Recently, Trump’s Russia Lawyer Jay Sekulow and his fellow American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) lawyer Skip Ash wrote a letter to the public affairs office at a VA clinic in Omaha. The issue that prompted Sekulow’s letter is one that’s become one of the latest outrage generators for the Christian nationalists — the removal of Bibles from POW/MIA tables on military bases and at VA medical facilities.
In their letter, Sekulow and Ash used a bunch of historical examples to argue that government promotions of Christianity weren’t considered at all unconstitutional by our country’s founders. Among their historical examples are several that are outright lies — particularly their claims about Thomas Jefferson’s actions as president.
Sekulow used these same lies about Jefferson back in 2013 to defend the inclusion of the words “so help me God” in the Air Force Academy’s Cadet Honor Oath — apparently not seeing the irony and hypocrisy of using lies to defend an oath in which the cadets swear not to lie — and now he’s using them again, this time to defend the inclusion of a Christian Bible as part of the POW/MIA table displays on military installations.
In his current letter, Sekulow not only uses historical revisionism about the early history of our country, but also uses a bit of historical revisionism regarding some more recent history by disregarding the real history of the POW/MIA table tradition — a tradition that did not originally include a Bible. So, before getting to Sekulow’s lies about the founders, a bit of background about the history of POW/MIA tables is in order.
Over the last several years, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has received complaints from numerous service members, veterans, and DoD civilian employees, most of them Christians, about the addition of a Christian Bible to the items displayed on POW/MIA tables on military bases and at veterans medical facilities, turning these formerly non-religious displays that honored service members of all religions, or no religion, not only into religious displays, but into specifically Christian religious displays.
These tables, also referred to as missing man tables or remembrance tables, are a tradition begun during the Vietnam War by a group of combat pilots known as the River Rats, and the original items on these tables did not include a Bible. As I explained a few months ago in a rebuttal to a Washington Examiner op-ed by Hiram Sasser and Mike Berry of First Liberty Institute, the addition of a Christian Bible as part of these displays didn’t begin until over three decades after the River Rats first began the POW/MIA table tradition, when the VFW Ladies Auxiliary published a script explaining the symbolism of the table’s items in a 1999 issue of its magazine, adding a Bible to list of table items. It was also around this same time that the National League of POW/MIA Families came out with a script that was nearly identical to the one in the VFW Ladies Auxiliary magazine, also including a Bible. Prior to this, the standard had been the American Legion’s version, which, sticking closely to the original tradition begun by the River Rats, does not include a Bible.
While the American Legion’s version is still widely used, and many POW/MIA tables stick to the original tradition and do not include a Bible, more and more military installations and veterans facilities in recent years have been using the National League of POW/MIA Families script and adding a Christian Bible to their displays. And, not surprisingly, this deviation from the previously non-religious displays has resulted numerous complaints not only from non-Christian or non-religious service members and veterans, but from many Christians who also want these tables restored to the original tradition — a tradition that honored all POW/MIA service members regardless of their religious beliefs.
But of course, fundamentalist Christian organizations like Jay Sekulow’s ACLJ claim that the National League of POW/MIA Families version is the tradition, since that’s the one that includes the Bible, completely ignoring that both the original Vietnam-era River Rats tradition and the long-standing American Legion version do not include a Bible.
But even more incredible is their absolutely ludicrous claim that the Christian Bible is a symbol of all faiths — you know, just like a Koran being placed on the table would obviously be seen by Christians not as a symbol specific to the Muslim faith, but as a symbol of their Christian faith as well.
In most cases, MRFF has been successful in getting the Bibles removed from these displays, or, as in one case, at least replacing this specifically Christian symbol with a generic blank book that really could be a symbol of all faiths.
Sekulow and Ash use what is basically a form letter to object to MRFF’s and other challenges to unconstitutional activity, with this form letter containing a section headed “Determining the Meaning & Reach of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment,” in which they presents a litany of unrelated historical claims, some true but others flat out lies. He points out that George Washington and John Adams issued proclamations for days of prayer (omitting, of course, that John Adams’s proclamation caused a riot in Philadelphia because of its mixing of religion and politics, and that Adams himself had to hide in his house for his own safety on the appointed day of prayer).
As expected in any litany of Christian nationalist historical revisionism, Sekulow’s letter zeroes in on Thomas Jefferson, claiming:
“Even President Thomas Jefferson — a man often described as a strong defender of strict church-state separation — undertook similar actions. In particular, President Jefferson signed multiple congressional acts providing for Christian missionary activity among the Indians.”
This claim is completely untrue. Thomas Jefferson never signed a single congressional act providing for Christian missionary activity among the Indians, let alone “multiple congressional acts” as Mr. Sekulow claims.
This popular lie is typically supported by historical revisionists with two types of alleged sources. The first is a series of acts signed by Jefferson that in reality had nothing to do with religion but were merely acts regarding military land grants; the second are certain Indian treaties signed by Jefferson. Mr. Sekulow opts for the lie about the Indian treaties, footnoting his claim with the following:
“See Daniel L. Dreisbach, Real Threat and Mere Shadow: Religious Liberty and the First Amendment 127 (1987) (noting that the 1803 treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians included federal funds to pay a Catholic missionary priest; noting further treaties made with the Wyandotte and Cherokee tribes involving state-supported missionary activity).”
