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By Ron Barnett Patriotic fife and drum music filled a Greenville, S.C.

, church as a teen-age mime-and-drama group demonstrated its vision of what has gone wrong with America. The devil a young man dressed in black and smeared with red makeup snatched Bibles from schoolchildren, an image the group used to illustrate the 1963 Supreme Court decision they said "kicked God out of school." Drugs, teen pregnancy, crime and unprecedented moral decay are the result, a narrator said. The heroes of this drama are America's Founding Fathers, who were described in terms familiar to evangelical Christians of the 1990s. "Over 200 years ago they shook off the chains of tyranny from Great Britain by divine call," the narrator said. But since then, "We eliminated God from the equation of American life, thus eliminating the reason this nation first began," he said. "And beyond the grave I hear the voices of our Founding Fathers pleading, `We need God in America again!"' That recent performance at Redemption Outreach Center in Greenville sounded a popular theme, especially in conservative churches, that America needs to return to the values of a more virtuous, Bible-based past. The nation's founders increasingly are invoked as moral anchors whose religious views, some believe, have been ignored.

But historians say the message that comes across in the portrayals of the Founding Fathers by some conservative Christians is the incorrect one that they were fundamentalist Christians. "Sometimes I cringe a little bit when I hear these interpretations," said David Beale, a professor of church history at Bob Jones University. "They're trying to Christianize people who were not Christians in the evangelical sense of the term." "The main politicians in those days, especially in the 18th century, were certainly not trying to defend Christianity exclusively," Beale said. "It was morality. It wasn't just Christianity. It was God and good ethics." A patriotic appeal In a speech by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson that was mailed to members of his politicalaction group, the Christian Coalition, he quoted the first three presidents to support his argument for a constitutional amendment "that guarantees religious expression for young and old, in our schools and every other public place ..." Such an amendment is needed, Robertson said, "to restore the proper understanding of the First Amendment," which protects "the free exercise" of religion. To illustrate the need for such an amendment, Robertson gave an example of moral decline in late 20th-century America: the gang rape of a teen-age girl a few years ago in a crowded Rhode Island pool hall. He then told of "a much more insidious crime," which he called "a rape of our nation's religious

heritage" and "rape of our governing document, the United States Constitution." The "suspects" in this "crime," Robertson said, were "learned justices of the Supreme Court, so-called legal scholars with multiple degrees from prestigious schools of law, paid representatives of such benign-sounding organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, and atheists like Madalyn Murray O'Hair." Heroes or heretics? It's not hard to see why the framers of the Constitution, a document held in patriotic reverence for its time-tested wisdom, are held high to support the theme of spiritual renewal. Numerous references to God can be found in their writings. Robertson concluded that "one simply cannot understand the American experiment of ordered liberty without understanding the role of faith in God and the tenets of Scripture in the lives of the nation's founders." Yet Jefferson and others expressed religious beliefs that are heretical to fundamentalist Christianity, according to Charles Lippy, a former Clemson University religion professor now teaching religion in American culture at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. "I think the religious right misunderstands completely both the religious views of many of the Founding Fathers as well as the religious complexion of the nation at the time of the Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution," Lippy said. It was religious freedom, the right of people "to think for themselves," not the promotion of any particular religion,

that was the cornerstone of the United States government, Lippy said. "From what I see from some of the material from the Christian Coalition and other groups of that sort is an assumption almost that all of these people were fundamentalists," Lippy said. "And the term did not even exist at the time. And they clearly were not that." The Founding Fathers tended to assume all forms of Christianity would produce people with good morals, Lippy said. "But they didn't want to be in the business of identifying any one of them as Truth with a capital T," he said. Freedom of conscience Jefferson, for example, edited his own version of the Gospels with a pair of scissors and paste, clipping out the miracles of Jesus and other portions he believed to be legend. He pasted together the parts he accepted as genuine into two compilations he called "The Philosophy of Jesus" and "The Life and Morals of Jesus." One ends with Jesus' death on the cross and the other with his being laid in the tomb. Both omit the Resurrection story, which is central to Christian doctrine. Historians said Jefferson was reluctant to talk about his religious views because of his passionate belief in the right of the individual to seek truth unimpeded. "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear," Jefferson wrote to his nephew in 1787.

