It’s election season. Time to dust off the Christian Nation myth.
I haven’t given much thought to Sally Quinn for several years, since I last read dead tree newspapers regularly, in the hoary pre-internet days of college. Now what the hell is this thing?
Romney captures the God vote at first debate
Edit: Based on Jamesbman’s comment drawing my attention to Sally Quinn’s other recent columns, I think it’s likely that this one was an intentional troll. If so, my opinion stands that it was a bad one.
Yeah, to whom will this be news? Republicans pander to people who wish the government enforced Christianity every year. If Romney hadn’t been trying hard not to talk about being a Mormon, he would have spoken out a lot more stridently and “owned” this topic months ago. There’s been a lot to hate about the 2012 election season, but I will say that until now, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little talk there was of either candidate being “chosen by God” or “called to serve” or other such meaningless noise. But Sally’s got the religion beat at the Washington Post, so obviously she’s excited for it to come back front and center.
Pure, uncut, weapon-grade revisionist history bollocks, thanks very much.
While watching the debate with my sister Keryn, I had an open thread on Facebook where several friends and I posted our real-time reactions in comments. When Romney say “Part of claiming your citizenship is claiming a belief in God, even if you are not Christian” my precise remark was, “Mitt: ‘Suck it, atheists.’”
No, Sally, the idea of being American and believing in God have never been synonymous. To say so is an insult to the founding fathers who did, in fact, seriously debate the question of how much of a role religion should have in public life, and came to the conclusion: pretty much none. As Farrell Till pointed out in his essay on “The Christian Nation Myth,”
Such a view of American history is completely contrary to known facts. The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it.
Thomas Jefferson said, “It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest.”
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