If they listen to many historians and read most social studies textbooks, Americans would think the nation’s Founding Fathers largely were irreligious, the speaker for next month’s Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast said.
However, David Barton, founder and president of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization, said 29 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence held seminary or Bible school degrees.
“We too often emphasize the exception rather than the rule,” he said in an e-mail. “We make sure that every student knows the two least-religious signers,” Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, so we “project the signers as being largely irreligious on the basis of Jefferson and Franklin rather than otherwise on the basis of the other 54.”
The 32nd annual prayer breakfast will be Tuesday, May 11, at 7 a.m. at the Chattanooga Convention Center. No breakfast was held last year because of a scheduling conflict with speakers.
Charles Monroe, chairman of the citizens committee that organizes the event, said Mr. Barton is a bit of departure as a speaker for the breakfast with his background as a history and constitutional scholar and in the fact his presentation will be interactive.