Myth #2: Nature’s Nation (Revolutionary Period)

-- If nature was to create a government, then the United States would be that government
-- Straight of the Enlightenment, the “self-evident” way in which things should work.
-- Thomas Jefferson’s concept of “self evidence” is a socially constructed construct.

Enlightenment Background
Religious wars for the first time after the Protestant Reformation
People started to wonder does “it have to be like this”
Look at the traditions in which everyone it willing to die for?
Descartes, searching for a new basis; Toulmin
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate
It all stems from the fact that the Bible was translated
What can we rely on? The Book of Nature
So what does nature teach?
Give the core reality of things
God exists
Moral Order
Laws on Heart: “we know the moral order”
Humans must acknowledge wrongs
Humans rewarded for right and wrong
This be Deism (the religious form of the Enlightenment)
Deism
We know God through Reason, expressed in nature
Remove the supernatural from Faith
Jesus is just a man
Closest to Unitarianism
Thomas Jefferson
One Perfect God
Future Reward
Love God with all your hear and your Neighbor as yourself
What he thought was ridiculous, disagreed with Calvin by saying that Calvin said:
Three Gods
Good works are nothing
Faith is everything
Reason in religion is worthless
Election of saved and damed
“There would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.”s


First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Written against the state church 

Critiquing Nature’s Nations
Every other governmental form is inferior 

David Walker
“Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” 1827.
Against Jefferson’s notion that Black were inferior, as nature taught

Nature teaches
Democracy is natural
The removal of Native Americans is natural
Capitalism is natural
Slavery is natural



Myth #3: Christian Nation
-- Attempts to Christianize the Republic
-- Move against the Deist, thought was that Jefferson would lead this country into immoral and heretical lands
-- John Adams and the Treaty of Tripoli, established a secular nation-state
-- Impulse was to return to being a Christian nation

The states thought the they would separate established state churches
But that was undermined by the first amendment
Lead to the preaching of the Second Great Awakening
Preaching about that we are loosing our sense of religiosity
Western expansion was lawless
Evangelistic revival preaching in order to get this country back on track
Stress of Calvinistic themes with a strong emphasis on response
Emphasis on conversion
Developments in the Second Great Awakening
Social Justice and Evangelism went hand-in-hand
Second Challenge to the Myth
fighting for this Christian Nation
it was not “we used to be a Christian Nation,” we where never a Christian Nation
In the founders mind it was a rejection of a State-sponsored religion