Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam?: Notes on the Significance of the Declaration of Independence

By Richard J. Rolwing

Each of the first 4 volumes contains 365 essays. Later volumes have fewer. Essays get longer as the issue get deeper. Rolwing examines nearly all of the major writers on our Basic Charter, most of whom , being Americans and liberals, repudiate it. He focuses on their manifold broadsides and rejections, reveals their multiple distortions and misunderstandings, rebukes their self-contradictions and inconsistencies, and pities their general Theo-phobia. He argues that while America was founded almost completely by Protestants (the only two so-called Deists were not that at all), what was founded was formally only a philosophical product, not a faith-based or Christian one, although the Philosophy used had been more Catholic than Protestant. Rolwing makes a great deal of American history, law, ethics, politics, philosophy, and religion easily accessible to the general public or average reader. Read any of these books and you will clap your hands that you are American.

Certainly the Declaration is worth many an hour explaining and defending it. Mr. Rolwing seeks to make the problems brought up about the documents capable of being understood by both scholar and ordinary citizen

Fr. James Schall, SJ

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514405185

Richard J. Rolwing

Richard J. Rolwing, a retired theologian, taught philosophy, world religions, Christianity, and politics at small colleges and large universities. He was a supermarket manager, arbitrator, insurance agent, mortgage broker, stockbroker, registered financial planner, and executive VP for several corporations, which drilled oil/gas wells, marketed business equipment internationally, and bought and operated a gold mine in California. He has rehabbed dozens of homes all over his city, spoken before business groups all over his state, and lectured before professional groups all over the nation. He has published four volumes on the philosophy behind the US Constitution. A recent work was Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose.

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Copyright © 2015 by Richard J. Rolwing.

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Rev. date: 10/27/2015

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CONTENTS

What Do You Mean?

America’s Christian Heritage

Calvin Coolidge

A Contemporary Declaration

Lincoln in Peoria

Sense and Nonsense

The Evolvers

Ellis

Orestes Brownson

The Friendship

A Quote

A New History Text (about America’s Founding)

The Pursuit of Happiness

You Can’t Get Away From It!

The Buddha

Under God

The Law

Animal Rights

The Tree That Saved History

The National Day of Prayer

An American Credo

A Thought

A Letter

American Creation

The Library of Congress

Self-government

All Men Are Persons?

A New Supreme Court Justice

The Signers

A Cold Man’s Warm Words

Forged in Faith

How Evil Works

What The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Said

Civil Religion

Philosophers to the Rescue?

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Theocracy or A Secular State?

The Christian History

Christian History Continued

Blackstone’s Commentaries

Local Self-Government

The First American Constitution: 1638

The Beginnings of New England

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES

The Development of the Declaration of Independence

The Difference God Makes

The Mormon

Endnotes

Previous books by Richard J. Rolwing

Look Out! A Philosophy of Revelation According to Karl Rahner

Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose

Israel’s Original Sin; A Catholic Confession 2 vols.

My Daily Constitution; A Natural Law Perspective 4 vols.

Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam? Notes on the State of the Declaration of Independence 13 vols.

What Do You Mean?

Most modern philosophers, oblivious of the full history of their field, or at least contemptuous of it, constantly argue about age-old questions as if there have been no age-old answers ever offered and at quite deep levels. Many modern scientists explore research into the human brain’s activities but cannot admit that there is any such thing as a human mind. Many modern philosophers study human language, i.e., words and sentences, but cannot admit that there is any such things as ideas and judgments. Both these scientists and philosophers simply presuppose that matter and energy exhaust reality, i.e., they presume a materialistic metaphysics. They are materialists. Of course, this implies that a human being is merely a higher animal. No soul that is both rational and free (capable of independence from matter’s determinations) exists. Man is not a combination of dual principles, matter and spirit. Spirit does not seem evolvable, so it is a purely imaginary figment to them.

