What’s up with the back and forth Protestant/Catholic baiting on X? Is it just for clicks?
I understand random antagonists on either side putting out rage bait. Like racism and anti-Semitism, it’s an exercise for small, stupid, mean minds.
Then there’s a long piece with a wide audience on a Catholic conspiracy to steer Conservatives in the U.S. Conspiracy theories are usually bogus bovine scatology. Easy to dismiss.
But, then the Heritage Foundation has a forum on “Catholicism and the American Founding”.
What is the point of this forum? Catholics were 1.7% of the U.S. at our founding. 1.7% means the forum should be done in less than an hour. Heritage spent an hour and a half on the “event”! LOL.
Again, who made the decision to spend time and money on this? What is the purpose of the forum?
Catholics and Jews were present at our Founding. They assimilated into our 4 regional sub-cultures. End of story until the immigrant waves of the 19th and early 20th Century. That’s a different tale than our founding and the creation of our former consensus culture.
When the thirteen colonies became thirteen united states, that America was 98.2% Protestant. The Protestant denominations had their differences, but they shared a focus, allegiance, and affinity to the Holy Bible. Furthermore, “dissenting” Protestantism is a unique view which is shaped and emboldened by shared experiences of persecution. This dissenting Protestant view shaped ideas from the Puritans of New England to the Quakers and Palatinate Germans in the Middle Atlantic, to the Presbyterians on the Frontier to the Methodists and Baptists throughout the colonies after the 1st Great Awakening.
Our American Biblical worldview was inherited from Great Britain and reinforced by the common use of the King James Bible. The King James Bible was the lingua franca among Protestants from the most royalist Anglican to the most republican Baptist. The highly literate colonists in America knew the King James Bible.
In fact, any person who wants to understand America – why it is as it is from the planting of a cross at Cape Henry, Virginia on April 29th, 1607 to today – must be Biblically literate.
The Biblical worldview of Dissident Protestantism is a legacy of “Christian” tolerance after the First Great Awakening. Especially among the Quakers and Baptists. That means honoring religious diversity, unless it threatens the existing religious expression or is sedition to the state, is embedded in our (former) consensus culture and American Civilization.
America became the place where it was safe to be a professing Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. Individual Americans discriminated on the basis of religion, but legal and social discrimination diminished over time. Until today, when Christians are in the cross hairs for speaking and practicing their religion.
Yet, the argument about a “Christian” nation remains. It depends on the definition of “Christian” as an adjective to the noun – nation. And, apparently, the Heritage Foundation is trying push distinctions between Protestants and Catholics.
Is a country where, once, an over-whelming majority of the citizens have a Christian Biblical worldview – secular? Where the moral-ethical basis of society is explicitly Christian?
Is a country where the Federal executive, legislative and judiciary repeatedly write until the 1960s, “ America is a Christian Nation” (or country), something other than “Christian?”
Is a country where the King James Bible is the moral-ethical basis for law until the 1930s, not a Christian nation?
In that respect, as John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Heritage Foundation is too important an organization, or was, to be doing silly things.
So, what is going on Heritage? Why did you do this? To what end?
Read James Atticus Bowden at https://jatticus.wordpress.com/ and https://substack.com/@jamesatticusbowden and https://x.com/jatticusbowden
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