LIBERTY LETTERS WITH STEVE FARRELL
Not long ago, I watched a noted atheist – an ACLU member – venomously attacked American Christians for daring to stand up for what they called the right of their children to have access to the truth in the classroom about America’s unique founding, a founding centered not just on the triumph of reason, as some wrongfully claim, but on the triumph of reason coupled with faith, particularly the Christian faith.
Coming to this atheists’ defense, one of the interviewers cited as “proof” that America was not founded by Christians – nor upon the principles of Christianity – the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which declared in Article XI, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” Here we have it, he declared, legal proof under the supremacy clause that this must be and still is the case – but more than that, with key founder President John Adams’ signature on it, a personal, in-your-face testimony against Christians and their incessant claims about God’s hand in founding this nation.
Now hold on there…
Notwithstanding that such a claim contradicts everything in John Adams’ writings to the contrary (we’ll get to that in a minute) – and the rest of the key founders as well – and notwithstanding the contradictory testimony of two centuries before the American founding and the nearly two centuries’ old testimony after the American founding, both of which embracing America’s Christian tradition in Congress, in the courts, in presidential speeches, in private and public classrooms, and in state and local governments, without question—notwithstanding that little sidestep—here’s yet another: The U.S. does not have and has not had the original copy of this treaty for at least two centuries (it was and is lost); while the two originals that do exist (in Italian and Arabic) have no such phrase nor any such clause in the treaty, period.
So what do we have then? A ‘certified copy’ written by a man, Joel Barlow, who brought to publication Thomas Paine’s diatribe against Christianity, “The Age of Reason,” and whose motives might be described as suspect.
The Avalon Project at Yale University, without assigning any motives to Mr. Barlow, notes of the blatant discrepancy:
As even a casual examination of the annotated translation of 1930 shows, the Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic; and even as such its defects throughout are obvious and glaring. Most extraordinary (and wholly unexplained) is the fact that Article 11 of the Barlow translation, with its famous phrase, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,” does not exist at all. There is no Article 11. The Arabic text which is between Articles 10 and 12 is in form a letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant. . How that script came to be written and to be regarded, as in the Barlow translation, as Article 11 of the treaty as there written, is a mystery and seemingly must remain so. Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point (1)
These Yale researchers note next:
[E]vidence of the erroneous character of the Barlow translation has been in the archives of the Department of State since perhaps 1800 or thereabouts; for in the handwriting of James Leander Cathcart [the American Consul to Tripoli, at the time] is the statement . that the Barlow translation is “extremely erroneous.” (2)
A “poor attempt at a paraphrase,” “defects throughout,” “obvious and glaring,” “extremely erroneous,” a “famous phrase [that] does not exist at all”; of these I have little doubt. But returning to Mr. Barlow’s motives in penning such a copy upon provisions that did not exist: his connection to the doctrines of the fallen angel Thomas Paine, and his own descent from his former involvement in the ministry into what was then dubbed “liberal Christianity” looms large, and helps unravel “the mystery.” So do a couple of other possible character flaws. A little over a decade after the signing of the Treaty of Tripoli, in an April 24, 1812 letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, we read of Madison’s concerns about Barlow’s fidelity to representing America in yet another land, France:
A letter from Barlow to Granger fills us with serious apprehensions that he is burning his fingers with matters which will work great embarrassment and mischief here, and which his instructions could not have suggested. (3)
Madison was concerned about the man’s fidelity to his American commission and common sense. John Adams had similar concerns. After denouncing the recent works of Tom Paine as “the Ravings and Rantings of Bedlam,” in a July 15, 1813 letter to Jefferson, Adams moved to the subject of Tom Paine’s publisher, Joel Barlow, who was “about to record Tom Paine as the great author of the American Revolution!”—to which Adams retorted, “If he was; I desire that my name may be blotted out forever, from its records.” (4) For Barlow to even consider repeating this outrageous fallacy for the reading of future generations demonstrated his willingness to be the pawn of a man who had turned not only on his faith, but on all of Christianity (including on America’s Founders, many of whom he came to despise, and who would revoke his citizenship over his newfound “Enemy of the Faith” status), and if not that or that alone, then Barlow’s tendency toward delusion or rank dishonesty and fraud – and to what end?, to what end?
