100. Storm-Rider

True, Thomas Jefferson was not an Orthodox Christian;

Thomas Jefferson was not a Deist, nor was he an Orthodox Christian.
……
The problem here is one of time.

Jefferson could most adequately be described as a Unitarian. While he did not attend church he did spend much time in his later years in association with prominant Unitarians including Joseph Priestly and John Adams.

As many as five American presidents were unitarians. (That is they did not believe in the trinity.)

But today no unitarian could be elected president.

Why not? The denomination has been rolled into pond scum. It embraced homosexuality for the pastor’s long ago. Now the big thing is polyamory among the parishioners.

Basically what this means is that the denomination doesn’t have any inner morality-or any inner spring. It basically takes on the mores and ways of the culture around it. So that when the culture goes bad, the denomination goes bad.

That means that God himself was never on the throne of Grace in that denomination. But only men conjuring.

There is more to it than that. The Arian Heresy was embraced by all the European protestant seminaries after about 1850 through the higher criticism school. The arian Heresy ascendence coincided with the ascendece of Atheisim the the philosophy departments of the European Universities. When Nietzche was talking about the death of God, he was also talking about was happening in his preacher father’s church.

Basically, the Arian Heresy stripped the European protestant churches of any power to ward off the attacks of the atheists. After all, a church has no power when the center of its worship is a human sacrifice.

This is why the European protestants collapsed in less than 100 years.

In the USA the arian heresy made it debut into the liberal mainline protestant denominations in about 1890. And completed its conquest about 1930-40.

Today the divide liberal and evangelical christians is over who Jesus is. The liberals at bottom believe that Jesus is just a man. The evangelicals believe as Christians of old — that Jesus is fully God and fully man. The liberal denominations are rapidly moving toward allowing homosexuals among their pastorate. And their membership is steadily shrinking like the European churches before.

It is a much different story for evangelicals whose numbers are yearly growing even as they are being pushed out of the public square.