acroyear | Our "Christian Nation" Beginnings? Not so "Christian" after all...

Ed Brayton takes on the "War on Christians" Conference where the speakers (including several Baptists) often invoked the memory of John Winthrop's speech about the Massachusetts Bay Colony being a "city on a hill". Shame they don't know just what kind of Christianity was being practiced back then.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: America's Christian Colonies:

Not only was the Massachusetts Bay Colony a brutal Christian theocracy, it didn't even spare Christians from its wrath if they were the wrong brand of Christian [he gives examples of Quakers who were killed and Baptists who were whipped]. And that colony was not alone. Virginia was officially Anglican and it was a crime to be a Baptist there as well. James Madison was inspired to fight for religious freedom and the end of such religious establishments when, as a young man, he saw Baptist ministers being imprisoned for the crime of preaching the wrong kind of Christianity. So there is extraordinary irony in Christians, especially Baptists, citing the early colonies as models for a "Christian nation".

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were an explicit repudiation of these practices. The Declaration's insistence on unalienable rights could not have been more in contrast to the theocratic rule of most of the colonies. The Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom and ban on religious tests for office were the last beginning of the end for the authoritarian madness that masqueraded as Christian piety under religious establishments.