Just as the Founding Fathers weren't unanimous in their opinions on what shape the new nation's government should take, they weren't monolithic in their views of religion, said Bill Steirer, a Clemson University history professor who specializes in the study of the American Revolution and the early years of the nation. While virtually all apparently believed in a Supreme Being and esteemed the moral and ethical guidelines of Christianity, many questioned the basics of Christian theology, Steirer said. "You could find almost anything you wanted to find among them in terms of their beliefs," Steirer said. Some of the Founding Fathers, like James Madison, a former theology student, were devout Christians. Others, Steirer said, were not. Also, the church as an institution wasn't uniformly strong throughout the colonies, he said. The Puritans held sway in New England, but in many areas of the Southern and middle colonies, churches were few and far between, he said. The founders saw JudeoChristian values as a cultural, ethical framework necessary for an orderly society rather than as a religious doctrine, Steirer said. He also said it's a mistake to try to take the Founding Fathers out of their historical context and try to imagine how they would react to problems of the late 20th century. "One of the reasons why they were such successful politicians in their own day was their adaptability and their skill in

dealing with the contemporary issues in visionary ways," Steirer said. "Who knows what they would do with today's issues, because I assume they'd apply those same characteristics of adaptability and vision and everything else." The Age of Reason Influenced by the Enlightenment and its emphasis on understanding the universe through science and rational thinking, some of America's most prominent early leaders were deists, holding to the view that God created the universe but takes no part in its functioning, historians said. Franklin, whom historians regard as a free-thinker and critic of organized religion, believed in God but questioned the divinity of Christ. "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity ...," Franklin wrote in 1790. Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet "Common Sense" helped galvanize support for the revolutionary cause, wrote out his unorthodox creed in his work "The Age of Reason." "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. ... I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." He was criticized for his beliefs, according to his biographers.

Chief Justice John Jay, on the other hand, was a staunch Episcopalian and one of the early presidents of the American Bible Society. Yet Jay objected to a motion that daily sessions of the First Continental Congress be opened with prayer, arguing there was too much diversity of faith among the delegates to make prayer feasible. His objection was overridden after an impassioned speech by Samuel Adams, a Puritan beer brewer and fervent revolutionary. Constance B. Shulz, a history professor at the University of South Carolina who has done extensive study on religion in early America, said the beginnings of the evangelical movement in the 1790s put the brakes on a century of "much more freewheeling religious beliefs." She said today's religious right is similar to the early Puritans in believing that there is "only one possible set of values" by which people should live. "No one disagrees with them that moral teaching is necessary," Shulz said. "The issue is who will decide what are the moral values that should be taught." Jefferson believed the Creator endowed humans with an inborn sense of morals and that organized religion too often attempts to control people through fear and mystery, she said. Jefferson was attacked by some of the religious conservatives of his time, she said. David White, a Southern Baptist minister and host of a Sunday morning radio show on WORD-AM who has studied American Christianity, said the social ills the religious right

attributes to loss of traditional religion stem more from increasing materialism and the gap between rich and poor. "I think moral decay is something that has occurred in every major civilization since the beginning of time," White said. The Constitution, he believes, was meant to be adapted to changing needs. "The thing that the Christian Right and other groups are basically attempting to do is make the argument that the intention of the Founding Fathers was to establish essentially a Christian nation without favoring any particular denomination or incarnation of Christian faith in other words no state-supported church," White said. "But the issue is not the intention of the Founding Fathers. The issue is modern realities and the flexibility of the Constitution." For example, the Constitution was amended long after the days of the Founding Fathers to abolish slavery and give women the right to vote. "It was a different era," White said. "They did not live in a multicultural society like we live in today." Religion or ethics? A Robertson spokesman said the religious broadcaster isn't trying to claim that all the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians. "He's never made a point to suggest that all of them practiced a particular type of Christianity or were indeed

Christian," said Gene Kapp, vice president for public relations at Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Yet some local grass-roots advocates of school-sponsored prayer say Christianity is the only authentic American religious viewpoint. "We're not advocating any religion except Jesus Christ and God," said Peggy Smith Shortt, a singer from Greenville who travels the country promoting school prayer. "We are advocating the religion which our history was founded on. We were founded `one nation under God."' What's not getting across in the rhetoric of the religious right is a realistic view of the lifestyles and beliefs of the early Americans, said A.V. Huff, a history professor at Furman University. When Robertson and others talk about "JudeoChristian values," they seem to be referring to a "small-town, intimate-community mindset" in which the local church plays a central role, Huff said. "They really are creating a kind of nostalgic community in the past which never existed," Huff said. Vice has always mixed with virtue in American society, in some ways moreso in the early years of the country than now, he said. For instance, early Americans consumed considerably more hard liquor than Americans do today, he said. Even George Washington, after twice losing elections to the Virginia House of Burgesses, was not above resorting to the conventional 18thcentury method of political persuasion on his third try, according to "Mountain Spirits," a book about the history of moonshine written by Joseph E. Dabney.

Washington won handily after plying voters with 169 gallons of rum, wine, beer and cider, the book said. Also, the percentage of Americans attending church now is much higher than it was during the Revolutionary War era, Huff said. If moral standards in America today are declining, at least some values have risen, Huff said. "In the past we very often excused violence within the family, or between the races," he said. Still, some members of the Christian Coalition believe history has been "revised" to take God out of the nation's foundation. "I'm not really an expert (in history), but I know enough to know that our Founding Fathers founded it that way and I think that we should follow those same beliefs," said Al Padgett, co-chairman of the Greenville County Christian Coalition.

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