Conclusion
Take alarm: this is the first experiment on our liberties
“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.”
— James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” (1785)1
I write these final words on a beautiful spring morning, a Sunday, sitting in the last pew at the St. Dennis Catholic church in Madison, Wisconsin. An elderly relative, visiting for a week and unable to drive, insisted on attending mass. I gave her a ride and now sit working in the back. (I did not last long. After about four or five paragraphs, I abandoned the nearly empty service for the company of my faithful dog and a long walk in a nearby dog park—to me, a far better way to spend a beautiful Sunday morning.)
The last mass I witnessed was during a full Catholic wedding. The priest mentioned the happy couple about sixty times—a respectable number, given that we had gathered together to celebrate them. But the priest was also able to mention his church and god more than 235 times.2 This four-to-one ratio of church over couple has held at the two other Catholic weddings I’ve attended. The Catholic Church is co-opting the prestige of more illustrious events, people, and moments for itself. Two people dedicate their lives to each other, and religion injects itself in the middle. Christian nationalism excels at this type of piracy and imposition. It attempts, like the Catholic priest at those weddings, to bask in unwarranted glory. It seeks to co-opt undeserved greatness, accolades, and credit. It claims a nation dedicated to the freedom of and from religion, for one particular religion. It insists that a nation with a godless Constitution is dedicated to one particular god. A religion that demands fearful, unwavering obedience takes credit for a rebellion and revolution in self-government. It declares that that revolution was the brainchild of a few Christians rather than of a group of unorthodox thinkers testing Enlightenment principles. It even claims universal human morality as its own invention.
Christian nationalism also contends that the United States of America is exceptional because the nation was chosen by a god, not because the founders’ enlightened experiment was successful. Christian nationalists sometimes misconstrue a 1983 Newsweek quote: “Historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.”3 Ken Woodward and David Gates’s full quote is more interesting, and, as one would imagine, more reflective of reality: “Now historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document: the source of a powerful myth of the United States as a special, sacred nation, a people called by God to establish a model society, a beacon to the world.”4 Biblical America is indeed a myth, a powerful one.
The sad irony of the myths of the Christian nation, biblical America, and Judeo-Christian principles is that they are born out of a misplaced zeal to revive or extend American exceptionalism. Trump and his Christian nationalist brethren want a return to a Christian nation; they want to “make America great again.” But religion did not make the United States, let alone make it great. “We the People” make America exceptional.
Religion is the millstone around the neck of American exceptionalism because religious faith denies experience and observation to preserve a belief.5 It is for this reason that it is unlikely to contribute to progress,6 though it will take credit for what science, rationality, experience, and observation have accomplished. America succeeded as an experiment because it was based on reason. If we abandon reason in favor of faith—or if our elected leaders commit this sin—we are asking to regress. Not to some golden age, but to a time “when religion ruled the world…called the Dark Ages,”7 to again borrow from Ruth Green.
Many specifics of Christian nationalism are not covered in this book, including some of its favorite minutiae.8 It is unnecessary to debunk every mined quote or disingenuous misrepresentation, because the foundational claim of the Christian nationalist identity—that Judeo-Christian principles influenced American principles—must be discarded. Christian principles conflict with American principles.
In the end, the Christian nationalists try to prove too much. Ben Franklin cautioned, “When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”9 By seeking to graft his religion on to the structure of the American government, the Christian nationalist is simply showing his religion to be “a bad one.” Not only bad, but also, according to Thomas Jefferson, erroneous, for “it is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”10 Christian nationalism, by its very existence, admits the weakness of Christianity’s truth claims, the frailty of a morality based on supernatural authority, and the shortcomings of an antiquated book. As with the Catholic wedding, Christian nationalists’ attempt to co-opt the power and prestige of the American Enlightenment for their own ends says far more about their insecurity and the genuine blindness of their faith than it does about America’s founding.
THE PAGEANTRY OF THE CATHOLIC MASS has distracted me from writing, as it has presumably distracted the congregation from an otherwise noticeable lack of substance—remember, faith is “the evidence of things not seen.” As if to compensate for this shortfall, the Catholic Church has built a ceremony to engage all the senses. Incense for the nose. Song and chanting for the ears. For touch, uncomfortable wood between bouts of rising and kneeling. For the eyes, soaring ceilings, stained glass, and long, flowing robes colorfully and ornately embroidered. And of course, wine and wafers or, depending on one’s level of credulity, blood and human flesh, for the tongue. It is hard to ignore these expensive distractions, but if we could, we might pare religions down to what is valuable. If we could ignore the differences in nomenclature and liturgy and costume and literature—we might find a few universal truths, such as the golden rule. Provided, of course, that we excise the tribalism along with the pageantry. This is not because all religion is correct or because all religion worships the same god under different guises, but because all religion is man-made. There are some universal human principles that the human authors of religion can’t help but put into their religion. Don’t steal, kill, or lie; treat others as you’d like to be treated; help those who can’t help themselves. But these are not religious principles. These are universal human principles, and we must jettison the religious from the humane. Humans need saving, but they need to be saved from religion.
