The Pledge of Allegiance, Christian Founding Fathers, and Soup

 Let's talk about them...

👩🏾‍🏫 Somebody cited the Pledge as proof America was founded as a Christian Nation. 

👉🏾 Don't do that, okay? 

* The Pledge was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, over a half century after the last Founding Father died. 

* Congress added the words "under God" to the Pledge in 1954. 

👩🏾‍🏫 Some also say the Founding Fathers were Christians and created this Nation based upon Christian principles. 

👉🏾 Depends on what you mean by Christian...Let's take a brief look at some of them.

* Patrick Henry, John Jay, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and John Witherspoon could be considered to have had "traditional" Christian beliefs. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister. 

* Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine didn't believe in traditional miracles, the divinity of Jesus, or divine revelation. 

Jefferson created his own Bible, editing anything supernatural out of it. 

These men were deists and theistic rationalists. 

* George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison respected Christian ethics and attended church, but they were moderates who generally avoided absolute religious beliefs that were based upon divine revelations and rarely spoke of Jesus's divinity. 

👩🏾‍🏫 All of those men seemed to have believed in God--a higher power, governing humans--but not all of them believed in the deity of Jesus Christ. 

Their shared belief in a supreme higher power, allowed them to agree upon using words like Creator and Divine Providence in the Declaration of Independence. 

👉🏾 Asking Google just a few questions, returned the above information. Technology has made research so much easier. 


👩🏾‍🏫 Points for Reflection 🤔: 

👉🏾 What does it mean to be a Christian? 

👉🏾 Can you BE a Christian and not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ? 


🗣 If the Founding Fathers were here today, they'd be giving Christian Nationalists and folk calling America a Christian Nation, side-eyed 👀 looks. 

🗣 The Charismatic Evangelical Movement? The deist and theistic rationalist Founding Fathers would have scoffed at it and tried to reason it away with enlightened and logical arguments. The moderates would've probably looked on with highbrow disdainment.

🗣📣 America is NOT a Christian Nation, nor has it ever been a Christian Nation. It's a Nation that has always been a soup of different religious beliefs, giving each of the religions--including Christianity--the freedom to exist. 

Just keepin' it real...

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