Letters policy
Send e-mail to letters@gainesvilletimes.com (no attached files, please, which can contain viruses); fax to 770-532-0457; or mail to The Times, P.O. Box 838, Gainesville, GA 30503. Include full name, hometown and phone number for confirmation. They should be limited to one topic on issues of public interest and may be edited for content and length (limit of 500 words). Letters originating from other sources or those involving personal, business or legal disputes, poetry, expressions of faith or memorial tributes may be rejected. You may be limited to one letter per month, two on a single topic. Submitted items may be published in print, electronic or other forms. Letters, columns and cartoons express the opinions of the authors and not of The Times editorial board.
To find a form to send a letter, click here
I write this epistle with the purpose of questioning the letter by the Rev. John Spinks (Dec. 4). As a Christian and a moderate Republican, I fathom no logic in his reasoning that Christianity is at this time or ever has been in the United States a persecuted party. Additionally, his attempt to be the Christian answer to Percy Shelley fighting against liberal powers-that-be would only be logical if he wasn’t a part of those powers.
Christianity has dominated the United States simply because those who migrated here from the merry-old shores of Mother Europe did a very good job of ostracizing Jews and Muslims (but always in Christ-like ways, such as the Spanish Inquisition and Semitic genocide) throughout the Middle Ages and squelched any sense of spirituality within the aboriginal population by use of mandatory conversion of the "heathen savage" or by diseases such as smallpox and syphilis.
As for the Founding Fathers, who have found themselves to be the red herring of many modern debates concerning government, if there is anything that they were not, it is right-wing or even spiritually guided by the Bible.
Thomas Jefferson physically cut out various parts of the Bible, including all the miracles of Jesus, the virgin birth and even the resurrection and was left with only the ethical and moral teachings of Jesus, ending his copy of the Bible with the crucifixion. Benjamin Franklin, while friendly toward Christians, was a Deist, a philosophical view toward religion which concedes the existence of a higher being who created the universe but dismissing of notions such as prayer, miracles and the divinity of Jesus.
Other Deists among the Founding Fathers include Thomas Paine and possibly James Madison, who some historical scholars will argue was an Atheist. George Washington seldom discussed religion, but when he did, it was also in a Deist vocabulary. He was never a confirmed Episcopalian, never took communion and, in fact, avoided church whenever communion was being offered.
On those terms, I can hardly see how a backlash to the beliefs of the Founding Fathers would be the desired result. I believe, and incorporate such into my belief as a Christian, that we live in a nation void of any state religion and such should be maintained, and love and acceptance of others is the true calling of every Christian person.
Clearly by the vastly different attitudes towards Christianity held between myself and the Rev. Spinks, there is no one "Christian" authority which governs all Christians, let alone the United States, and even if there was, such a constriction of constitutional rights in the name of theocracy should not be supported.
Freedom, religious, social and otherwise, was what guided our Founding Fathers, who were, at the time, the "wacky left," not idealisms of religious unity under the Christian church.
As a final statement I offer the words of Paine and ask they be considered, "Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst."
Kyle Shook
Gainesville