The political temperature in America, already hot, has increased to a boil following the assassination attempt on former President Trump. The stunning (and thankfully unsuccessful) attempt has served to galvanize the right, bringing a unity improbable a few short weeks ago.
It is not hard to understand why. Trump is not only beloved by many, but the sustained opposition on various fronts have led his followers to believe that he is the target of the ‘deep state’. There is a strong sense among some, even those who were not ardent Trump supporters, that it is possible that the attempt on his life was something more than a lone gunman on a slanted roof that was “accidentally” unsecured by Kim Cheatle’s (and Alejandro Mayorkas’s) Secret Service.
After all, Mayorkas’ failure to secure the southern border appears to be intentional. Thinking people are now solemnly considering the implications of the failure to secure the rooftop at Butler, PA, a task which also falls under the purview of the Secretary of Homeland Security.1https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/why-well-never-know-what-really-happened-in-butler-pa/ As former Navy Seal and Blackwater founder, Erik Prince, stated, “the fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.”2https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/why-well-never-know-what-really-happened-in-butler-pa/
In this line of thinking the ‘deep state’ conducting its own investigation3https://www.foxnews.com/politics/secret-service-check-box-senate-briefing-leaves-questions-infuriating while running interference to impede congressional investigation4https://www.foxnews.com/us/congress-denied-access-crucial-trump-protection-plan-screams-cover-your-mode-expert creates doubts about both objectivity and veracity.
Christian Nationalism
Unsurprisingly, the assassination attempt appears to have vitalized certain religious elements within conservativism. But even before the attempt on Trump’s life, the assertion that “America is a Christian Nation” had been gaining force for some time.5https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3540071-boebert-says-she-is-tired-of-separation-between-church-and-state-the-church-is-supposed-to-direct-the-government/
Most recently, at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference and five days before the attempted assassination, Senator Josh Hawley claimed (incorrectly) that America was founded in the tradition of Augustine as carried on by “stern Puritans”, and stated:
“And I’m sure some will say now I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say that I am advocating for Christian Nationalism. And so I do.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNbGxdDZ2I?t=260
Senator Hawley’s assertions are false, and Americans of all political and religious persuasions need to understand they are false.
Most of the Founding Fathers were not Puritans, nor could any sort of viable argument ever be made that they were. George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin: none of them were Puritans, nor were they followers of Augustine. Far from it.
Augustine of Hippo was born in 354 AD, died in 430 AD, and repeatedly advocated for torture and forced conversion.6Augustine’s Letters #185 Ch.6: “It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.” 7Augustine’s Letters #185 Ch.6: “Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction? Although even men who have not been compelled, but only led astray, are received by their loving mother with more affection if they are recalled to her bosom through the enforcement of terrible but salutary laws, and are the objects of far more deep congratulation than those whom she had never lost. Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show symptoms of resistance; especially since, if they multiply with growing abundance among the fugitive slaves and robbers, he has the more right in that the mark of the master is recognized on them.” His tyrannical views on the subject formed the basis of both the Crusades carried out by the Roman Catholic Church and the Inquisition, including the torture and murder of supposed Protestant “heretics”. https://churchandstate.org.uk/2016/04/the-dark-side-of-christian-history-the-inquisition-and-slavery/[/mfn]
Augustine was opposed to liberty of conscience, not in favor of it. Augustine, if he were alive, would have been opposed to the Declaration of Independence, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In contrast, the Founding Fathers passionately believed in liberty of conscience and were fiercely opposed to state coercion on religious grounds. This was the foundation of America – a land for all, without king or Pope, where no religious zealot could use the power of the state to impose his creed on his fellow men.
Senator Hawley stated the following in the same speech:
Twenty thousand practicing Augustinians made their way to these shores to found a society here on his principles. History knows them as the Puritans. Inspired by the ‘City of God’ they founded “The City On a Hill”. We are a nation forged from Augustine’s Vision a nation defined by the Dignity of the Common Man.8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNbGxdDZ2I?t=260
Again, Senator Hawley’s comments are demonstrably false. America was not “forged on Augustine’s vision”, but was founded most decidedly in opposition to Augustine’s tyrannical ideas. The Founding Fathers speak for themselves.