As America nears the tipping point in which Christianity’s power and privilege are reduced to equality, the Christian nation myths will be trumpeted with renewed vigor. Christian nationalists will not go gently into the obsolescence for which they are bound; they have grown accustomed to religious privilege. They are used to imposing their beliefs on unsuspecting schoolchildren, to politicians paying lip service to their deity, to their warped idea of “religious freedom” exempting them from universally applicable laws. But that time is ending. The end of Christian privilege is near.
As the myths debunked in this book are professed with more desperation, we must be prepared to refute them factually and vocally. This book provides the first half of that recipe. You are responsible for the rest. Outspoken resistance is, as Madison might say, the “first duty of citizens.”11 Christian nationalists have successfully persuaded too many Americans to abandon our heritage, to spurn our secular foundations in favor of their myth. It is time to reclaim that heritage and refute these myths. We need to remind Americans that our Constitution demands an absolute separation between
church and state, as John Kennedy said. We must raise hell when the wall of separation between state and church is breached. We must, as Madison warned, take “alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”12
Acknowledgments
This book required serious help, and I owe many my thanks. Most importantly, to my family, especially Elizabeth, Oliver, and Simon, thank you for your love and support. Elizabeth taught me to write well, read countless drafts, offered unflinching criticism, and was exceedingly patient and supportive. I love you. To Mom and Wally, Dad and Liz, Jessie and Sean, and Aunt Missy for their love and support. And to friends for the same, you know who you are.
To Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor for welcoming me at FFRF, supporting this book at every turn, and to Dan for his kind preface. To my FFRF family, especially the amazing legal team, for listening to me drone on about history.
To Susan Jacoby for encouraging me to think bigger with my manuscript and for providing supportive guidance and a thoughtful foreword. To Katherine and Matthew Stewart for mentoring a struggling writer. To Jerry DeWitt for his big heart. To Joe Cunningham for reading the first-ever draft and offering insight that only a 90-year-old veteran can.
To Ryan Jayne and Colin McNamara, two diligent, careful lawyers who checked every citation and collected bourbon bounties for mistakes found and holes poked.
To Mark Chancey for his guidance on biblical texts and history; Kevin Kruse for his advice and for reviewing a few chapters; Ed Brayton for reading an early draft; Warren Throckmorton, who has vanquished several Christian nationalists and who kindly gave time and insights; and Amanda Knief, who helped with a thorny research question.
To Jane Dystel, who took me in; Sterling Publishing for taking a chance; and Barbara Berger, whose editing, professionalism, and judgment improved this book significantly.
To those who preferred not to be or aren’t named. You know who you are. Thank you.
As with nearly all authors, I owe a debt to many better thinkers and writers. To Christopher Hitchens, whose Vanity Fair article revising the Ten Commandments inspired part of this book. He took the time to do a writer he’d never met a favor. I miss his pen.
Notes
Text and punctuation for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is based on the National Archives official transcripts: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html (emphasis added in each reference). The Draft of the Declaration of Independence is available on the Library of Congress (LOC) website: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trt001.html and http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/interactives/declaration-of-independence/equal/index.html.
For the American Presidency Project (APP), by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, see https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ and search by name, document or speech, and date.
For the Federalist Papers, see http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/fed.asp.
For letters cited in Founders Online at the National Archives (FO-NA), see https://founders.archives.gov/ (Search by letter title and date).
Epigraph
1 James Madison to Edward Everett, March 19, 1823, http://www.loc.gov/resource/mjm.20_0368_0370/ , in Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison, Comprising His Public Papers and His Private Correspondence…(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), vol. 9, 128–29. All 9 vol. at https://perma.cc/ZVW6-KYUW
2 George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” Polemic, no. 2, January 1946.
Introduction • Prelude to an Argument
3 Peter Raby, The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 101.
4 This was available on Judge James Taylor’s website, http://www.judgejamestaylor.com/foundationsdisplay.html, which is now defunct. However, it can still be seen here: https://perma.cc/WBV4-DFMC.
5 See Taylor’s website, supra.
6 Jeff Bobo, “Hawkins judge faces $3 million sexual harassment, wrongful dismissal lawsuit,” Times News, January 14, 2011. The former staff received restitution in the criminal case against Taylor; see next note.
