This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Jul 2008, by ken meece.
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06 Jul 08
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Consider the Declaration of Independence. It is not normally seen as an evangelical statement, despite the heroic attempts of the Christian right to claim it as such. God is mentioned four times, but obliquely, and never by name. Even so, the argument against kings derived much of its power from the vigor of Christian thought.
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John Adams, who helped edit the declaration, attributed the text to God as well as to Thomas Jefferson and expressed his wish that future Americans would celebrate the great day “by solemn acts of devotion” (along with bonfires, gunfire, the clanging of bells and other raffish pursuits of happiness).
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For most of American history, evangelicals were Democrats or their equivalents, profoundly uncomfortable near the temple of the moneychangers.
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Jefferson attracted huge numbers of voters simply because his running mate, Aaron Burr, was the grandson of the great evangelist Jonathan Edwards. In the 1920s, William Jennings Bryan was lampooned by H. L. Mencken as an ignoramus catching flies in a sweaty courthouse during the Scopes trial, but that snide dismissal overlooked Bryan’s long career as an advocate for progressive causes. F.D.R. consistently enjoyed the support of both traditional evangelicals and neo-Calvinists like Reinhold Niebuhr (enjoying new life as the writer intellectuals most like to quote without reading, after Tocqueville).
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Now and then he speaks in the ancient accents, promising to create “a kingdom right here on earth” or arguing that “our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.” Those phrases slip by, generally unnoticed by his partisans (who are evangelical in their own way).
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Not only do they connect us to the richness of a deep American past; they might even point to the better future we’ve been waiting for since, well, forever.
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