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November 23 - December 4, 2023
One reason the “nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles” claim has not been fully examined is that the vagueness of the term insulates that claim from scrutiny.
“Judeo-” is a sop, a fig leaf, tossed about to avoid controversy and complaint. It is simply a morsel of inclusion offered to soften the edge of an exclusionary, Christian movement.
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.”
The first is that America was founded as a Christian nation.
They abandon their earlier obscurantism, the first myth, in favor of a new one: the subtler argument that our nation is founded on Judeo-Christian principles.
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.
Mason Locke Weems,
There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion.
For Madison, the tendency of government and religion to mix and corrupt each other is so great “that the danger cannot be too carefully guarded against.”
Separation is not a one-way street that allows religion to influence government while preventing government from influencing religion; it is a wall preventing religion from tainting government as well.
As president, Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
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.
The least religious countries: Have the lowest rates of violent crime and homicide Are the best places to raise children and to be a mother Have the lowest rates of corruption Have the lowest levels of intolerance against racial and ethnic minorities Score highest for women’s rights and gender equality Have the greatest protection and enjoyment of political and civil liberties Are better at educating their youth in reading, math, and science Are the most peaceful Are the most prosperous Have the highest quality of life.50
Those states that are the most religious have more societal ills, and tend to: Have the highest rates of poverty Have the highest rates of obesity Have the highest rates of infant mortality Have the highest rates of STDs Have the highest rates of teen pregnancy Have the lowest percentage of college-educated adults Have the highest rates of murder and violent crime.51
People who believe they are acting in accord with a higher law are giving themselves a license to do anything.
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
Paine wrote, “Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.”
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.
But, despite the Christian nationalists’ arguments to the contrary, self-government and revolution against tyranny are not principles derived from Christianity or the bible.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE is an anti-Christian document with snippets of religious-sounding language as window dressing.
Rights are not bestowed, not even by kings. Rights are asserted, not given. Rights come from human nature, not divine nature.
Faith, almost by definition, is conceit.
Interpreting history using modern values, known as presentism, is frowned upon by historians.
“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?”3 “Presentism” is beside the point when dealing with a theology that claims to be timeless, absolute, and perfect.
Worshipping another god, suggesting that someone worship another god, and even proselytizing are protected by the Constitution. But they are capital crimes under biblical principles
The impossibility binds the believer to the religion, forcing them to seek ever greater faith.
Religious faith is, as Professor Peter Boghossian observes, “pretending to know things you don’t know.”6
There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”
“There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”35
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
Certainty without reason breeds absurdity.
But criticism of religion is the true beginning of freedom. Criticizing the system that claims to punish you for your thoughts is the first step against totalitarianism.
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.
many sects, Christian or otherwise, have built-in safeguards to exclude new information and the outside world: persecuting outsiders, shunning doubters, encouraging intrafaith marriage and punishing interfaith marriages, punishing apostates (sometimes with death), homeschooling or religious schooling, gathering together to shout down the doubts on at least a weekly basis, approving some texts and burning others.
Virtue was to be secondary to obedience, and the intellect—one’s understanding—ought to be sacrificed to god:
That we find it abhorrent proves the point: your moral judgment is your own. It is independent from the bible and religion.
Over about a decade, children born to parents in the Followers of Christ had an infant mortality rate that was ten times greater than that of Idaho as a whole.
He placed his family above the bible and Jesus’s words. Christians do this all the time. But they are not acting like Christians. They are exercising their own moral judgment and coming to better, more ethical conclusions than their savior.
Christian nationalists take advantage of times of fear and use them to impose their god on everyone.
The bloodshed might have been stemmed were it not for the unmovable certainty religion breeds in the faithful.