7 Bobo, “Former judge Taylor pleads to Hawkins charges, won’t get off probation until 2028,” Times News, October 12, 2012. See the formal charges against Taylor at In re: The Honorable James Taylor General Sessions Judge, Hawkins County, Tenn., at the Tenn. Court of the Judiciary, filed January 24, 2012, file no. 11-4731, docket no. M2011-00706-CJ-CJ-CJ, in Tenn. Appellate Court, Nashville, https://perma.cc/Z9Y8-XX8G.
8 For a history of the evolution of the phrase “Judeo-Christian values,” see Douglas Hartmann, Xuefeng Zhang, and William Wischstadt “One (Multicultural) Nation Under God? Changing Uses and Meanings of the Term ‘Judeo-Christian’ in the American Media,” Journal of Media and Religion 4, no. 4 (2005): 207–34.
9 Kenneth Woodward, “Losing Our Moral Umbrella,” Newsweek, December 6, 1992.
10 Jnanada Prakashan, ed., World Encyclopaedia of Interfaith Studies: Religious Pluralism, vol. 2 (New Delhi, India: Jnanada Prakashan, in assoc. with Global Open Univ., Nagaland, 2009), 388, quote from Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits.
11 Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 65–85, at 69.
12 Patrick Henry, “‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no. 1 (March 1981): 35–47.
13 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 12.
14 Michael T. Benson, Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 34.
15 Robert Davi, “‘War on Christmas’ Part of Secular Battle vs. Judeo-Christian Values,” Breitbart, December 24, 2013, http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2013/12/24/davi-die-hard-christmas/.
16 Judeo-Christian Voter Guide, see, e.g., https://perma.cc/P3EQ-TTUN.
17 See Pew Research Center, U.S. Religious Landscape Study, 2014, https://perma.cc/QAM2-QD56.
18 “Our Mission,” American Family Assoc., February 14, 2017, https://www.afa.net/who-we-are/our-mission/.
19 Christian Voter Guide, can be accessed via archive.org and compared with similar dates from the Judeo-Christian voter guide website, http://www.christianvoterguide.com/.
20 “Mission Statement,” Family Research Council, http://www.frc.org/mission-statement.
21 Peter Montgomery, “Tony Perkins Attacks DAR Moves toward Religious Inclusion,” Right Wing Watch online, January 4, 2013, www.RightWingWatch.org/post/tony-perkins-attacks-dar-moves-toward-religious-inclusion/.
22 John McCain, “Constitution Established a Christian Nation,” interview by Beliefnet.com, 2007, https://perma.cc/B8WL-CK3P.
23 See, e.g., Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); and Goldberg, “What Is Christian Nationalism?” Huffington Post, May 14, 2006: “Christian nationalists believe in a revisionist history, which holds that the founders were devout Christians who never intended to create a secular republic; separation of church and state…is a fraud perpetrated by God-hating subversives.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-goldberg/what-is-christian-nationa_b_20989.html.
24 See, e.g., John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987) (arguing that the Constitution is grounded in biblical principles); Alf J. Mapp Jr., The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 5–47.
25 McCreary County, Kentucky v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, 545 U.S. 844, 876 (2005).
26 Andrew L. Whitehead, Samuel L. Perry, and Joseph O. Baker, “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential El
ection,” Sociology of Religion 79, no. 2 (May 19, 2018): 147–71, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srx070.
27 Ibid., 148, 157.
28 The researchers summed up their study for the Washington Post. See Andrew L. Whitehead, Joseph O. Baker and Samuel L. Perry, “Despite Porn Stars and Playboy Models, White Evangelicals Aren’t Rejecting Trump. This is Why,” Washington Post, March 26, 2018.
29 Ibid.
30 Whitehead, Perry, Baker, “Make America Christian Again, 147–71, at 165.
31 Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation website, “Project Blitz,” https://perma.cc/45MJ-LUJL.
32 Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, “Report and Analysis on Religious Freedom Measures Impacting Prayer and Faith in America (2017): Legislation, Proclamations, Talking Points, Notes, Fact Sheets,” PDF 4, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwfCh32HsC3UYmV0NUp5cXZjT28/view.
33 Ibid., 9.
34 Ibid., 5.
35 Ibid., 10.
36 Ibid., 15.
37 Ibid., 5–6, 23.
38 Ibid., 27–30, 33.
39 Frederick Clarkson, “‘Project Blitz’ Seeks to Do for Christian Nationalism what ALEC Does for Big Business,” Religion Dispatches, April 27, 2018, https://perma.cc/YJ5H-TN6G.
40 Alan Dershowitz, Blasphemy: How the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 83.
41 Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 29. See also Randall Terry’s (formerly of Operation Rescue) speech in Bob Caylor, “Terry Preaches Theocratic Rule ‘No More Mr. Nice Christian’ Is the Pro-Life Activist’s Theme for the ’90s,” News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, IN), August 16, 1993, 1A. Terry wanted listeners “to let a wave of hatred wash over you…. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country…. Theocracy means God rules.”
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