As we noted back in July, a day of prayer, humiliation and fasting wasn’t new to the Continental Congress. (Go back to that episode’s show notes to see my explanation of the word “humiliation” in this context.) And, as Mike notes in the episode, it wasn’t even close to the last for this Congress.

That’s neither good nor bad; it probably gave everyone the opportunity to simply stop and contemplate matters. Tensions were rising high by now, and it would have been easy to make a rash, emotion-based decision. So why not take a moment to ensure that whatever deity you subscribe to is inclined to help you?

I don’t frame it that way to be provocative; we all too often hear rhetoric suggesting that all of the Founding Fathers were good Christians. In fact they ran the gamut from orthodox Christianity, through rationalistic theism, through Deism. Thomas Jefferson once edited a Bible which removed references to miracles and the divinity of Jesus. Even among the “orthodox Christian” crowd, one could find Quakers, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Anglicans, and Presbyterians. One of our first episodes featured a Jewish Patriot. And even though he didn’t appear to practice publicly, Alexander Hamilton was raised Jewish as a child.

The point here is that when you’re in hopeless times—and fighting off the British was considered a lost cause in those days—you take the comfort where you can. Whether that’s in God, Buddha, Krishna, Zeus, Mohammed or another human being, it’s not wrong to give yourself some form of contemplation.

Okay, rant over.

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