WI: America's Founders more aggressively anti-Christian

Inspired by this thread.

What if, instead of keeping it as there own private opinion, the great and powerful of America's founding who despised Christianity actually went out of their way to damage Christianity's standing in the nation, and promote their own brand of Deistic Neo-classical enlightened liberalism? Perhaps something like the French Revolution's anti-clericalism? Or do they chase the fundamentalists to Canada like they did the Monarchists? Or, as is depressingly likely, are they overthrown and murdered and forever damned in history textbooks?
 
Inspired by this thread.

What if, instead of keeping it as there own private opinion, the great and powerful of America's founding who despised Christianity actually went out of their way to damage Christianity's standing in the nation, and promote their own brand of Deistic Neo-classical enlightened liberalism? Perhaps something like the French Revolution's anti-clericalism? Or do they chase the fundamentalists to Canada like they did the Monarchists? Or, as is depressingly likely, are they overthrown and murdered and forever damned in history textbooks?

As not every "great and powerful" founding father was a Thomas Paine, John witherspoon for example, the scenario you propose is quite implausable. An anti-clerical US is as likely to develop in the 1770s/80s as a US with a solidly established [insert name of a major Protestant denomination of the era] Church.
 
Any overtly anti-religious Founding Fathers would be political failures, and thus not have the chance to be Founding Fathers.
 
Any overtly anti-religious Founding Fathers would be political failures, and thus not have the chance to be Founding Fathers.

Seconded. Thomas Paine, beloved for "Common Sense," became widely hated because of "The Age of Reason."

Anti-clericalism might be doable--we saw that OTL with certain comments Jefferson and others made--but an evangelistic anti-Christian would not be popular.
 
Considering how in OTL the closest thing to "the fundamentalists" there were in the United States were the New England Puritans, who were strong supporters of the Revolution, the Founders trying to chase them into Canada would be very undoable.

This assumes the Founders would even want to do this--they didn't want state churches, persecution, and religious war, but they did not want abuse of people because of their religious views either.
 
It's worth bearing in mind that France was also extremely religious at the time of the revolution. The difference between the two isn't how religious the populace is, it's how revolutionary the event was. In reality, the American Revolution wasn't much of a revolution, seeing as societal organisation remained very similar before or after.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
What if, instead of keeping it as there own private opinion, the great and powerful of America's founding who despised Christianity actually went out of their way to damage Christianity's standing in the nation, and promote their own brand of Deistic Neo-classical enlightened liberalism?

This is OTL. After all, the only Founding Father who "despised" Christianity was Thomas Paine, and he did go "out of [his] way to damage" Christianity by publishing The Age of Reason. The result was that he went from being a hero to a villain in the eyes of the American people.

Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and perhaps Washington were not themselves Christians, but that doesn't mean that they "despised" Christianity.
 
Yeah, this is ASB, considering that by doing so the Founding Fathers would alienate themselves (and Paine is an example himself).

Not to mention that IIRC, while the French Revolution was indeed anti-clerical, it wasn't even a sponsor of state atheism either!
 
The main point here is that we have to make the Founding Fathers less secular. And even then it would be open opposition to organised religion, not spirituality in general, mind. They were deists after all, which some may say is just hopeful atheism, or atheist training wheels.

I would have to imagine that a less secular foundation of those United States would lead to a move towards deism in the political classes. Religions would have to pay taxes like any other organisation. Maybe a few religions seem to get too big for their britches, or refuse to pay taxes, and they are clamped down on. Deistic men and religious men will be voted to local and state and federal governments and get laws passed supporting either side. A compromise would be reached between and within states over governments that are officially some religion or another, and those that are officially none.

And I predict the first great conflagration in those United States would not be a clash some hundred years after it's formation over the freedom for some men to own other men, but probably a conflict fifty-sixty years after it's formation between those who want the Federal government to be officially irreligious/deistic, and those who want it to be officially religious. And the religious would win.

Secularism is kind of my pet philosophy, one of the most important reasons I can see for the success and longevity of the US government, probably the oldest in the world. Without it, the United States would today be unrecognisable.

Ironically, I think the best way to neuter the current American tendency to be more religious than their European cousins would be to have an official Church of America.
 
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