The Founding Myth

by Andrew L Seidel

  Do not cross the street. Do not talk to strangers. Do not go trick-or-treating without your parents.

  Do not cross the street, do not talk to strangers, do not go trick-or-treating, without your parents.

  In the first example, the child cannot ever cross the street. The child can never talk to strangers. But the child can go trick-or-treating, so long as her parents are present. The punctuation gives the sentence an incorrect meaning—of course the child may cross the street and talk to strangers with her parents; otherwise she’d never go anywhere or meet anyone. In the second example, punctuation clarifies the message: she can do any of the three activities so long as her parents are present.

  The more accurate interpretation of these four commandments might be: do not kill your neighbor or commit adultery with your neighbor or steal from your neighbor or bear false witness against your neighbor.12 Under this interpretation, which not all scholars agree with, the prohibitions are not applied equally; they are applied only to one’s neighbor. So it is permissible to kill and steal, so long as you don’t kill your neighbor or steal from your neighbor. There are different rules for people, depending on their status as a neighbor.

  I’ve hinted at this interpretation several times already, and it makes learning who one’s neighbor is all the more important—which is why the first five commandments help identify neighbors before explaining that you should not kill them. Do you worship my god? Only my god? Do you curse my god or do you respect him? Do you worship and rest when my god says to? Do you obey your parents and priest who tell you to worship my god? If so, you’re my neighbor and it’s important that I not kill you.

  Our modern, broadminded interpretation of “neighbor” encompasses all humans, but that was not the meaning for Moses and his tribe.13 Immediately after receiving the first set of commandments, Moses descends from the mount to find his followers violating the idol-worship prohibition. Enraged, Moses destroys the only physical evidence that a god exists and relays a command from Yahweh to his priests to “kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.” Moses uses those terms synonymously. The murders are acceptable to Moses and Yahweh because these neighbors have betrayed their god and worshipped an idol, essentially forfeiting their status as neighbors by breaking one of those commandments meant to identify those to whom the latter commandments apply.

  Leviticus 19:18 provides another contemporaneous contextual definition of the word “neighbor:” “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”14 Two verses earlier is another example: “You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand against the blood of your neighbor.”15 God also tells the Israelites that they should occasionally expunge debts “held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community.”16 Of course, you can still recover debts from “foreigners.”17

  Thus, according to the biblical text itself, “neighbor” refers only to your fellow believers.18

  The in-group interpretation of these commandments makes even more sense given the events that follow the covenant. Shortly after receiving the commandments, the Israelites go on a killing spree. According to the bible, they commit genocide after genocide—more than seventy all told.19 “Thou shalt not kill” is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled with the genocides the Israelites inflict on the inhabitants of the region, unless their killings are not murder because the victims did not worship Yahweh. All the groups of people they destroyed were people who did not worship their god. The Israelites did not violate the divine prohibition on murder because that commandment applied only to other Israelites.

  This interpretation also makes more sense given the sheer levels of brutality and violence in the bible. There is so much bloodshed that it’s almost as if there are no limits on murder at all. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker makes the point so beautifully that it is worth reproducing in whole:

  The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others…. Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total.20

  The Sanhedrin, the high religious court, interpreted these rules in this exclusive, in-group manner before Jesus entered the scene. According to this court, an Israelite was not guilty of murder unless he killed another Israelite.21 Even if he intended to kill a non-Israelite (“heathen”), the act was not murder.22 The Jewish Encyclopedia is explicit on this point, explaining that under some laws, “the Gentile…is not a neighbor.”23

  Far from the universal human meaning bestowed upon it by modern believers, “neighbor” means your clan, your tribe, your brother believer—and no one else. The basis of Judeo-Christian morality and ethics is the clan. The tribe is more important than morality; people who are different are lesser. Those who exercise their freedom of religion to worship differently will be treated as nonhumans. Does that sound like an American principle?

  Christian apologists seek to paint Jesus as redefining “neighbor” to include all humans. But the bible tells a different story.

