Daggah

I think a powerful argument can be made against the claim that the USA is a Christian nation by pointing out that many of the great minds who influenced the American Revolution were not Christian at all.

John Locke's writings (specifically, the second of his Two Treatises on Government) were a great influence on the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. His Letter of Toleration argued for the necessity of the separation of the Church from the State. Also, he did not believe that Biblical morality should necessarily be law:

From The Works of John Locke, p. 36.

Locke, along with others influenced by the works of the Levellers, felt strongly that beliefs can't be altered by coercion or force, and believed that every man has the right to form his own religious views. That doesn't sound like a very Christian concept to me.

Thomas Paine's deism is obvious in his writing; The Age of Reason (which I plan on reading soon) is an example of his writings against Christianity. In "Common Sense," he provided the first argument in favor of separation from Britain. He was a tremendous influence on American history, and Thomas Jefferson greatly admired him.

(On a side note, the biography of Thomas Paine found <a href="http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/B/tpaine/paine.htm" target="_blank">here</a> happens to link to a page in the Infidels library. Worth mentioning.)

This is just the beginning, guys. I'm 19 and my knowledge is limited, so I'd love it if some of you history buffs added to all of this.

hezekiah jones

Nor would Locke have looked too kindly on the fundies, like David Barton and D. James Kennedy, that are pushing this "christian nation" business:

Mind you, Locke didn't take very kindly to atheists either.

Daggah

What other philosophers (outside of the movements Locke and Paine were a part of) and philosophies influenced early American thinking?

I can't really blame Locke for not taking kindly to atheists. In those days science had not yet reached the point at which one could have at least a semi-decent answer to "where did it all come from?" Besides, blaming people of that time for anti-atheist sentiment is like blaming people of that time for racist sentiments too; it was an [unfortunate] product of the society that they lived in.

SLD

I think you have to read Madison and Jefferson and their views on separation of church and state. But you cannot read them in isolation the way you read Locke. They were not philosophers, but politicians with a specific political goals in mind. You cannot read them in the abstract, but must understand the political and cultural milieu in which they wrote, and the specific battles they were fighting at the time that they wrote their opinions. Otherwise you fail to understand what they are really talking about.

I would also add that you shouldn't put too much stock in Locke. His ideas of tolerance were not what the founders had in mind when they crafted the First Amendment's religious clauses. The genius of the founders is that there really aren't any philosophers to whom you can point and say they are the intellectual founders of the nation. The founders themselves were the driving force behind very new and radical ideas that were far ahead of their time. Particularly, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.

You're only 19, you've got a lot of reading to do. Have fun.

SLD

fromtheright

SLD,

No surprise, I'm sure, but I disagree with you especially as to the influence of other philosophers generally. I know that Locke didn't favor toleration as broadly as did the Founders, but I think it would be hard to argue that they were not familiar with Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration, which in its own time was revolutionary. Are you arguing that they weren't heavily influenced by early English writers on broader revolutionary and political issues?

Gene

[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: fromtheright ]</p>

Oregon Slim

Not obvious to me. He certainly never espouses atheism in any of his writings that I've read. He always carefully distinguishes his criticism of religion from criticism or skepticism about God's existence. But he's just too careful about always denying being an atheist every chance he gets. It just makes me wonder what he was really thinking and why he wrote that way. But his writings are deist at every turn, yes.

Daggah

Oregon Slim, I don't mean to come across as if I'm attacking you, but are you sure you read what I wrote properly? I never said anything about Paine and atheism.

Oregon Slim

No, you didn't. But you said Paine was a deist, which means that he wasn't an atheist. Church leaders called Paine an atheist during his lifetime. He never wrote one atheist sentence that I can remember seeing. He wrote as a deist. But he was so thorough at painting himself as a deist, it's unnatural. I'd think that a good writer would get carried away with an idea somewhere or challenge a reader to infer his intent or otherwise vary his presentation a little. But when writing things that atheists and deists would agree on, he repeatedly was careful to write in a way that was clearly deist and not atheist. It's just curious that he denied being an atheist so many times. It makes me suspicious. Maybe the Age of Reason was more a collection of essays than a book, and he was simply repeating his position clearly within each essay. Maybe it was a good markething plan. I don't really know.

The works stand on their own, regardless. I'm not confident, however, that you can say for sure that they paint an accurate picture of the man who wrote them. I don't think that was their purpose.