Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers is a book that will probably set off both the Christian fundamentalists and the fundamentalist left as it seeks to tell the story of what the founding fathers of the United States truly believed theistically - or whether they believed in God at all. What is even better is the author uses these men's own words to explain their beliefs.
For those of you that are not from the U.S., let me explain the odd problem that the founding fathers present. You see, there are two groups that seem to want to adopt them - both actually rather wrong in their presumptions. One faction is the Christian fundies/evangelicals who continually try to convince us that the founding fathers were Christians bent on founding the U.S. as a Christian country. On the other hand, you have radical fundamentalist secularist/atheists who try to portray them as avid athiests who would have said so but didn't, as they were in fear of persecution.
Reading Moral Minority will convince you that neither of the two extremes is even close to getting it right. Author Brooke Allen only concentrates on six of the group known as the founding fathers: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, presumably because they, of all the founding fathers, produced the most amount of writing from which to judge them. Barring reading the complete works of all these men it, sufficient knowledge can be gained from Allen's overview of what the men believed and why.
My only small gripe with the book is the preface which comes off a bit inaccurate when taken in context with the rest of the book. The tone of the preface is a bit too politically correct and anti-Christian - it ought to be taking into account what is contained therein. One almost wishes the final chapter, which pertains to the background of the time, was at the beginning of the book to give a refresher course for those who either fell asleep in history class or who are not as grounded in 18th century history as they might want to be.
Overall, this is an excellent book about the beliefs of the six founders and well worth a read. I shall refer to it often when someone spouts off about these men claiming them to be something they were not. Highly recommended.
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