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May 24, 2019 - January 24, 2021
The first half of the first book, Genesis, contains, among other things, fratricide,13 polygamy,14 incest,15 pimping one’s wife to a king,16 and a father offering his daughters up to gang rape and then later impregnating them himself.17
I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.18
This alone casts suspicion on Christianity’s value to healthy families.
Jesus died a victim of Judeo-Christianity’s filicidal tendencies. His alleged father has him tortured and murdered by the state out of some perverse love: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”24 The first epistle of John, 1 John 4:7–21, exalts this sacrifice and betrays the writer’s ignorance of the true meaning of love, although he uses the word nearly thirty times in the passage. In his attempt to explain that which he does not know, he bastardizes love into an exaltation of child sacrifice: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is
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Nonsense like this cheapens real love.
In Virginia, West Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, Arkansas, Washington, and Idaho, laws for negligent homicide, manslaughter, and capital murder have religious exemptions.28 This means that if a child is sick the parent can pray instead of seeking real help. Insulin might save the diabetic child, but parents can substitute prayer. They can pray until their child dies. And not suffer any consequences.
The two most common reasons for homelessness in LGBTQ youth are: (1) family rejection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender, and (2) being evicted from family homes as a result of coming out.36
LGBTQ youth who are rejected by their families are eight times more likely to attempt suicide than those who are accepted.37
Judeo-Christianity is anti-family.
The Constitution protects us by limiting power and defining our rights. God’s commandments limit our rights and impose power on us.
The Ten Commandments did not positively influence the foundations of the United States. America would survive without them—indeed, it survives in spite of them—because the United States is founded on ideals that are far more important, impressive, and timeless than anything Judeo-Christianity can offer.
PART IV
AMERICAN VERBIAGE
23
Argument by Idiom
The words “so help me God” do not appear in the oath prescribed in Article 2, §1 of the Constitution. Our godless Constitution does not ask presidents to seek a god’s help or call down a god’s wrath on oath breakers.
Apparently, we have Washington Irving, the creator of so much early American folklore, including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, to thank for this myth too.
That a short child could hear and remember for half a century the final words of this oath—which no present and much closer adults recording the moment did—through an “innumerable throng” of adults, over a distance of more than 200 feet, uttered by a notoriously soft-spoken man, without the aid of modern technology, is simply not to be believed.
No evidence suggests that any early president—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams—added pious words to the oath. The first reliable, contemporaneous account of a president adding these words comes nearly a century after the founding, at Chester A. Arthur’s public inauguration in 1881.
This public oath was actually Arthur’s second presidential oath. He had already taken the official oath and assumed the office of president two days earlier, immediately on Garfield’s death. In that private ceremony, he did not edit the oath. The second oath, the one with the religious language, was a public reenactment done for show.18 It was more strategic piety.
Thus, the modern tradition of presidents adding a god to the oath can be tied directly to the Washington Irving myth about George Washington through Woodrow Wilson, the president largely responsible for that modern trend. Myths are powerful, regardless of their truth.
“In God we trust” was first added to American coinage in 1863, during the height of the Civil War, seventy-five years after the Constitutional Convention. It was added to paper currency in 1955 and became the national motto in 1956. “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. The first president to close a speech with “God bless America” was Richard Nixon, in a mendacious presidential message about Watergate.
Shenanigans!
24
“In God We Trust”: The Belligerent Motto
Three men are ultimately responsible for getting “God” on American currency: a preacher, a secretary, and a man seeking to amend the Constitution to promote his personal deity.
As William Lloyd Garrison, a leading abolitionist, put it, “In this country, the Bible has been used to support slavery and capital punishment; while in the old countries, it has been quoted to sustain all manner of tyranny and persecution. All reforms are anti-Bible.”
The bible gave slavery a divine sanction
Evangelical Christianity invaded and polarized the political debate in the decades leading up to the Civil War, limiting the potential political solutions.
Religion did exactly what the framers feared: it poisoned the political system.
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.”
Webster found it curious that believers failed to realize how unconvincing religious arguments are to everyone else: “They do not remember that the doctrines and miracles of Jesus Christ have, in eighteen hundred years, converted only a small portion of the human race; and among the nations that are converted to Christianity, they forget how many vices and crimes, public and private, still prevail, and that many of them—public crimes especially, which are offences against the Christian religion—pass without exciting particular regret or indignation.”
