What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (34 page)

“I wish it [the Christian religion] were more productive of good works…I mean real good works…not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing…or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity.”

 

He expected a bit more from God’s cheerleaders, I guess.

John Adams:

Raised as a Congregationalist, he later rejected many of its doctrines, like the Trinity, and opted for the one-god Unitarian church instead. His father wanted him to be a minister, but he thought being a lawyer was a more noble pursuit. (Frankly, “noble” is not a word that comes to mind in either case.) He felt that religion had a role in developing morals and virtues, and he was more overtly Christian in his sensibilities than most of the founders. He believed Christian morality was key to the success of his country. But in the course of his career he sent mixed messages about the relationship of church and state—understandable given that he and his cohorts were charting new territory and he was a product of churchy New England. Yet he had moments when he could get very rough on the dogmas of the Old Time Religion:

“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?”

 

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”

 

He said it, not me.

James Madison:

The “Father of the Constitution” attended St. John’s Episcopal Church while he was president but, like his compatriots, he was more likely a Deist. Actually, he’s a bit difficult to figure out on the religion score. For a time he considered a career in the ministry. But he also felt that religious belief should be directed by reason, and he objected to taxes being used to support churches. He had these things to say about the alleged benefits of religion:

“In no instance have…the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”

 

“…religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together…”

 

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”

 

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

 

Guys like Madison didn’t show up on your doorstep on Sunday afternoon with pamphlets about Jesus.

Thomas Paine:

The great writer and agitator of the American Revolution also believed in a rational approach to God.

“It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything;”

 

Sounds moderate enough. But get a few beers in him (Samuel Adams?) and he’d give you an earful of what he
really
thought:

“Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.”

 

Paine’s landmark book,
The Age of Reason
, dissected the Bible chapter and verse, and ridiculed many religious dogmas. This didn’t win him a lot of friends. (It rarely does; trust me.) He was accused of being an atheist, which he wasn’t. He simply saw a huge gap between spiritual truth and what Scripture was peddling.

“It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.”

 

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

 

Okay, he hits religion pretty hard. But he did think it through:

“Are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God…would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of deaths, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.”

 

Another concept for the SyFy Channel? Ironically, Paine’s bottom line on all this sounds more like Jesus than a lot of Christians do.

“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

 

Thomas Jefferson:

While Jefferson was also raised in the Episcopal Church, we often think of him as a Deist. But he didn’t belong to any such sect, and some think him more a Unitarian. He believed in the morals and ethics of Jesus, but he felt that a lot of traditional Christianity was “errors and corruptions” added to the original message.

In an 1819 letter to his former secretary, William Short, Jefferson declared that the Gospels served up, “a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.” And while he believed they also presented “sublime ideas of the Supreme Being,” that included “precepts of the purist morality and benevolence…with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed,” he then added:

“These [ideas] could not be the intentions of the groveling authors who related them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds.”

 

It’s the “groveling authors” of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John he’s talking about. To set the record straight, Jefferson edited something now called
The Jefferson Bible
, wherein he actually cut out, rearranged, and shuffled together the verses of the four Gospels into a single chronology. But in doing so, he left out all of the miracles—no virgin birth, no resurrection. He regarded all that as junk added by Jesus’ biographers, who had distorted his original teachings:

“…his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State…to filch wealth and power to themselves…”

 

Like the pagan philosophers he studied, Jefferson didn’t see the need to support human rights with religious belief. When he wrote the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he was vilified for doubting ideas like the Great Flood and the biblical age of the earth. But he did manage to include this:

“Our civil liberties are not dependent upon our religious opinions.”

 

Rights and freedoms do not require religion; they transcend it. Everyone deserves basic rights no matter what they believe. Nor does civil society depend upon any particular deity:

“…it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.”

 

Jefferson admired the philosophy of Jesus, but he didn’t buy it wholesale, and he had some major problems with the religion it spawned:

“There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.”

 

Given this attitude, it’s not surprising that he had no interest in mixing church and state. The history of that idea wasn’t good:

“In every country and 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…they [the Church] have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.”

 

So, when someone tried to slip Jesus into the Constitution:

“An amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that [the preamble] should read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’; the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.”

 

He believed America was big enough for all of us. Oh, and just in case you’re still not clear about where our doubting Thomas landed on the issue of taking the Bible literally:

“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. 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 classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

 

There are quotes I could cite that are even harsher than these, but you get the idea.

A Step into the Future

Every revolutionary stands with one foot in the past and one in the future—the world in which he grows up and the world he hopes to create. America’s revolutionaries appeared on the scene at one of those great pivotal moments in history when age-old ideas like monarchy, miracles, witchcraft, slavery, and religion-based laws were being shown the door. As with any revolution, the record was mixed. But they did manage to establish a country upon ideas that most of the world didn’t even have on the back burner at the time.

Sure, they went to church. They prayed to God and learned from Scripture. They believed their country was divinely blessed. Their attitudes were complex and evolving. But they were not a devout conclave of theocrats. They were products of the Enlightenment; men of reason and worldly matters. And they could be a lot of fun.

Franklin was an inventor, Jefferson a scientist, and Paine a skeptic. Washington told bawdy jokes. Hamilton was all about money. They cursed, they drank, and they had affairs. They pursued happiness! It’s not that they didn’t like Jesus. They did. What bugged them was what so many churches were doing with Jesus, and they didn’t want government shoving any of that down their throats. Anyway, they were mostly about no taxation without representation.

But here’s the really important point:

It doesn’t matter what the Founding Fathers thought about God!
It doesn’t matter what
anyone
in power or authority thinks about God. All that matters in America is what
you
think about God. When you
do
have to worry about someone else’s concept of God, you don’t have religious freedom.

As for the Constitution, it doesn’t matter what spiritual beliefs the framers had when they wrote it. It’s what they put on paper that counts. And because they couldn’t agree with each other about religion, they made nothing about it official. When it came to matters of faith, everyone should decide for themselves.

So, in the final analysis, where does all this leave us?

The Most Moral People in History

“Western civilization is in a spiritual crisis!”

My entire life I’ve heard this woeful drone by everyone from academic philosophers to pestering evangelicals to inner peace creeps. My first thought is always: When were we
not
in a spiritual crisis?

According to the Old Testament, we’ve been wrestling with dire moral dilemmas ever since Adam and Eve committed their dietary infraction. The story of the Israelites is one spiritual calamity after another. The advent of Christianity didn’t help much. Immediately there were fights over who could and couldn’t be a Christian, what Jesus was made of, how many parts God came in, and whether or not the pope was his mouthpiece. Factions fought in the streets. You had challenges from Gnostics, pagans, heathens, blasphemers, heretics, witches, Druids, Cathars, and a growing wave of Muslims. Plenty of spiritual crises to go around.

The Christian response to all this included preaching, prayer, charity, crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, tons of baroque artwork, and a non-stop succession of end-of-the-world panics. The faith then split into Catholic and Orthodox, and later spun off into thousands of Protestant sects. Who knew
what
to believe? Then came troublemakers like Galileo, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Hugh Hefner. And those are just the biggies. There were many smaller hiccups along the way that included false messiahs, corrupt churches, and troubling popular trends (like patent leather shoes) too numerous to list. If we’re in a spiritual crisis today, it didn’t start with the Pill or the ban on school prayer.