Finally, the original Treaty of Tripoli of 1805 that IS in our possession and IS signed by a Founding President has no such Barlow inspired, anti-Christian clause. (5)
The bottom line: If this is the best Founding Era ‘proof’ these historical revisionists can come up with against Christianity (and John Adams) it is pathetic. – An original treaty signed by Adams that is not the original, and in fact is not signed by Adams (on the copy he cites), and is at odds with both of the originals that we do have, and was declared by the then American Consul to Tripoli, Leander Cathcart, to be an “extremely erroneous” copy, one at odds with the follow-on treaty that was signed but a few years later (yet another proof against this lie), and all of this based on a copy written by a man whose motives and judgment were highly suspect. Pathetic indeed.
Equally pathetic is any attempt to attach the noble name of John Adams to a denunciation of America’s godly beginnings.
A small sample of the real John Adams reveals just how deep the fraud of this revisionist account. When Adam’s was asked by an educational group of youth to identify America’s founding pillars, here is what he answered in a document that CAN be authenticated:
Science [the science of government] and Morals are the great Pillars on which this Country has been raised to its present population, opulence and prosperity, and these alone, can advance, support and preserve it.
He then added:
Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity, or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction, that after the most industrious and impartial researches, the longest liver of you all will find no Principles, Institutions, or Systems of Education, more fit, IN GENERAL to be transmitted to your posterity, than those you have received from your Ancestors. (6)
Years later in a letter to Jefferson, Mr. Adams further elaborated on what he meant that day:
Could my Answer be understood, by any candid reader or hearer, to recommend, to all others[:] The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved Independence were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly . could unite. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all these Sects were United: And the general principles of English and American liberty which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence. Now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God; and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System. I could therefore safely say, consistently with all my then and present information, that I believed they would never make discoveries in contradiction to these General Principles.” (7)
This is typical John Adams, the same man who laid it on the line quite clearly that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” that it was “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (8)
And again from Adams:
Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. (9)
And again:
The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity.(10)
And, once more, even eleven years before Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence declares John Adams:
[our rights preceded government], rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws – Rights derived from the great Legislator of the Universe. (11)
Well, these are the roots, the Great Pillars that past and future generations of youth ought to frequently refer back to as learning and science move forward, these “eternal and immutable” principles that lay at the foundation of everything good, lest in the name of progress we pass down to posterity nothing more than a high-brow, high-tech house of cards.
But here’s one more vital point: Adams would have nothing to do with the lie that passes around the university and public school system today as so-called solid granite truth, that America’s roots go deep into another soil, that of the amoral, libertine, European ‘Enlightenment, they tell us. Here is what Adam’s said of that ‘illustrious’ founding group:
[They appear] to me like young scholars from a college of sailors flushed with recent pay or prize money, mounted on wild horses, lashing and spearing, till they would kill the horses and break their own necks. (12)
He wasn’t kidding. And the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, two world wars, the invention and perpetuation of mass murdering, liberty destroying communism and fascism, and now the socialist, world government promoting, secularist European Union on that continent referred to by Adams, proved him prophetic. License is not liberty. The European Enlightenment with all of its anti-God, anti-private property, anti-limited government rhetoric is not the legacy this country’s ancestors passed down to our children. Yet it is to these latter so-called fellow ‘founders’, these atheists who spawned the greatest bloodletting tyranny in history, are they who the ACLU and the revisionist ‘scholars’ young and old (yes, they who have hijacked America’s educational system, and rewritten America’s story to fit their Godless, socialist paradigm) and the very goons they would have you and your kids look back to – look back like Lot’s wife to the polluted, prideful, despotic people and political philosophies our progenitors barely escaped, back to the land where the battle cry ‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” hid a more absolute, more thorough ‘Tyranny!’ Robbery! and Mass Murder!
Adams had it right. One pillar of salt is enough. We don’t need 300 million more. Not on our watch.
