Christianist revisionism: under (the fog of) God
Christianism and jingoism often go hand-in-hand, and usually tagging along is the ridiculously distorted notion that the Founding Fathers of this country were a bunch of bible-thumping Jesus freaks. This is simply not true. Andrew Sullivan points to a particularly egregious example of this Christianist revisionism from the Concerned Women for America:
I’ll let Andrew do the criticism:
Fortunately, if you go to the announcement on CWA’s website, they seem to have corrected the factual error. I still disagree with their stance. I find loyalty oaths to be somewhat creepy and Orwellian, especially ones that throw a religious assertion into the mix. But I’m glad CWA has the integrity to correct their factual errors. That’s what the blogosphere is for: to call you on your shit. Kudos to those who listen.
And just for the record, I do find all the “Under God” and “In God We Trust” rhetoric rather annoying. Unlike Sullivan, I feel such religious assertions should be removed from our currency and other official areas. I am as proud and convinced of my own atheistic religious beliefs as the theists are in theirs, but I would never dream of having some official proclamation of atheism emblazoned on our money. I would like the same respect from my fellow Americans who do believe in God. However, I do think there are more important fights than purging our nation of luke-warm ceremonial deism. I’d take an end to U.S. torture or a repeal of the estate-tax give-away over removing “In God We Trust” any day of the week.
Swann said, "As Americans commemorate Flag Day, it is also appropriate to remember the importance of keeping God in our Pledge. CWA strongly supports the mention of God in our nation's oath in keeping with our constitutional freedoms. We are free from an established religion and free to worship as we choose. Our country's founding fathers were men of faith who intentionally included the phrase 'under God' in an oath that serves as a symbol of loyalty and patriotism to our great country.
I’ll let Andrew do the criticism:
The small factual problem is that the pledge was not created or conceived by the founding fathers, whose deist, cafeteria Christianity CWFA would now almost certainly deride as "secular humanism". (Very few of the founders believed Jesus was divine. Can you imagine what CWFA would say about a politician today who shared Jefferson's worldview?) The pledge was invented by a socialist in 1892; and the phrase "under God" was added as recently as 1954.
Fortunately, if you go to the announcement on CWA’s website, they seem to have corrected the factual error. I still disagree with their stance. I find loyalty oaths to be somewhat creepy and Orwellian, especially ones that throw a religious assertion into the mix. But I’m glad CWA has the integrity to correct their factual errors. That’s what the blogosphere is for: to call you on your shit. Kudos to those who listen.
And just for the record, I do find all the “Under God” and “In God We Trust” rhetoric rather annoying. Unlike Sullivan, I feel such religious assertions should be removed from our currency and other official areas. I am as proud and convinced of my own atheistic religious beliefs as the theists are in theirs, but I would never dream of having some official proclamation of atheism emblazoned on our money. I would like the same respect from my fellow Americans who do believe in God. However, I do think there are more important fights than purging our nation of luke-warm ceremonial deism. I’d take an end to U.S. torture or a repeal of the estate-tax give-away over removing “In God We Trust” any day of the week.
Comments
I also wonder how our Founding Fathers would've fared socially, what with the stockings, powdered wigs, and all....
That's why we call ourselves the "reality based community".
I think a good symptom of ideological dysfunction is the divorce from the observable world. You always have to check back with it. Many religious and political ideologies constantly denigrate this "fallen" world, saying what happens in it doesn't count, or that it is inherently corrupt, or that any actions taken in it are justified if they are going to bring about some future utopia.
Communism fell into this ("We live in a workers paradise!") and I think American Christianism has leapt into it most enthusiastically ("George Bush is a man of God and we should support him!") Both these delusions are based on a priori deductions rather than observations of the world.
I think American fundamentalists are trained to think this way because of the way they are taught about the Bible (the literal, final, infallible word of God). Once you've turned off your critical faculties, and been told that doing so is a virtue of the highest kind, it seems very easy to do so in other arenas. I see religious fundamentalism as a "gateway drug" to political authoritarianism, and that's why it scares me so much.
I think those on the other side of the political spectrum have been guilty of this too (e.g. "Anything the US does is inherently corrupt"). But it isn't leftist delusion that are damaging this country right now, because lefists aren't in power.