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."

Honoring an American Revolutionary on July 4th

As the nation celebrates July 4th with a President directly descended from the Pilgrims, let us honor an American revolutionary who died on this date. He has been airbrushed from our history books by the Texas schoolboard and replaced with John Calvin. A sharpshooter, a wine collector, a bibliophile, architect, agronomist,inventor and a writer, he and his pint-sized neighbor James Madison brought us the concept of the separation of church and state. He died proudest of having written the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. An enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, he was the lover of Sally Hemmings and an owner of slaves. When the British burned down Washington during the War of 1812, his library formed the replacement for the Library of Congress. Without him,it's doubtful whether the idea of America would have reached the pinnacle it has. His name was Thomas Hussein Jefferson. And let's read his words that have inspired a nation throughout its history.

"When in the Course of human events,it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hod these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.-That to secure these rights,Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,-That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence ,indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world...

The Unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united states of America, July 4, 1776.

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.

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.