The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Seidel makes a powerful argument that the term “Judeo-Christian” is basically a twentieth-century, post-Holocaust, made-in-America formulation designed to sound more inclusive than it is for those who really pay attention only to the “Christian” half of the hyphenated fabrication.

He recalls Benjamin’s Franklin’s argument—as incisive today as it was more than 200 years ago—that 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 oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

“When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything equal to it.” — Oscar Wilde3

“Judeo-Christian” is slippery because it is more a political invention than a scholarly description.

“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.

Christian nationalists are historical revisionists bent on “restoring” America to the Judeo-Christian principles on which they wish it were founded.

James Dobson founded Focus on the Family and thinks “that we have been, from the beginning, a people of faith whose government is built wholly on a Judeo-Christian foundation.”

Rick Perry—former Texas governor, Dancing with the Stars contestant,

A what contestant???

Lamborn, and Steve King are some of its most strident proponents.62 Representative King of Iowa, known for his racism and xenophobia, proclaimed that our nation “was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which means we need less law enforcement than anybody else in the world”63—

80 The Christian nationalism ideal fuses two identities, Christian and American, so that to be one, you must also be the other.

George Santayana’s warning that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” rings true because the past influences the present.

The claim is demonstrably false as revealed by any number of documents

from the time, including America’s godless Constitution, Madison’s Memorial,

Treaty of T...

“the Government of the United

…States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

did Judeo-Christian principles positively influence the founding of the United States? No, they did not.

Not only are Christian nationalists wrong, but their beliefs and identity run counter to the ideals on which this nation was founded.

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” — Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 19882

In Lengel’s enlightening book Inventing George Washington, he writes, “Over and again, Weems emphasized Washington’s Christian upbringing, frequent prayers, and spiritual dependence on God.”20 But historical facts tell us of a different Washington. He was a man of little or no religion with a strong character that, had he been religious, would have prevented showy religious displays.

“truth requires me to say, that Gen. Washington never received the communion, in the churches of which I am the parochial minister.

One’s personal theistic beliefs do not “own” the other ideas generated by one’s mind.

First, our Constitution is deliberately godless. There are no references to gods, goddesses, or divine intervention.

They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought.

There is no freedom of religion without a government that is free from religion.

“It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read,” Jefferson wrote.

Religion was assigned to the moral supplements section, along with law

Religion was not morality, but a substitute or supplement.

“On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”34

They were claiming that religion is necessary for societal morality. And they were wrong.

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. The enlightened could use reason to discover morality, so they needed no religion other than a bare deism or theism, to which many luminaries ascribed.

Common elitist L

“Jefferson and other elites” confined their views to that elite circle, fearing that spreading them might undermine society’s moral order.

Funny because they thought they were better than everyone.

“no morals but their own interests.”

Says the pot

“At the time of the Revolution most of the founding fathers had not put much emotional stock in religion, even when they were regular churchgoers. As enlightened gentlemen, they abhorred ‘that gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers’ and looked forward to the day when ‘the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.’”41

Who is this? Aleister fucking Crowley?

Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society is, the better off it is.

Look into this

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” — The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American by Andrew L Seidel

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.” — The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American by Andrew L Seidel

“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

IF THE FOUNDERS BELIEVED THAT RELIGION was important to ensure moral behavior for the masses but not for themselves—the educated elite—it means the founders were moral without religion. It means they built a government using their own morality, not religion. And this eviscerates the Christian nationalist claim.

If the founders had been bible-beating believers, they might never have thought to revolt against an empire and declare independence.

syllogism.

The more religious a monarch, the more likely he would be to think a god had assigned him his rightful place as ruler.

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.

Religion promotes elitism, no...

Interesting…

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE is an anti-Christian document with snippets of religious-sounding language as window dressing.

Progress threatens religion—this was true for and well known to the founders.

myth. Not a single reference mentions Jesus Christ, Yahweh, or a specifically Christian god. The references specify, at most, a broad deism or, possibly, a narrow theism in the “Supreme Judge” reference.

Deism is the belief that a god or supernatural being created the universe but has played no role in events since, rather like a watchmaker who made the universe and set it in motion;

Theism is a belief that a god or gods play an active role in current events, tinkering with the watch’s ge...

That was the only mention of Christianity in the whole document—that the Christian king is a slaver while “infidel powers” loathe the slave trade.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportations thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative [his veto] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce…10

(That Jefferson could write of freedom so eloquently and condemn slavery in fervent and revealing terms here and elsewhere, while at the same time owning slaves and fathering children with the slaves, who then became slaves themselves, is a paradox of cowardice.