Ever since Sarah Palin invoked the "real America" during the 2008 presidential campaign, I've been wondering when the conservative movement would publicly unveil their "message" for the 2010 Congressional elections.
The Conservative Policy Action Conference (CPAC) began last week, and very quickly made clear their agenda:
Marco Rubio called the November midterm elections "a referendum on our very identity as a nation."
So, this election season we will not be discussing the pros and cons of universal health care or how best to achieve it. We will not be talking about jobs or addressing our energy needs or indeed trying to solve any of the myriad economic problems facing the nation and the world.
We will be having a referendum on "our very identity as a nation."
(And you thought we were just trying to fix our health care system.)
This type of thing has been going on for a long time in this country, much of it motivated by religious fervor. Indeed, this argument over "identity" has raged from the moment Europeans first landed on these shores. It was typically settled by military force, murder, torture, and selling heretics and unbelievers into slavery.
In more recent generations, the debate has been less violent, but no less impassioned. The "culture wars" of the 80's and 90's were a continuation of the historical battle between the True Believers and the perceived Enemy of the moment. As Michael Lind puts it in an article on Salon.com:
Anglo-American Protestants viewed Catholicism as the chief enemy of the "true religion" of Protestant Christianity well into the 20th century, and some still do. But in the mythology of the reactionary right, the United Nations has long since replaced the Vatican as the center of global conspiracies, and the alleged Catholic threat to Protestantism has been replaced by the alleged "secular humanist" threat to the "Judeo- Christian tradition."
Russell Shorto's excellent New York Times article, How Chrisian were the Founders?, explores in detail how this war is still being waged. The main battleground is our public schools. Conservatives Christian activists are working to "reshape the history that children in public schools study." Or, to put it less delicately, they are attempting to rewrite our country's history from a Christian perspective with the ultimate goal of reshaping American society.
As one activist put it in Shorto's article, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
The methods they are using today are obviously quite a bit more polite than what occurred early in our history, but the goal remains the same: to establish the United States as a Christian nation chosen by God to be a beacon unto the world.
So, are we a Christian nation?
The Spanish Catholics who first settled here certainly thought so. They diligently slaughtered, tortured and sold into slavery any native populations they encountered who refused to accept their faith.
In addition, there is a little-known story that appears in Kenneth C. Davis' excellent book, America's Hidden History, in which Spanish forces zealously slaughter a small settlement of French Huguenots who had fled persecution in Europe - America's "first true Pilgrims."
The Spanish were not willing to tolerate a "Lutheran" presence in the New World, so they annihilated them. A Spanish chaplain who accompanied the soldiers and witnessed the slaughter, proudly declared,
"The greatest victory which I feel for this event is the victory which Our Lord has given us so that his Holy Gospel may be planted and preached in these parts."
He had no qualms that "the men were hanged without hesitation," and about fifty women and children were rounded up and shipped to Puerto Rico. The victorious Spanish admiral placed a sign above the dead men that read, "I do this, not as to Frenchmen, but as to Lutherans."
Presumably, this is not the precise history our modern-day proselytizers invoke when they claim that America was founded on Biblical precepts, since the zealots of this story were Catholics.
No, the history the conservative activists invoke begins with the arrival of our Pilgrims, the ones on the Mayflower and the many subsequent ships that brought our nation's Protestant ancestors to our shores. That history, as one might expect, unfolds in a way that is rarely discussed in polite company. The Puritans, like the Spanish before them, essentially imported Europe's religious wars to the New World and expanded them more widely.
As Kenneth Davis describes it in his book:
The real story is, of course, far more complicated. It is a long twisting tale of the struggle for power and land...and the struggle of religious dissenters in a place that tolerated none.
Not long after fleeing persecution in Europe and landing in the New World, the Puritans were massacring the native population, executing Quakers and excommunicating anyone who deviated from the strictest Puritan dogma. In 1690, Puritan Boston "decreed a prohibition against Roman Catholics, Quakers, and other sects such as Anabaptists. All were banned under pain of death."
The Puritans were just as firm in the righteousness of their religious fervor as the Spanish were a hundred years before them - and as our modern Evangelical leaders are today. Not surprisingly, the Puritans were also just as brutal to those who would dare to challenge their spiritual authority.
When a woman named Anne Hutchinson, who had been a thorn in the Puritan Fathers' side for a number of years, was killed in an attack by natives, John Winthrop, longtime governor of Massachusetts, remarked:
Thus it has pleased the Lord to have compassion of his poor churches here, and to discover this great impostor, an instrument of Satan so fitted to his service for interrupting the passage [of his] kingdom in this part of the world, and poisoning the churches here.
Another Puritan minister declared, upon Hutchinson's death:
Thus the Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from this great and sore affliction.
So when, in the present day, a conservative Christian activist named Cynthia Dunbar, one of the leaders of the movement to portray America as having "a divinely preordained mission," says: “This is undeniably our past, and it clearly delineates us as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian,” I begin to worry.
Either Ms. Dunbar has never read an actual history book or she has something rather nasty in mind for those of us who don't adhere to her particular brand of Christianity.
She's right: it is undeniably our past. But far from being the idealized, heroic past conservative activists would spoon-feed the nation's children, it is a bloody, violent past, replete with intolerance, butchery and untold suffering inflicted in the name of God.