Only things which are extended (in space) can exist. So nothing that is intended can. Intentions are supposedly mental but really fictional. Human reality is only extensional, not both intentional and extensional. The famous Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Harvard, 1982, p. 55) gives us what he calls the skeptical paradox that there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word.

Of course, Kripke seems assured that his own words have meanings. The term word here refers to, or means, for Kripke, the spoken and audible sound stretched across material space – extended—, or the written and readable figures stretched across material paper – again, extended. That is all there is to a word. There is no room for anything immaterial like a meaning that is intended. A purely material animal cannot express what it does not possess, nor could another like it detect and grasp such.. Why don’t dogs talk? They have nothing to say. That’s the classic answer. Kripke ignores it. And he does not explain why and how a word differs from a burp.

Barry Stroud comments, Whatever is described in purely extensional terms, and so not described as meaning anything or being understood in some particular way rather than in others, can never fix or determine or constitute something’s meaning one thing rather than another. (The Transparency of Naturalism, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Nov/09, p.165) It is actually worse than that. There can be no meaning whatsoever, much less a determinate meaning for any meaning must be a determinate meaning — meaning this or that. Stroud quotes the famous W.V. Quine’s Epistemology Naturalized (from his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia, 1969, as cited by Floyd and Shieh’s Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy. (Oxford, 2001, p.217). I doubt that I have ever fully understood anything that I could not explain in extensional language. If it is not fully material, he cannot fully grasp it. But Stroud says, If he is right about that, it means (?) this very remark of his is something he does not fully understand.(Ibid)

Yes and No. We cannot fully understand anything. But we cannot even partially understand anything if we insist from the start that we can understand only purely material things, and that only purely material things exist.. Stroud means(!) that Quine’s statement does not consist of purely written figures or spoken sound waves. If it does not also contain, and express, a meaning, it makes no sense. It is nonsense, unintelligible.

Quine says if his own sentence is more than figures and sounds, it cannot be fully explained. He is not all wrong, but he is wrong in what he means or intends. Meaning is something intentional, not extensional. It is spiritual, not physical. It is a mind-product as well as a brain product expressed extensionally. Those two, the mind and the brain, work together and even as one because they exist together even as one. The mind itself is spiritual, and as such is not fully understandable even by another mind which is also material as well as spiritual, that is, is incarnated in a bodified brain. But we can understand much about what something is by the way it works and what it does, even if it remains ultimately a mystery. It is absurd for Quine to deny that meaning exists, and to say that language is no more than figures and sounds. It is not that Quine does not fully understand what he says (although that is true), but that he does not understand at all what he is doing when he expresses language. Only words and sentences exist? There are no ideas and judgments or propositions, because there is no mind, nothing spiritual, no soul, no mind at all?

Stroud claims that modern philosophy, which espouses what it calls naturalism, just as modern scientists do, tries to avoid all intentional vocabulary. They do not want to refer to intentional phenomena. But, he says, there is no human thought, knowledge, or action without human intentional attitudes. So there is no acknowledging and understanding of thought, knowledge, and action without acknowledging and understanding those attitudes. If human beings are part of the natural world, our having intentional attitudes must be understood as part of the natural world. We are the kinds of beings who naturally have such attitudes.(Ibid)

Without realizing it, or at least without letting on, Stroud argues for the existence of the human soul (and all that implies and presupposes). He argues that we need to explain the emergence of beings with intentional attitudes. There was a time when there were no beings with intentional attitudes at all. Now they are all over the place. One might take an interest in how that transition occurred; how there came to be subjects with intentional attitudes in a world that originally did not contain them.(Ibid)

In the natural law tradition, the western tradition of reason, on which the Declaration of Independence depended, the relation between ideas and words, and between judgments and propositions, resembles the relation between the human soul and the human body. The material embodies the mental. The soul animates the body and material embodies the spiritual.. The spiritual incarnates itself physically. While you will never fully comprehend that mystery, it is self-evident, unavoidable, and never honestly deniable.

