yitwail wrote:Setanta wrote:
Although the rightwingnuts like to deny it, "timeless biblical values" do not constitute fidelity to the spirit of "the American founding."
Set, some religious conservatives may regard Puritans as founding fathers, rather than the framers of the Constitution. in that case, biblical values are mostly consistent with the founders' intent.
There were thirteen colonies which formed the United States. Two, and two only, had a Congregationalist establishment (Puritans in the new world became what are today known as Congregationalists), Massachusetts and Connecticutt. Before the grant of a charter to the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Virginia Company was formed, and the colony of Virginia is the first permanent English colony in North America (exclusive of islands in the Carribean). Virginia originally had an Anglican establishment. Rhode Island had no religious establishment. Although many of the settlers of the Hampshire Grants were Congregationalists from Massachusetts, New Hampshire had no religious establishment, and Congregationalists could only nominally be said to have been the most common sect. New York had no religious establishment, but only had a provision for the preservation of the Dutch Reformed Church--and the same applied to New Jersey. Delaware was originally a Swedish colony, taken from them by the Dutch, and then, subsequently by the English--there was no religious establishment, simply a provision for the preservation of the Lutheran religion. Pennsylvania was a colonly granted to the Quaker William Penn, and it explicitly declared that it was religiously tolerant. Maryland was a grant to the Calvert family of Lord Baltimore, English Catholics, and had no religious establishment. North Carolina had no religious establishment. South Carolina was nominally Anglican. Georgia had no religious establishment.
A paucity of scholarship such as was evident in your remark is the basis upon which bible-thumpers might choose to allege that Congregationalists were the founders of this nation. They weren't the first and they weren't the most important, despite the "New England-centric" propaganda which Americans have peddled in school for a century and a half.
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