Paul Wilczynski's Observations

UUWorld: What would Jefferson and Adams do?

The Rev. Dr. F. Forrester Church, senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, hypothesizes on what John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would have to say if they were to pay a surprise visit to the 21st–century United States. I'm particularly interested in Adams, of course, because he's buried in the basement of my church.

.. in 1798, Alexander Hamilton had no difficulty convincing Adams that a National Fast Day would honor and galvanize his more conservative Federalist political base. Indeed it did. Raising a host of traditional black cockades, hundreds of New England preachers seized this governmentally sanctioned opportunity to pronounce French and Jeffersonian infidelity a demonic double threat to the future of America's Christian Republic.

Later in life, Adams looked back ruefully on his decision to promote a religious event for political gain. He went so far as to claim that it cost him the presidency. For one thing, it left the plausible impression that he had buckled under pressure from Presbyterian Church leaders, who urgently were calling for the president to proclaim a day of national worship. Declaring a National Fast was like poking a stick into a nest of hornets. In alarm, Dissenting Christians (Baptists, Methodists, and the like) howled that Adams was compromising church–state separation. For sound religious reasons, they came out in droves to support Jefferson, the more secular candidate. "Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion," Adams concluded in 1812, years too late to save him from his ill–calculated experiment in Christian governance.

I suspect, for all his piety, that Adams would want our current president to grasp this insight, too.

Good to see that, back then, Christians voted in favor of separation of church and state. I agree with Church - learning from our past can be a Good Thing.

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 10:45 AM