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May 6 - May 26, 2020
You may think abortion is murder and I may think it is a legitimate medical choice, but the commandments handed down on Sinai will not help us resolve the question of how this issue is to be decided in a modern democratic society defined by religious pluralism.
The single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or even political party; it was believing the United States is and should be a Christian nation.26
Project Blitz encapsulates the problem Christian nationalism poses. First, it seeks to alter our history, values, and national identity. Then it codifies Christian privilege in the law, favoring Christians above others. Finally, it legally disfavors the nonreligious, non-Christians, and minorities such as the LGBTQ community, by, for instance, permitting discrimination against them in places of public accommodation or in employment.
President John F. Kennedy explained to Yale’s graduating class of 1962 that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears…. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
Christian nationalism operates like a ratchet or a noose, with each violation tightening its hold and making it more difficult to undo. Worse, the violations are used to justify other violations, so the tightening proceeds apace.
The destruction of a beloved myth is no more persecution than the erosion of an unwarranted privilege. Many conservative American Christians fail to grasp these distinctions and, as a result, they are gripped by a morbid persecution complex.
There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion.
A MORE INSIDIOUS RATIONALE underlies the Christian nationalist claim about the founders: the myth that only Christians are moral. The argument is that the United States was created by Christians for Christians because only they are moral,24 that Christianity is required for a moral society.
For many founders, religion was not the source of morality; they thought it was a substitute for morality: a substitute for those who didn’t have the time and education to discover moral truths on their own. Often, when the founders spoke of “religion and morality,” they were speaking not of one thing, but of two separate phenomena—religion for the people, morality for them.
The educated elite, including the founders, achieved morality independent of religion, but they failed to extend the possibility of that achievement to others. They thought religion was needed for the commoners.
Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society is, the better off it is. We now know that religion is not necessary for a society to succeed.
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.”53
There is a strong correlation between reformers and religious heterodoxy.55 People who are more likely to question the political status quo are more likely to question religion, and vice versa. If the founders had been bible-beating believers, they might never have thought to revolt against an empire and declare independence.
No matter how repressive the government, Boucher argued, “it is our duty not to disturb and destroy the peace of the community, by becoming refractory and rebellious subjects, and resisting the ordinances of God.”47 According to Boucher, the bible never even discusses government except to say that it must be obeyed, not rebelled against: “The only circumstance relative to government, for which the Scriptures seem to be particularly solicitous, is in inculcating obedience to lawful governors.”48
Religions, particularly established religions or religions to which a majority of the population ascribe, will nearly always oppose revolution because revolution upsets the status quo in which they are powerful.
Abbe Nollett, a man of the church, deemed it “as impious to ward off Heavens’ lightnings as for a child to ward off the chastening rod of its father.”52 Franklin retorted that “the Thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the Rain, Hail, or Sunshine of Heaven, against the Inconvenience of which we guard by Roofs & Shades without Scruple.”
Literally Christianity was against lightning rods. Wtf
Becker wrote that the fact that the engrossed Declaration’s “capitalization and punctuation follo[w] neither previous copies, nor reason, nor the custom of any age known to man, is one of the irremediable evils of life to be accepted with becoming resignation.”
I feel this in my bones.
If the theological scholars of Jefferson’s generation thought invoking “Nature’s God” was “arrant atheism,” we can safely conclude that Jefferson’s usage was not Judeo-Christian.
“Their” is also a possessive pronoun—“their rights as individuals.” In this context it indicates a choice, that individuals have their own, valid view of “their Creator.” Readers are meant to interpret this phrase as referring to whichever creator—god or otherwise—they believe in. This is probably why Christian nationalists believe the phrase refers to the Christian god.
Religious freedom allows citizens to practice any religion so long as it doesn’t infringe on another’s rights. The Mayflower settlers were looking for a place to practice their religion and force others to practice it too. That is not freedom. It is dissent from the ruling religion and a desire to impose your own. They wanted a theocracy.
Is there a context in which harming innocent children is an appropriate punishment for a parent’s misdeeds, as the second commandment requires? Even attempting such an argument proves the point that everything, no matter how immoral, is permissible with divine sanction.
The Golden Rule is not a Judeo-Christian principle. It is a universal human principle. This “interchangeability of perspectives” is the “foundation of morality” and can be seen in just as many secular, ethical traditions as religious traditions,
If Christianity is about anything, it is about obedience to god. That’s why the original sin is not genocide, murder, or rape, but eating a piece of fruit after being told not to.
Freedom under the yoke of absolute power does not exist, even if it were a benevolent power. “No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power,” observed Thomas Paine.22 Blind obedience to and fear of an omnipotent being is tyranny, not freedom.
