History

SFL Flashback: The Founding Fathers

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This post was originally featured on SFL in June of 2009

To many fundamentalists, the Founding Fathers rank right up there with the Twelve Apostles as men to be admired and followed. Their crowning achievement was to plant this country, the Baptist States of America. This name was later changed to the “United States” by the evil left-wing Department of Education who, according to WorldNetDaily, also recently mandated that all public school children must take an oath of allegiance to Satan.

There is no doubt that the founding fathers were a pretty amazing bunch of guys. They were smart and driven, and they loved freedom. The Constitution they drafted stands as one of the most amazing documents in modern history. But while most of these founders were religious men, strangely enough not one of them was a Baptist. In fact, the plurality of them were Anglicans with a good number of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Quakers mixed in. One would suppose that good fundamental Baptists would be a bit perturbed by their denomination being underrepresented in the founding of the nation but somehow it never actually comes up in the sermons on God and Country Sunday.

Back when the country was founded, it was a great place. The Founding Fathers outlawed Democrats, rock music, and votes for women. The pregnancy rate for fourteen-year-old was high, but since they’d already been married for two or three years by that point it was to be expected. Everybody went to church on Sunday and most folks worked hard from sun-up to sundown doing things like selling slaves, planting tobacco, and displacing Indians from their homelands. It’s easy to see why these times would evoke nostalgia in many fundamentalists.

If fundamentalists had a process for canonizing saints, one can rest assured that the Founding Fathers would find their place enshrined in their lists, right down to the last beer-swilling, slave-owning philanderer among them.

49 thoughts on “SFL Flashback: The Founding Fathers”

    2. I would ask Natalie for my butt cushion, but the IFB in wont let her work on the Lord’s Day, haymen?

  3. Yes you are… And very funny Craig!

    I’m fairly new here and I’ve been trying to figure out this “butt cushion” thing though to no avail soooooo…. who’s gonna explain this crazy lil fun tease?! LOL

    ~~~Heart 😀

    1. Ahem. IIIIIII shall do the honors.

      It all goes back to my childhood. (this is when you start regretting that you asked)

      When I was a little girl visiting a fundy church (usually on vacation) and even in our own church, they had hard wooden pews. Well, in strategic locations, there would be a seat cushion that someone had put in a spot that was “their” spot. Some of them had made quite a camp for themselves with mints and tissues and “their” hymnal, and as a child, I was very fascinated with this and how we couldn’t sit on these cushions.

      Well, so, when I came to SFL, I finally had a place where I could have some fun with my fundy upbringing, so I just HAD to give celebrity to these darling seat cushions.

      Now, I couldn’t very well be kosher about it, so I started referring to them as butt cushions. At first, I would express my disdain for someone by claiming to pick up my butt cushion and move it to the other side of the church (SFL), but Don kept putting a whoopie cushion in it and you can’t be a proper fundy lady when every time you sit down…. well. So, I learned to stay put.

      Then, I started giving them out for whatever, but the first posters thing just stuck.

      So, there you are. 🙂

      1. And, BTW, I’m not fundy, but my pseudo alter ego who teaches the Superior Christian Womenhood Class at our beloved SFL Baptist Church with the white piano, is.

        2. Oh, and the women’s conferences. One week on learning how to be inferior and superior at the same time.

  4. Our hats off to our Fundie Father Ben Franklin who printed the contents of a gospel tract on the back of every news paper he printed and delivered them house to house and door to door. Anyone who believes otherwise is a history twister and is fighting for the cause of the devil.

  6. This is a great site and I follow it because I know well some Fundies due to marriage. While I am a lifelong Presbyterian (and went to a Quaker school in Philadelphia), your site has implications and suggestions far wider that a superficial read suggests and helps me understand those Fundies in my life.

    Here is a comment lifted from a site concerning the Presbyterian Historical group in Philadelphia, and is interesting: This, what follows, is the exact quote for your consideration.

    “A clock belonging to John Witherspoon, the only active minister to sign the Declaration of Independence, serves to remind the visitor of the leadership and probity evinced by Presbyterian preachers and teachers during the time the Declaration and Constitution were being written.”

    Too bad, I guess that the Fundies are not represented. It must have been a mistake, I am sure.

  7. Dear Darrell:

    Being an American may not make everyone a Christian; but it certainly can’t hurt either.

    Christian Socialist

    PS: Shouldn’t that be WhirledNetDaily?

    1. Exactly, anymore than if my cat has her kittens in my oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits. 😛

      Visualize Whirled Peas! :mrgreen:

      2. Re World Net Daily:

        Any site whose editorial board includes Hal “Here Comes the Antichrist” Lindsay and Pat “Blame the Jews” Buchanan has already lost whatever credibility they might have had at the start.

        Two years ago, I was visiting an East Coast friend in Southern Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Mason-Dixon. Northbound on Route 15 between Gettysburg and Harrisburg (somewhere around York Springs), there was this prominent hardcore Birther billboard:
        “WHERE’S THE REAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE?” filling the entire billboard except for three small letters in the lower right corner: WND — World Net Daily.

  9. Heard every excuse in the book for the Anglican, Deist and Unitarian founders of this country. “They didn’t know about how dangerous tobacco was.” “The Anglicans were good folk back in those days.” “Most of the denominations back in those days believed just like we do now.” Let’s not even begin to start examining the lives of the KJV translators. That’s when fundy apologetics gets crazy.

      1. Before the cotton gin, tobacco was THE big cash crop of the southern colonies.

  10. This sounds so much different than the history portrayed by A-Beka and David Barton, which are both really lame.

  11. Very few Fundies have a clue what a Deist actually is. They think it’s like a Congregationalist or Anglican. They hear Thomas Jefferson was one, but since ‘all the Founding Fathers were Christians’, that must be another denomination. And the revisionist history pushed by fringe home school curriculum groups perpetuates the falsehood.

    One of my favorite ways to upset Fundies is to point out that the U.S. was never a true Christian nation. That just because we were founded on what are considered Judeo-Christian values doesn’t mean the writers of our constitution were all Christian. That doesn’t play well in the IFB, especially around Independence Day.

  12. Get a copy of The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders, by Gregg L. Frazer, . One caveat however, it’s a bit more scholarly than David Barton or ABeka books!

    1. It seems to be too new for our Library System. It isn’t on the inter-library web site. I will look into it. It’s blurb on Amazon looks interesting.

    2. “A bit more scholarly than David Barton or ABeka books” only means there’s at least one fact in it that the author didn’t just make up out of thin air.

    3. I don’t think it’s fair to use the word scholarly in the same sentence as either David Barton or A-Beka

  13. Get a copy of The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders, by Gregg L. Frazer. One caveat however, it’s a bit more scholarly than David Barton or ABeka books!

  16. If this election drags on past Tuesday, I may just need to kill someone…. or move to Denmark.We put a political bumper sticker on our car “Republicans for Voldemort”. Still applicable after 2 elections.

    1. I have that sticker too! It’s next to ‘Jesus was a Liberal’. How’s that for annoying fundies? (I live in Portland OR. I drive a Volvo. The back is completely plastered with stickers. I think it’s a city ordinance or something.)

    3. Just think, Liz —

      Wednesday THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN BEGINS!

      (You’ll have to flee a lot farther than Denmark. I suggest finding a portal/gate to Ponyville in Equestria.)

  17. Slavery and Genocide are always two things that come to mind when I think of our great christian founding fathers!

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