Our Brilliant Founding Fathers

Thanks to the culture’s revisionist teaching both in school and in the media, you will oftentimes hear that our Founding Fathers were not really Christians, that they were mostly deists or that they were a group of secularists, agnostics, and even atheists who didn’t believe in God.

The truth is the vast majority of them openly proclaimed a strong Christian faith.

Not only that, they also strongly believed in the benefits of a Christian education for the new nation because they felt Christian principles provided five distinct benefits for society.

First comes the benefit of a civil society. Civilized behavior is not the result of a good constitution or good laws. No matter how good the laws may be, you can’t have a civil society if people’s manners are universally corrupt. Manners teach you to focus on someone other than yourself and to have concern for other people. If only the tough and the rough survive, then you must govern by brute force and raw power.

Second, the Founders believed any self-governing nation needed self-governing citizens and Christian principles provide the basis for just that. If citizens can’t control themselves, then government control must increase and limited government correspondingly decreases. Civil laws can attempt to regulate and restrain outward conduct, but these laws can’t address the heart. Christianity addresses theft, murder, and all other evil human behaviors before they occur, while they’re only a thought in the heart.

The third benefit of a Christian worldview is good citizenship. Even Benjamin Franklin, who was not a believer in the divinity of Christ, still urged the instruction of youth in the principles of Christianity because he believed those principles laid the foundation for the honorable traits like integrity and honesty that made for good citizenship. It doesn't matter for the purposes of their citizenship if your neighbor doesn’t believe in Christ as long as he conducts himself according to the basic tenets of Christianity including the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.

The fourth benefit is the elevation of every kind of knowledge. The Founding Fathers were excellent students of history and they knew that history has consistently shown that the elevation of academic achievements always accompanies the open promotion of Christian principles. Up until very recently science and religion have kept company together and have helped the world progress in amazing ways. Many of the greatest achievements in literature, art, sculpture, music, government, philosophy, science, etc. have occurred at the hands of openly professed Christians. Just think of Milton, Defoe, Calvin, Bach, Handel, Michelangelo, Locke, da Vinci, Newton, Kepler, and Galileo just to name a few.

Fifth and finally, teaching Christian principles results in the cohesive value system necessary for the successful governance of a nation composed of millions of individuals from diverse backgrounds and different ethnic and religious groups. Having a standard value system in society means that everyone, no matter their beliefs, can still know what is right and wrong as far as living in the society goes. This common set of values used to give us national stability and tranquility. Without a firm Christian foundation, our values now flip-flop, often depending on which judge who gets the case.

Since the courts removed Christian principles from schools and the public arena starting in the 1960’s, violent crime has gone up nearly 700 percent. teen pregnancies have increased 700 percent, and academic achievement scores have plummeted. America now consistently places among the last in the world in math and science, and literacy has fallen from the best in the world to 48th -- the worst of any industrial nation.

I sure wish we had more men like the Founding Fathers around today. This country was mightily blessed by God for over two centuries because of the rock-solid foundation they laid. I pray our nation will open its collective eyes and recognize the source of our prosperity before it’s too late. (Check out Wallbuilders for more great info on our Founding Fathers to counteract all the misinformation that’s out there.)