Onward Deist Soldiers?

A month ago, I came face to face with the Protestant Right. I was introduced to a member of a "Bible church" in a neighboring community. The fellow asked what work I had done. When I replied that I had taught U.S. history at the Collegium for 32 years before moving to Geezerville, the evangelical man said that I must be aware of the distortion of "our history" in current textbooks. When I asked for a specific example, I was told that the Founding Fathers were Christians and current teaching suppressed this historical truth. I had read the works of Jon Butler, Gary B. Nash, and Merrill D. Peterson and all of these respected historians are adamant that the Founding Fathers were not Christians. However, did I speak truth to this evangelical nonsense? No. The Protestant Right is in full cry these days. Evolution is under attack by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. Display of a religious monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds has been approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. Take care. If this is (fair & balanced) cravenness, so be it.

[x HNN]
An Interview with Jon Butler: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
By Rick Shenkman

You hear it all the time from the right wing. The United States was founded as a Christian country. What do you make of that?

Well, first of all, it wasn't. The United States wasn't founded as a Christian country. Religion played very little role in the American Revolution and it played very little role in the making of the Constitution. That's largely because the Founding Fathers were on the whole deists who had a very abstract conception of God, whose view of God was not a God who acted in the world today and manipulated events in a way that actually changed the course of human history. Their view of religion was really a view that stressed ethics and morals rather than a direct divine intervention.

And when you use the term deists, define that. What does that mean?

A deist means someone who believes in the existence of God or a God, the God who sets the world into being, lays down moral and ethical principals and then charges men and women with living lives according to those principles but does not intervene in the world on a daily basis.

Let's go through some of them. George Washington?

George Washington was a man for whom if you were to look at his writings, you would be very hard pressed to find any deep, personal involvement with religion. Washington thought religion was important for the culture and he thought religion was important for soldiers largely because he hoped it would instill good discipline, though he was often bitterly disappointed by the discipline that it did or didn't instill.

And he thought that society needed religion. But he was not a pious man himself. That is, he wasn't someone who was given to daily Bible reading. He wasn't someone who was evangelical. He simply was a believer. It's fair, perfectly fair, to describe Washington as a believer but not as someone whose daily behavior, whose political life, whose principles are so deeply infected by religion that you would have felt it if you were talking to him.

Thomas Jefferson?

Well, Jefferson's interesting because recently evangelicals, some evangelicals, have tried to make Jefferson out as an evangelical. Jefferson actually was deeply interested in the question of religion and morals and it's why Jefferson, particularly in his later years, developed a notebook of Jesus' sayings that he found morally and ethically interesting. It's now long since been published and is sometimes called, The Jefferson Bible. But Jefferson had real trouble with the Divinity of Christ and he had real trouble with the description of various events mentioned in both the New and the Old Testament so that he was an enlightened skeptic who was profoundly interested in the figure of Christ as a human being and as an ethical teacher. But he was not religious in any modern meaning of that word or any eighteenth century meaning of that word. He wasn't a regular church goer and he never affiliated himself with a religious denomination--unlike Washington who actually did. He was an Episcopalian. Jefferson, however, was interested in morals and ethics and thought that morals and ethics were important but that's different than saying religion is important because morals and ethics can come from many sources other than religion and Jefferson knew that and understood that.

Where does he stand on Christ exactly?

Jefferson rejected the divinity of Christ, but he believed that Christ was a deeply interesting and profoundly important moral or ethical teacher and it was in Christ's moral and ethical teachings that Jefferson was particularly interested. And so that's what attracted him to the figure of Christ was the moral and ethical teachings as described in the New Testament. But he was not an evangelical and he was not a deeply pious individual.

Let's move on to Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was even less religious than Washington and Jefferson. Franklin was an egotist. Franklin was someone who believed far more in himself than he could possibly have believed have believed in the divinity of Christ, which he didn't. He believed in such things as the transmigration of souls. That is that human, that humans came into being in another existence and he may have had occult beliefs. He was a Mason who was deeply interested in Masonic secrets and there are some signs that Franklin believed in the mysteries of Occultism though he never really wrote much about it and never really said much about it. Franklin is another writer whom you can read all you want to read in the many published volumes of Franklin's writings and read very little about religion.

Where did the conservatives come up with this idea that the Founding Fathers were so religious?

