Faith of Our Founders
Senator Tim Kaine came within a shade of being our vice president a decade ago, despite apparently knowing very little about American history. He recently likened "the notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government but come from the Creator" to "what the Iranian government believes." He finds the idea "extremely troubling." He should probably take up his gripe with Thomas Jefferson, who snuck it into the Declaration of Independence, that rascal. Yet Kaine's shameful illiteracy points to something important: Clearly, even our elites—Kaine graduated from Harvard Law School—do not grasp the role of religion and the God of the Bible in the early republic, which is not just to say the quantity of that role (a big one), but its qualities.
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An Honest Look at a Latter Day Saint
Nineteenth-century America was a land of prophets unseen since ancient Israel. These preachers roamed the frontier, erecting churches and gathering followings. One obscure but particularly extreme example from Ohio "jumped off a riverbank in an attempt to catch the heavenly message." Another, born into an obscure family of hardscrabble New York farmers, soon passed into the very same rural Midwestern town. Surrounded by failed apostles, this one would go on to build a church with 17 million adherents. In the new biography Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, John G. Turner sets out to discover what separated Joseph Smith from his contemporaries.
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