There was a time when there was no mathematical knowledge in the world either. Now there is a lot of it. But a successful naturalistic explanation of how mathematical knowledge came to be, if we had one, would not imply that mathematical propositions are equivalent to some combination of non-mathematical facts of the kind that played a role in the emergence of that very knowledge. (Ibid)

Stroud asks about the origin of human consciousness, of human language, and of human mathematics. No explanation of them is possible without the use of intentional means. We have to admit that we have and use intentional attitudes. The term natural cannot be restricted to the purely material or extended. Such a restriction is self-contradictory. Otherwise, we would have to interpret the Declaration of Independence as claiming, that because rights that are inalienable, and thus super-empirical (undetectable by any science), are supernatural. Rights are not extended realities. Yes, they may be supernatural in origin, as created by God who endows human creatures with them, but the Declaration never meant to claim they were beyond created nature. After all, those who do speak of them, when they ever do, call them natural rights as opposed to legal or civil rights. They belong in our universe; they are not super-natural.

If they were, their existence could not be recognized except through a special heavenly revelation. They come with our human nature. They are as self-evident as their owners, according to the Declaration. Just because such rights are intentional realities/relations does not mean they are supernatural, or not natural, not belonging to man as man. After all, Americans did call them for two centuries, when they did speak of them, natural rights as opposed to purely legal or civil rights granted by constitutions and governments.

The Declaration says they belong to human nature, to our human natures. However, the UN vocabulary of human rights has won the day of late, if only because the UN offers no explanation of their origin or their goal. But at least such language means such rights belong to human nature.

We see here one more among the many reasons, if they do not all come down eventually to one reason, why so many contemporary American intellectuals are hostile to the Declaration of Independence. Its rights are not scientifically verifiable or disprovable. Furthermore, they are certain, they think, or claim, that the asserted source and goal of such rights, God, as well as the soul that supposedly enjoys such rights, are pure mythology. All the while they make their living seeking and trying to communicate meanings.

So the Declaration is never appealed to even by modern Americans both because theses rights are beyond scientific detection and because they originate with the Creator.

The Declaration meant to capture and communicate meaning. In doing so it gave birth to this nation. You would think that American thinkers, philosophers and scientists, would begin where the American nation began, for all American arguments should begin with the Declaration of Independence.

America’s Christian Heritage

This is the title of a 1997 75 page picture-less pamphlet published by the Christian Defense Fund located in Springfield VA. It is a protest against what it calls the Liberal History Lesson. CDF begins by telling us that lesson. "America, say liberals, was a product of the Enlightenment, which was a rejection of Christianity.

America, say liberals, was founded primarily by Deists, not by Christians. The Constitution, say liberals, and specifically the First Amendment, erects a so-called ‘wall of separation between church and state’ that cannot and must not be transgressed in any way. Moreover, say liberals, the government cannot in any way support or favor religious faith.

This philosophy, this misreading of American history, this mistaken interpretation of our Constitution, has led to a relentless assault on America’s religious institutions and traditions by our educational system, the courts and throughout our popular culture…

This little book proves, beyond any doubt, that America was founded predominantly by Bible-believing Christians, that America’s political institutions were constructed entirely upon Christian principles, and that America’s Founding Fathers had in mind a government that would not only be hospitable toward Christianity, but would actively encourage and promote Christianity and reverence for God. As the US Supreme Court stated so clearly in 1892: Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon the teachings of the redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to the extent, our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.

Before we proceed to consider the rest of this work, which consists of quotations from Founding Fathers, American presidents, great American statesmen, Supreme Court rulings, and Congressional proclamations, I offer some comments on this preface.

The first thing is the last appeal, the reference to the 1892 Supreme Court statement. The author or authors of the book did not inclose quotation marks around the statement. But supposing the exactitude of the attribution of those words to the Court, there were few precedents for such in the Articles of Confederation Congress, and really none in the first Constitutional Congress. Hospitality toward Christianity does not necessarily require hostility, or lack of hostility, toward any other religions. It certainly does not logically include the promotion and encouragement of Christianity on the part of American government., or even giving it any preference legally or politically.