But the South, though morally wrong, had the stronger religious argument for its position and was therefore far less likely to do away with slavery because of religious pleading or moral reasoning. After all, God was on their side. The Confederate States of America motto said so: Deo vindice, “God will vindicate” or “With God our protector [or avenger].”22 The motto meant to call upon the “Christian God.”
The confederacy essentially copied the 1787 US Constitution’s preamble but added the one thing the confederacy thought most important, a clause “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Jefferson Davis and Daniel Webster were right: the bible supported the southern slaveholders, not the northern abolitionists.
Another major argument for slavery was not just biblical sanction, but that Christianity civilized “the Negro race” by bringing them to Jesus. Slavery created Christians.
Religion played an important role in the abolition movement, but it played a bigger role on the other side of the argument.
Mr. DOUGLASS.—Why, as I said in another place, to a smaller audience the other day, in answer to the question, “Mr. Douglass, are there not Methodist churches, Baptist churches, Congregational churches, Episcopal churches, Roman Catholic churches, Presbyterian churches in the United States, and in the southern states of America, and do they not have revivals of religion, accessions to their ranks from day to day, and will you tell me that these men are not followers of the meek and lowly Saviour?” Most unhesitatingly I do. Revivals in religion, and revivals in the slave trade, go hand in hand
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A Voice.—It is not true. Mr. DOUGLASS.—Not true! is it not? (Immense cheers.) Hear the following advertisement:—“Field Negroes, by Thomas Gadsden.” I read now from The American Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery; by an American, or by J. G. Birney. This has been before the public in this country and the United States for the last six years; not a fact nor a statement in it has been called in question. (Cheers.) The following is taken from the Charleston Courier of Feb. 12, 1835:—“Field Negroes, by Thomas Gadsden. On Tuesday, the 17th inst., will be sold at the north of the Exchange, at
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Secular forces drove religious sects to reexamine their collective consciences or, as Smith puts it, “Religious advocacy trailed behind the path secular ideas had already laid.”
Christianity and the bible justified slavery and allowed otherwise moral people to assuage their consciences by telling themselves that they were acting in accord with their god’s law. That divine sanction was critical. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
As commanders have for millennia, Civil War generals and preachers stoked soldiers’ piety, recognizing religion’s usefulness in convincing men and boys to march to their death without fear because god is on their side. Margaret Mitchell commented on this phenomenon in Gone with the Wind. Rhett Butler dryly asks, “If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?”
The ebb of religion in the ranks as the conflict dragged on is well documented by the soldiers themselves. Before the disillusioning bullets extinguished the pious fervor, the Christian god was placed on American coinage.
Fear is a friend to those who would violate inalienable rights, including the right to a secular government.
On December 9, 1863, Secretary Chase approved the final language: “In God We Trust.”66 Congress made the change official a few months later when it passed a new coinage bill, though it did not actually vote on the new language—it simply gave the Mint director, Pollock, the power to fix the shape, motto, and devices of the coins, with the approval of the Treasury secretary.
Watkinson, Pollock, and Chase took advantage of a fearful, distracted nation and abused their government offices to impose their personal religious beliefs on all citizens.
25
“One nation under God”: The Divisive Motto
In America’s wild marketplace, religion must be at least partly about marketing. It should come as no surprise that during the golden age of American marketing—the Mad Men era—religion was quite literally sold to the country. In his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse convincingly shows that the wave of public piety in America, which peaked in the 1950s, was the result of a coordinated corporate strategy. The campaign was launched during the 1930s and 1940s as a response to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the regulation
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The high-water mark for the religious messaging was the Religion in American Life campaign conducted by the Ad Council in partnership with America’s best admen and advertising agencies. RIAL professed two goals: “(1) to accent the importance of all religious institutions as the basis of American life” and “(2) to urge all Americans to attend the church or synagogue of their choice.”10 The Ad Council ran 2,200 RIAL ads in newspapers in 1949 and steadily increased that number each year, to nearly 10,000 ads in 1956.11 Magazine, radio, television, billboards, posters in transportation hubs, and
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He opened each cabinet meeting with a prayer. Halfway through one meeting, Ike apparently realized he’d forgotten the opening prayer. “Oh, God dammit, we forgot the silent prayer,” swore the pious politician.
