America For Purchase

I recently wrote two articles about the Religious Right: Founding Fathers Were Not Christians and The Religious Right is a Cult.  Both articles point out the distorted truths propagated by this group of men, mainly Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, John Hagee, David R Reagan, James Strong, Rod Parsley, Tony Perkins and Fred Phelps.   Other important authors have also written about this cult.  Americans should take note, get educated and rethink the delusions presented by these politically and financially motivated anarchists.  See the excerpts below.

As Frederick Clarkson, Co-Founder of Talk To Action, wrote in a recent Public Eye story entitled History is Powerful: Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters:

The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America’s supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept.

But the Christian nationalist narrative has a fatal flaw: it is based on revisionist history that does not stand up under scrutiny. The bad news is that to true believers, it does not have to stand up to the facts of history to be a powerful and animating part of the once and future Christian nation. Indeed, through a growing cottage industry of Christian revisionist books and lectures now dominating the curricula of home schools and many private Christian academies, Christian nationalism becomes a central feature of the political identity of children growing up in the movement. The contest for control of the narrative of American history is well underway. (emphasis mine)

Why Should You Care?

Well, because fake history is being taught in hundreds of American public schools, because America is splitting into two opposing political camps and one of those embraces a falsified version of American history, and because that fake history has even become cited pervasively in Congressional debates and the consequences are not minor:

One might have expected such government-sponsored lies from a totalitarian regime such as the former Soviet Union. But the United States government claims to foster the teaching of accurate history. Are we sliding towards totalitarian government?

At stake are the rights of minorities in America, the separation of church and state, and the preservation of religious liberty. In fact, pluralistic American democracy is itself at risk.

America, and the American electorate is bifurcating, wrote political science professor Tom Schaller, in a recent Baltimore Sun editorial. So, we should ask ourselves, which political camp, and which narrative of history, will exert more influence in America in the coming decades?

As a practical point, you should care because church state separation has become badly eroded and breached over the past two decades. Consider – religious organizations that get federal funds to provide social services can now practice religious discrimination in their hiring practices;  a new federal program launching this summer will literally install courts in churches; several billion dollars in federal domestic and international aid dollars have gone to promote failed “abstinence-only” sex ed programs advocated by the religious right. I could go on. The list is long.

And, what has been behind growing support for such violations of church/state separation is the fact that millions of Americans, probably tens of millions, believe that the church/state separation principle is a fraud, a pernicious myth, and that the United States was founded, and intended, as a Christian nation.

A substantial percent of Americans now believe that America was founded as a Christian nation, and they believe that in part because the flood of revisionist history, based on historical lies, fabrications and distortions, and misquotes and false quotes incorrectly attributed to America’s founders, that has been written over the past several decades.

Many of America’s leaders, in fact, have come to believe in the “Christian Nation” myth and the precepts that myth has been built on have become, to a worrying extent, taught to American teenagers; through Bible class curriculum taught in hundreds of America’s public schools, through homeschooling curricula and, through the JROTC program, to America’s future military leaders.

By Bruce Wilson writes:

IN 2004, The Texas Republican Party platform declared the United States to be a “Christian nation”. Christian nationalism is probably the driving ideology of the Christian right, and that ideology rests on a falsified version of history that tens of millions of Americans believe to be true.

Falsified history, asserting that the US was founded as a “Christian nation” and that the founders intended the separation of church and state principle to keep government out of religion but not vice-versa, has become shockingly widespread:

It is being taught at hundreds of US high schools, through an elective Bible class curriculum, it gets taught in the US Army’s Junior ROTC curriculum, it gets showcased in an exhibit from the US Library of Congress, blasted from talk radio, broadcast by PBS, pushed by many religious broadcasters as a matter of course, distributed appended to Bibles given US troops, spread via Christian homeschooling curriculum taught to hundreds of thousands of students (at least), and promoted via a blizzard of videotapes, works of dubious and brazenly falsified American history….. on and on (I’m sure the full list of vectors for fake history is longer still).

Filed under: Religious Right