  When Jesus sent out his twelve apostles to convince people that he was god, he didn’t send them out to everyone: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.”24 Not exactly an equal opportunity preacher. When Jesus gives his new commandment to “love one another,” he does not extend it beyond brother believers.25 He says “one another,” and he is commanding only his closest followers, the twelve apostles. He gives them that command so that “everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”26 This is not an expansion of loving your neighbor into other religions—it is just a command that Jesus’s closest followers love each other. If you were to say at your next office meeting, to twelve coworkers or subordinates, “be nice to each other,” no one would reasonably think you were addressing the statement to anyone outside that room. So why treat Jesus’s words differently? One book attributed to John the Evangelist reiterates the believer-must-love-believer point several times.27 The author even specifically says that believers only need to love other believers:

  Whoever says, “I am in the light,” while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go.28

  Other authorities, some ancient, leave out the word “sister.”29 Either way, the comma
nd to love can only be read as an in-group command. The next chapter of 1 John specifically interprets the “love your neighbor” commandment to mean “brothers” (again, other authorities leave out the “sisters”):”

  For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother…. Do not be astonished, brothers and sisters, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another…. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers,…and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?30

  “The world” is other people and believers are not commanded to love them—only “one another” and their “brothers and sisters.”

  The books of both Matthew and Mark tell of a woman, a non-Israelite, with a sick daughter. She asks Jesus to cure the child. Jesus ignores her and his disciples urge him to send her away, but she persists. Finally, Jesus chides the woman, saying, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, miracles are for my people, my neighbors, my children—not for dogs who worship other gods. It is not until after she has professed her faith in him, until after she calls Jesus “master” and “Lord” for the third time, that he relents, noting, “Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus deigns to save the innocent, sick child only because the mother converts and declares her obedience to and belief in him.31

  The closest Jesus gets to a command for universal love is in his Sermon on the Mount. He says to “love your enemies”32 and lays out his version of the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:1–5, in which “neighbor” has been interpreted as “brother”). Immediately after explaining his Golden Rule, Jesus says, in verse 6, “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.” This is not a tolerant, expansive message or ministry; it is elitist and insular. In the final chapter of the last book of the bible, the literary acid trip that is the Book of Revelation, Jesus points out that his followers will be in the kingdom of heaven, while “outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.”33 Also according to Revelation, before Jesus returns, he’ll send plagues, including locusts. But the locusts will harm “only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them.”34 Once again, believers, followers, and coreligionists are saved. Insects torture everyone else for five months.

  There is also the small matter of hell, the place of eternal torment for all who do not believe that Jesus is god.35 Love your enemies indeed. If you are of the correct religion, you get eternal bliss; if not, eternal torment (see chapter 9).

  Even the seemingly open-minded, inclusive passages of the New Testament betray tribalism. Standing alone, this sentiment penned by the apostle Paul sounds broad and inclusive: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”36 But in context, this is more like the slogan of the Orwellian farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Paul’s version might read “Everyone is equal, so long as you are a Christian,”37 for that is the true sentiment behind the passage:

  For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.38

  The modern attempt to portray Jesus as a bastion of equality instead of an elitist was valuable to the civil rights movement but is belied by American history. During the civil rights movement, Jesus was also used to argue for segregation. On May 23, 1954—the Sunday after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, integrating the nation’s schools—Reverend Carey Daniel of the First Baptist Church of West Dallas delivered a sermon titled “God: The Original Segregationist.”39 When he published it in pamphlet form, it sold over a million copies.40 Like Daniel, Mississippi Presbyterian minister Guy Gillespie’s “A Christian View on Segregation” was influential, was widely distributed, and made the same arguments, drawing on the bible for support.41 Bob Jones, the evangelist and founder of an eponymous religious school, infamously declared that segregation was scriptural in his 1960 Easter sermon: “If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God.”42 At the height of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Montgomery City Council issued a statement saying that it “will forever stand like a rock against racial equality, intermarriage, and mixing of the races in schools” and rooted its intransigence in religion:“There must continue the separation of the races under God’s creation and plan.”43

