The Dogmatic Divide Between Modern Evangelical Christianity And The Founding Fathers

In a recent attack ad, presidential hopeful Rick Perry used the following voiceover:

As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion. And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.

The politics of the Obama attack aside, one must wonder if Rick Perry’s historical education was as poor as his scientific one. As even a cursory study of American history will show, the founding fathers of our democracy had some ideas about religion that Rick Perry and his fundamentalist elk would find extremely distasteful and potentially blasphemous. Yet it is their versions of faith, which share little or nothing in common with Perry’s brand, that shaped early America and served as the bedrock for the foundation of the United States.

George Washington was raised Episcopalian, a mainline Anglican Church, though there is some serious question as to what, if any, flavor of Christianity he followed as an adult. He was particularly quiet about his own religious beliefs during his public years, even going so far as to not directly confirm he even believed in Christianity. When religion did make it into his public speaking, often limited it to mention of God, typically refraining from using the term Jesus Christ.

Even if Washington retained the faith system of his childhood, it has much more in common with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy than it does with Rick Perry’s modern Christian Evangelicalism. Episcopalians believe in Apostolic succession and have a strong an emphasis on sacramental theology. While they do not believe in transubstantiation in the strict sense, the teaching of Real Presence does allow for such an interpretation.