With regard to the necessity invoked, the only possible necessity that could be there would be logical necessity. For even if things were as these authors make out, things could have occurred otherwise. It is actually impossible ‘that it is impossible that it should be otherwise.’ That would make America, sad to say, inhospitable to Jews, but communications between President George Washington and the Jews of that time in America showed that they both understood their situation quite otherwise than the Christian Defense of today sees it.

The authors probably mean to say that the Founding generation were convinced Christians and would have acted as such. They would have produced a political, legal, and social product as Christian as they were. Apparently the authors think that furniture handmade by the Amish is necessarily Christian furniture. And their horses and buggies likewise. However, something similar is relevant. I have maintained in many ways throughout these works on the Constitution and the Declaration that the founding generation of Christians relied upon and used a philosophy that their ancestors had nurtured over centuries. It has been called a Christian philosophy, even the Christian philosophy, and acknowledged to have been traditionally Catholic philosophy. While the Founders’ political and legal product was philosophical in nature, it was simultaneously Christian in ultimate inspiration, even if Christians never invented the philosophy. Its truth value and its intellectual availability is of universal scope and relevance. Yet in fact, modern secularists, secular liberals, insistently call it Catholic (faith-based) theology in disguise.

The authors speak of Bible-believing Christians. Are there any other kind? They know there are not, but this phrase is used to hint that Protestant Christianity was the Founders’ faith. They are quite correct, but that phrase can imply that Catholic Christians were not (and never have been) Bible-believing Christians. They do not want to say such in this ecumenical age, but they do hint at the fact that Protestants claim they believe only the Bible and not Tradition or a church discerner of true tradition. And there were very few Catholics in America at the founding.

The notion of ‘Christian principles’ becomes a broad and loose category throughout such writings and even in the quotations. Furthermore, in a traditional Protestant fashion, every reference to God and, or, religion is taken by them as if it refers to faith-based thought and practice, and because those who do the referring were Christian believers, the designation refers to the historical Christian religion and its revealing God.

There are three quotes from John Adams. Two of them refer only to God, not to Christianity. The third one boasts that a nation which used only the Bible for their law book would be a paradise. That was in 1756 when he was obviously a young man.

There are three quotes from Samuel Adams. One speaks only of God. In fact, it says the Declaration of Independence restored Him as the true sovereign of all men. The other two express Christian faith.

The Continental Congress over an 8-year period referred once each to the Bible, to Jesus, and to Christianity, and even ordered 20,000 Bibles to be imported into the country. While three references are not much, those words and actions are perhaps the strongest evidence that the Founders thought they were, in nation-building, constructing the kingdom of God, promoting Christianity. They certainly saw their actions as religious but one can be religious without being Christian. Most of the references to God in the writings of the thinkers of that time expressed religious thoughts and concerns but not Christian ones, if only for ‘ecumenical’ reasons. However, the Confederate Congress was often without a quorum, and was only barely supportive of the army soldiers in conflict. It was not much of a congress and not much of a confederacy. That is why the people abandoned it and replaced it inside of ten years.

Washington’s references in his speeches and acts were references to God and were religious but not explicitly Christian. The pamphlet quotes the four places in which the Declaration of Independence speaks of God, but as I have often shown, those references were no more than philosophically religious.

Alexis De Tocqueville is next. He saw the spirit of freedom and the spirit of religion marching in common and reigning over the country. Later he refers to the attitude of Americans as a faith in their religion. Not a philosopher, he does not distinguish between faith and philosophy. He recognized that in the US, the sovereign authority is religious, but because most Americans were deeply Christian, he assumes that if you are a committed theist, you are a Christian. Not true, at least, not true on the theoretical level. Still, he attributed America’s uniqueness and greatness, especially its liberty, even at that time to her goodness and her Christianity. I have no problem with his observations, but they still do not make every building that Christians built a church.

