Sunday Sermon:

Once again, I'm going to promote an evangelical Christian sermon. This time from the Chapel at The Masters College, an evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant college. You can hear Gregg Frazer explain his PhD thesis to students at TMC here where he argues America's key Founders were "religious" but not "Christian" and otherwise refutes the Christian Nation idea ala Barton, Federer, Kennedy, and Eidsmoe.

Much of what he has to say I've reproduced on my blogs over the past few years; however, something that this lecture gives that I've perhaps neglected is the value to conservative traditional Christians in rejecting the Christian America idea. The secularists who read my blogs enjoy hearing how Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams were men who put their faith more so in reason than revelation and otherwise denied orthodox Christianity. However, conservative Christians do well to understand that traditional Christianity is not Americanism. And those Christians should think long and hard about the two and do their best not to conflate them else they risk corrupting the purity of their faith. They risk "Mormonizing" their faith, that is importing a-biblical ideas into the Christian religion and pretending such are scripture. Instead of the Book of Mormon, we get the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and words of Christian American prophets, America's Founders. Ironic in that Mormonism, unlike Christianity, developed in America after its Founding, actually officially incorporates many of these ideas as divinely inspired on the same level as the Old and New Testament. Mormonism, though not exactly the same as the religious faith of America's key Founders, is closer to it than is orthodox Trinitarian Christianity.

Anyway Dr. Frazer's lecture can be heard here.