Defending the Declaration: How the Bible and Christianity Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence

by Gary T. Amos

Book Overview

After ten years of research and four years of writing, Dr. Gary Amos reveals that the evidence from primary sources is irrefutable: underlying the Declaration of Independence is a foundation of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0943497698
• ISBN13: 9780943497693
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc.
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The truth at last!

This is the most well-studied, in depth, view of what our founders intended when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. It exposes the false itterations of those who have attempted to revise our founder's intents by claiming they were deists. It gives accurate Biblical and historical reasoning for the faith that is in us. It would be impossible for a revisionist to refute this truth.

An Important Work

First, one caveat: this book is in dire need of some editing. Amos often repeats himself and relies on conclusory arguments and non sequiturs.However, Amos has still performed an invaluable service. He has assembled a broad array of historical sources to demonstrate that the Declaration of Independence (and the American Revolution) stands solidly within the mainstream of historic Christian theology and legal/political thought. While Jefferson may have personally been a Deist, this book shows that his ideas were indebted much more to historic Christianity than to the secular "Enlightenment." Admittedly, Amos is often on shaky ground when he tries to find clear Biblical authority for some of the Founders' ideas. However, he makes a very convincing case that their ideas were directly descended from the writings of Aquinas, Calvin, and the Puritans.Therefore, while not a masterpiece of writing, this book is an invaluable reference to refute the modern "establishment" of secularism as our national religion.

Christianity vindicated by a return to primary sources

«Unlike men of the Enlightenment who acted on the ideals of Christianity while denying their source, modern society is trying to act on occidental secular concepts, as well as attribute Western achievements to them. That is why Western society is in the same early stages of dysfunction that preceded the fall of Greece and Rome.» Gary T. AmosLike the author of this book, though not from college professors but from my own readings, as I am self-taught in this area, I first accepted and taught the consensus theory of the United States as «the nation of the Enlightenment». In my own case, I was being deluded by my Objectivist mentors, for whom faith being the very poison of reason, and reason the only possible basis for the existence and recognition of individual rights, Christianity cannot have had anything to do with the founding of a nation based on the protection of these rights.To give an idea of the kind of ideas I used to accept, John Ridpath, Objectivism's foremost intellectual historian, recently declared that the theory that «America is rooted in religion» is «a tragic error and a vicious smear of the greatness of America» ; «America was founded on Enlightenment principles, on an Aristotelian perspective of the world, on an understanding of the role of the independent rational mind, and on an understanding of the need for freedom, property, industry, and science. But this has never been widely understood.»Here is not the place to refute this lie and the false dichotomies it is based on : a whole book would be necessary, and this is precisely what Gary T. Amos has offered us with *Defending the Declaration*. Trying to show «how the Bible and Christianity influenced the writing of the Declaration of Independence», Amos, who is presented as holding «a Juris Doctor degree» and degrees «in history and theology», focuses on the political philosophy of the document, devoting one chapter to each of its principles, and tracing their origins to the Bible and Christian thought.Returning to primary sources instead of blithely swallowing the concoctions of secular historians, Amos shows that the political ideas expressed in the Declaration are at least as old as the 11th century and such Catholic scholars as Manegold of Lautenbach, who in 1080 wrote : «No man can make himself king or emperor. The people raise a man above them in this way in order that he may govern them in accordance with right reason, give to each one his own, protect the good, destroy the wicked, and administer justice to every man. But if he violates the contract [pactum] under which he was elected, distrurbing and confounding that which he was established to set in order, then the people is justly and reasonably released from its obligation to obey him. For he was the first to break the faith that bound them together.» (p132.)Such quotations will come as so many shocks to those who believe that Jefferson's political philosophy was no older than the late 17th century and Locke's *Sec

Christian ideas did, in fact, shape American founding ideas

Amos makes many important contributions. But he makes two points that seemed especially important to me. First, Amos shows the fallacious belief that only non-Christian ideas affect Christians. Secular historians, for some odd reason, think that Christian ideas do not affect non-Christians. An example of what I mean is Jefferson. Many want to say that he was almost totally influenced by deism and Enlightened ideas (which were themselves supposedly not influenced by Christian ideas), but when we actually look at what he said and wrote, he fell right in line ideologically with the Baptists and other quite Christian groups.Second, Amos shows how the founding ideas cannot be traced to Rome or Greece. Rather, they can only truly be traced to the Gregorian Reform which was around the year 1200. Anti-Christian and even many Christian historians ignore this fact. But ideas like separation of church and state, inalienable rights, law of nature (which leads to the common law) and the general demythologizing of the state came from Christian thinkers.This book is the popular version of a text book Gary Amos wrote for his Common Law class at Regent Law School. I would recommend this text book if you enjoyed this popular version (I am not sure how you would get that text book though). I am not in the law school, but I read his text and the reading transformed my view of Christian legal and political threory.