Faith and Freedom Revisited

Wes Riddle, in an essay in Dallas Blog, imagines a past that never was, a past where America's Founding Fathers resemble modern-day conservative, evangelical Christians, a past where "the whole idea of there being very many drug addicts would have been absolutely shocking."

The colonials would have no trouble understanding modern drug addiction. For them, alcohol addiction was a widespread and continual problem.

The colonials consisted of many Christians, to be sure, but there were Deists and atheists and others, too, and the government they collectively instituted was secular, not Judeo-Christian. That was deliberate, based on a profound distrust of organized religion.

The following quotes by Thomas Jefferson should be enough to dispel the notions that Mr Riddle is trying to peddle about the Christian nature of our early Republic. There are many more. Interested readers should spend some time reading the Founders in their own words, instead of notions Mr Riddle imagines them to have believed. All the founders. You'd learn that there was a wide variety of religious opinion, not the uniform Christian mentality Mr Riddle presents. And it was because of that diversity, our Founders wisely decided on a secular government.

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter."

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823