This is a response to Wandel's last post.
I will start by noting that the author dedicates his work to "[the] Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (Covenanters)"--and therefore displays that he has a stake in the allegation which has nothing to do with history or historiography. He begins setting up his straw men immediately. In the Forward, he writes:
Quote:They [humanistic historians] have argued that there was no deception, that America is still a Christian nation, that the Constitution “in principle” was and remains a Christian document, and it is only the nefarious work of the U.S. Supreme Court and the American Civil Liberties Union that has stripped the Constitution of its original Christian character.
Leaving aside the silly inferential contention that there is any such thing as "humanistic historians," or the equally silly inferential contention that such "humanistic historians" control the accepted canon of American history--this claim is clearly false. No one at the time that the constitution was offered for ratification, and no serious historian of whom i know since then has alleged that the constitution was a "Christian document." I can think of few things as hilarious as a claim that "humanistic historians" would want to seek scape goats for stripping the constitution of its (alleged) original Christian character.
Then he makes a wildly more farcical claim, a contention about the Christian foundation of the constitution:
Quote:Problem: political conservatives are deceived theologically because they do not recognize the implications of the intellectual shift from the deistic unitarian god of Sir Isaac Newton to the purposeless universe of Charles Darwin. They do not comprehend that the Darwinian god of man-controlled organic evolution (Lester Frank Ward)1 has replaced Newton’s god of the balanced machine. Process philosophy has replaced natural law theory.
Oh yeah, there's a problem here--more than one. Newton advocated a view similar to that of Robert Boyle, but it was Boyle, not Newton, who proposed the mechanistic view of a deistic cosmos. Newton held that worshipping god as god was idolatry, and he may well have been a Socinian, and possibly an Arian--scholars are still churning out papers in the thousands of pages about what has been discovered from his private writings and the contents of his library. However, most people have heard of Isaac Newton, but not Robert Boyle, so he's basically indulging in some historical name-dropping here.
This remark was offered in the context of political and especially religous conservatives calling for a return to the principles of the founders--but he alleges that they are deceived about the nature of those principles. The fling at Darwin is all the more ludicrous in that Darwin was not born until 1809, more than twenty years after the constitutional convention. He then attributes (inferentially) this view of a "Darwinian god of man contolled organic evolution" to Lester Frank Ward, and cites one of his own works in a footnote for evidence that this is true! This is
ipse dixit squared--"We know that this is so, not because i say so here, but because i said so over here a few years ago." Great dodge, if your readers are that gullible.
However, Mr. North does not leave us in suspense about why he claims that the constitution breaks a covenant with god. He asserts very shortly after the previous passage that:
Quote:There is no final earthly sovereignty. [the author's italics, not mine] God, not man, is the final judge. But man, in his continuing rebellion against God, seeks to bring final sovereignty in history down to earth, to award some spokesman or institution with final, unitary sovereignty.
I did read further into this author's fantasy world, but i'm not going to make the effort to respond to all of his nonsense here. It isn't necessary as the Forward clearly shows his premises, and those premises are flawed. Almost no one today calling themselves a Christian is going to embrace Newton's ideas of deity, or that their religious mysteries are errant superstition. The fundamentalists might embrace Boyle's view of a mechanistic cosmos, so long as they get to assert that god is the mechanic. There is no evidence anywhere that the framers proposed the constitution as a covenant with god, and this joker's objection is simply to state that there is no earthly authority for sovereignty, that all sovereignty must come from god. Unstated, but embarrassingly obvious (it ought to embarrass Mr. North, at any event, were he not a religious fanatic) is that Mr. North is privy to god's plan, even if almost all the rest of us are not.
In short, this is a typical "i know god's will, you don't, so shut up and listen" religious fanatic's screed. It was interesting, in a sort of watching a train wreck way, though, Wandel. Sorry i took so long to respond--just this commentary on the Forward has taken me more than two hours, and that does not include the time necessary to have read most of the document which you linked.
