perception wrote: I believe there was a heck of a lot more religious zeal and self righteous fervor back around the time our constitution was created than there is now. The integrity and moral courage of those men was tested and not found wanting but no one accused them of having dark and sinister motives.
This is a patently false statement, although i'm sure you have made it in good faith. The "founding fathers" were, almost to a man, theists--i.e., although professing a belief in a deity, they did not espouse fervent religious belief, nor display sectarian zeal. Washington, in the lull between his resignation as head of the Virginia Militia and going off to Philadelphia in hope of getting the Commander in Chief's job, was a minor official of the Truro parish Anglican church. He did not take up his duties again after the Revolution. Both Madison and Jefferson spoke out against the application of religious principles in public life--in particular, Jefferson, who railed against the imposition of the beliefs of others. The following is from the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (and my thanks to Dyslexia for his post of this excerpt in another thread): ". . . to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness." Patrick Henry first came to public notice in Virginia for his discursus in the case of an Anglican minister suing for damages in the issue of his stipend. The English Civil Wars of the 17th Century had ended only a century before Stamp Act crisis-they were the product of what one member of Parliament in 1640 referred to as "the vexed question of religion." Not simply the leaders of the American revolution, but many men and women of good conscience in England were so profoundly "turned off" by the Thirty Years War and two civil wars in England, that it is specious to describe almost any public figure in either nation in the late 17th and in the 18th centuries as deeply religious. The "great awakening" in the 1730's is touted, espeically by the religiously devout, as evidence of the deep religious feelings of Americans. It was a flash in the pan, and came at a time when, in fact, political figures in Massachussetts were taking positive steps to remove all "taint" of religion from their colony's government, and more and more of the inhabitants of Virginia were refusing to pay the support of the established religion of that colony. As i earlier stated, i believe you wrote in good faith, but your contention about the religious character of the founders of this nation is more a case of wishful thinking on the part of those in our contemporary world of religious conviction than anything to do with the historical record.
As for dark and sinister motives, reasonable estimates of historians place the number of loyalist (i.e., "Tories") in America at the time of the Revolution at about one third of the population. They most certainly did accuse the "Rebels" of dark and sinister motives. As well, Samuel Johnson in London sneered at the American revolutionaries who demanded liberty while keeping slaves (a nice bit of mental gymnastics on the part of an Englishman-the English introduced slavery into North America, and made good money supplying the market, while slavery flourished in the West Indies at that time). I have a great deal of respect for Washington and Madison, very little for Jefferson (for reasons which have nothing to do with his part in the framing of the Constitution)-but I'm never comfortable with the effort to elevate them to the status of Demigods without human failings; and i will never be convinced of any of them having great religious conviction-the historical record contradicts such an assertion.
