Has America Gone Atheist?

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Gilbert Keith said:
*My point is that in this country would vote in a racist christian before an atheist.*Then what does that tell you about the public’s fear of atheists?

Judging by the careers of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all atheists, I’d say the public is onto something.
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Their atheism has nothing to do with what they did, anymore than Gogan’s (sp?) faith had anything to do with what he did. They killed in the name of the state, not atheism. Zealots of any stripe are bad.
 
Gilbert Keith:
Sam

Thomas Jefferson was an atheist? Ask Jefferson:

etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/foley-browse?id=JC0088

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Very interesting. I had never come across that. That settles the answer to that question in favor of “deist,” then.

As for the source of Lincoln’s closet atheism, William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and, later, biographer said of Lincoln: “Lincoln was very politic, and a very shrewd man in some particulars. When he was talking to a Christian, he adapted himself to the Christian … he was at moments, as it were, a Christian, through politeness, courtesy, or good breeding toward the delicate, tender-nerved man, the Christian, and in two minutes after, in the absence of such men, and among his own kind, the same old unbeliever.”

An earlier law partner of Lincoln’s told Herndon that Abe was, “an avowed and open infidel, and bordered on atheism.”
 
As to Lincoln, I think he is all over the religious map, even indulging in seances in the White House.

But I would be less likely to believe what others said of him than what he said of his own views. While in his earlier life he may have been something of an agnostic, as when Herndon knew him, by the time he reached full maturity I believe he had acquired a powerful religious sense. He certainly did not think highly of people who attacked religion, especially if such people were in public service.

The following quotes are particularly instructive:

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.” (cited in Carl Sandburg’s The Prairie Years)

And again:

*"*Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day. No, no, man was made for immortality." (1857 speech to a Chicago group)
 
Gilbert Keith:
Jefferson almost sounds like a Bible thumping Christian here:
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Jefferson was convinced that the teachings of Jesus were the most perfect moral framework ever constructed by man. That’s why he went to the trouble of extracting the moral lessons from the New Testament and removing them from what he saw as the unnecessary supernatural trappings of the original myth.

There aren’t a whole lot of surviving copies of the Jefferson Bible, but there’s at least one at the National Archive; they had it on display last time I was there, several years back.

Upon further reading, my earlier assertion was indeed incorrect. Although Jefferson was accused of atheism by his political opponents, his own writings mark him as a pretty much textbook deist – he believed in a Creator, but not in any particular supernatural revelation, let alone actual religion.

He is also clearly on the record as an enemy of the Church:

Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800
“[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”

Thomas Jefferson** to Samuel Kercheval, January 19, 1810**
“But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.”

Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
“One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Jefferson’s Autobiography
“[A]n amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that [the preamble] should read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’; the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

On the subject of early American founding fathers and Presidents who weren’t Christian, I’ve also found a few quotes from John Adams:

From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756):
“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’"

**Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11: **Written during the Administration of George Washington and signed into law by John Adams.
“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, (July 16, 1814):
“Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.”

James Madison:
Letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774:
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise”

Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Section 7, 1785:
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

As for non-President founding fathers, Ben Franklin and Ethan Allen were vocal deists, and Thomas Paine an outspoken atheist. Further quotes can be provided if you want, but this post is already getting longish.
 
Gilbert Keith:
Jefferson almost sounds like a Bible thumping Christian here:
Click to expand...
Jefferson was convinced that the teachings of Jesus were the most perfect moral framework ever constructed by man. That’s why he went to the trouble of extracting the moral lessons from the New Testament and removing them from what he saw as the unnecessary supernatural trappings of the original myth.

There aren’t a whole lot of surviving copies of the Jefferson Bible, but there’s at least one at the National Archive; they had it on display last time I was there, several years back.

Upon further reading, my earlier assertion was indeed incorrect. Although Jefferson was accused of atheism by his political opponents, his own writings mark him as a pretty much textbook deist – he believed in a Creator, but not in any particular supernatural revelation, let alone actual religion.

Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800
“[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”

Thomas Jefferson** to Samuel Kercheval, January 19, 1810**
“But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.”

Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
“One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Jefferson’s Autobiography
“[A]n amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that [the preamble] should read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’; the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

On the subject of early American founding fathers and Presidents who weren’t Christian, I’ve also found a few quotes from John Adams:

From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756):
“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’”

**Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11: **Written during the Administration of George Washington and signed into law by John Adams.
“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, (July 16, 1814):
“Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.”

James Madison:
Letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774:
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise”

Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Section 7, 1785:
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

As for non-President founding fathers, Ben Franklin and Ethan Allen were vocal deists, and Thomas Paine an outspoken atheist. Further quotes can be provided if you want, but this post is already getting longish.
 
Sam

***Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800
**“[The clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”

Thomas Jefferson** to Samuel Kercheval, January 19, 1810**
“But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.”*
Strange remarks indeed coming from the owner of many slaves, who by the way, except for a few household favorites, arranged for selling them once again into bondage upon the time of his death.
 
Sam

***Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
*“One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

Nearly two hundred years later that day is nowhere in sight!

*And it certainly can’t be because “reason and freedom of thought” have not yet dawned.
 
Sam

***From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756):
*“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’”

Jefferson was fourteen years old at the time of this remark. Most likely going through the frequent flirtation with atheism for boys of that age … hardly the remark of a seasoned thinker.
 
Sam

*James Madison:
Letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774:
“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise”
*

Read any biography of Isaac Newton. He was shackled by religion?
 
I’m not actually posting this stuff because I necessarily think all the quotes are correct. I’m posting it simply to show that America has never been the “Christian nation” that many in today’s religious right try to portray it as. The founding fathers and, yes, the first Presidents very consciously constructed a government in which religion had no place in the actual system of government. If the people wanted to be religious, that was fine, but they very carefully preserved that oft-mentioned wall of separation between Church and State.

**John Adams’ A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787–88:
“The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. … It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [forming the U.S. government] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. …Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery… are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”

Thomas Jefferson** to Jeremiah Moore, August 14, 1800
**“The clergy, by getting themselves established by law, & ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. They are still so in many countries & even in some of these United States. Even in 1783, we doubted the stability of our recent measures for reducing them to the footing of other useful callings. It now appears that our means were effectual.”

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, December 6, 1813
“History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.”

**Jefferson’s Autobiography
**“[A]n amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that [the preamble] should read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’; the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination”

James Madison**, Detached Memoranda, believed to have been written circa 1817.
**“The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles: The tenets of the chaplains elected [by the majority] shut the door of worship against the members whose creeds and consciences forbid a participation in that of the majority. To say nothing of other sects, this is the case with that of Roman Catholics and Quakers who have always had members in one or both of the Legislative branches. Could a Catholic clergyman ever hope to be appointed a Chaplain? To say that his religious principles are obnoxious or that his sect is small, is to lift the evil at once and exhibit in its naked deformity the doctrine that religious truth is to be tested by numbers. or that the major sects have a right to govern the minor.”
 
Gilbert Keith:
Sam

From a letter to Charles Cushing (October 19, 1756):
“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’”

Jefferson was fourteen years old at the time of this remark. Most likely going through the frequent flirtation with atheism for boys of that age … hardly the remark of a seasoned thinker.
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Note – this quote was from John Adams. He was born in 1735, which would make him 21 at the time of this letter. Still youngish – but his views don’t seem to change in later letters.
 
Sam

*“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
*
Quite true. But it was founded, welcomed, promoted and defended in a nation probably more Christian than the present nation.
 
Sam,

Note – this quote was from John Adams. He was born in 1735, which would make him 21 at the time of this letter. Still youngish – but his views don’t seem to change in later letters.

Thank you, my error.

I don’t think he changed much throughout his life. Possibly this anti-religious bias is a clue to the difficulties he had in getting along with his contemporaries …

We may keep in mind that Jefferson and Adams came after the age of Voltaire and Rousseau … when rebellion of every sort was the order of the day.
 
At the Constitutional Convention, 1787, James Madison recorded the following remarks made by Benjamin Franklin to the president of the Convention:

"I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth – *that God governs in the affairs of men. *And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel; We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ouselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Government by Human Wisdom and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.

"I therefore beg leave to move – that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service –

“Mr. Sherman seconded the motion.”

The motion was generally supported in principle, with several reservations, but it failed to carry when it was realized that the Convention had no funds to arrange for the carrying out of it.
 
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