Well, when they discuss the Founding Fathers or when individuals who are interested in stressing the role of religion in the period of the American Revolution discuss this subject, they often stress several characteristics. One is that it is absolutely true that many of the second level and third levels in the American Revolution were themselves church members and some of them were deeply involved in religion themselves.

It's also true that most Protestant clergymen at the time of the American Revolution, especially toward the end of the Revolution, very eagerly backed the Revolution. So there's a great deal of formal religious support for the American Revolution and that makes it appear as though this is a Christian nation or that religion had something to do with the coming of the Revolution, the texture of the Revolution, the making of the Revolution.

But I think that many historians will argue, and I think quite correctly, that the Revolution was a political event. It was centered in an understanding of what politics is and by that we mean secular politics, holding power. Who has authority? Why should they have authority? It wasn't centered in religious events. It wasn't centered in miracles. It wasn't centered in church disputes. There was some difficulty with the Anglican church but it was relatively minor and as an example all one needs to do is look at the Declaration of Independence. Neither in Jefferson's beautifully written opening statement in the Declaration nor in the long list of grievances against George the Third does religion figure in any important way anywhere. And the Declaration of Independence accurately summarizes the motivations of those who were back the American Revolution.

Some of the conservatives will say, well, but it does make a reference to nature's God and isn't that a bow to religion?

It is a bow to religion but it's hardly a bow to evangelicalism. Nature's God was the deist's God. Nature's God, When evangelicals discuss religion they mean to speak of the God of the Old and the New Testament not the God of nature. The God of nature is an almost secular God and in a certain way that actually makes the point that that's a deistical understanding of religion not a specifically Christian understanding of religion. To talk about nature's God is not to talk about the God of Christ.

John Patrick Diggins has advanced the argument that not only were the Founding Fathers not particularly religious but in fact they were deeply suspicious of religion because of the role that they saw religion played in old Europe, where they saw it not as cohesive but as divisive. Do you agree?

The answer is yes and the reason is very simple. The principal Founding Fathers — Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin — were in fact deeply suspicious of a European pattern of governmental involvement in religion. They were deeply concerned about an involvement in religion because they saw government as corrupting religion. Ministers who were paid by the state and paid by the government didn't pay any attention to their parishes. They didn't care about their parishioners. They could have, they sold their parishes. They sold their jobs and brought in a hireling to do it and they wandered off to live somewhere else and they didn't need to pay attention to their parishioners because the parishioners weren't paying them. The state was paying them.

In addition, it corrupts the state. That is, it brings into government elements of politics and elements of religion that are less than desirable. The most important being coercion. When government is involved with religion in a positive way, the history that these men saw was a history of coercion and a history of coercion meant a history of physical coercion and it meant ultimately warfare. Most of the wars from 1300 to 1800 had been religious wars and the wars that these men knew about in particular were the wars of religion that were fought over the Reformation in which Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other, stuffed Bibles into the slit stomachs of dead soldiers so that they would eat, literally eat, their words, eat the words of an alien Bible and die with those words in their stomachs. This was the world of government involvement with religion that these men knew and a world they wanted to reject.

To create the United States meant to create a new nation free from those old attachments and that's what they created in 1776 and that's what they perfected in 1789 with the coming of the federal government. And thus it's not an accident that the First Amendment deals with religion. It doesn't just deal with Christianity. It deals with religion with a small "r" meaning all things religious.

What about the conservatives' belief that we need to go back to the religion of the Founding Fathers?

If we went back to the religion of the Founding Fathers we would go back to deism. If we picked up modern religion, it's not the religion of the Founding Fathers. Indeed, we are probably more religious than the society that created the American Revolution. There are a number of ways to think about that. Sixty percent of Americans belong to churches today, 20 percent belonged in 1776. And if we count slaves, for example, it probably reduces the figure to 10 percent of the society that belonged to any kind of religious organization.

Modern Americans probably know more about religious doctrine in general, Christianity, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, than most Americans did in 1776. I would argue that America in the 1990s is a far more deeply religious society, whose politics is more driven by religion, than it was in 1776. So those who want to go back would be going back to a much more profoundly secular society.

What do you make of the politicians who take the opposite point of view. It must make you go crazy.

