More Religion

I'm delighted bloggers are pushing back on the onslaught of fundamentalists and Glenn Beck types against the Founding Fathers. Harvey Wasserman posts on www.dailykos.com this morning "The Founders were not Fundamentalists". Actually, for the record, 99.9% of Christians globally are not fundamentalists. But Harvey adds to the debate, reminding us we should embrace our history without blinkers. Wasserman's own history of the United States is www.harveywasserman.com ,which also includes the number of pot-smoking founders.

He reminds us that Ethan Allen, the guerrilla leader of the Green Mountain Boys, was a militant atheist as were many of the farmers and artisans who supported the Revolution. So, Boycott Ethan Allen Furniture. Harvey's a little too tame on Thomas Paine, where he says he never mentioned religion. Paine, Glenn Beck's first hero when he appeared on Fox News, was a non-believer and a proto-socialist. The best part of Wasserman's post is his embrace of Benjamin Franklin and his amorous affairs.

But he adds some critical items to the whole debate. Thomas Jefferson, the hero of David Barton's Christian revisionism, wrote his own gospel, editing out all references of the miraculous to Jesus and portrayed Jesus as an activist and moral leader and a mortal. Founding fathers--John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams--were all freethinkers.

George Washington became an Anglican as was required to join the British Army at the time. He rarely went to church, sometimes to the Presbyterian Church one block away from my house, and refused last rites. As we know from recent films, George Washington was a Mason. He also opined that religion should be regulated so that it would have no influence on politics.

In a 1796 treaty he signed, Washington wrote ,"the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

To assure early American Jews, George Washington in a letter to the Jews in Truro, Mass, he wrote, the "Government of the United States , which gives bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistances, requires only that they live under its protection,should demean themselves as good citizens."

For those of us concerned about the past Administration's embrace of torture, it should be remembered that it was George Washington with his Revolutionary Army, who established the historical prohibitions of our military against using torture.

Since yesterday was Abraham Lincoln's Birthday, we might remind everyone that Lincoln was also notorious for his anti-religious sentiments and even sacriligious remarks. As Fred Kaplan noted in his book on Lincoln's reading, he learned his rhetoric by reading the Bible and Shakespeare and that his use of language with biblical allusions did not reflect his religious views.

Or Ronald Reagan, who once told conservative Christians, "you can't be for me, but I'm for you", actually didn't go to Church and was excused by his supporters because he claimed,"it was too much bother for the rest of the congregation."

When we see these assaults by fundamentalists on American history, we should remember that this is nothing new but dates back to the 1930s. With the country mired in the Great Depression, most denominations of Christians embraced a social gospel, stressing assistance to the poor and the Americans marginalized from our society. Within some of these denominations were factions who felt there was a Christian basis for capitalism and that Christian embrace of science and sociology eroded the message of salvation. Former Christian right leader Frank Schaeffer's father was among those who went the fundamentalist way. My grandfather took the directly opposite direction becoming an advocate of the social gospel, even being socialist. This faultline in protestantism led to the the Christian Nationalist Movement and the attempts to revise American history as a saga of a Christian country. Even though this has morphed in the last few decades into a more radical right agenda, it was in the Depression that the struggle began in earnest.

When you see modern fundamentalist embracing the notion of a white Jesus, the picture seen on many churches throughout the country, and arguing a biblical basis for laissez-faire capitalism, you only have to go back to the 1920s to locate where this is coming from. A blogger recently wrote from Pennsylvania that churches there actually gave seminars on the Christian basis for laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that both Sweden and Canada are "failed states" and that the old Confederacy was a model state. I wonder whether the AMZ Baptist Church would agree. But the Christian argument for slavery lasted well-beyond Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and it seems to persist.

Fundamentalist Christians share with Islamists the same attitude toward sacred texts. Historically, the Church fathers always argued that the interpretation of the Bible must be tempered by tradition. The Bible was to be interpreted but not literally. In the Muslim faith, the same standards apply; the Quran must be interpreted along other sacred texts to understand its real meaning. The Reformation led to the availability of the Bible for all worshippers with the intent that Catholic priests could not prevent the believer from reading God's Word. But reformation theologians never argued for the literal interpretation of the Bible like American fundamentalists do. In fact, it is manifestly absurd. Sometime check out fundamentalist preachers on television as they use Concordances and other materials to explain a biblical passage. They don't even preach a literal Bible.

Not all fundamentalist Christians are dangerous. That right goes in my mind to what Andrew Sullivan calls "Christianist" for their worship of the apocalypse. This strain of Christian worships the Book of Revelations, not the Gospel. These are the Left Behind Christians, who celebrate the coming end days and the notion of Rapture. Unfortunately for us, there are about 15 million such believers in the United States. This mindset is behind Rev. Hagee's Christians for Israel, which supports the state of Israel for the purpose of provoking a global holocaust, which will lead to Christians being raised in rapture, while Jews and non-believers are cannon fodder for the judgement of Jesus Christ. This is the group supported by Senator Joe Lieberman and which backed John McCain for President. The most interesting twist to these end-timers is Sarah Palin, whose own minister said the Rapture would occur in Wasilla, Alaska.

The "Christianist" dimension here is that the end-timers aim to "infiltrate" the political structures in the United States to influence policy so as to activate the end-time scenario. They hold the mirror religious view of the Iranian President. The other aspect is their profound anti-Americanism. These American fundamentalists despise American society in all its manifestations. Edited out of Republican narratives is the denunciations of our society by Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell whenever they applauded 9/11 or Hurrcane Katrina as God's judgment on us. It is also for that reason they support the creation of parallel institutions, home-schooling, anti-science and revisionist history. If you follow the Prop 8 trial like I do, they even want to create a Christianist legal system, which would regulate personal behavior and lifestyles. One of the more shocking displays of Christianist thinking has been the fundamentalist opposition to Health Care Reform. But this is rooted in a firm belief that our government is fundamentally corrupt and non-Christian. And , horrors of horrors, secular.