Celebrate our Christian heritage

As Independence Day creeps up on us, some historians use the holiday as a time to degrade and bash our founding fathers. For the last few years the target-of-choice has been Thomas Jefferson and the out-of-wedlock child he supposedly had with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves on the plantation. In reality, DNA evidence could only prove that one of more than two dozen Jefferson men in Virginia fathered a child with Hemings, and seven of them were at Monticello when the child was conceived! There is no way of knowing if it was Thomas Jefferson himself. But it makes for more interesting history to say he did, so that is the commonly held belief.\nAt least this revisionist history only comes once a year. Sometimes historical lies actually find their way into textbooks and end up haunting us year--round. I was always told in my history classes as I was growing up that "most" of the founding fathers were deists. Deists essentially believe in a god, but not a personal one or one that reveals itself to mankind. In other words, deists do not believe in Jesus, the God of Judaism and Christianity, or any Divine guidance.\nSo when my history teachers told me "most" of the founding fathers were deists, what did they really mean? Out of 250 Founding Fathers, only three were deists, or not religious. That leaves 247 others who were wholly Christian.\nIn fact, of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 27 of them held seminary degrees or Bible school degrees. In his first official act, President George Washington did the unthinkable: He prayed in public. "Most" of the founding fathers were actually Christians, and they merely reflected a faith held by "most" of the country.\nThey understood that a nation without God could not stand. It's no wonder that John Adams, our first vice president and second president, wrote in 1798, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."\nCan you imagine the political backlash if a candidate said something like that today? Politicians can commit perjury, obstruct justice, tamper with witnesses and sexually harass multiple supporters (using state troopers to do it), but they better not profess their faith in public. We can't allow the "Religious Right" or God to dominate the public square. Or at least that's what we've been taught.\nThe "wall of separation" between church and state has become a grossly misunderstood principle, perhaps more prevalent than the deist lie. Liberal activists would have us believe that the "deist founding fathers" wanted to protect the government from religious meddling with a "wall of separation" that is "high and impregnable" (language from a 1947 Supreme Court decision). I always get a kick out of asking those same activists to point out the phrase "wall of separation" in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence or any official American document. It simply doesn't exist.\nThe now-famous phrase is first mentioned in a private letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 in a reply to an inquiry from the Danbury Baptist Association. The "wall of separation" referred, not to the exclusion of religious people from government, but to the protection of religion from governmental interference.\nIronically, two days after he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jefferson attended a church service conducted by a Baptist minister in the halls of the House of Representatives. Jefferson clearly found church services in the Capital building to be perfectly acceptable, and even commendable.\nI like what Stephen Carter, Yale professor and author of the book, "The Culture of Disbelief," had to say: "Religious people are as fully members of American society as anyone else, as are people who are not religious. If you want to disagree with them, disagree with them. If you want to argue against them, do that. But don't ever suggest that, because they are religious people, they somehow have less right to be in the public square than other people do."\nThis Fourth of July, celebrate our Christian heritage, instead of denying that it exists. You might even re-read the Declaration of Independence for old-time's sake. Just remember that the "Truths" and "Creator" mentioned in it are capitalized for a reason.