  The City of Montgomery, Carey, Gillespie, Jones, and their brethren drew support from both the Old and the New Testaments. Reverend T. Robert Ingram of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church of Houston thought segregation “was simply applied Christianity,” according to one scholar.44 “The most complete and devastating discriminatory practices that can ever be exercised,” wrote Ingram, “are those of Jesus Christ.”45 In a pamphlet entitled “Jesus: Master-Segregationist,” Lawrence Neff, a Methodist minister in Atlanta, noted that Jesus sent out his disciples with instructions to avoid Gentiles and Samaritans and to preach only to Jews.46 Neff had support in the New Testament, as we’ve just seen. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul quotes the Hebrew bible and reminds Christians to “be separate from them [unbelievers], says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean.”47

  Even Alabama governor George Wallace, in his 1963 inaugural speech—which is also known as the “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” speech—called on the Christian god and Jesus Christ. Fearful of integration, Wallace attacked the federal government as the instrument that would destroy segregation. He argued that “we are become government-fearing people…not God-fearing people. We find we have replaced faith with fear…and though we may give lip service to the Almighty…in reality, government has become our god…. The politician is to change their status from servant of the people to master of the people…to play at being God…without faith in God…and without the wisdom of God. It is a system that is the very opposite of Christ for it feeds and encourages everything degenerate and base in our people as it assumes the responsibilities that we ourselves should assume.” He then drew “the line in the dust and toss[ed] the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny” and uttered the notorious line: “I say . . . segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.”48

  Trump supporters are often driven by a longing for this bygone era, when religion supported their racism and they could claim to be superior to others simply by looking at the color of their skin, not the content of their character.49 Christian nationalism is inextricably tied up in the bigotry and longing for a restoration to a racist golden age. Remember, it was not economic anxiety or even racism that was the best predictor of a 2016 Trump voter—it was Christian nationalism. It’s easy for Christian nationalists to sweep aside anything that might be construed as sentiments about treating strangers and foreigners as if they were natives, as in Leviticus 19:33–34, because most of the bible, including the New Testament, backs up their scriptural interpretation.

  The Washington Post profiled a small-town congregation hearing a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments in Alabama in July 2018. The Post recounted an exchange between two congregants. These “followers of Donald Trump” are the everyday Christian nationalists that carried Trump into office, and they implicitly understand this us-versus-them interpretation of their book:

  Love thy neighbor…meant “love thy American neighbor.” Welc
ome the stranger…meant the “legal immigrant stranger.” “The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”50

  In the minds of these Christian nationalists, Trump “woke a sleeping Christian nation” that is threatened by “unpapered people,” and the bible justifies bigotry against such people. After all, slavery was never “as bad as people said it was. ‘Slaves were valued…. They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.’”51 The us-versus-them tenet of Christian nationalism is not only central to Trumpian rhetoric but is also being promoted at the highest levels of power in a bible study conducted for the President’s cabinet, for US Senators, and for US Representatives. This bible study is the reason former attorney general Jeff Sessions cited Romans 13 to justify separating children from their parents at America’s southern border.52

  US laws incorporate prohibitions that are reflected in at least three of the Ten Commandments: murder, theft, and lying (e.g. fraud, perjury). However, unlike the Decalogue and Christian nationalism with its insularity, our laws apply to everyone and do not rest on divine claims but on an agreement of “We the People.”53 More importantly, these universal principles are not unique to Judeo-Christianity, so they fail to support the myth that America is founded on Judeo-Christian principles. It cannot be denied that our country was founded to favor a similarly small group of people: white men. True, white men of various religions were welcomed, but that is still a narrow group. But the ideal that America is attempting to live up to is the nonbiblical principle inscribed on the Supreme Court in Washington, DC: “Equal Justice Under Law.” Whereas the immutable, imperfect law of the Judeo-Christian god will forever discriminate against people who don’t believe in the “right” god, American law comes ever closer to attaining the equality ideal. God’s law holds that some people are more equal than others. American law has expanded to include men of other races, then women, and so on, until now we are finally beginning to treat people of different sexual orientation equally under the law. We have not fully realized the ideal, but at least our founders gave us room and a process to grow. Progress is possible under our founding documents, while the bible will forever enshrine an ancient and outdated morality. Nothing in these commandments supports the Christian nationalist argument.