When they say "Christian", they broadly mean "white" (a distinction of racial commonality forged in the 19th century) but more specifically they mean Anglo-Protestant.
The invention of "whiteness" is not the topic at hand in today's diary, though it is a favourite theme of mine. (It is intimately related to the pseudo-theology of the fundie right and is central, sadly, to the creation of the modern Republican Party.) However, today's diary is about the history of religion's indisputable role in our nation's beginnings and why our founder's sought to minimize it's influence on our public sphere.
The self-righteous swagger of the Cartoon Christians and their ahistorical claim to fulfilling America's providential destiny needs to be examined - and examined closely.
America was not founded by "Christians" - at least not in anything but a nominal way. America was settled by opportunists, pirates, ne'er do wells and the dissolute sons of the British aristocracy. For understandable reasons our current crop of leaders prefer to stress the "Christian" identity of those early generations, though few of us here would disagree that they are, even now, better characterized by the latter list.
The myth of The Mayflower has been a potent one and it is from its arrival at Cape Cod in 1620 that much of this delusional history derives.
First, some facts: Only a third of the 149 passengers on the Mayflower were pilgrims. The Mayflower itself was subscribed to under the Auspices of the Virginia Company and was first and foremost a commercial venture NOT a spiritual one. The pilgrims were Scottish Calvinists from Nottingham. Disappointed that King James I embraced the established church when ascending to the English throne, they had first tried Holland but were attracted to the New World in their relentless (and ultimately futile) ambition to build the New Jerusalem from scratch.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was not uniformly religious at all. Most of the early settlers there had fled England to be free from Religion (and the endless turmoil arising from it), not to establish a new one. In a coastal town like Marblehead we find they didn't even have a church until 1684 - sixty years after it had been settled.
What attracted the English to the New England coast was the fishing, not the faith. (As Niall Ferguson brilliantly put it is his 2002 book, EMPIRE - "Not God, but cod")
Although our latter day Christians speak fondly of the Plymouth settlement as a prototype of American values they always fail to mention that the Puritan community was, by intent, a COMMUNIST village in which all the members shared labour and produce. Plymouth was NOT (at least at first) an "ownership" society. No doubt they would have been horrified by the social Darwinism, the throw-grandma-from-the-train mentality of today's born again vultures.
It took the puritans a while to finagle legitimacy for their growing theocracy. That they succeeded at all was due to the massive numbers who migrated in the next few decades. (By 1640 they accounted for half of the European settlers in what would become the United States) and it was by dint of numbers that they transformed the original commercial charter of the Bay Colony into a religious one.
When not busy torturing Quakers or whipping licentious women, they developed a crude form of democracy in which only members of the elect were allowed to vote. In their anticipation of Jesus' return (Cotton Mather predicted it for 1697. When that didn't happen, he revised it for 1716. That date also passed. Happily, for him at least, he did not live to see the date of his third prediction, 1736, similarly pass with Jesus, once again, standing them up.) they sought to build a model of a religious state.
But far from creating a blissful meritocracy based on Spiritual distinction - a community of saints - the City on the Hill was rift with dissent and conflict from the start. Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams immediately come to mind as religious dissidents who were forced to flee the narrow hierarchy of the Salem Saints. The claim to saintly virtue so corrupted the life of the colony, where citizens were pitted against each other in a relentless war of public piety, that we must concede that the Witch trials of the early 1690s were in no way an aberration but, on the contrary, the inevitable result of the divisive and envious climate it's strict Calvinist voodoo created.
When today's holy-rollers attempt to dismiss the founder's injunction against the establishment of a church in the Constitution as a residue of Old World worries they are simply lying. It wasn't the continental Religious wars of the 17th century that cautioned them but the immediate history of fractious conflict and sectarianism that they sprang from.
On a final note, few ever comment on why it should be that the original Colony of theocratic exceptionalism should have come to be the most liberal and tolerant state in the nation - so much so that our modern-day puritans can do nothing but heave scorn on it.
I would be bold to suggest that it was because they learned the hard way to what folly such an ambition can lead.
You can and you can't...
You will and you won't...
You will be damned if you do
And you will be damned if you don't.
- Preacher Lorenzo Dow on Calvinism, 1814
In drafting this short essay I have relied most heavily on Niall Ferguson's EMPIRE (Basic Books, 2002) and James Morone's outstanding (and underrated) history of moral politics in America, HELLFIRE NATION (Yale University Press, 2003)
I hope my fellow Kossacks will find this a useful read and helpful tool in deflating the absurd claims of our common foes in the UN-reality community.
Thanks.
UPDATE: Please read the comments/exchange here as it's pretty interesting - and Pt 2 is now posted here