American Exceptionalism--A Different Take

While fundamentalist Christian David Barton and Justice Tony Scalia lecture the new teabaggers on the "real meaning" of the Constitution,it's worth remembering that rising above Alexandria's King Street Metro station is an architectural relic called the Washington Masonic Monument ,which celebrates George Washington's freemasonry and the role the freemasons played in the creation of our country. This is not part of American history you'll hear Barton and Scalia talk about but it does have significance.

Freemasons today believe we are in the age of Lucifer, when religious fundamentalisms of all stripes will try and vanquish reason, science and the eternal wisdoms. Because of freemasons' interest in the wisdom of ancient cultures,one of the countries' where they are prevalent but underground is Iran. Freemasons in the United States have maintained constant contact with their brothers in Iran since the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. Since their creation in the 17th century, they have been directly involved in creating Republican forms of government. Outside of the United States, one of the most famous mason was the great Italian nationalist, Garibaldi.

Freemasonry is generally thought to be atheistic by their enemies but in fact a Freemason swears an oath to "study the hidden secrets of Nature and Science in Order the better to know his Maker." Our own rights are said to be derived from Nature's creator, not the known God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. There was a reson for this. Our Founding Fathers wanted our founding to have universal applicability and not be limited to one or another religious tradition. Key Founding Fathers were freemasons as well as Deists, which sometimes overlapped.

Having learned from the failures of other groups in taking direct, overt action, the freemasons worked behind the scenes politically. The political agenda was to create a tolerant and prosperous society with a degree of social and economic freedom that would give people the chance to explore both the inner and outer cosmos.

It's not hard to understand the long-term, traumatic effects of the Holocaust both on the Jewish consciousness and on Western Europe. The Thirty Years War laid waste to Central Europe and claimed a number of religious victims rivalling the Holocaust. So it's not hard to understand that these religious wars spurred the growth of people trying to escape religion's strangehold on political entities. And people who retained the memories of religious conflicts and wanted to create a country with the separation of Church and State. No, our Founding Fathers really did not want to create a Christian nation. The European past was still burned in their memories.

The Scottish and English Freemasons worked in England to support a constitutional monarchy working with a democratic parliament. In America, they did something completely different.

For fans of the Teaparty, on 16 December 1773 a group of men dressed as Indians dumped British tea into the Boston harbor and inspired the American Revolution. After they dumped the tea, they hurried back inside St. Andrews Masonic Lodge. Fellow mason Ben Franklin thought the whole idea ridiculous.

The following year Benjamin Franklin met Thomas Paine in a masonic lodge in London and urged him to emigrate to America. Paine, one of Glenn beck's favorites,actually coined the phrase,"the United States of America". While advocating the creation of a federation of states, he also urged the abolition of slavery and state funding for the education of the poor. Considered as atheist as a Deist, Paine wrote the Age of Reason, where he lampooned Christianity and religion. It would be hard to imagine him writing the book today--in the American embassy in Paris. But for Glenn Beck, Paine really did like to quote Isaiah.

According to masonic lore, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington consulted one of the "Hidden Masters" who directs history on the design of the American flag. The use of the five-pointed star on the flag was meant to echo the symbols on the ceiling of a chamber in the Egyptian pyramid of Unas.

For reasons of full disclosure,my grandfather McColm was a 32nd Degree Mason and his den was filled with Egyptian texts and artifacts. I still have his prized copy of the Book of the Dead. This obsession with ancient Egypt is not unusual or strange among masons because they are searching for the secrets of ancient science. This science also includes astrology.

You don't have to be Dan Brown to get into all the Masonic elements in the layout of Washington,D.C.

On the doors of the Capitol Building there is a depiction of a Masonic ceremony that took place in 1793, when George Washington laid the cornerstone. Washington had a horoscope made for the founding of the Capital Building. According to freemasons, the history of humankind is charted by the movement of stars and planets. What Washington was doingwith his Masonic ceremony was inviting the hierachies of heavenly beings to participate in the ceremony. The foundation of the stone occurred when Jupiter was rising in the East. The phrase "Annuit Coeptis", which hovers over the pyramid on the dollar bill is adapted from the line in Virgil's Aeneid--"Jupiter, favor us in our undertaking."

Tony Scalia will like this. The phrase "Novus Ordo Seclorum" on the dollar bill also is adapted from Virgil's Eclogues where he looks forward to a new age, when people will be reunited with the gods so there will be no need for religion. The dollar bill, according to masons,looks forward to the end of the Catholic Church's world domination and the beginning of the new spiritual era.

Washington built his city under the sign of Virgo and as the architectural layout of the city indicates it was meant to welcome Isis, the goddess associated with Virgo. So, according to this formulation, George Washington deliberately built his city to invite the Mother Goddess to participate in the destony of the United States.

So we really are a funky City on the Hill. But you won't hear any of this from our born-again constitutionalists.

Revolutionary Considerations

This morning I received a video by a former general in our military demanding President Obama resign or be impeached and that we restore American exceptionalism. Also this morning I have noticed that the teajehadists at the Focus on the Family and its research arm have embraced the tea parties and are warning about the moral collapse of our society and government tyranny. This they attribute to our fear of God. Next was a Washington Post article on how teabaggers celebrated the July 4th with materials from the 9-12 project. They claim the tenth amendment would protect them from health reform.

Progressives who bitch and moan about the imperfections of the healthcare reform bill and the Wall Street Reform should read about James Madison's trials and tribulations in negotiating the creation of our Constitution. And, yes, Barack Obama and Judge Thurgood Marshall were right. It is an imperfect document as Madison himself would tell you. The tale of Madison's preparation for the constitutional debates and the vote swapping that went on is colorfully describedin Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Houghton Mifflin Holt, 2010). The chapter on Madison is "The Greatest Lawgiver of Modernity".

Of direct application today was the creation of the Commerce Clause in the Constitution. The problem Madison was grappling with was how do you get individual states to support projects that would develop the nation as a whole. I will be curious to see how the Supreme Court deals with the discussions of this clause when the healthcare bill comes before them. I doubt very much that the so-called "originalists"will consult the intent of Madison at the time.

After all in Citizens United, the Roberts court did not consult Thomas Jefferson on his fears of "an aristocracy of corporations". With our government basically enslaved by a military/ terrorist complex, I doubt we will see any conservatives mention that George Washington refused to attend the Cincinnatus Society composed of officers in the revolutionary army because he opposed any insinuation of there being any military elite.

Jack Rakove's new book has some interesting details on the whole issue of the separation of church and state. James Madison, considered to this day Princeton's greatest graduate student, hated the idea of "noxious amendments to the Constitution." However, to get the anti-federalists to come along, he indulged their wishes. The first amendment was dear to his heart. When he had served in the House of Delegates in Virginia, Patrick Henry proposed the first faith-based initiative by suggesting the state subsidize churches "without preference". The proposal seemed to have majority approval of the House until Madison objected that this was the "establishment of religion". He felt so strongly about this that he rounded up 10,000 people to sign a petition denouncing the move. Instead, he introduced Jefferson's draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which passed.

Madison was obsessed by preventing a different type of tyranny--the tyranny of the majority. He feared that majorities were popular in nature and would act with passion, not reason and their will would prevail over any mere statement of principles. We have seen this is how Latin American countries have gone through constitutions. Traditionally , bills of rights were thought to operate as a restraint on government by providing the people with a basis for knowing when their rulers were overstepping their power. Madison considered that function no longer fit the political life of a republic.

"Wherever the real power in a government lies,there is danger of oppression,"Madison observed. "In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents."

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.