Deism Debunked!

The Conservapedia really is a priceless work. It's too bad that the open source model threatens to someday undermine this crucial cultural artifact. One amusing endeavor is to stroll through the pages for various Founding Father types. You'll see that the sole preoccupation of the entries about such men as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson is assessing the extent of their Christian faith and trying to make the best available case that the person in question did, indeed, subscribe to religious views that a 21st Century American Evangelical would find congenial. Thus, Washington's entry

George Washington (1732-1799) was unanimously elected President of the United States of America and the Commander-in-Chief in the Revolutionary War!^[1] He was also a devout Christian, with his adopted daughter once stating that if you question Washington's faith you may as well question whether or not he was a patriot!^[2]

There's absolutely nothing to be done with Jefferson ("With regard to Christianity, Jefferson admired the ethical and moral teachings of Jesus, but did not believe in the divinity of Christ.") "Many historians believe that Benjamin Franklin was a deist," they inform us, "but although Franklin wrote widely, he rarely made statements associated with principles of Deism." Take that, liberals!

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/02/deism-debunked/41547/