Stephen Fry made this point nicely: “What is the point of the Catholic church if it says ‘oh, well we couldn’t know better because nobody else did.’ Then what are you for?”
To this day, 41 percent of Americans think Jesus is returning to earth sometime in the next forty years—presumably bringing Armageddon with him.11 That is a remarkably stubborn belief, given that every Christian who has ever held this belief has been wrong.
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
John Locke, a major influence on the founders, wrote of this phenomenon: “Where they [religions] have not the Power to carry on Persecution, and to become Masters, there they desire to live upon fair Terms, and preach up Toleration.”6 But when “they begin to feel themselves the stronger, then presently Peace and Charity are to be laid aside.”7
“Just think about Irish history, the Middle East, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is negotiable. It just depends on who’s doing the killing and who’s getting killed.” — George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, 20041
To this day, Maryland outlaws oral sex as an “unnatural or perverted sexual practice.”
Note for after the pandemic: go to Maryland and commit crimes.
According to The Jewish Encyclopedia, adultery is “sexual intercourse of a married woman with any man other than her husband. The crime can be committed only by and with a married woman; for the unlawful intercourse of a married man with an unmarried woman is not technically Adultery in the Jewish law.”
This raises the question of why a god that passed a prohibition on adultery designed to prevent married women from straying would have chosen a married woman to bear his son, but that is not for me to answer.
What goes on in the bedroom of two consenting adults is no business of the state. When the state does intrude, it is often with a law based on Judeo-Christian principles, like those embodied in the seventh commandment.
The bible repeatedly subjugates women, but treating women as chattel was not simply a sign of the times. Other contemporaneous cultures in the region were often less misogynistic. Archaeologist and priest Roland de Vaux wrote, “The social and legal position of an Israelite wife was…inferior to the position a wife occupied in the great countries round about. In Egypt the wife was often the head of the family, with all the rights such a position entailed. In Babylon she could acquire property, take legal action, be a party to contracts.”10 But in Judeo-Christianity, the “degraded status of
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Childbirth is not just viewed as god’s punishment—it is considered unclean. Women must be purified afterward.17 Women are unclean when they menstruate.18 Everything an unclean woman touches is unclean.19 In this childish understanding of the world, the bible essentially tells us that women have cooties.
Since some songs in the liturgy required high voices and women were to remain silent, the religious solution was to castrate boys.
Yeah, totally makes sense
Religion must maintain a closed information system to perpetuate itself.42 Religious dogma cannot withstand the facts, scrutiny, or doubt that come with exploration, discovery, and expanded horizons. Religion is often too inflexible to incorporate new information, like human evolution or a heliocentric solar system, so it demands that followers shut out reality.
Feeling randy? Angry? Then you’re guilty. With Jesus, humans are guilty for being human.
Growing up Christian was a constant battle against myself. I felt guilty for thinking and feeling.
America has abandoned or is still trying to escape the parts of the Ten Commandments that can rightly be said to have influenced it: legalized slavery, codified sexism and suppression of the sexual impulse, and inequality among races and religions under the law. These are not the influences the Christian nationalists wish to claim, but they are all that history justifies.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bible passages that conflict with modern moral judgment. Passages advocating genocide, murder, rape, slavery, subjugation of women and races—we’ve seen many in these last few chapters.12 That enlightened citizens ignore these passages shows that their morality is independent of religion.
Herein lies a major problem with the Judeo-Christian principles argument. Society has traditionally labeled anything good, virtuous, or kind as “Christian.” When people are misbehaving, a father disowning his gay daughter for instance, people may say, “That’s not very Christian.” But it is very Christian—it’s just that the tenets of Christianity are immoral.
Christian nationalists take advantage of times of fear and use them to impose their god on everyone. When doing so, they often destroy earlier unifying messages with their new, divisive message.
So, at the advice of a proselytizing preacher, two government officials—one with a religious agenda so all-consuming he was trying to amend the Constitution to honor his god—deliberately used the time of “national peril and danger,” when people were too busy dying for the Constitution to protect it from a rear-guard assault, to promote their personal religion. Even if this addition were not decades after the founding, it’s hard to see how three men betraying a founding principle—keeping state and church separate—is itself a founding principle. Watkinson, Pollock, and Chase took advantage of a
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Their message could not be countered with logic because it was based on faith. They claimed that freedoms are given by their god, that “Christianity and capitalism [are] inextricably intertwined,” that the “New Dealers were the ones violating the Ten Commandments,” and, most familiarly, that this is a nation “under God.”9
