Tag: history

When Washington Crossed the Delaware on Christmas 1776, It Wasn’t in the Name of Christian Nationalism

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Most people see America as an experiment in classical liberalism, whereby the founders created a system of limited government, religious pluralism and liberty. Religious leaders are free to spread their message through the culture—but not to take control of the levers of power and base lawmaking on their sectarian Bible interpretations. The Constitution protects everyone’s natural rights, with its main purpose limiting the sphere of government—not implementing rules to assure proper religious observance.

There really is no other way to seriously read our Constitution, but many religious people still argue the founders were Christians who envisioned a Christian nation. Some of the founders were indeed devout Christians and these folks cherry-pick Christian quotations from them.

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Christian nationalists often argue that America cannot survive as a multicultural, multi-religious nation. To which I’ll quote a 1788 rebuttal from George Washington: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” As we approach the 250th anniversary of our founding, Americans must not let Washington’s brilliant legacy and the nation’s ideals get hijacked”

https://reason.com/2025/12/25/christian-nationalism-is-a-threat-to-americas-founding-principles/

This 1,300-Page Anticapitalist History Gets a Few Things Wrong

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Adam Smith, widely considered the first major theorist of capitalism, abhorred the institution of slavery. “Whatever work [a slave] does…can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own,” he wrote in 1776. In an earlier lecture, Smith indicted laws that “strengthen the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection.” The plantation system at the core of this economy was not a competitive market; planters had secured a state-sanctioned “monopoly against all the rest of the world” and “indemnif[ied] themselves by the exorbitancy of their profites for their expensive and thriftless method of cultivation.” Smith singled out the exceptional cruelty found in the British colonies of “Jamaica and Barbadoes, where slaves are numerous and objects of jealousy [and] punishments even for slight offences are very shocking.””

https://reason.com/2025/12/29/this-1300-page-anticapitalist-history-gets-a-few-things-wrong/