Hijacking History by Kathleen Wellman

Author:Kathleen Wellman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

This account distills America’s success in forming a republic to adherence to biblical Christianity. It gave Americans “virtue and character.” Other countries have not succeeded in forming such a government “because their people have not embraced a moral code based on the Bible.” The Abeka US history textbook is even more expansive on the connection between the Bible and the nation: “The secret to America’s success is the influence of Biblical Christianity.” Only it makes possible a democratic republic, as “our system of government will only work in a nation where a majority of citizens are steeped in the virtues of Biblical Christianity. . . . The only hope for a democratic republic is constant Biblical evangelism. The only sure way to save a nation is to save the souls of its citizens.” It cites Noah Webster, who maintained that “the principles of all genuine liberty and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority.”66

While the BJU textbook concedes that the Constitution’s notion of popular sovereignty was an Enlightenment legacy, it objects that the Enlightenment saw men as essentially good. In contrast, the founders’ “Protestant-Puritan heritage taught them that man could not be trusted,” and they incorporated their central understanding of sin into the Constitution. Their Protestant heritage thus provided a corrective to any Enlightenment influence.67

As Green amply documents, since the 1800s, Americans have wanted a creation myth of the providential founding of the United States to distinguish it from other nations.68 But using the Constitution to support a Christian founding discounts the prominence of Enlightenment ideas and overlooks the absence of appeals to religion in the Constitution.

Historians recognize that the Constitution was deliberately silent on the issue of religion, unlike earlier colonial governing documents. Green sums up the more usual understanding of the Constitution:

The Framers taught that eternal truth could be discovered through reason and common sense and that factions could be controlled through the mechanism of republican government. The decision to adopt a constitutional government could not rely on moral virtue which in turn helped to bring about a detachment of religion from republican government.69

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