Benjamin Franklin, as governor of PA, in 1748, proposed a day of fasting and prayer, saying It is the duty of mankind on all suitable occasions to acknowledge their dependence on the Divine Being. He speaks amply of God but does not bring up Christianity at all. Like John Adams at times he would advocate the principals of primitive Christianity, or the general ethics of Christianity, meaning mostly the ten commandments and new testament virtues. He nearly always spoke as Washington spoke, and nearly all presidents since him, of God, but not of Jesus, or the Christian faith.

Alexander Hamilton once, after the Constitutional Convention, urged the formation of a Christian Constitutional Society whose first object would be to support the Christian religion, and second object would be to support the US. That, of course, would be both Christian and political, even American. But he obviously then never saw any Christian church filling the bill, nor did he conceive of the political construction of the Constitution and the nation as filling that bill. He was suggesting that a new voluntary group apart from any church, state, or future party, was needed to unite the two-sided mindsets of Americans, their political hopes and their Christian hopes.

While Patrick Henry was a great orator, a dedicated Christian, a 5-time governor of Virginia, and, which the pamphlet never mentions, he refused to sign or ratify the Federal Constitution, he was correct when he said once, It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists [meaning unclear] but by Christians; but he was incorrect when he continued by saying, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was not founded on religions, true, even if such were possible, but neither was it founded on any historical religion.

Four or five quotes are taken from Thomas Jefferson about God and about his own churchless Christianity, which was mostly philosophical. As president he issued no religious proclamations.

The pamphlet quotes Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln many times, but they were not Founders. Five quotes are taken from Thomas Paine’s references to God in Common Sense. Paine later became infatuated with the French Revolution, which he mistakenly saw as in the same tradition as the American Revolution. Paine later realized his error. The American Revolution was based on Christian principles, while the French Revolution was hostile to Christianity. This last clause is quite correct, but not the first clause. While the American Revolution was not hostile to Christianity, and Christian ministers largely supported it, it was not based on principles of Christian faith. It mostly appealed explicitly to reason in the philosophy of natural law, an ethical system of principles that were compatible with Christian morality, and that had traditionally been developed by Christian thinkers. "The American Revolution resulted in unprecedented religious liberty for its citizens, while the French revolution ended in a bloodthirsty tyranny. Paine’s unfortunate defense of the French Revolution was titled The Age of Reason, a book he later recanted: ‘I would give worlds, if I had them, if the Age of Reason had never been published. O Lord, help! Stay with me! It is hell to be left alone.’ Thomas Paine’s last words were, ‘I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator God.’"

Princeton University’s original official motto after 1746 was Under God’s Power She Flourishes. So Christians had schools that were at least religious and monotheistic.

Then the pamphlet goes back to the original Pilgrims of 1620 who spoke of themselves as a Christian missionary group. But they were only quite remotely Founders, and not formal ones at that.

Next we come to Joseph Story, a law professor from Harvard, raised to the Supreme Court in 1811, and who served there for 34 years. He was not exactly a Founder, but he grew up and studied law while the Founding was being finished. He wrote the first, and since, classical, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. "In a speech at Harvard [not from the bench], Story stated bluntly: ‘There never has been a period of history in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation. The American legal system embraced and kept the precedents of English Common Law up to the date of 7/4/1776. After that, subsequent English judicial decisions were irrelevant for Americans. But the Christianity" most referred to among the Founders in this regard really restrictively related to the morality coming from the Hebrew ten commandments, which were included in the full Christian Bible. On the other hand, the Common Law built up over centuries mostly by established customs and judicial decisions based upon them, rather than legislatures, was not an exercise in Christian moral theology or Christian ethics, but rather the application of the use of sound reason in the natural law tradition. It was civil law developed philosophically. It was certainly not Canon Law, the law of the Catholic Church, even if nearly all Christians belonged to that church before the Reformation.

Story also wrote A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the US, and said this about the First Amendment: "‘We are not to attribute this prohibition of a national religious establishment to an indifference to religion in general, and especially to Christianity (which none could hold in more reverence than the framers of the Constitution)…[a statement about the (recent) history by one who had been there]

Probably, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the [First] Amendment to it now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that, Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship. Any attempt to level all religions, and to make it matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.’