It doesn't make me go crazy. It makes me feel sad because it's inaccurate. It's not a historically accurate view of American society. It's a very useful view because many modern men and women are driven by a jeremiad, that is jeremiad lamenting the conditions in the wilderness. We tend to feel bad when we hear that we are not as religious as our fathers or our grandfathers or our great grandfathers and that spurs many of us on to greater religious activity. Unfortunately in this case the jeremiad simply isn't true. And I don't think that those who insist it is true would really want to go back to the kind of society that existed on thee eve of the American Revolution.

Americans do become religious in the nineteenth century, don't they? That's what you say in your book.

The American Revolution created the basis for new uses of religion in a new society and that was conveyed in the lesson taught by the First Amendment. If government was no longer going to be supporting religion how was religion going to support itself? It would have to support itself by its own means. Through its own measures. It would have to generate its measures. And this is what every one of the churches began to do. As soon as religion dropped out of the state and the state dropped out of religion, the churches began fending for themselves. And they discovered that in fending for themselves that their contributions were going up, they were producing more newspapers, more tracts, they were beginning to circulate those tracts, they created a national religious economy long before there was a secular economy. You could trade more actively in religious goods than you could in other kinds in the United States in 1805 or 1810.

What happened in the United States is that the churches actually benefited from this separation of church and state that was dictated by the First Amendment. In addition to which America became kind of a spiritual hothouse in the nineteenth century. Not only did the quantity off religion go up but so did the proliferation of doctrine. There became new religions--the Mormons, the spiritualists--all created in the United States. New religious groups that no one had ever heard of before, that had never existed anywhere else in western society than in the United States.

Jon Butler, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Yale University, is the author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990). This interview was conducted by HNN editor Rick Shenkman for The Learning Channel series, "Myth America," which aired several years ago.

Copyright © 2004 History News Network

The Founding Fathers WERE NOT Devout Christians!

We live in terrifying times. The Roman Catholic Church is about to denounce the theory of evolution. Can the Inquisition be far behind? In this country, the Religious Right is seeking to overthrow the secular institutions that hold them at bay. Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine — Deist author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man — "that dirty, little atheist." Recently, we have the sight of Jeb Bush pandering to the Religious Right in Florida by ordering a criminal investigation of Michael Schiavo. According to Governor Bush, the husband of the late vegetable — Terri Schiavo — should be investigated for criminal behavior or negligence in the events surrounding the poor woman's stroke. This morning's fishwrap contained a small item that the Florida Attorney General found no untoward behavior on Michael Schiavo's part. Damn, there could have been a good lynchin' in the Sunshine State. If this is (fair & balanced) religiosity, so be it.

[x Palm Beach Post]
Founders sought freedom of faith in new nation
By Steve Gushée

The great majority of Americans today embrace Christianity. Nevertheless, Independence Day that we celebrate on Monday did not give birth to a Christian nation. The founders created an experiment in heretofore unheard-of religious freedom.

Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, was not Christian. He and many of the founding fathers were 18th-century rationalists who embraced a kind of deism, at best a natural, nonsupernatural Christian heresy.

Rather than endorse a religion, the founders sought to protect their fledgling nation from all religious influence. They were painfully aware of the wicked role Christianity played for centuries in Europe. They knew their forefathers had come to this country in the 17th century to escape the religious-political complex of the Old Country that persecuted those who did not conform to the established faith; Catholic in some countries, Protestant in others.

Jefferson and many of his contemporaries did believe in God, but few of today's Christians would recognize their deist deity. Deists believe in one Supreme Being who set creation in motion and then made himself scarce. They are skeptical of miracles. They reject any idea of a God who is involved with his creation. They deny the revelation of Scripture, eyeing that book simply as a superb moral document.

Jefferson did not accept the orthodox teaching of the role of Jesus as savior in Christianity. He wrote his own Bible and threw out what Christians call the Old Testament. He deleted from the New Testament all verses that referred to the supernatural. His Bible is a simple moral code filled with the teaching and parables of Jesus. It ends with Jesus' burial. He included no account of the resurrection, the formative event of Christianity.

James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen and others insisted that God was a pillar of the new nation, but they understood God in a vastly different way than most people do today.

The founders believed in a God that neither Jews, Christians nor Muslims would today recognize. Their understanding of Jesus was skewed from both that of the early church and contemporary faith.

