Never Walked In High Heels

“We are a Christian nation. We were formed as a Christian nation, and a Christian nation is what we shall claim to be. People forget that.” She was getting more frustrated in her debate. The quilt on the wall and the dried flowers were the quintessential marks of a country home. She lived in typical Middle America. Good, God-fearing, hardworking stock, who believed that all the founding fathers were men of God.

I didn’t say anything at first, but I thought back to my 11^th grade US History class and seemed to remember an early lecture brought on by an older teacher—no they weren’t all Christians I thought to myself. At least not in the way we think of when we say they were. Weren’t they deists? The longer I thought about it the more I agreed with my assumption. I finally went home to look it up on Wikipedia when my mother asked me to check my facts after breaking into the argument and making such a claim. I was right, most of them were indeed deists. I’m always envious of deists simply because I’m not one. In fact I’m the dead opposite. Reason and rationale is tempting to me though, as are many of the deist doctrines, but there are so many things I cannot agree on. Deism is best described as this: God is like a clockmaker, he put all the parts in place and let it unwind itself. It’s a kind of hands-off deity where God created the world and then sat back to watch—like he created the world for his entertainment—a substitute TV show. With this in mind, God doesn’t rule over every aspect of our lives. The ultimate anti-predestination argument, man makes his own destiny and every choice he makes is one that he is directly responsible for. Born out of the Enlightenment, this view of God is highly allowing of individualism, reason, and rationality.

Now bring that philosophy to the men who wrote our Constitution. It gives you a whole new perspective on that document doesn’t it? If you read it, all of it, you can see that that single piece of paper was meticulously written, word-by-word to allow a great amount of flexibility in interpretation. It was almost like the Founding Fathers felt the government should mimic their view of God—hands-off, let the country and people unwind how they will. There goal was to protect people’s rights and afford everyone civility.

We were not founded in the modern Christian ideals. America was truly a great experiment and nobody knew how it would turn out. In writing the Constitution, maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for the mistakes of the future. Write the document and see where the country goes. Sounds like a pretty radical idea even if it was based on the Enlightenment and reason. To afford people the greatest freedom and to make them responsible for everything they do, doesn’t agree with much of the modern interpretations of Christianity. It’s radical really, almost humanistic, and forces us to be the drivers of our own fate. The truth is, I’m unsure if any of the Founding Fathers knew what to envision when they drafted that document. Who in recent history had ever successfully tried to make a country? Any man would be panicked in such a situation, and I can’t help but wonder, did they even think America would last this long?

Current events are making people say America is going down hill or America is finally coming into it’s own—depending on who you ask. Looking at the Constitution, I can say that considering what the Founding Fathers envisioned, America has great flexibility to create whatever type nation it wants.