Here is the latest from New Ideal, the ARI's magazine. It's an article entitled "America Was Founded On Secular Ideals" by Tom Bowden.
https://newideal.aynrand.org/a...
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Here’s one particularly telling passage in which Peikoff answers those who claim America was born a Christian nation:
"Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but reason, nature, happiness, man. Many of the Founding Fathers, of course, continued to believe in God and to do so sincerely, but it was a vestigial belief, a leftover from the past which no longer shaped the essence of their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs. He was regarded now as an aloof spectator who neither responds to prayer nor offers revelations nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint, known as deism, cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion; it is the step between Christianity and outright atheism."
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Here is my letter to Tom Bowden
Hello Mr. Bowden,
In New Ideal article referencing Leonard Peikoff’s Religion Vs. America, you repeated his claim that the Founders were mainly or mostly Deists.
This is inaccurate. As Prof. Mark Hall said recently on twitter, you could count all the Deist founders on one hand and have fingers left over. There were, however, many explicit and orthodox Christians among the founders.
For some reason my cut and paste isn’t working but if you google “Mark Hall George Fox university” you’ll find a link to a paper that discusses the religion of the founders.
Regards,
Neil Parille
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Here is the paper: https://www.heritage.org/polit...