Those extraordinary men fashioned a remarkable nation that acknowledged God, without name, definition, limit or identity, as the creator, the author of human rights and the source of all good things.

The result is not so much a Christian nation as a marvelous opportunity for the unfettered practice of any and all religious faith. That's worth celebrating.

Steve Gushée has been an Episcopal clergyman for more than 35 years. He was born and raised in Detroit, served churches in Connecticut from 1966 to 1991 including ministry as the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford.

Gushée graduated from Kent School in Connecticut, Brown University and The Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was the full-time religion writer for The Palm Beach Post until 1999, and his column continues to appear there weekly.

He is married and lives in West Palm Beach. He has three children and five grandchildren.

Copyright © 2005 Palm Beach Post

Strange Bedfellows

I cannot get the image of W holding hands with the Saudi prince out of my mind. Would Churchill have embraced Hitler? Would FDR have held hands with Hirohito? I am ashamed. More than 15,000 of our volunteer troops have died in Iraq. The vast majority of the insurgent enemy in Iraq are not Iraqis. The vast majority of insurgents (and terrorists) are Saudis. That's right. Citizens of the kingdom whose leader W holds by the hand at the Crawford ranch. Excuse me while I go vomit. The Big Lie is alive and well and it can be found in the bullshit (See the book that has been on the NYTimes bestseller list for 16 weeks: On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt.) that W and his cronies spout. If this is the (fair & balanced) truth, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Al Qaeda's Smart Bombs
By ROBERT A. PAPE

WHILE we don't yet know who organized the terrorist attacks in London on Thursday, it seems likely that they were the latest in a series of bombings, most of them suicide attacks, over the past several years by Al Qaeda and its supporters. Although many Americans had hoped that Al Qaeda has been badly weakened by American counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, 2001, the facts indicate otherwise. Since 2002, Al Qaeda has been involved in at least 17 bombings that killed more than 700 people - more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined.

To make sense of this campaign, I compiled data on the 71 terrorists who killed themselves between 1995 and 2004 in carrying out attacks sponsored by Osama bin Laden's network. I was able to collect the names, nationalities and detailed demographic information on 67 of these bombers, data that provides insight into the underlying causes of Al Qaeda's suicide terrorism and how the group's strategy has evolved since 2001.

Most important, the figures show that Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.

As the chart on bottom shows, the overwhelming majority of attackers are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries in which the United States has stationed combat troops since 1990. Of the other suicide terrorists, most came from America's closest allies in the Muslim world - Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco - rather than from those the State Department considers "state sponsors of terrorism" like Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq. Afghanistan produced Qaeda suicide terrorists only after the American-led invasion of the country in 2001. The clear implication is that if Al Qaeda was no longer able to draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is a heavy American combat presence, it might well collapse.

As the top chart shows, what is common among the attacks is not their location but the identity of the victims killed. Since 2002, the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama bin Laden has cited as supporting the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is good evidence that this shift in Al Qaeda's scheme was the product of deliberate choice. In December 2003, the Norwegian intelligence service found a lengthy Qaeda planning document on a radical Islamic Web site that described a coherent strategy for compelling the United States and its allies to leave Iraq. It made clear that more spectacular attacks against the United States like those of 9/11 would be insufficient, and that it would be more effective to attack America's European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing the economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear.

In particular, the document weighed the advantages of attacking Britain, Poland and Spain, and concluded that Spain in particular, because of the high level of domestic opposition to the Iraq war, was the most vulnerable.

"It is necessary to make utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain in March next year," the document stated. "We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program."

That prediction, of course, proved murderously prescient. Yet it was only one step in the plan: "Lastly, we emphasize that a withdrawal of the Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would put huge pressure on the British presence, a pressure that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly."

No matter who took the bombs onto those buses and subways in London, the attacks are clearly of a piece with Al Qaeda's post-9/11 strategy. And while we don't know if the claim of responsibility from a group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe was legitimate, an understanding of Al Qaeda's strategic logic may help explain why that message included a threat of further attacks against Italy and Denmark, both of which contributed troops in Iraq.

The bottom line, then, is that the terrorists have not been fundamentally weakened but have changed course and achieved significant success. The London attacks will only encourage Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the belief that they will succeed in their ultimate aim: causing America and its allies to withdraw forces from the Muslim world.

Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company