A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Obama is far more Christian than most of the leading Founding Fathers…. September 16, 2013

….of these United States.  Shocking?  Perhaps.  But as Christopher Ferrara documents to exhaustive length (almost too exhaustive), few if any of the leading Founding Fathers were practicing Christians in any recognizable sense. They were, in fact, very young, very hip, very radical enlightenment deists, almost all masons to a man, many of which repudiated at great length such concepts as the Holy Trinity, the Resurrection, the Incarnation, and other absolutely essential aspects of Christianity.  This was something my dear departed friend Vicki Middleton would have taken very hard, because she really clung to the current-day evangelical Christian pretension that this nation was founded upon a bedrock of Christian belief.  Nothing could be further from the truth, at least regarding the most important leaders of the revolution.  Our current President Obama actually emotes far more orthodox Christian beliefs than many of the Founders did.

Below, I will list some of the leading lights of the American Revolution, and what kind of religious convictions, if any, they held.  All data is compiled from Christopher Ferrara’s Liberty: The God that Failed, but what is below is exactly that, a compilation, and not meant to be an exact quote from a certain page:

George Washington: Unquestionably not a professing, practicing Christian of any stripe.  When describing his vague masonic “god,” Washington invariably used terms like “Almighty Being,” “invisible Hand,” and “the Great Author.” The pastor of Washington’s home Anglican parish, when asked about Washington’s religious convictions, answered: “Sir, Washington is a deist.”  Even more. It is no accident that Washington’s monument in the nation’s capitol is a masonic obelisk.  Washington was such a confirmed mason (as were almost all the leading enlightenment rationalists) that he donned masonic vestments and conducted a masonic “blessing” ceremony when he laid the cornerstone of the US Capitol building.  Never once in his copious writings and public speeches did Washington ever use the name of Jesus Christ, even though the country was virtually 100% Christian at that time.  It was widely known in Washington’s time that he was not a practicing Christian, and was in fact a deist.  This was scandalous to many.  It was not until decades after Washington’s death that a massive cultus was built up, attempting to turn him into a paragon of virtue (the cherry tree incident is total fabrication) and a dedicated Christian male.  Another small factoid is that he refused to kneel with the rest of the congregation whenever he did go with his wife to their Anglican church.

Thomas Jefferson:  Another enlightenment deist, Jefferson was perhaps the most militant of all the founding fathers in attacking orthodox Christian beliefs.  He was really quite contemptuous of Christianity.  He composed his own blasphemous version of the Bible, which specifically repudiated the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and was a forerunner of the kind of modernist belief that turns Jesus Christ into a really cool dude.  I’m sure such belief helped Jefferson rationalize his slave owning, beating, and fornicating. Jefferson openly rejected a Divine Chirst, and spoke derisively of “A hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads.”  He also referred to God as an “ethereal gas.”  Further, Jefferson actually counseled friends and family members that it was preferable to be atheist than a professing Christian, and felt that Catholicism was the worst religion anyone could possibly embrace.

Benjamin Franklin: Franklin was yet another enlightenment deist, this time more on the libertine side. Franklin was an early materialist, and felt any republic would have to be founded on the same kind of principles.  Deist, like modernism, was the religious belief of the elites. If we remember that deism was the 18th century version of radical modernist secularism, and we recall that Franklin was one of America’s earliest and best known popular intellects, it is no surprise that Franklin should also have been deist.  Franklin was also a great mason, which masonic beliefs actually helped organize and advance the revolution in France, when he was stationed there as US ambassador during the Revolutionary War.  Franklin referred to Our Blessed Lord as “Author and Owner of our System” – a masonic declaration of “god” if there ever was one.

James Madison: Madison was another deist using phrases like “that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations,” who also refused to kneel during prayer.  However, having seen the political price for apostasy his predecessors in the presidency had paid, especially Jefferson, whose apostasy was far too public too keep hidden, Madison adopted a shrewd policy of obfuscation and refusal to address the topic. Although a nominal member of the Anglican church, he was never confirmed and his attendance at church was desultory.  He was certainly not a convinced Christian, although he was not the militant deist like the others on this list.  Madison was another Mason.

John Adams: Adams views on Christianity were somewhat more orthodox than many of his revolutionary confederates, but he openly described that he was glad the Constitution had been framed on pluralist, non-religious grounds, and that it made no reference to God as our Creator, Benefactor, or the Foundation upon which our government rests. He was sympathetic to masonry, although Adams himself was no mason. He was, like all his confederates, a deist, only a less radical one.

A list of some of the Founding Fathers who were also Freemasons: Washington, Franklin, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, James Otis……..in fact, it is believed that as many as 52 out of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were masons.

All this matters, because these men crafted this nation’s government.  Numerous Americans believe – have been very carefully led to believe – that this nation is the “shining city on a hill,” founded on Christian principles and with God’s special blessing.  Well, the hill was protestant to start with, the city is deist, and the principles were masonic.  Whether God will bless a nation that deliberately, from its inception, rejected naming Him as the Source upon which all governmental authority rests, and which made plain that His Laws would NOT form the framework for the laws of this nation, is, I think, self-evident.  This nation coasted along on the fumes of Christendom which its early settlers brought over from England, and received periodical refills of Christian belief and practice through mass immigration from Catholic countries, but that is now running to exhaustion, and the masonic, practically atheist principles upon which this nation were founded – cut off from Grace, specifically rejecting the primacy of the Church and the Social Reign of Christ the King – are now becoming glaringly apparent.

“A Republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin once famously said, when asked what the Constitutional Convention (unelected, and going way, way beyond it’s commission*) was working on in long, secret sessions. Keep it we have, but it appears the nation will founder, not because of some external threat, but because of the erroneous, radical liberal protestant notions cooked into it from the beginning.

So, while Obama may be a fake Christian, or a secular modernist, or a muslim, he at least mouths are feigns a Christianity far more sincere than any of the above men ever purported to hold. And that should be supremely unsettling for every American, but especially Catholic Americans.

*- I was personally shocked to learn that there was never a general vote in this country to breakaway from England, dissolve the Articles of Confederation, or even approve the Constitution.  No one was ever elected to the Continental Congress, nor to the Constitutional Convention. In every case, a narrow cabal of radical elites, determined what kind of “liberty” the people would have, and then proceeded to go about getting it. Those who refused the proferred liberty were crushed.  The vast majority of citizens had absolutely no say in any of this, and those who remained loyal to England were brutally treated and run out of the country – which helped found Canada as a viable enterprise. As Ferrara says throughout the book, liberty has always come at the barrel of a gun.  It’s just another form of power politics, without the limits imposed by the Church.