James Madison stated the following regarding liberty of conscience and religious freedom:
That Religion or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, being under the direction of reason and conviction only, not of violence or compulsion, all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of Conscience.9https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0054-0003
James Madison, Amendments to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 1776
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It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.10https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-01-02-0054-0003
James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, circa June 20, 1785
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Conscience is the most sacred of all property.11https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-14-02-0238
James Madison, essay on Property, March 29, 1792
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We are teaching the world the great truth that Governments do better without Kings and Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion Flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.12https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-02-02-0471
James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822
In the fight to pass the Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty, Madison remonstrated with that generation’s version of “Christian Nationalists” who tried to insert the words “Jesus Christ” in a preamble. Madison stated, “The better proof of reverence for that holy name would be not to profane it by making it a topic of legislative discussion…”13https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-01-02-0549
Benjamin Franklin stated, “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
George Washington, in a letter to Touro Synagogue to assure the religious freedom of the Jews in the U.S., stated:
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation…It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.
May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.14https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135
George Washington, Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, Aug. 18, 1790 in: The Writings of George Washington, p. 766-67
Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote of inalienable rights for every person under the sun.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…15https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
The Declaration of Independence–A Transcription.
According to the Founding Fathers, it is for the purpose of securing and protecting “these rights” – the very rights that Augustine opposed – that government is instituted. Augustine’s endorsement of torture and persecution is not only un-Christian, it is un-American. In fact, that is the very point of America: it was the intention of the Founding Fathers to render the creation of a persecutorial Augustinian state forever unconstitutional.
It is strange to have Senator Hawley invoke Augustine and Puritans instead of the Founding Fathers. But Senator Hawley is correct about the Puritans insofar as it is true that the Puritans were just as tyrannical and intolerant as Augustine. The Puritans were so persecutorial, most of the Pilgrims settled south of Massachusetts to get away from them.
They were especially cruel in their persecution of the Quakers, whom they drastically outnumbered, and with whom they had certain theological disagreements.
Beginning in 1656, Puritan church-state laws forbade any sea captain to land Quakers in Massachusetts. “Any individual of that sect was to be committed at once to the House of Correction, to be severely whipped on his or her entrance, and kept constantly at work, and none were suffered to speak with them.”16 https://historicipswich.net/2022/11/29/persecution-of-quakers-by-the-puritans/
“It was decreed that any Quaker arriving in the Colony should have one of his ears cut off. For another offence, he should lose the other ear. Every Quaker woman should be severely whipped. For a third offence, the tongue was to be bored through with a hot iron.”17 https://historicipswich.net/2022/11/29/persecution-of-quakers-by-the-puritans/
Ibid.
Quakers were sentenced to death in several cases at Boston. 18 https://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/15/Mary-Dyer 19 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Barrett-Dyer
A 1661 law ordered that “any wandering Quakers be apprehended, stripped naked from the middle upward, tied to cart’s-tayle and whipped thro the town.”20https://historicipswich.net/2022/11/29/persecution-of-quakers-by-the-puritans/
As Providence designed, however, Roger Williams, the eventual founder of Rhode Island, was raised up to face the Puritans’ intolerance. America was forged on Roger Williams’ vision of a free land.
As a preacher standing for civil and religious liberty and against the intolerance of the church/state, Roger Williams’ preaching made a clash with Puritan Governor John Winthrop and the leadership in Massachusetts inevitable. Roger Williams insisted that “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.” He held “God requireth not a uniformity of religion.” Williams held that, “[E]nforced uniformity confounds civil and religious liberty and denies the principles of Christianity and civility. No man shall be required to worship or maintain a worship against his will.”.21https://archive.org/details/per_early-baptist_the-bloudy-tenent-of-pe_roger-williams_1644/
Williams was summoned to return to England to face the charge of sedition, but before his arrest word from the coiner of the phrase “City of God”—John Winthrop warned him to flee before capture. William Jackson Armstrong, an author and citizen of Ohio referenced Roger Williams in 1889 as follows:
The civil power has no jurisdiction over the human conscience. Conscience belongs to the individual, and is not the property of the body politic. All human laws which prescribe or prohibit religious doctrines are damnable and unjust. Magistrates are but the agents of the people; on them no spiritual power whatever can ever be conferred.
