America Is Not a Christian Nation: Why Is the Right Obsessed With Pushing a Revisionist History?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/belief/america-not-christian-nation-and-never-has-been-why-right-obsessed-pushing-revisionist

It’s common to hear conservatives say things like Paul Ryan did during the campaign: “Our rights come from nature and God, not from government.” Liberals shrug most of the time when they hear such rhetoric. It sounds like an empty platitude, much like praising the troops or waving the flag, that makes audiences feel good but doesn’t actually have any real-world importance. What liberals don’t understand, however, is that what sounds like an empty platitude actually signifies an elaborate, paranoid theory on the right about sneaky liberals trying to destroy America, a theory that is being used to justify all manner of incursions against religious freedom and separation of church and state.

The Christian right theory goes something like this: Once upon a time, a bunch of deeply religious Christian men revolted against the king of England and started a new nation with a Constitution based on the Bible. Being deeply religious fundamentalist Christians, they intended for their new society to reflect Christian values and the idea that rights come from God. But then a bunch of evil liberals with a secularist agenda decided to deny that our country is a Christian nation. Insisting that rights come from the government/the social contract/rational thinking, these secularists set out to dismantle our Christian nation and replace it with an unholy secularist democracy with atheists running amok and women getting abortions and gays getting married and civilization collapse. For some reason, the theory always ends with civilization collapse. The moral of the story is that we better get right with God and agree that he totally gave us our rights before the world ends. Insert dramatic music here.

None of this actually went down that way, but there are Christian right revisionist historians who are pushing this claim hard. David Barton is a major advisor to all sorts of Christian right figures and he has long promoted the completely false theory that the Founders wanted something very close to a Christian theocracy. Indeed, in their desperation to make people believe what simply isn’t true, activists on the right have even gone so far as to try to push Barton’s lies about the Founders into public school textbooks. The notion that America’s founders believed rights come "from God" goes straight back to Barton’s making-stuff-up style of “history.”

Despite the fact that liberals rarely engage them on this point, Christian right thinkers are forever ranting on about it. Rick Santorum’s speech at the Values Voter Summit this past weekend is an excellent example of the form. He delivered an inane, inaccurate lecture about the French revolution, describing it as doomed from the get-go because the revolutionaries believed in “equality, liberty, and fraternity,” which he contrasted with the Americans who supposedly believed in “paternity,” i.e. the theory that rights come from God. Rick Santorum debated the long-dead French revolutionaries, assuming that the word “fraternity” was an attempt to avoid admitting there was a God and then blaming everything bad that happened to France since then on its secularist government.

[DetlefK]

1. So, the american rebels insisted on having an absolutist ruler???

[cantbeserious]

2. Domionists One And All - A Human Virus Plauging The American Body Politic

eom

[Igel]

3. Because there's not a single "Right" in this argument.

There are lots of them, howevermuch it may make life easier to simplify their views to a 2D, extreme position.

Define "Christian nation". If you can't define your terms, you can't know what you're arguing about.

Can you be Deist and Christian?

Can a nation be 'Christian' if its government is secular but most of its population is 'Christian'? Is the nation the government or the population? Is is this a false choice--a nation is only Xian if both government and people are Xian?

What if the government's secular but most of the principles are derived from a specific belief system? Does it matter if those principles are shared by other belief systems? A lot of purely secular thought is shaped by the culture it's produced in--and that culture is often shaped (or integrated with) a religion.

What if most of the early principles are Xian but there are later influences? Is Xianity such a purist faith that any deviation from absolutely pure Xianity makes it entirely non-Xian? (Which Xianity are we even talking about?) Or is it the other way around--it's such an open faith that 99% secular + 1% Xian makes it Xian.

You pick your definition. You make your argument. Then, if your definition doesn't match the definition people you think you are arguing against, all you have is a nice straw man. But it's fall, harvest time, and so it'll make a dandy decoration on your stoop.

[el_bryanto]

15. The main thing is what do you mean by a Christian Nation

The answers vary - but most people who make a big point over proclaiming that we are a Christian Nation are looking for some sort of Christian Dominionism theory.

Bryant

[jeff47]

17. Can you be Deist and Christian?

No.