During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson signed over forty treaties with various Indian nations. The 1803 treaty with the Kaskaskia is the only one that contained anything whatsoever having to do with religion, and even that one had nothing to do with promoting “Christian missionary activity among the Indians.” No other Indian treaty signed by Jefferson, including the other two used by Mr. Sekulow in his footnote, contained any mention of religion.
When Jefferson signed the treaty with the Kaskaskia in 1803, these Indians were already Catholic and had been for generations. They had begun converting to Catholicism in the late 1600s after a Jesuit priest from France, Father Jacques Marquette, first encountered them in 1673 while exploring the Mississippi River with Louis Jolliet. By 1803, “the greater part of the said tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic Church,” as Article 3 of the treaty signed by Jefferson states.
Lies like this one used by Mr. Sekulow always use words like “Christian missionary” to make it sound as if that Jefferson was trying to convert the Indians to Christianity. Obviously, this was not the case with the Kaskaskia treaty, since these Indians were already Catholic. The support of a priest and help building a new church were among the provisions that they asked for in exchange for ceding nine million acres of land to the United States, not something the government was pushing on them.
As Jefferson was well aware, there was nothing unconstitutional about granting these provisions. This was a treaty with a sovereign nation. It was not an act of Congress as Mr. Sekulow claims. As was made very clear in a lengthy 1796 debate in the House of Representatives on the treaty making power, unless a treaty provision threatened the rights or interests of American citizens, there was no constitutional reason not to allow it, even if that same provision would be unconstitutional in a law made by Congress for the American people.
So what of the other two treaties in Mr. Sekulow’s footnote? Well, here he is being completely dishonest about what the source he cites actually says. In no way did Daniel L. Dreisbach say in his book Real Threat and Mere Shadow that these treaties with the Wyandottes and Cherokees involved state-supported missionary activity. This book says the exact opposite. These treaties were mentioned because they didn’t contain any religious provisions. What they did contain were provisions for money that wasn’t designated for a particular purpose. Dreisbach used these two treaties as examples in a footnote to argue that Jefferson, if he had wanted to avoid listing the provisions for religious purposes in the Kaskaskia treaty, could have done so with a provision that did not specify what the money was for, such as the provisions found in these Wyandotte and Cherokee treaties. So, Mr. Sekulow is not only lying about Jefferson’s actions; he is blatantly lying about what his source says to support his lie.
Mr. Sekulow’s next claim about Jefferson is also a flat out lie:
“Further, during his presidency, President Jefferson also developed a school curriculum for the District of Columbia that used the Bible and a Christian hymnal as the primary texts to teach reading ...”
This popular lie was concocted by taking the fact that in 1805, while serving as President of the United States, Jefferson was named as president of the brand new Washington, D.C. school board, and then combining that fact with an 1813 report from a school in Washington that was using the Bible and a hymnal as reading texts. The problem with this story? The school in question didn’t even exist when Jefferson was president. It didn’t open until 1812 — three years after Jefferson had left Washington.
Mr. Sekulow’s footnote for this lie is:
“John W. Whitehead, The Second American Revolution 100 (1982) (citing 1 J.O. Wilson, Public Schools of Washington 5 (1897).”
Here, Mr. Sekulow is citing a revisionist history book that claims to be citing another source. But that source, J.O. Wilson’s Public Schools of Washington, does not support the claim made by John W. Whitehead and repeated by Mr. Sekulow. In fact, J.O. Wilson’s debunks this claim.
Jefferson had nothing whatsoever to do with the curriculum of any school in Washington, not even the ones that actually did open during his presidency. He was elected president of the school board in 1805 (at a meeting that he didn’t even attend), but, according to the minutes of the school board, never took an active role in this position. His only actual involvement was to make a donation of $200 when money was being raised to start the school system.
The Washington school board attempted to establish and maintain two public schools beginning in 1806. These first two schools were the only schools that existed in Washington during Jefferson’s presidency. When the city council decided to cut the public funding for these schools in half in 1809, one of the two schools was forced to close. The school buildings had been paid for with private donations, but the school board couldn’t afford to pay high enough salaries to hire and keep qualified teachers.
In 1811, two years after the end of Jefferson’s presidency, the teacher of a Lancasterian school that had been opened in Georgetown wrote to the Washington school board suggesting that this type of school might solve their problem. Lancasterian schools used a plan of education developed by Joseph Lancaster in England as an economical way to educate large numbers of poor children. By using the older students to teach the younger ones, Lancaster’s method allowed one teacher to oversee the education of hundreds of children. The school in Georgetown was teaching three hundred and fifty students with one teacher.
In 1812, the Washington school board decided to try the Lancasterian method, and Henry Ould, a teacher trained by Joseph Lancaster in England, was brought over to run the new Lancasterian school.
In 1813, Mr. Ould submitted a progress report to the school board in which he said that the Bible and Watts’s Hymns were being used as reading texts. This 1813 report, when anachronistically combined with the fact that Jefferson had been elected school board president eight years earlier, is used to make the completely false claim that Mr. Sekulow makes in his letter — that Jefferson “developed a school curriculum for the District of Columbia that used the Bible and a Christian hymnal.”
If Sekulow is going to claim that Mikey Weinstein’s email to the Omaha VA facility objecting to the Bible display contains “numerous, erroneous, legal and factual arguments,” as he does in his letter, he might want to do so with a letter that isn’t full of erroneous history.