Down amid the shadows and fogs of his sea-girt land, there had fallen upon this man [Roger Williams] an inspiration that was to roll back the tide of human hate and fear that had devastated this world for forty centuries. Reflecting upon the suffering of his race from religious cruelty, there had broken into his brain the conception, simple and sublime, of the words of Jesus of Nazareth to the Herodians with the tribute money : “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
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From that declaration of Roger Williams, two hundred and forty years ago, was born the American Constitution. Presbyterian England in the first half of the seventeenth century was not big enough to hold this inspired man. His continued presence would have split the throne of the Tudors and Plantaganets. From English religious persecution Roger Williams fled to the Puritans of New England. These gentlemen, too, had fled from Europe to enjoy (as they said) the blessings of religious liberty. But they had only enough liberty for Puritans and not enough for Roger Williams. So this brave man fled once more from the New England Puritans to the wilderness, and, among the barbarians of the North American forests in the Province of Rhode Island, established the first government according religious tolerance ever founded on this earth. 22https://documents.adventistarchives.org/7Tracts/SL/SL18891015-20.pdf William Jackson Armstrong “Romanism and Civil Liberty”
William Jackson Armstrong “Romanism and Civil Liberty”
Historian, professor and religious liberty advocate Alonzo T. Jones succinctly points to the roots of Puritan intolerance:
But yet those ambitious prelates of the fourth century were not content with stopping all manner of work, and closing public places on Sunday. They had secured the power of the State so far, and they determined to carry it yet further and use the power of the State to compel everybody to worship according to the dictates of the church. And one of the greatest Fathers of the church, was father to this theory. That was the great church Father and Catholic saint, Augustine— and by the way, he is grandfather to National Reform, too, as we shall prove one of these days.
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Augustine taught that,— “It is indeed better that men should be brought to serve God by instruction than by fear of punishment or by pain. But because the former means are better, the latter must not therefore be neglected. . . . Many must often be brought back to their Lord, like wicked servants, by the rod of temporal suffering, before they attain to the highest grade of religious development.”
Notes the theologian and historian August Neander, “It was by Augustine, then, that a theory was proposed and founded, which . . . contained the germ of that whole system of spiritual despotism, of intolerance and persecution, which ended in the tribunals of the Inquisition.” 23https://documents.adventistarchives.org/Periodicals/AmSn/AmSn18880301-V03-03.pdf
American Sentinel March 3, 1888 Alonzo. T. Jones
The Woke Left as Intolerant as the Puritans
It is doubtless true that the woke Left is as intolerant as the Puritans. It has used its increased power in education, media and government to impose its intolerable ideology on society. Large and hairy men who think they are women dominate women’s sporting events. Children are taken from parents by force and given cross sex hormones and have their genitals cut off. Sodom owns the month of June by government edict.
Millions of babies are aborted every year in cold blood. Governments collude with social media companies to make war on free speech. Organized groups loot and burn in large cities with impunity. The border is open and millions of illegal immigrants have entered the country, and the Left thinks they all ought to be allowed to vote.24https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13621419/democrats-republicans-vote-illegal-aliens-voter-id-trump.html
Is it any surprise that the cry arises: “America is a Christian Nation! We must go back to God!”
The state of society is dire. We are witnesses to the moral, social, and economic decay of not only America, but of all the western world in real time. Rome fell from corruption, decadence and profligacy, and the West falters similarly.
But the solution to America’s problems does not lie in so-called Christian Nationalism, a union of church and state, or government legislation to compel some tortured and hypocritical pantomime of the Christian religion. Shall we replace the forced confession of preferred pronouns with forced compliance or confession of some religious tenet?
Make no mistake – what many dislike most about the Left is its tyrannical use of government to cram its hideous ideology down our collective throats. A neutral state ought not to be controlled by religious or ideological partisanship. The state is tasked with the governance of a vast multitude, with vastly different spiritual and religious views. There ought to be no rainbow flags flying at the White House any more than there ought to be flags with a cross or a crescent moon flying at the White House.
The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of God, or Jesus Christ. The first clause of the First Amendment forbids Congress from passing any laws tending to the “establishment of religion”. There is no state religion in the U.S.
In 1796, in the last year that George Washington was President, the Treaty of Tripoli was signed to protect American merchant ships from piracy by the Barbary States. Article 11 states as follows:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, – as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], – and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli.
The Treaty was unanimously ratified in 1797 by the Senate, and copies were provided to every senator. Then President of the United States, John Adams, endorsed it as follows:
Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed, and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof.25https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp
There are increasing calls for a church-state union. Friends, we already have one. That’s what government by left wing idealogues in the Church of the Woke is. How do you like it?
It is no more a solution to America’s problems to have religious tyrants legislating their religion than it is to have left wing zealots legislating their ideology. Tyrants are tyrants. Tyranny is tyranny.
Unity in the political right is desirable if it is in favor of the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. A new intolerant Puritanism is as anti-American as the ideological oppression of the Left.
Check out Sources
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- 6Augustine’s Letters #185 Ch.6: “It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.”
- 7Augustine’s Letters #185 Ch.6: “Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction? Although even men who have not been compelled, but only led astray, are received by their loving mother with more affection if they are recalled to her bosom through the enforcement of terrible but salutary laws, and are the objects of far more deep congratulation than those whom she had never lost. Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show symptoms of resistance; especially since, if they multiply with growing abundance among the fugitive slaves and robbers, he has the more right in that the mark of the master is recognized on them.”
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