Deists believe in God as watchmaker - he created the universe, wound it up and then left it to run. That means no Christ - the watchmaker God does not interfere with the world, and Christ is a massive intervention.

If you don't believe in Christ, you can't be Christian.

[Demo_Chris]

4. Because that's what they would like it to become. nt

[B Calm]

5. and Bachmann calls us a constitutional republic instead of a democratic republic.

They just make up shit and fling it out there!

[madokie]

6. I have a neighbor who believes this crap

From time to time I have to remind him otherwise he'll get way out there. To the point I can't stand to be around him at all.

[PassingFair]

12. Your neighbor needs to be introduced to Thomas Paine.

He sounds "unenlightened"!

[demwing]

7. Straight answer

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

Its all about control.

That being said, Paul Ryan is partly correct. Our rights do not come from government. At least not anymore than does our money come from the bank. A bank secures and protects our money, our government secures and. protects our rights. Banks are not the source of our fiscal wealth, and governments are not the source of our civil rights.

The Declaration of Independence lays it out very clearly:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Paul Ryan gets half the facts right, but misses (or ignores) the self evident truth--just because our rights are not dependant on our government does not mean that they are dependant on Jesus.

I can find God in the words of the founders, but not Christ.

Pretty odd for a "Christian" nation...

[LuvNewcastle]

8. They're obsessed with history because if they can convince you that

their version of history is correct, they can get you to swallow all the other shit they throw at you. Your perception of the past influences your views on the present and where you want to be in the future. It's a brainwashing technique, pure and simple.

[Orsino]

9. Their god is a jealous god, and a greedy bastard.

He wants all of the things.

[TBF]

10. They need to study why our Puritan ancestors came here -

my own included - they were unhappy with the church of England. They wanted separation of church and state. That's what they found in the new world and that is what we continue to need now - nearly 400 years later (my own ancestor came over in 1635).

[anneboleyn]

11. Seriously. And then watch "John Adams" for a quick lesson about Jefferson, Franklin, et al.

Hardly religious fundies in any sense. They always seem to forget that the very architects of our constitution and the declaration of independence were men with very different ideas about religion than their own.

And exactly -- our Puritan forefathers were escaping religious persecution, not trying to re-establish a regime here in the colonies.

[el_bryanto]

14. That's not completely true

The puritans wanted to be free to impose their own theocratic vision of society. Look at how they treated those who dissented from their orthodoxy - Roger Williams for example.

That said, they had some beneficial things as well; they clearly favored education and reading, producing a very literate society that eventually produced the counter arguments to their theocracy and in some ways planted the seeds for the separation of Church and State we enjoy (at least in some ways) today.

Bryant

[hootinholler]

16. Which is why they were 'persecuted'

Because the Church of England would be having none of that shit.

[Kablooie]

13. They believe whatever they say is true. They create their own reality.

They think they are Gods chosen people so anything they say becomes true simply because they say it.
Not only in history but in everything including science and politics.

[jsr]

18. Because ignorant people buy trash.

Do not look on the wine when it is red, When it sparkles in the cup, When it goes down smoothly.

[Initech]

19. But what these idiots still don't get is that our founding fathers were not fundamentalist Christian

[alp227]

20. Speaking of Paul Ryan...

Mike Malloy on the fallacy of God-given rights (10/1/12)

[MisterP]

21. and this lets them shorten the whole lineage of US and UK Constitutional guarantees and rights

Deism, the Bill of Rights, the Enlightenment, etc., etc. all had their roots in England's antiestablishmentarian wave of 1600-60 (plus Montesquieu and Pascal)--and these Diggers and 5th Monarchists won't really fit all that well into the Religious Right's framework!

by coopting the Founders as *their* sort of Protestant, they can portray themselves as "THE American religion," as the true heirs to the Great Awakenings (and not those stuffy Methodists--why, they told Bush to NOT go into Iraq! how can they be TrueXtiansTM?): IIRC they did the same to Paine (and that cynical almost-Gypsy Adam Smith) re: 20th-c. forms of capitalism

[One_Life_To_Give]

22. People see what they expect to read.

Wanting to believe the founding fathers were exactly like yourself is nothing new. And there is no shortage of things to be taken out of context and interpreted to support their view.