U.S. was born a Christian nation
Evangelical writer and thinker, Robert Knight, author of “Fighting for America’s Soul: How Sweeping Change Threatens Our Nation and What We Must Do,” and one of the drafters of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, has prepared for CNN.com an essay asserting that America’s creation was, in fact, rooted in Christianity. This essay may be viewed by clicking here.
This “history” of America and Christianity given us by Robert Knight is similar to the “truths” of the Koran that the right wing haters of Islam propagate. Virtually every quote is taken out of context. There is no awareness that the meaning of the words and concepts used by, say, Adams or Jefferson might be quite different from what today’s right-wingers claim they mean. Ironically, neither Adams nor Jefferson would even be considered “Christian” if they were to walk into most conservative -evangelical or fundamentalist churches of today. They were deists, not Trinitarian Christians. They had a high suspicion of “revealed truths in the Bible.” The leading “Framers” or “Founding Fathers,” including Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin did not believe in a biblical revelation, but in the “revelation” of naturalistic political philosophy as it emerged out of the European Enlightenment– no friend to people believing that the Bible is the only source of divine truth.
When most of the framers used terms like God and Christian, they were not referring to the God incarnate in a Jewish man in Nazareth who sided with the poor and powerless, was opposed by the religious leaders of his day, and was executed by Rome, and who, according to his followers who claimed to be eye-witnesses, rose to life from the grave on the third day of his death.
The framers God was the God of the philosophers. They were closer to the ancient Greeks and Romans and to the European philosophical tradition that took a powerful political turn in England and Scotland in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Many of them, especially Adams and Jefferson and Paine were hostile to traditional Christian belief about a dying and rising Savior. Their support for religious freedom was to avoid the nightmare of the religious wars that they had seen destroy Europe in the previous centuries.
They also believed that religion was best when it remained “within the limits of reason alone,” to quote Kant’s famous work–written during the US Constitution-ratification debates, and published in 1793. They believed that a reason-dominated religion– as opposed to a Bible-dominated religion– was necessary to have a unified country that operated upon moral principles. Religion shaped people for morality was their argument, but it sure wasn’t the kind of religion that people now claim it was.
In the Adams quote in this Robert Knight article, the eternal principles Adams is speaking of are the eternal principles of nature or natural law as discovered by reason– a position closer to Stoic philosophy than to Christian interpretations of the Bible. They are decidedly not the teachings of the Old and New Testament, which had very little truck with eternal principles and eternal truths and eternal laws, which most biblical texts that seem to approach them reject as idiolatry.
This constant mis-reading of American history and its critical texts is a form of finding what you want to be true, (America was founded to be “Christian”) just as is the Right-wing’s constant “quoting of the Koran” finds what it wants to be true (Islam is evil; Muslims have an agenda of domination).
As a person who has spent a good portion of his adult and professional life studying ancient texts, and who knows that he’ll never fully plumb the multitude of their meanings, I am amazed at how easy right wing commentators can claim to know the Koran, what every verse means, the context of the terms, the history of the meanings of terms. These right-wing commentators, so full of Koranic understanding after a week, a month, a year, or a few minutes study, argue exactly as the militant atheists, who love to quote passages of the Bible that are filled with violence and hatred. Both the militant atheists and the right-wing haters of Islam are either ignorant of the meanings of these historical texts or deliberately twisting them for political advantage. Probably both. As Chris Hedges says in his fascinating book against Militant Atheism, the militant atheists and the right-wing “Christians” are mirror images of each other.
And now we see another mirror and those who gaze into it who resemble but cannot see each other: right-wing “Christians” and “Muslim” terrorists.