It has been the modern liberal interpretation that the Constitution or state or government is neutral –indifferent toward– all historical religions and even to the natural or philosophical religion of the Declaration. Story began that paragraph with the word probably. so he is again speaking of his own historical knowledge of that time, and it is only a general observation. He does not quote any state or federal legal text. And there is quite a difference between indifference toward all historical religions and respect for their varying and often opposing elements. It is far more reasonable to interpret the minds of the Founders and Framers as having respect for religions rather than indifference toward them. Those who respect appreciate their underlying Christian faith; the indifferent disrespect it as the so-called ‘enlightened’ did all religions, even if some of the framers like Jefferson and Franklin retained a philosophical religion that was monotheistic and compatible with Biblical religion.

It should be granted that the originators of our government never completely clarified for even themselves the relation between the philosophical product they brought forth and their Christian faith. In a concrete historical respect, the latter was very helpful in promoting and developing the tradition of the former. But in strict logic, the former was not dependent upon the latter. They never worked out just how in the future Americans could go on with a naturally religious political system not united to their historical religious faith and its institutions. This pamphlet presumes that their not-Christian government, composed by and for mostly Christians at the time, yet open to people of other historical religions becoming citizens, could favor Christianity without at the same time disfavoring other historical religions. I admit, and even insist, that it could and should favor the Declaration’s natural philosophical and monotheistic natural religion, regardless of whether other historical religions are compatible with it. But it has not done that for the last 65 years at least. And prevailing contempt for the Declaration underlies its refusal, and also the reverse.

The pamphlet goes on to quote again from Story’s Commentaries: "It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent where the public worship of God, and the support of religion [at least natural religion, of which Story often spoke] constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape." (Emphasis added.) It remains a problem even two centuries since, although here he speaks not of the formal legal question of compatibility, but of another concern, namely, whether a free (self-governed) political/legal system can endure without formally including at least what was the Declaration’s natural religion.

Then the pamphlet quotes from Story on the purpose of the First Amendment: The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects [denominations] and to prevent any national ecclesiastical patronage of the national government i.e. to prevent any one denomination from seeking political domination. Prostrating Christianity may have meant putting it down to the level of all other non-Christian religions at the intellectual level, or it may have meant only giving it no more legal status than them. It is unclear. The Framers themselves were unclear on this matter, both in their thinking and in their framing.

Then the pamphlet cites some Supreme Court cases. In an 1844 case, 70 years after the founding, the city of Philadelphia opposed the establishment of a Deist school by a Frenchman named Girard. The city lawyers argued, The plan of education proposed is anti-Christian [apparently not just non-Christian], and therefore repugnant to the law. [What law?] The lawyers say Christian morality from the Bible must be taught. Justice Story gave the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion: Christianity… is not to be maliciously and openly reviled and blasphemed against, to the annoyance of believers or the injury of the public… Then, apparently, it told Girard no dice. It is unnecessary for us, however, to consider [even consider?] the establishment of a school or college, for the propagation of… Deism, or any other form of infidelity. Such a case is not to be presumed to exist in a Christian country… Why may [!] not the Bible, and especially the New Testament, without note or comment [to forestall various denominations complaining?] be read and taught [that’s not unreasonable] as a divine revelation [that is unreasonable in a public school, unless it is only acknowledged that many believe it to be divine revelation]….

Then the court adds, It is also said, and truly, that the Christian religion is a part of the common law of Pennsylvania… Whether that was true at the time I do not know, but I doubt it, and calling Pennsylvania law ‘the common law’ is problematic, too.

It is true that in 1890 the Supreme Court rules against Mormon polygamy, saying It is contrary to the spirit [the spirit?] of Christianity and the civilization which Christianity has produced in the western world. Only Christianity produced western civilization? Polygamy could have been outlawed on purely rational grounds if the rationale could have been produced. Obviously, the Court was not up to that. And whether that 1890 decision deserves overturning on its own merits is a good question. It certainly is not indisputably faithful to the Founding documents.

