Liars for Jesus

Glenn Beck promises us a new version of the First Amendment brought to you by Christian revisionist David Barton. Mr. Barton spearheaded the RNC's outreach to conservative clergy in 2004 and Newt Gingrich has asked him to gather politically active evangelicals to a meeting for Gingrich to re-launch his old organization. This would not be newsworthy except the same David Barton is heavily involved in the Texas school book debate as discussed in an excellent article in the New York Times yesterday. Normally, I would just shrug such a thing off to the reptile brains in Texas except that because it is such a big market the decisions on the textbooks may affect over 40 states.

Sometimes I think that the internet could save us all. A blogger named Chris Rodda, one of the few people actually monitoring the religious right in the United States, has written a book Liars for Jesus: the Religious Right's Alternative Vision of American History. This book rebuts chapter and verse the arguments by Barton and his cohorts that we are a "Christian" country. I watched about an hour of her Youtube presentations last night and found her arguments convincing but her opposition horrifying. You can find it today on the Dailykos; her Huffington Post blog was taken down this morning.

If you would like to learn something about the real relationship between Church and State during the first generation after the American Revolution, I recommend Forrest Church's So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State (Harcourt, 2007, $16.00). For the past twenty years, we have been blessed by the blossoming of great works in American history, which have contributed to the understanding of our unruly nation. To see a full-scale assault on our history by the religious right, I find appalling.

When I was young, we learned all about the different religious sects and how they shaped our colonial history. Despite claims by the right that the 60s and 70s wiped this out of our schoolbooks, I note that my son's history books from middle school through high school covered the same material with even more attention to detail. The basics were the same.

Barton and his cronies have been travelling under the radar but having a large impact on both our school systems and our politics. It really is time that they be challenged directly at every level. Was America filled with Christian sects at the time of independence? Of course. But the Christian nationalist history that has been lying around from the 1930s, just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Just from memory I'll deal with a few of the items that they raise and Chris Rodda debunks. First, they claim that half the signers of the Declaration of Independence were seminary graduates. Interesting, except seminary meant in those days a school. It had no religious connotation. Only one minister signed the Declaration--John Witherspoon and two former divinity students who became a trader and lawyer respectfully.

When the Revolution was concluded, the United States and Britain signed a peace treaty with the notation "In the Name of the Holy Trinity." The United States actually signed three such treaties until about 1826. Each of the treaties were drafted by European nations with established state churches and as such routinely used this formulation in their diplomacy. the United States Government never drafted a treaty using such language.

Because of the war against Britain, the United States experienced a shortage of print materials, including bibles. The Christian revisionists claim that the United States Congress authorized the printing of a Bible of the Revolution by a printer in Philadelphia. Not quite-- the first American bible was being printed in Philadelphia and the printer asked for Congress' authorization. Instead, they gave it to the chaplain to approve its accuracy and the quality of the job. Congress sent a letter remarking on both qualities with the intent to give our printers a leg up on the competition. It had nothing to do with approving a a Bible per se. The printer wrote George Washington to have Congress pay for 20,000 of the Bibles to hand out to revolutionary soldiers. Washington had his secretary respond that the printer should ask Congress. They refused to pay for it. It was only in the 1930s that with so few of the Bibles remaining that book dealers called it the Revolution Bible to inflate its sale value.

In the revisionist history, James Madison is downgraded in his role at the Constitutional Congress and Govenor Morris is elevated because he spoke so much. Interestingly, Morris was slated to become the American ambassador to France but was passed over because he was considered too "irreligious" even for the French. But Madison remains a thorn in their side because of his very non-religious attitudes and his role in creating the separation of church and state. Interestingly, Madison has always been one of the favorite Founding Fathers for traditional political conservatives because of his defense of federalism.

The Big Christian hero is ...drumroll... Thomas Jefferson. Christian revisionist claim that the University of Virginia was not the first secular university in the United States but was intended by Jefferson to contain six seminaries. The fact of the matter was that Jefferson was under attack in Virginia for asking so much money for UVa from the religious denominations that he wrote a letter offering any sect to establish a seminary at the University. He knew the Anglicans were trying to re-establish their seminar at William & Mary, which he himself had disbanded when Governor; the Presbyterians were busy somewhere else; and the Congregationalists weren't interested; and the Baptists had yet to create seminaries. In the response of his friend to Thomas Jefferson, the friend complimented Jefferson on his adroit way in defusing the religious opposition to UVa.

The revisionists also claim that Jefferson as President was keen for prosletyzing the Indians. For this they cite a treaty he signed that provided funds for a church and the salary of a preacher (actually a Catholic priest). Of the 200 treaties our founding fathers signed with Indian nations only three contained similar provisions. In the case of the Jefferson treaty, it had to do with an Indian tribe who had converted to Catholicism in the 17th century. They wanted to pay their priest several years of salary and wanted funding for a church and in return the United States would reaps thousands of acres of land. When Jefferson wanted to address Congress on the details of this treaty, James Madison interceded ,telling him Congress might misinterpret the concrete details as sponsoring religion. Jefferson refrained from revealing the details.

Baptists have always loved Jefferson. But the revisionists have gotten it wrong. They claim Baptists in Danbury, Conn. wrote Jefferson about their concerns about the First Amendment and the establishment clause . Not true, they wrote Jefferson about the fact that Connecticut like Rhode Island did not write a new constitution as they were asked and simply re-asserted their original charters which in fact esblished congregationalism as the state church. Jefferson wrote back voicing support for their concerns and denounced any form of a protestant popedom. Baptists at that time had to get written wavers from the state to practice their religion. What Jefferson wrote to the Baptists did not support the revisionist accounts of the First Amendment.

The big whopper of revisionists is the claim that John Adams wrote that the Holy Spirit informed everything and that unless it was present in government men would live in depravity. This is supposed to cinch the case that our Founding Fathers wanted a Christian government. The part of the letter they do not quote is that Adams is discussing the rationale for a monarchy and by the end of his letter he concludes that the whole notion of the Holy Spirit is bunk and that it plays on people's ignorance. But my Presbyterians did in fact support Adams because he did believe religion should play a greater role in our politics. But he didn't believe the nonsense the revisionists attribute to him.

The First Amendment is one of the reasons our country has the greatest expressions and diversity of religious faith in the world. It is our ethic of tolerance and pluralism that fosters this richness. There is no a single Founding Father who ever believed in theocracy. It is simply sick that the religious right actually believe they are being repressed. Only days ago they began their suit to repeal the new Hate Crimes legislation because they argue they can't express their anti-homosexual beliefs. And they have whipped up the news that Judge Wagner, a conservative Republican appointed by George H.W. Bush, is biased in the Prop 8 trial because of "his preferred lifestyle". Only weeks ago, radical right churches and conservative Catholics at the instigation of Watergate figure Chuck Colson boasted 1 million signatures to their Manhattan Manifesto, decrying the state of our culture and the permissiveness shown to gays and the issue of gay marriage. For their information, every Christian always has lived in a secular society whether it was Imperial Rome,even the Holy Roman Empire and the United States.

The reason the Founding Fathers were highly skeptical of establishing a religion in the United States was because they were trying to avoid the bloody inter-Christian wars that had wracked Europe for centuries. If you want some evidence of this, just look what happened when Benjamin Franklin asked the Constitutional Convention to open each session with a prayer to "the Heavens". They unanimously turned him down and did not offer a more Christan prayer.