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Fisher
Ames: Defender of Liberty, Christian Educator
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Ames
Christian University proudly takes its name from Fisher Ames, one of
America's "forgotten founding fathers," and a historical proponent of
the Bible as the source of all wisdom.
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Fisher
Ames is best known for his opposition to Jeffersonian democracy. Pure
democracy, he argued, would lend itself to the new nation's coming
under the influence of the basest of human motivations: greed and a
lack of public virtue. Left unchecked, Ames believed, pure democracy
would itself swallow up the very freedom on which it was founded.
But
Ames was no opponent of liberty. To the contrary, he argued forcefully
that the new United States of America was to be constructed as a
constitutional republic. To succeed, he believed, the United States
must lash itself to a constitution of laws, not the whim of democratic
preference.
In
addition, Fisher Ames was among the outspoken supporters of the Bible's
central role in all of education. As the Word of God, Ames held, the
Bible should be at the very center of the curriculum.
We
honor not only Fisher Ames' distinction between democracy and
republican forms of government, but the fine intellectual rigor
required to differentiate between the two. It is this level of
discovery and insight, we believe, that makes up the Great Ideas on
which our biblically-based curriculum is founded.
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