"So great is my veneration of the Bible,
that the earlier my children begin to read it
the more confident will be my hope
that they will prove
useful citizens of their country
and respectable members of society."
—John Quincy Adams

Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times, recently commented that people in Washington see this election as the 1950s vs. 1960s.

I would say the breakdown fits the candidates' takes on faith.

George Bush, a self-classified "born-again Christian," faces John Kerry, who, after being coached to inject more "God talk" into his stumping, gave this summary of beliefs:

"I'm a Catholic and I practice, but at the same time I have an open-mindedness to many other expressions of spirituality that come through different religions I've spent some time reading and thinking about [religion] and trying to study it, and I've arrived at not so much a sense of the differences, but a sense of the similarities in so many ways; the value-system roots and linkages between the Torah, the Qur'an, and the Bible and the fundamental story that runs through all of this, that really connects all of us. I've always been fascinated by the transcendentalists and the pantheists and others who found these great connections just in nature, in trees, the ponds, the ripples of the wind on the pond, the great feast of nature itself."

Certainly it's not hard to figure who's nailed the flower-child-Age-of-Aquarius-Krishna-Consciousness-follow-the-Beatles-to-the-Maharishi vote.

Kerry's answer to Bob Schieffer on faith in the last televised debate represents a full-fledged endorsement of New Age philosophy—many paths lead to the same truth of our oneness and religions simply represent different means for realizing God, Allah, or whatever the "higher being" is comfortably seen as or in.

Kerry said: "Everything is a gift from the Almighty, and as I measure the words of the Bible—and we all do; different people measure different things—the Koran, the Torah, or, you know, Native Americans who gave me a blessing the other day had their own special sense of connectedness to a higher being. And people all find their ways to express it."

*****

More and more Americans are either unaware of our country's deep biblical Christian roots or want to forget that's our heritage.

In talking to a guy just the other day about religion and politics, he became visibly irritated when I reminded him our Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution were devout Bible-believing Christians who saw the one true God of the Bible and Christian precepts as the underpinnings to all governance.

"Religion is the basis and foundation of Government," once wrote James Madison, recognized as the "Father of the Constitution" and a committed Christian.

George Washington, another solid Christian, once said, "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God or the Bible."

Thomas Jefferson, who called himself "a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus," said while president, "No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example."

John Adams, who referred to the Bible as "the best book in the world; it contains more than all the libraries I have seen," once wrote, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

The names of similar-minded Bible-believers make up any Who's Who in American history:

John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Jay, Daniel Webster, Noah Webster, Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, the list goes on and on.

I had a friend the other day express surprise when I informed him George Washington was a Christian. I guess secularists have long tried to pin him as a Deist, just as they've incorrectly done with Jefferson and others.

Author David Limbaugh, in his current New York Times bestseller, "Persecution; How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity," informs the reader that Washington, raised by a devout Christian mother who trained him in the habit of daily prayer, was a vestryman in the Episcopal Church. He carried with him a 24-page personal daily prayer book containing favorite prayers in his own handwriting.

For Monday morning, for example, Washington wrote down as his prayer, "Daily frame me more and more into the likeness of Thy Son, Jesus Christ, that living in Thy fear, and dying in Thy Favor, I may in Thy appointed time attain the resurrection of the just into eternal life."

Other evidence shows Washington urged his troops "to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier."

In a speech Washington delivered to the Delaware Indian Chiefs, he advised, "You do well to wish to learn our arts and way of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ…Congress will do everything they can to assist you in this wise intention."

In another speech given May 12, 1779, Washington pronounced the need for children to learn "above all" the "religion of Jesus Christ," and to learn this would make them "greater and happier than they already are."

Limbaugh's book gives a succinct history lesson on our nation's beginnings "by Christians whose ancestors came to America for the very purpose of escaping religious persecution and seeking religious liberty."

Amidst intensifying religious intolerance in early 17^th century England, Limbaugh explains, arose two "fanatical" movements—the Separatists and the Puritans.

The Separatists, unhappy with what they perceived as the Church of England's abandonment of biblical principles and consequently persecuted for challenging church authority, left for the Netherlands, where they formed the English Separatist Church.

Not satisfied with the degree of religious autonomy given there, though, and fearing being absorbed into the Dutch culture, these Separatists (today known as Pilgrims) set out for the New World to create a Bible-based society as Englishmen.

