Constitution and Christian principles

Major, I agree. Someone mentioned Masonic affiliations, so I decided to list them while I was at it. According to the God & Country site, 16 of the 50 some-odd delegates to the Constitutional Convention were Masons. I personally doubt affiliation with Masonry or the fact that 29% of the delegates were Masons has much significance.

Even considering religious affiliation can be slippery, because some people do not hold the faith of their denomination, and some non-member attenders are in agreement with their church beliefs. And in colonial times one must also consider the tendency to hold nominal membership in a state church. Nevertheless, the religious affiliation of the founding fathers (if the God & Country website is accurate) shows that the majority were Christians (even if nominal ones), and not deists, as claimed by one post in this thread. How much their religious affiliation & religious views informed their opinions for constitutional government is another matter altogether.

And in answer to the original question, IMO, the Constitution is a legal (not religious) document that is not explicitly Christian, but one that is in general harmony with Baptist principles. I say Baptist, because the principle of religious freedom is a mostly Anabaptist/Baptist concept that was not held by the majority of Christians in 1776 or 1789.

 

In absence of evidence to the contrary, the God & Country web site appears to show that the majority were affiliated with Christian denominations. Even some of those always proclaimed as deists - Franklin, for example - held notions of Divine providence not consistent with the fundamental tenets of deism.

Whatever might be wrong with the zealotry of and incorrect in the anyalysis by Barton and others, they have nevertheless led in a needed corrective to the unhistorical notions that nearly all the founding fathers were a bunch of deists.

 

Perhaps the key "Christian principle" is that all men are sinners and therefore need to be governed by law instead of at man's whim. Hence, a constitutional republic rather that a democracy.

 

Jefferson was not a Deist. He was a watery Episcopalian with some doctrinal doubts, but he was in regular attendance at his local Episcopal church until he died. </font>[/QUOTE]Some doctrinal doubts? Try the miracles. Ever taken a look at the Jefferson Bible. It is without all the miracles. I call that a true liberal.

 

Jefferson was not a Deist. He was a watery Episcopalian with some doctrinal doubts, but he was in regular attendance at his local Episcopal church until he died. </font>[/QUOTE]Some doctrinal doubts? Try the miracles. Ever taken a look at the Jefferson Bible. It is without all the miracles. I call that a true liberal. </font>[/QUOTE]The Jefferson Bible is a myth. Jefferson, some time after he was president, performed a devotional exercise in a diary of excerpting the moral teachings of Jesus from the Gospels, and then put the diary on the shelf. Eighty years after his death, an archivist with the library of Congress found the diary and it was published as Jefferson's Bible. Source: The Rewriting of America's History by Catherine Millard.

 

Its been years since I did the research, but in Jefferson's letters he often attacked the Pauline writings. Sorry I can't document it now for it has been MNAY years since I did the work.

 

This is not a principle that is in the Constitution. This is a principle which was written into the Declaration of Independence (which is not a document of law). The D of I was making the case that all people are endowed by their Creator with "certain inalienable rights", and that those rights include, but are not limited to "life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness". The D of I goes on to accuse the King of England of depriving the colonies of those rights, and as such, the colonies have decided to separate themselves from the crown to preserve the rights spelled out.

You're quite right about that. The Constitution (by way of the amendment) asserts only to guarantee that the government will not respect the establishment of religion, and that, it will not prohibit the free excercise thereof (to the point where government is not forced to respect the establishment of such).

Additionally, the Constitution quarantees each person's individual freedom (including the freedom to sin and make bad choices) so long as a person's freedom does not infringe on another person's individual freedom.

While it's not specificically Christian, part of Christianity is giving to God what is God's and to Ceasar what is Ceasar's. That would include, imo, fighting to preserve the rights of individuals who differ from us in belief. For if their rights are taken, it's just a matter before our rights are taken.

 

That's right. However, because the Declaration, along with the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, is among the seminal founding documents of the nation, I feel it is not out of line to examine its philosophical underpinnings in considering the meaning of the Constitution. The Constitution flows from the same stream of thought and is the practical extension of the ideology of the Declaration. </font>[/QUOTE]Have to differ rsr. The US Constitution, imho, is a "stand alone." It is not part of a body of legal documents like those which make up the UK constituion (please, NO criticism intended here. I respect and admire the UK system).

The Declaration was Jeffersonian, the Constitution primarily Madisonian.

 

Yes, the Constitution was part of a conservative resurgence that sought to repudiate the liberal and innovative principles of the Articles of Confederation and to turn away from many of the revolutionary principles of the Declaration of Independence. And as part of a bloodless coup d'etat, it is a stand-alone document. The government that had issued the D of I had essentially been ousted and replaced by the actions of the state ratifying conventions.

 

Actually, it's the other way arouond. The Articles of Confederation were quite conservative in their scope (to the point where, as the supreme law of the land, the A of I were rather ineffective), and the Constitution was quite liberal in comparison.

 

The Articles of Confederation were not adequate to run our nation. Confederacies are inherently unstable. Without the Constitution, we would have never moved west of the Mississippi River, and we might not have kept what we had. Imagine Mexico's border extending to St. Paul and St. Louis. This is what the Articles would have brought us.

 

The Constitution restored separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches, a strong monarch-like chief executive, a bicameral legislature, and wrested control from the states of many powers the Crown had had that the states had taken upon themselves during the Revolution. It represented a conservative repudiation of much of that Revolution in favor of a strong central government.