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Empathy, compassion, guilt, forgiveness, morality, and responsibility cannot be claimed as the monopoly of one religion. They are, to borrow from Christopher Hitchens, part of our “elementary human solidarity.”
The founding documents of the United States revere and protect freedom above all else. The bible worships and demands the opposite: obedience, submission, and servility. And it secures that obedience through fear. Fear and obey god.
Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense that a government is in the business of “securing freedom and property to all men, and above all things, the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”5
Christian nationalists are required by their bible to believe in eternal punishment and Noah’s ark; they are free to believe such things because of our Constitution.
The bible is rife with obedience and servility. Perhaps the most familiar example of biblically mandated obedience is the story in which the all-powerful god commands Abraham to murder his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice, a “burnt offering.”6 The sacrifice of Isaac was “a test of true devotion,” as one scholar has noted.7
God requires fear and unquestioning obedience to the point of killing your children.
As we’ve seen, the bible’s demand for slavish obedience prohibits rebellions of the very type that freed the American colonies from Great Britain: “If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the good things of the land; but if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”15
“No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power,” observed Thomas Paine.22
One of the starkest conflicts between biblical and American principles is how each treats the guilty. The Eighth Amendment provides that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Christian nationalists are claiming not only that archaic standards influenced the thought and actions of the founders many centuries later, but also that Judeo-Christianity is the final authority on an absolute, universal morality. Therefore, we should judge Judeo-Christianity and its moral claims by the highest moral code of any time.
The framers of the Constitution understood that social norms shift and accounted for those shifts using flexible language such as “cruel and unusual,” which defines a category of prohibited punishment in the Eighth Amendment.
By building a standard that can mature, the founders recognized that morality and society inevitably progress. The evolving standard is itself antithetical to the Judeo-Christian idea that morality was perfected millennia ago.
Judeo-Christianity’s claim to the moral high ground makes it perfectly fair to point out its atrocities—for instance, that the bible advocates burning people to death as punishment:
The New Testament also advocates this brutal punishment. In John 15:6, Jesus says, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”
Unlike modern execution methods, stoning requires the entire community to take part, ensuring all are responsible. This biblical punishment is imposed for relatively minor crimes.
Working—specifically, collecting sticks—on the sabbath.
Blasphemy.
Suggesting another religion or god.
Being a stubborn child.
Being a medium or wizard.
Having premarital sex—if you are a woman.
A woman failing to cry out for help when she is raped.
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—as are the other so-called crimes for which the bible commands death: breaking the sabbath, blasphemy, promiscuity, obstinacy, being raped, and witchcraft—a crime with a unique history on the North American continent.
While almost every culture and religion has an afterlife, Jesus was the first to preach about it as a place of eternal punishment. The place of torment is mentioned 162 times in the New Testament and not once in the Old Testament.10
THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT TO THE US CONSTITUTION could have been written with hell in mind: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
But the court has declared that the “basic concept underlying the Eighth Amendment is nothing less than the dignity of man.”40
Techniques such as crucifixion, which is simply death by torture, exceed those bounds. The Supreme Court has explicitly said so.
That sinners are punished eternally for a finite crime is arguably hell’s greatest offense to justice;
Some modern liberal Christians simply describe hell as an eternal separation from Jesus and ignore the persistent, graphic descriptions offered by their forebears and the bible.
Creative interpretation might limit the agony of the hell-bound, but not the infinity of the punishment.
The founders were explicit about the need for personal responsibility in the new constitutional system they had created.2
In one study, researchers looked at keywords people used when applying for loans. An applicant who mentioned their god—as in, “I swear to God I’ll pay you back”—was 2.2 times more likely to default on the loan, making it “among the single highest indicators that someone would not pay back.”3
Although vicarious redemption through Jesus’s sacrifice is central only to Christianity, vicarious redemption is common within Judeo-Christianity.
god tells Moses to “take all the chiefs of the people, and impale them in the sun before the LORD, in order that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel.”5
Biblical animal sacrifice is even more common than human sacrifice.
The biblical ambition to abolish personal responsibility is not limited to vicarious redemption through human and animal sacrifice, though. The biblical god regularly punishes innocent people, including children who are penalized for their parent’s mistakes (we’ll see this in the Second Commandment too, in chapter 15), as well as entire groups of people who are punished for the minor infractions of one person in the group:
Genesis 6:7, 6:13, 6:17; 7:4, 7:21–23—God kills everything and everyone except Noah, Noah’s family, and a pair of each animal because he regrets making humans. Genesis 22:2–12—God commands a father to kill his son as a test. Neither has done anything wrong; god just wants to make sure Abraham is so scared of him that he will kill Isaac, his child. Genesis 34:25—Jacob’s sons “took their swords and came against the city unawares, and killed all the males.” To avenge the rape of their sister they kill the rapists—and every other male. Exodus 11:4–6; 11:29–30—God kills firstborn children unless
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“The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law,” said the Supreme Court more than one hundred years ago.18
Benjamin Franklin thought it “better for a hundred guilty persons to escape than for one innocent person to suffer.”19 Franklin may have discussed the principle with Voltaire when the two met in Paris in 1778. Years earlier, the French philosopher had written, “It is better to run the risk of sparing the guilty than to condemn the innocent.”20
Some have tried to argue that presuming innocence is in fact biblical. The chain of logic21 is tenuous and difficult to trace, but if followed it leads to a single quote from Deuteronomy 17:2–5,
This is a command to kill everyone of another religion. The “thorough inquiry” requirement is not a presumption of innocence, nor is it all that original.
The children killed for and by god—Egypt’s firstborn, Jephthah’s unnamed daughter, Eli’s descendants, Achon’s family, the thousands of babies and children who died in Noah’s flood—were all innocent; they did “not yet know right from wrong,” as the bible says.22
SEPARATION OF POWERS CAME FROM MONTESQUIEU, not Isaiah.
“It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandize or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” — John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,”17871
What about faith? Was America founded on the Christian faith? The bible says that faith can move mountains.
Notice the dodge: the impossible becomes possible if you have enough faith. Since the impossible is, by definition, impossible, the believer’s faith is always wanting. If the stubborn mountain refuses to move, it is because the follower had doubts, a weak faith.
The impossibility binds the believer to the religion, forcing them to seek ever greater faith.
It is hardly credible to argue that Judeo-Christianity, and especially Protestantism, is responsible for the founders’ use of reason when Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, called reason “the Devil’s greatest whore.”8 Many Christian beliefs, including the resurrection and the virgin birth, require the believer to suspend, not apply, reason.
Jefferson rejected a faith-based government and any government attempt to declare articles of faith: “The Newtonian principles of gravitation is now more firmly established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the government to step in, and to make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”10
Religion was left out, both out of the convention—the delegates rejected a motion for daily prayers, finding them “unnecessary”33—and out of the Constitution, which mentioned religion only to prohibit religious tests for public office. (The First Amendment was added later and it too excludes religion, keeping religion out of government and vice versa; see pages 173–74).