Shorto notes:
The language in the Mayflower Compact...describes the Pilgrims’ journey as being “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith” and thus instills the idea that America was founded as a project for the spread of Christianity.
Is this the "identity" we're going to be hearing so much about during this election season?
There is a striking similarity between Dunbar's writings and the rhetoric emerging from CPAC. Marco Rubio and Tim Pawlenty want to "rescue the nation" from the "liberals."
Dunbar writes:
...this battle for our nation's children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.
To be fair, conservative political activists don't invoke the country's Puritan origins so much as they do the Founding Fathers. The Founders and their "intent" are much in vogue among the tea party crowd and the gang of Republican leaders who are trying to harness and manipulate their anger for political gain.
The history text-book activists claim that "the true picture of America’s Christian founding has been whitewashed by “the liberal agenda" — in order for liberals to succeed “they must first rewrite our nation’s history” and obscure the Christian intentions of the founders."
(As with most statements from the increasingly Orwellian world of the conservative movement, you can be certain that whatever it is the conservatives imagine the liberals are doing, they themselves are doing it for real, and in spades.
George Bush and Dick Cheney spent eight years trampling on freedoms, and it is the conservatives themselves who have become the experts at rewriting history, the more recent the better.)
There is no doubt that many of the Founders, though they were products of the Enlightenment, held strong religious beliefs. A few of them later expressed a feeling that "the hand of God was employed in this work" of creating the Constitution.
It does not logically follow that the United States is a Christian nation. In fact, the Founders were, as Richard Beeman writes, "unlikely to invoke divine intervention, or indeed, any religious basis for the 'science' of government and politics."
Whatever the religious beliefs of the individual Founders, their collective "intent" in drafting the Constitution could not have been more clear: to create a system of government that specifically addressed the problem of "how to allocate and restrain power in a way that best assured liberty." As a group, they were in agreement that this balance could best be achieved by ensuring that the secular and the sacred operated separately and apart.
Beeman's excellent book, Plain, Honest Men, is a day-by-day account of the drafting of the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787, reconstructed from journals, diaries and letters written by the men who were actually in the room in what was then the Pennsylvania State House.
Beeman writes:
The United States Constitution was meant to be - and is, resolutely - a legal document, drafted in an age when the substance of the law was becoming more secular and when its leading practitioners were consciously purging from their profession legal imperatives derived from anything hinting of divine sanction...Whatever their private beliefs, the vast majority of the Founding Fathers operated on the assumption that temporal and spiritual aspects of public life should be kept separate.
At CPAC, Tim Pawlenty, who continues to amaze and astonish as he scales to new heights of insincere pandering, declares:
I say to those naysayers trying to crowd out God from the conversation. ‘If it is good enough for the founding fathers, it should be good enough for each and every one of us.‘”
Apparently, the Founders themselves were just fine with "crowding God from the conversation." Beeman relates a remarkable moment when, as the negotiations had reached what seemed to be an insurmountable impasse, Benjamin Franklin, who to this point in the proceedings had said almost nothing, proposed "that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations" be held every morning.
Beeman writes, "An embarrassed silence followed."
The other delegates delicately side-stepped Franklin's suggestion and the issue was never raised again.
As for the general logic of "good enough for the Founders," many of the Founders were slave-owners. Is that "good enough for each and every one of us" today? We became united states only because the Founders agreed that slaves would be counted as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of proportional representation. Without that compromise, the outcome of the Constitutional Convention would have been very much in doubt.
How "Originalist" do we want to get?
Reading Beeman's book, and other historical accounts of our nation's founding, has given me a better appreciation for the historical underpinnings of "states' rights," and a clearer understanding of the deep suspicion of a distant, centralized authority that is seemingly embedded into this nation's DNA.
There are potentially fascinating and interesting debates to be had around these issues, with profound implications for the nation's future. It's conceivable that a civilized discussion of how to best "allocate and restrain power" could result in creative and beneficial outcomes for all Americans.
But it's pretty difficult to have any kind of rational, substantive debate when one side believes that every idea the other side proposes is a threat to the nation's very existence.
It's also pretty difficult to know how to respond when you are accused of trying to "destroy America's freedoms." What do you say, "No I'm not"? It's a bit like trying to answer the famous question, "When did you stop beating your wife?"
In reality, the battle over the nation's religious identity is being waged by only one side. There is no "liberal agenda," despite all the conservative rhetoric to the contrary. There is no "war on religion." Only a deeply-held belief that we must strongly resist any attempt by a person or group of people to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of the nation in the public sphere. The Founders were quite explicit about this in the Establishment Clause.
Conservatives activists remain unmoved by such rational arguments. As Michael Lind puts it:
...this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers.
Now Marco Rubio has warned us. Conservative activists plan to continue to wage their war against a perceived "secular" enemy - although now the "afflictions" in their midst are wild-eyed liberals and a black president named Barack Obama.
And as Russell Shorto says in his New York Times piece, "They are in it for the long haul."
Some observers say that over time their effort could have far-reaching consequences. “The more you can associate Christianity with the founding, the more you can sway the future Supreme Court,” Martin Marty says. “That is what Pat Robertson was about years ago. Establish the founders as Christians, and you have it made.”
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