When their Mayflower, in 1620, inadvertently landed off-course much further north of Jamestown, Va., where they had won authorization to settle by the English Virginia Company underwriting their sailing venture, a contract for the group's self-governance was drawn up and they settled in Plymouth. The agreement became known as the Mayflower Compact.

Acknowledged in the writing of the Compact was the Pilgrims' purpose for their voyage—"For the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith."

"This was the first time in recorded history that a free community of equal men created a new civil government by means of a social contract," writes Limbaugh. "Thus the colonists united in this contract, formed a government whose authority was derived from the consent of the government and which established the principle that all men were entitled to equal treatment with the law.

"These principles were later incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, giving lie to the widely held belief that the Constitution's idea of social contract was a secular construct borrowed from John Locke, as espoused in his 'Second Treatise of Civil Government' in 1690.

"As Author M. Stanton Evans notes, 'The Compact was executed on Nov. 11, 1620, predating Locke's 'Second Treatise' by seven decades.' "

Locke is another one wrongly pegged as a Deist by those anxious to discount Christian influence, writes Limbaugh. The charge against Locke even elicited this defense from James Wilson, one of the original U.S. Supreme Court judges and a signer of the Declaration of Independence: "I am equally far from believing Mr. Locke was a friend to infidelity [a disbelief in the Bible and Christianity]. The consequence has been that the writings of Mr. Locke, one of the most able, most sincere, and most amiable assertors of Christianity, have been perverted to purposes which he would have deprecated and prevented had he discovered or foreseen them."

As Limbaugh points out, decades of revisionism has resulted in America's public schools and universities pushing as gospel the notion that secularism and rationalism dominated the thinking of our founders, framers and signers.

They will even tell you that at the time of the American Revolution, the country as a whole was as much or more influenced by French Enlightenment thinking, ignoring the fact that starting in 1734 the nation witnessed a vast Christian revival so pervasive it became known as "America's Great Awakening."

"According to modern thinking, these (secular, rationalist) ideas, traced further into the past, originated with the Greeks and Romans, and when the founders used religious terms or referred to a deity, their terms were generic at best, and at worst, were cynical attempts to dupe and win over the common Christian colonist," writes Limbaugh. "It is not Christ, say the skeptics, but Enlightenment humanism that generated the ideas in the Declaration of Independence."

One of the major problems with this argument, as Limbaugh credits author Gary Amos with aptly explaining, is that "the concept of inalienable rights couldn't have come from the Greeks and Romans, but is traceable to the Scriptures."

Limbaugh writes, "The Greeks, said Amos, were polytheists who would never have subscribed to the notion that 'all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator (singular) with certain unalienable rights.'

"Moreover, according to Amos, the Greeks believed the universe originated from an impersonal divine force, not a personal God as revealed in the Bible. Human beings were an extension of that divine force; there was virtually no distinction between humans and the divine, so the Declaration's concept of men being endowed by their creator would never have occurred to the Greeks…

"It is a biblical concept (from Genesis) that God created man in His image and likeness."

Even through my childhood, our country could still just expect a Christian man holding the highest office of the land.

Jimmy Carter is actually credited for inventing the term "born again."

Ronald Reagan cited the Bible as "the greatest message ever written"—a favorite book of his in which he said he "never had any doubt" of its Divine inspiration.

After his death, in fact, it was widely reported in Christian news circles that another favorite book of his, the 1903 Christian children's book, "That Printer of Udell's: A Story of the Middle West," by Harold Bell Wright, is what first inspired him to pursue a career in public service.

In Reagan's memoirs, he called Udell's a "wonderful book about a devout itinerant Christian," which "made such an impact on me that I decided to join my mother's church." He was 12 at the time.

I was headed for an appointment on the Upper East side one day last week, walking along Park Avenue, when I passed Central Presbyterian Church on 64th Street and noticed its front doors were open. I walked inside to take a quick peek at the old sanctuary and, stepping into the foyer, my eyes were drawn to two large brass plaques on the wall.

Engraved on the one were the words "Central Presbyterian Church Honor Roll 1917-1919," followed by a long alphabetical listing of men and women from the church who had either served or helped out in World War I.

On the other plaque was an engraved bust of President Woodrow Wilson with this quote from him, dated 1917:

"The Right is more precious than peace. We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts. To such a task we dedicate our lives."

Of course, Wilson was a Christian. He believed in "Right" in terms of what the Bible says on it.

As Wilson also once said, "There are a good many problems before the American people today, and before me as President, but I expect to find the solution of those problems just in the proportion that I am faithful in the study of the Word of God."