should also be factored in.
2. Founding Faith continues the fallacy in point #1 by putting to much weight on hearsay statements from Madison and especially Jefferson’s 1803 letter to the Baptists, which would be called in court as ex post facto and obiter dicta.
3. As Waldman points out, it was Fisher Ames who ultimately formulated and proposed the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and he was an accomodationist: shouldn’t his intent be most important, if any?
4. Founding Faith calls the authors of the 14th amendment, which was interpreted to apply the First Amendment to the States, as “19th century Founding Fathers,” which is a contradiction in terms.
5.Founding Faith just seems to assume that all the 20th century secularizing Supreme Court cases were adjudicated properly, but that is begging the question, that’s exactly the point being debated.
6.On the next to the last page of the book, p. 204, Waldman comes down squarely on the side of the separationists, virtually telling the accomodationists to stop squalking, they don’t have it so bad, and the Founding Fathers would be pleased how things have turned out.
Again, the author raises many interesting facts and points, does so in an engaging style, but does not forge the compromise that he sought.
Rating: 1 / 5
There are few questions that can get legal scholars, jurists, and ideologues as excited as the question of what the attitude of the American founders towards religion was. For the last fifty-or-so years, the issue has had no shortage of opinions written on the issue. Some feel that the founders advocated for complete seperation between religion and government. Others believe that the founders only wished to prevent establishing a national religion; anything short of that would have been acceptable.
This book (along with several others, like American Gospel) take the middle view. Profiling the seperate views of Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jerfferson, and Madison, Waldman an attempt to show that the founders themselves may have been of a divided mind on the question of how much religion and state should intermingle. The conclusion the author comes to: (a) the founders were as confused on the subject as we are, and had as many different opinions; (b) myths abound on both sides of the current church/state debates.
Waldman debunks two myths simulteneously myths. The founders were neither deists as the “left” supposes, or Christians of the variety that the “right” commonly supposes. While most of the founders were Christians, most were quite liberal by any conservative Christian standard. (Of Washington, Waldman notes that he was the type of Christian who would have gone to church “unless there was a good football game on.” Of Jefferson, Waldman notes that he was a Christian only in the sense that he believed Christ to be a good moral philosopher.) While all the founders seemed to believe in a God active in the world (ruling out deism), most (excepting Adams) took the bible as highly metaphorical, rarely referred to Jesus Christ in writings, and made disparaging comments in private letters to do with organized religion.
Waldman’s book is well-researched, very readable, and hard to argue with. He takes us from the early days of the colonies (where all but two states had strong political support for religion), through the Revolution and Constitutional Convention (where discussion of religion was always brief), all the way through Madison’s death. The drafing of the first amendment is focused on quite heavily, and Waldman does a good job in showing how our Bill of Rights was more an act of political compromise than ideeological zest. (The first amendment went through multiple drafts, the final of which is the one using the vaguest, and thus most politically expedient, language.)
In the end, Waldman concludes that hoping for any “original intent” of our Founders on religion is hopeless. Like Jack Rakove’s book “Original Meanings,” Waldman reminds us through astute historical analysis that not only were their too many heads to have any single intent, but that even the founders (namely Franklin and Adams) had quite evolving and not always consistent internal views. They are not Gods whose views were fully formed, but humans whose views were nuanced and evolving.
A very good read for those who want a well-researched and -argued book on the Founding Faiths.
Rating: 5 / 5
Finally a book that uses historical facts, instead of subjective opinions.
FANTASTIC FANTASTIC FANTASTIC!!!!!!!
A must read…
Rating: 5 / 5