Patrick Henry quote about gospel of Jesus first appeared in 1956

To the editor,

Bishop Paul Blake claims that Patrick Henry said, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians not on religions but on the gospel of Jesus Christ"

He never did. This is another bogus right wing quote used by the "Christian nation" crowd. The quote was first seen in the periodical "The Virginian" in 1956. It doesn't claim he said it, either. It is part of the article's own claims. There are dozens of bogus founder quotes out there. Most come from the religious right but I have found one real doozey from the separationist side, too.

Patrick Henry was a political foe of Jefferson and Madison. Henry detested the Constitution and said some pretty nasty things about it. He was as anti-federalist as it got. Their political battles came to a head even before the Constitutional Convention of 1787. In 1785, Henry proposed a law in which Virginia would support Christian teachers. Up against this was James Madison with the Virginia Religious Liberty Statute, written by Thomas Jefferson. Addressing Henry's law in Madison's famous "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments", Madison stated:

"Because the proposed establishment is a departure from the generous policy, which, offering an asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion, promised a lustre to our country, and an accession to the number of its citizens. What a melancholy mark is the bill of sudden degeneracy? Instead of holding forth an asylum to the persecuted, it is itself a signal of persecution. It degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in religion do not bend to those of the legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance."

Jefferson's law passed in 1786 and then served as the template for the Constitution's ban on religious tests for oaths of office (Art 6) and the religious clauses of the first amendment. This is a clue why the U.S. Senate claimed in 1797 in the Treaty of Tripoli that "the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion"

James Veverka

Tilton