Dispelling the myth of a 'Christian nation'

Inside the First Amendment by Charles Haynes

Culture warriors, pseudo-historians and opportunistic politicians have spent the last several decades peddling the myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation."

The propaganda appears to be working.

A majority of the American people (51 percent) believes that the U. S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the State of the First Amendment survey released last month by the First Amendment Center.

Because language about a Christian America has been a staple of Religious Right rhetoric, it is not surprising that acceptance of this false interpretation of the Constitution is strongest amongst evangelicals (71 percent) and conservatives (67 percent).

 Even many non-evangelical Christians (47 percent) and liberals (33 percent) appear to believe the fiction of a constitutionally mandated Christian America as historical fact. Forgive me for being snippy, but read the Constitution. Nowhere will you find mention of God, Christ or any intention to found a Christian nation.

On the contrary, the only reference to religion in the Constitution-before the addition of the Bill of Rights-comes in article VI: "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

This means that political power in the United States may never be limited to people of one faith-a necessary condition for a "Christian nation"-but must be open to people of all faiths or none.

Barring a religious test for office sparked widespread outrage in 1787, especially in states with religious tests designed to make sure that only Protestants or Christians would ever be allowed to hold public office.

In their wisdom, the framers in Philadelphia knew that the time had come to break from the precedents of history and bar any religious group from imposing itself on the nation using the engine of government.

Even this was not good enough for Thomas Jefferson and other founders who wanted to prohibit any and all entanglement of government and religion in the new nation.

In 1791, the opening words of the First Amendment-"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or the free exercise thereof"-were added to the Constitution, further ensuring a fully secular state with a guarantee of religious freedom for all.

Of course, some of the founders worried that "no establishment" might lead to a breakdown in Christian values in American culture. Alexander Hamilton, for example, contemplated the creation of a "Christian Constitutional Society" to promote Christian virtues and principles among the people.

In spite of this anxiety, drafters of the Constitution took the radical step of founding the first nation in history with no established religion.

Truth be told, they had little choice. Religious divisions among the many Protestant sects in 18th century America were deep and abiding. Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists and many others fought bitterly over what it meant to be "Christian"-although almost al could agree that "Papists" (Roman Catholics) were followers of the anti-Christ.

In other words, religious diversity at America's founding made a necessity of religious freedom because no one group had the power or the numbers to impose its version of  true faith-Christian or otherwise-on all others.

It is worth remembering, however, that principles as much as practical politics inspired many of our founders to define religious freedom as requiring no establishment of religion.

Roger William founded the colony of Rhode Island in 1636 out of his conviction that only by erecting a "wall or hedge of separation" between the "garden of the church" and "the wilderness of the world" would it be possible to protect liberty of conscience as required by God. Religious freedom, Williams argued, is itself a Christian principle.

Any attempt to establish a Christian nation, therefore, always has been and always will be unjust, dangerous and profoundly un-Christian.

Charles C. Haynes is a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center. e-mail: chaynes@freedomforum.org. 

The Otherfish Wrap would like to thank Mr. Haynes for sharing the right to publish this article with us. In these times, we must find truth amongst a proliferation of lies. This article attempts to inject a little sanity into the discussion of politics amongst the people of the Earth.

The Cult of Ignorance and America's Worship of Stupidity

I am an avid student of parenting issues and am seeing a startling parallel between the development of the human organism and our country as a whole. There are critical times in the development of the human brain. Called efflorescence, these times are characterized by what is best described as a blossoming of synaptic potential in the brain. My understanding is that new neurons are created, which inevitably displace some connections, but allow new connections to develop as well. The times that this occurs are well known in the first stages of life, but the second phase, that takes place in adolescence, is something we are less familiar with. Anyone who has raised children knows far more about this phenomenon than science can prove or recognize at this time.

The scary thing is that with our new found personal computing potential and the increased ability to communicate via the digital realm, it is as if our entire human potential has been changed in similar ways. Many of the same effects that brain growth can manifest are taking place throughout our culture and especially in these United States. Babies have this efflorescence because their brains must become capable of far more than the new born can process. Similarly, in adolescence, the human organism must greatly increase skills and integrate more responsibilities as well as developing sensitivity to subtlety. With this mighty "brain storm", change occurs which temporarily debilitates us with the ultimate result being increased functionality. Luckily, for most, parents are still there to guide us through these turbulent times and add a sense of stability to the craziness that is taking place inside our cranium. Our whole culture has run amok in that we cannot "see" the results of our actions or understand the results of inaction within the greater context in which we are becoming able to operate.

