The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, Monticello, August 6, 18162

of the eight cities within the United States that make the safest-city list, nearly all are located in the least religious regions of the country.”

People who believe they are acting in accord with a higher law are giving themselves a license to do anything. That is, as the physicist Steven Weinberg observed, the real danger of religion: “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

The idea that all people are created equal is not a religious idea; the idea that some people are special or chosen is one that various religious groups have embraced throughout history.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE is an anti-Christian document with snippets of religious-sounding language as window dressing. If Jefferson and the other revolutionaries had been devout Christians, they never would have rebelled, the Declaration would never have been written, and America’s political relationship to the United Kingdom today would resemble Canada’s. The Christian bible stands directly opposed to the Declaration’s central ideas, including that it is “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [their government], and to institute a new Government.”

The road to atheism is littered with bibles that have been read cover to cover.

The Golden Rule is not a Judeo-Christian principle. It is a universal human principle.

Benjamin Franklin thought it “better for a hundred guilty persons to escape than for one innocent person to suffer.”

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 16703

The idea that Jesus was born of a virgin is a transliterative mistake that cannot be admitted because of religious certitude. The original Hebrew text labels Mary alma, Hebrew for “young woman.”39 This was mistranslated into Greek as parthenos, “virgin,” even though there is a different Hebrew word for virgin.40

Intellectual honesty requires that only those worthy of respect receive it.

“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 is perhaps the precept at the heart of the American experiment: our thoughts are free.

The father of the modern conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, recognized and feared the inflexibility of religion in politics in 1994 when he famously insisted, “If and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.”12

When religion is used as a political weapon, it becomes weakened and tainted.

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.”