Steve Farrell is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of The Moral Liberal, one of the original pundits at NewsMax.com (1999-2007), and the author of the highly praised inspirational novel Dark Rose
Footnotes:
1. Miller, Hunter. “The Avalon Project at Yale Law School: The Barbary Treaties: Tripoli 1796. Found online at: http://www.yale.edu/
lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/barbary/bar1796n.htm
2. Ibid.
3. Madison, James. “Writings of James Madison, Volume 2, 1794-1815,” p. 533.
4. Cappon, Lester J. “The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail and John Adams,” University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1959, renewed 1987, p. 358.
5. “Treaty of Peace and Amity, Signed at Tripoli June 4, 1805, online at http://www.yale.edu/
lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/barbary/bar1805t.htm
6. Cappon, Lester J. Quoted from Adams’ answer to “the Address of the Young Men of the City of Philadelphia, the District of South Wark, and the Northern Liberties,” p. 339.
7. Ibid., pgs. 339-340.
8. Adams, John; Adams, Charles Francis, ed.. “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Volume IX,” Boston: Little Brown, 1854, p. 229.
9. Ibid. p. 401
10. Adams, John; Butterfield, L.H.. “Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, Volume III” Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 234, from diary entry for June 21, 1776.
11. Adams, John; Taylor. Robert J., editor. “Papers of John Adams, Volume 1,” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977- p. 109, as quoted in Grant, James. “John Adams: Party of One,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005, p. 62.
12. Cannon, Lester. J. Pgs. 357-358.
Author’s Additional note:
There were other factors at play that may have influenced Joel Barlow to insert such ideas in his “extremely erroneous” copy of the original. Read this insightful article by David Barton at http://wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=5
James Wilson had a great influence during the American Founding but has been called “
Wilson served as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, where he voted for and signed the Declaration of Independence. He later was a member of the Constitutional Convention, where he signed the Constitution. 
In Spirit and In Truth The Word 
THE HUMBLED STATE HONORS GOD!
William Andrew Dillard
THE HUMBLED STATE HONORS GOD!
It is an ironic, but interesting turn of events deserving considerable thought and appreciation. I write about coming to grips with one’s elevated relationship with God in New Covenant discipleship. It is elevation by another that humbles man. Please think with me for a moment.
Natural man, in his hereditarily, sinful condition is most often prideful, in denial of his condemned state, and resistant toward repentance from sin to exercise faith in God. But when he is saved by the grace of God, and embarks on a life of discipleship, he rejoices in his new position as a child of the King, even though he may continue to see himself as low, largely worthless, still plagued by sin, and sometimes rebellious. He may feel this is the proper viewpoint that honors the God of his salvation. Perhaps there is a need to re-examine a couple of things: self imposed humility may not be humility at all, and the highest honor man bestows upon God is to live within the perimeters of His calling while understanding and accepting the position in life that His unspeakable gift brings.
Colossians 2:18 speaks of a voluntary humility while verse 23 speaks of fleshly, will worship and humility. There is such a thing as being proud to be humble, but that is all pride rather than humility. True humility comes through reconciliation of oneself to God. Moreover, if God exalts His obedient children to heights not often considered, then He is honored most by their understanding, acceptance, and proper handling of that exalted state, which excludes fleshly pride.
Just what is this godly exaltation that God’s children may know? First, it is the privilege of being admitted to His Bride through baptism and fellowship in a New Testament church. Secondly, it is occupying the position of mature sons of God who are destined to rule the world with King Jesus at His coming. Thirdly it is being a viable part of the present “Israel of God,” Gal. 6: 16, which is His body, the pillar and ground of the truth, I Timothy 3:15. Additionally, one is exalted to being a god, John 10: 31-36; I Cor. 8:5. Jesus used this very terminology to confound the know-it-all Pharisees about those unto whom the Word of God came, Psalm 82:6. Certainly, the Lord’s church is the recipient of His Word: the faith once delivered to the saints. As gods (little g), they constitute His body, His Bride, His Israel, His representatives and the designated supporters of the truth. Who is it then who could not be humbled by such lofty exaltation? Moreover, who then would not be totally sobered by that responsibility? But more, to the point, who would deny these God-given designations and still claim to honor Him? He is honored in truth, and in our acceptance and obedience of Heaven’s provisions and placements.
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