The 1892 ruling by the Supreme Court is relevant because of its source, but not because it reflects what the Court would have decided during the 1790s a 100 years before. The pamphlet devotes nearly 8 pages to quoting this decision, without telling us what the case was about. I shall quote it at length, although, of course, the late 20th century Supreme Court has surely dismissed most of it as not worth recalling. It certainly has never embraced it as settled law. [That is a phrase which liberals insist must be applied to Roe v. Wade, so that overturning it becomes a legal impossibility, but because liberals are mostly non-originalists and call the Constitution a living document, they refuse to call the Constitution settled law.]

Church of the Holy Trinity v U.S., 1892: Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise; and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian. This is not true, much less necessarily so.

Emphatically Christian means either explicitly or concretely and unequivocally Christian.

To the extent our [political/legal] institutions are based on the natural law tradition, they are compatibly Christian. But nowhere do our basic charters or any subsequent Congressional laws say they are based upon the teachings of the Redeemer. The judges were activist here, usurping authority they lacked, making law that never existed, and no doubt helped provoke the 20th century revolt from a reasonable view of our history.

No purpose of action against religion [this would include natural religion and any historical religion] can be imputed to any legislation [before the 20th century!], state or national, because this is a religious people [it does not say Christian people, although that is also true] This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.

It next refers to Columbus’s commission acknowledging God. It says the colonial grant to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 authorized him to make laws provided they be not against the true Christian faith. That means only a negative, similar to the new constitutions of Iraq and Afghanistan with reference to Islam. It says a lot, but with extreme vagueness.

King James I in 1606 granted Virginia a charter which began … in propagating of the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness. But the Declaration of Independence voided all previous colonial charters. The court goes on to refer to other charters which also say one of the purposes of the grants is to establish [start and promote] the Christiana religion. The Mayflower Compact by the 1620 Pilgrims begins, having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith… a voyage to plant the first colony in Virginia… But no later state constitutions, nor did the federal one, include such statements. By then politics had been distinguished from faith-based theology.

The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut in 1638-9 is another example of the same.

The Charter of Privileges granted by William Penn to Pennsylvania in 1701 advocates only religious profession and worship. Even if it ultimately meant Christian religious profession and worship, it never said that, and said something less, which is compatible with the Declaration, and not incompatible with the Federal Constitution. The court here does not claim what the earlier Girard decision had said, that Christianity was part of the law of Pennsylvania.

Then the 1892 Court quotes the Declaration’s ‘We hold’… and its references to the supreme Judge and to Divine Providence. "We fine everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth… because of a general recognition of this truth [here the pamphlet inserts in these brackets = ‘that we are a Christian nation’]. That was not explicitly said. The Court said more than what was said. We can be, and are, a religious nation formally, without being also a Christian nation formally, even if we are largely concretely and historically, a Christian people more or less.

There is no dissonance in these declarations [there should have been subsequent to 1776]. There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning [if you overlook the ambiguity and even polyvalence of the words used]; they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation [Yes, definitely, but that is not the same as a Christian nation.] Many Islamic countries are religious ones, and long have been such. The court goes on: These are not individual sayings, declarations of private persons: they are organic utterances; they speak the voice of the entire people."

"While because of a general recognition of this truth the question has seldom been presented to the courts, yet we find that in Updegraph v. the Commonwealth it was decided that, Christianity, general Christianity, is, and always has been, a part of the common law, not Christianity with an established church… but Christianity with a liberty of conscience to all men."

General Christianity is something including anything calling itself Christianity, with the orthodoxy of either belief, practice, or worship not being determinable by any Christian. But the explicit nature of the common moral teaching, largely from the Old Testament in the form of the ten commandments, at the base of traditional English Common law, is not enough at all to claim that Christianity is part of the common law, for that phrasing claims far too much, with a likewise extreme vagueness. We see here that Protestants are prevented