The Faith of the Founding Fathers

The Christianists love to blather ad nausea about America having been founded as a "Christian nation." The only problem, of course, is that the claim is not true and as we have seen before such as in the preamble of Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom - which is still a part of the Code of Virginia but which consistently ignored by Christianists and Republicans, including my former classmate, George Allen, who talks of Jeffersonian principles even as he prostitutes himself to the religious right - Jefferson had nothing but contempt for the intermixing of religion and the dispensing of civil legal rights. A post at Right Wing Watch adds to the list of inconvenient facts that show the lie of Christianists like David Barton who try to twist history to fit their theocratic agenda. Here are some post highlights:
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John Adams, on the other hand, is held up as a paragon of what it means to be a true Christian and a statesmen. But, for some reason, the Religious Right never bothers to mention that, like Thomas Jefferson, Adams did not believe that Jesus was God or that he died for the sins of mankind and actually mocked the idea:
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[Adams] could not accept the historic Christian belief that Jesus Christ was God or that his death atoned for the sins of the world: "An incarnate God!!! An eternal, self-existent omnipresent Author of this stupendous Universe suffering on a Cross!!! My Soul starts with horror, at the Idea." Adams thought the notion of "a mere creature, or finite Being," making "Satisfaction to the infinite justice for the sins of the world" was a "convenient Cover for absurdity." These doctrines were not part of the pure and undefiled teachings of Jesus as found in the Gospels, but were rather created by the leaders of the early Christian church who "misunderstood" Jesus' message and thus presented it in "very paradoxical Shapes."
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There is one major problem with Potts's story of Washington praying at Valley Forge - it probably did not happen. While it is likely that Washington prayed while he was with the army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778, it is unlikely that the story reported by Potts, memorialized in paintings and read to millions of schoolchildren, is anything more than legend. It was first told in the seventeenth edition (1816) of Mason Lock Weem's Life of Washington. Weems claimed to have heard it directly from Potts, his "good old FRIEND." Potts may have owned the house where Washington stayed at Valley Forge, but his aunt Deborah Potts Hewes was living there alone at the time. Indeed, Potts was probably not even residing in Valley Forge during the encampment. And he was definitely not married. It would be another twenty-five years before he wed Sarah, making a conversation with her in the wake of the supposed Washington prayer impossible. Another version of the story, which appeared in the diary of Reverend Nathaniel Randolph Snowden, claims that it was John Potts, Issac's brother, who heard Washington praying. These discrepancies, coupled with the fact that Weems was known for writing stories about Washington based upon scanty evidence, have led historians to discredit it.
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The surest defense to revisionist history is an accurate knowledge of history - something that is given an abysmally low priority in our public schools and which plays directly into the hands of those who would subvert the U. S. Constitution such as Barton.