Religiously Claiming Jefferson

This week a twitter feed for retiring United Methodist bishop William Willimon exclaimed: "[Thomas] Jefferson created a polity with religion completely free as long as it was personal and private… [creating] essentially [an] atheist national polity." Earlier this year, Willimon, who's returning to Duke University, faulted Jefferson for the "privatization" of God through the "modern democratic, liberal nation state in order to neutralize Christianity, to bury God in the confines of the self, to trivialize the Trinity, and to keep this governmentally troubling faith from going public."

As Willimon asserted, the Jeffersonian experiment has created the "omnipotent state and its capitalist economy." Of course, Jeffersonians believed in minimal government. And an omnipotent state is a contradiction to a free market economy. Although Methodist, Willimon belongs to the neo-Anabaptist perspective, most popularized by his popular Duke colleague Stanley Hauerwas, that demonizes American democracy while not offering any alternatives, except "the church." Mainstream Christianity professes that God has ordained other institutions besides the church, such as the state, rightly ordered.

Sensibly, Willimon did note that the "government has found that Christians (well, any believer who thinks that his or her God might be more important than the state) are easier to manage if they will confine their faith to something within." But this modern drive to privatize religion was launched by secularists and strict separationists, not Jeffersonians, who believed in a thriving civil society that included robust religious institutions. Religious enthusiasts and evangelicals of the early 19th century supported Jefferson and his party instead of the Federalists and the established churches of the eastern seaboard.

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Evermyrtle

You can tell a Christian by the things that they want to talk about, the books you read, the movies watch the books your read, the friends you keep. Your Christianity shows through all of this and more. It cannot be private, you want to!! share it.
- Washington22
  
  You are so right. Hi, Evermyrtle. Bree is back. I found her on another site right now.
http://www.facebook.com/people/David-B-Severy/557985964 David B Severy

If the founders had modeled the government on heaven, and given us a theocracy it would have been a Kingdom with a King, as Jesus is a King with a Kingdom! In this earth God ordains government. We got a republic because that is what God let us do and or desired that we do. If you want to please God, do what He tells you to do. But we should beware supporting our government just to be free from authority and able to do whatever we wish. God's Kingdom will not suffer independent spirits who do their own thing. If we are now living a life of independence from God and the church, we will have to change, for God seeks those who will WORSHIP HIM, who will love Him, and obey His Son's teaching.
- http://www.missiontoisrael.org Ted R. Weiland
  
  "McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader", America’s most popular school book in the 1800s, also testified to America’s early form of theocratic government:
  
  "Their form of government was as strictly theocratical insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their code of laws was the Pentateuch…. God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so…." (William Holmes McGuffey, McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader (New York, NY: American Book Company, 1879) p. 225.)
  
  William McGuffey was undoubtedly influenced by the writings of renowned early American preachers such as John Cotton:
  
  "The famous John Cotton, the first minister of Boston … earnestly pleaded “that the government might be considered as a theocracy, wherein the Lord was judge, lawgiver and king; that the laws which He gave Israel might be adopted….” At the desire of the court, he compiled a system of laws founded chiefly on the laws of Moses…. (Jeremy Belknap, John Farmer, The History of New-Hampshire (Dover, NH: George Wadleigh, 1862) pp. 42-43.)
  
  John W. Welch commented on the outstanding influence Yahweh’s law had in Colonial America:
  
  "Indeed, it has rightly been concluded that “the ideal polity of early Puritan New England was thought to comprehend divine intentions as revealed in Mosaic law.” The rule of law began, not with the rules of man but with the rules of God. One Puritan document directly states, [T]he more any law smells of man, the more unprofitable,” and thus, it asserts, the only proper laws were in fact “divine ordinances, revealed in the pages of Holy Writ and administered according to deductions and rules gathered from the Word of God.'" (John W. Welch, “Biblical Law in America: Historical Perspectives and Potentials for Reform,” Brigham Young University Law Review, 30 September 2002, http://www.contra-mundum.org/essays/theonomy/WEL1.pdf.)
  
  For more, see "The Preamble: WE THE PEOPLE vs. YAHWEH" at http://www.missiontoisrael.org/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt3.php.
  - Bighoss
    
    And thank GOD the theocratic notions of these ranting babblers were never realized, since the Constitution has a First Amendment to ensure against a theocratic government in this nation!
Mexseiko

Our founding fathers corrected in our government what they rejected from England. That was it's tyrant taxation, the imposing of a single religion, and the royal dictatorship in general. They did not foresee the evil of Atheism, and worse yet, Islam. There were several social issues then, but they didn't imagine the social immoralities a party would support in order to raise and stay in power.