Secular thinkers like to claim Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as their own founders. Constitutional scholar Bill Norton walks Jenny Beth Martin through why the record says otherwise. Jefferson lived fifty years past the Declaration of Independence, and near the end of his life he answered the atheist label directly in a letter: "I am a Christian." He loved the teachings of Christ so much, and trusted the church's handling of them so little, that he cut Christ's words out of printed Bibles and pasted them into his own volume — what Norton and Jenny Beth Martin recognize as the first red letter Bible. Norton explains Jefferson's distinction between religion as a personal relationship with the Creator and church as a community's relationship with God, why his famous separation of church and state was designed to make religion flourish rather than restrain it, and how Madison said freedom of religion produced better preachers and better doctrine. Franklin gets the same correction: the man who once called himself a deist stood in the Constitutional Convention and declared that God governs in the affairs of men, and that an empire cannot rise without His aid.
Watch Bill Norton's free constitutional and founding principles training at teapartypatriots.org/1776. Full episodes at jennybethshow.com and more at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — Did Jefferson Believe in God?
00:15 — The Founders Secularists Claim
01:05 — Which Jefferson? A Lifetime of Change
01:38 — 'The Most Pure and Sublime' Teachings
01:52 — The First Red Letter Bible
03:44 — 'I Am a Christian': Jefferson's Letter
04:19 — Religion vs. Church: Two Relationships
05:19 — Separation of Church and State, Reconsidered
06:23 — Franklin: A Deist Who Believed God Governs
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