Finding the Founding Fathers

Andrew Kelley

Before I start, I would like to state, for anyone who does not know, that I am a conservative who typically votes for – and will likely continue to vote for – the republican party.

That being said, I would like to address and issue that I find often being espoused in both parties’ political agendas but is most prevalent on the conservative side. That is, getting back to the ideals of the founding fathers.

Too many churches have classes teaching congregants that the founding fathers were Christian men (or at least considerably sympathetic to Christian ideas) that set up a Christian nation with Christian ideas. And the implication of all of this is that America has seemed to so far, been a great notion, and that in order to maintain it’s greatness, Christians should continually fight to re-affirm, and re-legistlate the worldview of the founding fathers. Fine, I understand that someone might agree with the worldview of Washington and Adams and so on. But reverence for them is not really the issue at hand.

I often hear people asserting what the founding fathers did or didn’t think as arguments for how people should or shouldn’t think about America today. My question is: why are the founding fathers our perfect ideal for the way that our country should be managed? Isn’t it sort of an ad hominem to appeal to a fallible group of people regardless of what their ideas were?

It would make more sense to address the ideas, and not worry either way whether or not they came from the founding fathers. Simply put, I don’t care about what any of the founding fathers said beyond whether or not those ideas were good. Appealing to ideas on the bases of who thought them up is nonsense. What if there was a doctor who insisted on appealing to Hippocrates for all modern medical practices? Yes, he was formative in the field of medicine, but no, I don’t want him doing my appendectomy.

Likewise, I am not convinced that all of the ideas of the founding fathers were good ones. Slavery seems like a pretty good example.

It worries me that Christians like to hold up the “Christian” ideals of the founding fathers and sort of create a political canon to draw ideas from. These guys didn’t have everything right and although I am happy to consider their ideas, I am not interested in supporting them just because they were “what American was founded on.”  To me, one of the best things about America is it’s ability to change.

Again, slavery seems like a pretty good example.

Andrew Kelley
Andrew is a former regular contributor to The Two Cities.

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9 responses to “Finding the Founding Fathers”

  1. Andrew Faris

    JD,

    I don’t know if you saw this, but I thought this interview with George Marsden and Mark Noll was a really helpful and nuanced look at this issue. Check it.

    Andrew

    Reply
  2. Andrew Kelley

    Thanks man, I’ll definitely take a look.

    Reply
  3. Abisai Garcia

    I completely agree with you . Great article .

    Reply
  4. Richard Gonzales

    Great article, though I wish it were longer because it’s about such an interesting topic!

    After reading this article and watching Andrew Faris’ video link, I have some questions. Do you think many people believe in America’s exceptionalism because we have Christian roots? Or many people believe we are a Christian nation because God’s hand is evident by our odds-defying revolution? How does that square with the exceptional, odds-defying revolution in China?

    I know I’m only circling your article’s focus here, but I hope you’ll entertain these questions.

    Reply
  5. Carrie Allen

    Glad to know there are Republicans out there who think this way!

    Reply
  6. The Political Authority of the American Founding Fathers | Cogito, Credo, Petam

    […] Andrew Kelley writes at The Two Cities against ‘asserting what the founding fathers did or didn’t think as arguments for how people […]

    Reply
  7. Matthew

    You make a good point. And, as often arises when people talk about this, not all the Founding Fathers were even Christians in the first place. Many were, but others were Deists. So, which Founding Fathers and which principles do people want to return to?

    Reply
  8. Lue-Yee Tsang

    Matthew,

    A person’s principles of government, though inherently related to a worldview, are not always consistent with that same person’s theology, because the good and the evil in people’s thinking is uneven. The truths that the Founding Fathers held to be self-evident were doctrines that in fact, despite coexisting sometimes with heretical views of God, were based on Protestant doctrines of the Church and human society, and of nature and grace. Latent in today’s call for a return to the Founding Fathers, then, may be a call for a return to Protestant principles.

    You rightly resist an urge to conceive of a monolithic bloc of Founding Fathers – also the responsible thing to do about, say, the Westminster Divines or the Synod of Dort – but it’s not true that there was no basic centre of assumptions or ideas in the thought of the Founding Fathers. The deists and Unitarians, of course, were not logically bound to a Protestant political philosophy, but often such philosophy was both congenial to their deism and satisfying to their quasi-Protestant sentiments. A more marginal figure, both religiously and politically, might be Thomas Paine, who was an important pamphleteer but ultimately was not a mainstream thinker.

    Reply
  9. Lue-Yee Tsang

    On the political end of things: ‘The Constitution is Not Sacred’.

    Reply

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