LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY lihan161051)

One common assertion heard from the dominionist/Reconstructionist followers in this country is that the Founding Fathers were Christian and the USA was founded on Christian principles. Let's look more closely at this argument, because it's contradictory in some rather revealing ways.



First of all, let's consider the fact that dominion theology and its parent theology, dispensationalism, are a relatively recent invention, dating back to the late 1800's at the earliest and beginning to gain a solid foothold in the beginning of the 20th century. Its core denominations, the Assemblies of God and the Foursquare International Gospel Church, were founded near the turn of the century and, with the Pentecostal denominations, form the bulk of dominionist practice and its strongest adherents typically come from these denominations. But the key point to understand first is that this movement dates back no earlier than the 1870's-1880's.

The second point to consider is that the definition within domionionist/dispensationalist churches as to who is a "Christian" is both extremely strict and a little counterintuitive to outsiders. Dispensationalism takes as one of its core beliefs the idea that it is the first religious movement since the early Christian apostles to actually *be* made up of true Christians. In other words, of all the branches of Christian theology, dispensationalism and dominion theology consider their branch to be the only true Christianity in existence and routinely demonize all other branches of theology as heresy. This is especially true today, but it has been a feature of dispensationalism and its various derivatives almost from the very beginning.

Taken together, these two facts add up to the so far somewhat logical conclusion that there *cannot* have been any *true* Christians between the early 1st Century and the late 1800's. This has in fact been asserted many times in the past within dispensationalist doctrine and is largely an accepted point of faith in many cases.

But one completely logical consequence to this assertion is that anyone alive during the mid to late 1700's, including the authors of the American Revolution and the Constitution and most particularly including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, arguably two of the most influential Founding Fathers in the early history of the USA, cannot, *by definition*, have been *true* Christians according to this same doctrine. This is very difficult to reconcile, again given the fact that the definitions in question are very strict.

The assertion that they were somehow *true* Christians requires an inconsistent application of a much looser definition of "Christian", not even taking into account the historical fact that Jefferson was a Deist with very discerning notions as to which elements of the Gospels could have been true (notions he acted on by literally cutting passages out of the pages of a Bible and pasting them on paper to serve as his own New Testament) and notable contempt for the fundamentalists of his day and age. Asserting that Jefferson, among others, was a "Christian" is a deliberately misleading twist of logic and an unadvertised switch to an almost meaninglessly liberal definition of "Christian". And applying this same logic to the idea that dispensationalist "Christian" ideas were somehow encoded into a document written with the express intent of protecting a rigorously secularist vision of government (inspired by fresh memories of Anglican abuses at the whim of George III in the Colonial era) which was only ratified by the states on the promise of the Bill of Rights, requires an equally doubtful stretch of logic and a similar uncharacteristic change of definition.

Since few if any other influences between the early apostolic era and the present day have been given this unusually liberal interpretation, the only remaining conclusion is that the assertion that the USA and its founders are divinely ordained as "Christian" is at best an omission of convenience, and at worst, deliberately disingenuous, serving only to reveal the desperate maneuverings of a movement willing to go to any length to portray themselves as divinely empowered to take charge over a country that belongs no more to them than to any other ideology ..