FEDERALIST PAPERS
EXAMPLES OF FAITH-BASED EXPRESSIONS
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Founding Fathers Have Provided Significant Examples of Faith-Based Beliefs in Essays Arguing for Ratification of the Constitution.
It can be convincingly be argued that our US Constitution would not have been ratified had not the Federalist Papers convinced our country's founding fathers that it was in the interest of the thirteen individual states and of the United States, as a united whole, to do so.
Three of the founding fathers wrote jointly under the pen name of Plubius; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published a series of 85 essays, beginning immediately after the Constitutional Convention of September, 1787. And by the following spring their effort had succeded, the Constitution had been ratified.
In light of the affront taken by a minority of law-makers, judges, and citizens to the inclusion of "One Nation under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance, a reading of the Federalist Papers can help dispel the fiction that our founding fathers envisioned a "fire-wall" between governance and theist or deist principles.
Knowing something of the factious temperment of people and the nature of people to divide with animosity over both frivolous and profound issues, our founding fathers did not shy away from initiating legislative measures in the Constitution that would work to minimize the power of any group or person, no matter their power, or numbers, or wealth.
Our founding fathers recognized that factions are elemental to the running of a government and they sought ways to minimize political and religious tyranny, but in writing the Federalist Papers they certainly expressed the country's clear connection with moral values and God.
Let us consider some of the ways in which the authors of the Federalist Papers display faith-based beliefs:
Essay 20, Topic 21, urges Americans to let their praise of gratitude for auspicious amity distinguising political counsels rise to heaven.The importance of the Federalist Papers in helping lay the foundation of the United States cannot be overestimated.
Essay 37, Topic 14, tells us that any person of pious reflection must perceive that in drafting the Constitution there is to be found in it a finger of that Almighty hand that has so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.
Essay 43, Topic 30, asserts that nothing is more repugnant than intolerance in political parties, stressing the importance of moderation the essay concludes that one cannot avoid a belief that the great principle of self-preservation is a transcendent law of both nature and God...
Essay 1, Topic 4, concludes that in politics, as in religion, it's absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecutions.
Essay 2, Topic 4, refers to God in three separate instances, referring to the country they wrote that God blessed it with a variety of soils, watered with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. In other instance the author makes note with equal pleasure that God gave this one connected country to one united people. And in a third instance wrote that it appears like this inheritance was designed by God for a band of breathern united by the strongest ties.
Essay 31, Topic 2, informs us that theorems may conflict with common sense. Mathematicians agree on the infinite divisibility of matter, the infinite divisibility of a finite thing, but that this is no more compreshensible to common sense than religious mysteries that non-believers have worked so hard to debunk.
Essay 37, Topic 10, addresses how difficult it is to express ideas and words clearly, without ambiguity. The task of clear writing is lameted, for when the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.
Essay 44, Topic 24, sets forward the idea that there must be safeguards against the misuse of religion, in that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Essay 51, lets us know that in a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.
Essay 57, Topic 6, briefly elaborates that no qualification of wealth, birth, religious faith, or civil profession is permitted to fetter the judgement or disappoint the inclination of the people.
On one hand the authors expressed their faith-based beliefs but on the other hand they forged ahead in making certain that religion would not be permitted to divide the people or to otherwise tyrannize any individual or group.
However, by their very example in writing the Federalist Papers, its authors showed that while government may not make any law respecting an establishment of religion, expressions of faith-based beliefs are natural and wholesome whether in government or among the populace, the only criteria in government being to steadfastly remain within the expressed bounds of both the letter and spirit of the second amendment law.
John E. Appleseed, American Patriot, 12 July 2002.
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