We all know individuals who are cheerleaders for the "no growth" model. The ones who will be childminds throughout life. Some of them can be fun at parties, but will forever be challenged by the tilt of the Earth or it's revolving around the Sun. Retardation of a person's development can be caused by many things and I do not want to belabor that here, but for our culture, it is essential to guard against retention of childlike ways. We cannot continue to be the country that throws temper tantrums or makes bad decisions in the future. Adolescent behavior is difficult enough for those ho have to live with one or two people who are suffering the consequences of this stage, but when a whole country is trying to adjust, it can throw the whole planet off it's game.

Our Church of the Ignorant, seems to me, to have gotten it's start long long ago. Terminology like "ignorance is bliss" and our fascination with "idiot savants" is well known. When I was a child, I never could understand the love people seemed to have for The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy. The stupidity behind their violence just upset me. Many tried to tell me that it was fun (and funny), and they encouraged me to lighten up, but the underlying messages were too puerile for my young brain. Like the spacy period that we all went through in adolescence, having to relearn things that we had known years earlier, our whole culture seems to have forgotten some of the basic facts of life, the things we learned in kindergarten, and how to be helpful to others that we may one day depend on for our own quality of life.

I see this most clearly in the realm of politics, but it is all around us. It has been a long understood phenomenon that all it takes to bring people together is to give them a really good enemy. As our ability to communicate improves, it is harder and harder to establish criteria for who would make "a really good enemy". What is needed is a new way to bring people together without the need for hate, deception and trumping up charges that really don't hold any water. Case in point...here in Wisconsin we are currently being told that public sector employees, except police, fire and emergency services personnel, are costing us more than we can afford to pay them. Teachers alone are being singled out for a 900 million dollar pay cut and another half billion is being proposed to be cut from health care workers in our state. This is concurrent with continued funding for our prison system which is nearly two billion dollars. I don't want to discount the need for doing something with people who threaten public safety, but in this day and age, we have incarcerated huge numbers of people for non-violent drug crimes, while we let those who ran our economy into the ground amass ever greater wealth. We are also living through the safest time period in over thirty years. Even as crime rates continue to plummet, we are told that we must be involved in a war on crime, a drug war, and be "ever vigilant" against every manner of imagined threat. But I digress. The point is that those who destroy the economy, the ecological integrity of our land, air and water, those who fill the airwaves with lies and distractions from those real problems and those who destroy the lives of the poorest people among us by making them work harder for less are held up as "successful" and allowed to keep the wealth that they take from the rest of us. In fact, if they get themselves into trouble or crash the economy, we say that they are too big to fail and take even more from the poor, to fund more wealth and tax relief for the rich.

If we are to believe most of the rhetoric that makes it's way into the "news" the only safe place is sitting at home in front of the tee vee. Luckily, as more and more people get out in the world, they discover that the biggest threat that we face is the dumbing down of our culture by the major media outlets. This week's exoneration of the church of hate known as the Westboro Baptist Church is as fine an example of the Cult of Ignorance as one can find. Imagine, having the "right" to invent a fictitious character who is supposedly all powerful but that would kill innocents because they were mad at gay people. Then, imagine the courts affirming the right to speak out about this abominable belief in the presence of people that are grieving their lost loved ones. Assaulting both the sensibilities and emotions of those who are gathered to mourn their husband, lover, child or friend in a lame attempt to popularize their quirky beliefs. Those who "serve" our country are left to swing in the wind, but the very people who they served can attack and desecrate their memory? What is next? Should we demand that all children be raped so that they might have more compassion for the perpetrators of this heinous crime? I think that Baptists claim Christ as their savior. I have never heard a story about Christ that made him out to be a hateful bastard. Somehow, it isn't very comforting to know that if he had truly existed, he would have had every right to treat others without respect.
Like the child, who for years, has known that after each meal they need to rinse their dishes and put them in the dishwasher, wash their hands and put the leftovers away, our country has gotten things right for quite a while. The source of our current break down in reason and lack of attention to logic and sanity remains obscure. My own feeling is that it is a result of being awash in a sea of ideas and opinions that are not well-reasoned or thoughtful. Like the brain that is rapidly adding nerve cells, some are blocking established routes and connections, leading to utterly unrealistic behavior. In time we will hopefully learn to utilize this new potential. With a bit of luck it will be before we destroy ourselves completely. Many children are not able to navigate through these turbulent times, but with the steady hand of a compassionate mentor, they have a much better chance of surviving into adulthood.
Education is the second most expensive thing in the world ignorance is the first. Please speak out on behalf of truth. It may be the most important time in the history of humankind to do so.