Steven K. Green > Quotes

“Whether it was celebrated or lamented, the Constitution was universally seen as a secular document establishing a civil frame of government. In essence, few in the first generation would have viewed America as a “Christian nation,” insofar as that term implied that the government was specially ordained by God or founded on Christian principles. That perspective would shortly change.98”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“The “large majority of ministers who published sermons during the Revolutionary era justified the war effort by a rationale that was more political than religious.” Rather than making the Revolution into a religious cause, they turned religion into a political cause.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“With religious nonconformists outnumbering Anglicans after 1700, and economic motives eclipsing any sense of a religious mission, the colony adopted a moderate religious stance where all Protestants, and even Jews (but not Catholics), were tolerated. But as in North Carolina, religious toleration was a response to circumstances rather than a commitment to principle.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“In both instances of Franklin and Jefferson, revisionist writers have emphasized those aspects of their beliefs that are consistent with Christian faith, while discounting their more rational, heterodox views. As stated, a common technique is to define deism narrowly, as promoting a worldview similar to atheism, and to portray it as incompatible with Christianity. A “true deist” would believe only in a “Clock-maker” deity and would eschew the value of prayer or any merit in the Bible. Any acknowledgment of providence now moves one from the ranks of deism into the bosom of Christianity, now broadly defined. Imagining the metaphorical cup as being half-full rather than the reverse, revisionist writers claim that any demonstration of faith makes one Christian or evangelical, instead of acknowledging how the beliefs of many Founders diverged from the prevailing religious orthodoxy of the time.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“The myth of America’s religious founding thus provided an explanation for those who needed to sanctify the past before they could go forward with America’s chosen mission and its manifest destiny. This myth, promoted in patriotic addresses, sermons, essays, and in school books, became the dominant narrative of America’s founding.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“Cotton’s code was never enacted, but in 1641 the General Court adopted the Body of Liberties, written by lawyer and pastor Nathaniel Ward, the author of The Simple Cobler of Aggawam. Like Cotton’s proposed code, the Body of Liberties relied heavily on the Old Testament, with various provisions containing biblical phrases and scriptural cross references. One capital offense provided that if “any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death,” and cited Deuteronomy and Exodus for authority.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“Colonial America was not settled out of a search for religious liberty, but it stumbled onto that principle just in time.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“Because Americans lack a common ethnicity or extensive heritage, our founding myth is more important than it is for most other peoples. Unlike other peoples and nations that can rely on centuries of gradual development, Americans must rely on their founding as a nation for their identity. And because the United States, unlike most other nations, can point to a specific event when we became a nation, our founding period is that much more important. Our founding myths give us our identity, help establish us as a common people (“E Pluribus Unum”), and distinguish us from other peoples (i.e., American exceptionalism). In essence, our founding myths make us Americans. Like ancient myths, America’s founding myths also involve the interposition of the divine in the nation’s creation. And like the ancient myths, once the founding is over and the identity has been forged, the involvement of the divine is over or reduced; it is not an ongoing or recurring occurrence.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“As George Marsden reminds us, “at the time of the American Revolution there was no distinctly ‘Christian’ line of political thought as opposed to secular political thought. Everything was Christian, and nothing was.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“With its emphasis on stability and Christian unity, colonial Virginia was not a receptive place for religious dissenters. Catholic clergy were banned, and in 1640 the assembly required all officials to take an oath of allegiance and supremacy to the king and the Anglican church, effectively banning Catholics from office holding. Throughout the seventeenth century, colonial leaders harassed clergy and lay people with Puritan leanings. The assembly ordered all dissenters (Puritans) out of the colony in 1642, with Governor William Berkeley driving the more ardent believers from the colony several years later.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“At the risk of oversimplification, the unifying theme of the Hebrew scripture is one of forging a national identity connected to God through a covenant. God remains an active, though an increasingly distant, agent in this creation of Jewish identity, acting chiefly through his prophets, cajoling Israel into becoming a nation, into being a people of God.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“The haphazard unfolding of religious toleration described above occurred chiefly by default (and in New York, to enhance a commercial environment), not to promote religious freedom. However, three colonies present arguable claims to the narrative of America being a haven for religious liberty: Maryland, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“while one can debate whether a particular Founder was religiously devout, there is little question that many regularly attended Christian worship and participated in the public celebrations of religion. The occasional portrayal of the Founders as religion-despising deists is as inaccurate as the claim that they were all born-again Christians.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“Jefferson then distilled and enunciated these “essentials” in several personal works he shared with friends, his “Syllabus,” and two extracts from the Bible: “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus,” sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible.” In these works Jefferson disputed core Christian doctrines while he omitted references to miracles and Jesus’ resurrection. Although his own spirituality apparently grew later in life, he remained a religious skeptic and on the fringes of unitarianism in his beliefs. Throughout his life he opposed religious orthodoxy and intolerance, and the government’s subversion of religion for political gain. “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush, “but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”90”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“Yet, more is at stake in this debate beyond simply acknowledging the religious inclinations of those people involved in the nation’s founding. The Founders gave birth to the United States in a way that is unparalleled in the history of most nations. “Unlike so many nations with origins lost in the distant past, the United States began as a political entity in a specific time and place, as the handiwork of specific individuals.” The United States has an identifiable “founding generation.” Possibly the Founders’ inclinations and motivations matter simply because they were “great men” and their ideas can be identified. In addition, because the United States embraces representative democracy as the only legitimate form of government, the founding was the time when We the People spoke. Only those members of the founding generation (1775–1790) voted for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. All subsequent generations of Americans live in the legacy of their democratic thoughts and actions. So as Gordon Wood has observed, “the stakes in these historical arguments about eighteenth century political culture are very high—they are nothing less than the kind of society we have been, or ought to become.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“Religious imagery and symbolism were the common idioms that all speakers employed when making rhetorical points. Rather than indicating a level of personal piety, the frequency of religious discourse indicates the high degree of biblical literacy and the common use of popular idioms. That one can find references to God or scripture in the political writings of the era is thus unremarkable (even less remarkable when one examines the political sermons of the period).”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“All in all, Christian nation proponents commit several errors in their claims about the religious beliefs of the Founders. Their claims isolate the religious language of the Founders and other individuals from their immediate and cultural contexts. They pick statements that conform to modern confessions of faith, while they fail to acknowledge how those statements may have deviated from standards of religious orthodoxy of the time. And they draw assumptions from those isolated statements about how the speaker may have understood the basis of republican principles or the appropriate relationship between church and state matters. In the final analysis, a majority of the leading Founders were neither orthodox Protestants nor hard-core deists; yet, most leaned toward a form of rational theism, an approach that viewed Christianity, or theism generally, through the lens of Enlightenment rationalism. But more to the assumptions that underlie the Christian nation narrative, there is little evidence that the religious rhetoric of the Founders directed their understandings about the foundations of civil government.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding

“As noted, late in their deliberations the drafters of the Constitution included a clause prohibiting religious tests or prerequisites for holding any federal office.”
― Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding