The Trump Administration is on a mission to vandalize our national parks, museums, and cultural institutions, stripping all mentions of black history and slavery (as well as mentions of Native Americans, Jews, Muslims, and other minorities) from our public celebrations and monuments about American History. Beyond the obvious racist, white supremacist, anti-American, hate inspired politics of the MAGA party, this represents a fundamental problem with one of our most sacred national institutions – Freedom of Religion.
American history begins with a quest for freedom FROM religion. This is not a typo; our early settlers came here to ESCAPE the religious dogma of state mandated religion. A prime example is the Puritans of New England who sought to be free from the orthodoxy of the Church of England. Similarly, other oppressed religious groups, especially Anabaptist, Calvinist, and other evangelical protestant sets fled from Europe in the hopes of not being constrained by state religion.[i] The popular narrative is that these people were denied the ability to worship as the saw fit; but this overlooks a very important question: Why were their religious expressions being suppressed? After all, for a king to expend resources chasing down a few dissenters who only wanted to pray in a different manner seems expensive and wasteful. No, these people had their religious practices suppressed because the ideas they espoused were POLITICALLY dangerous, not religiously.
Most Protestant sects in Europe[ii] were restricted not on religious grounds but for the politics their religions demanded. These sects understood the authority of kings and popes and sought to elevate the opinions of their “true believers” above that of the established conservative governments and ecclesiastical orders. This is the Enlightenment and the tenants that held up “divine rights” and “apostolic succession” were undergoing challenges everywhere, but evangelical sects wanted to go well beyond the schism between catholic and protestant Europe. They sought to overturn governments, all in the name of God; and these sects engrained some of the most damaging and destructive ideas into American Society.
Now MAGA wants to build a theocracy in America based on some of these horrors and do so in the name of American history. These are ideas that the Founding Fathers EXPLICITLY chose not to incorporate into our national blueprint (the US Constitution). It was not an omission, it was deliberate. They saw the problems with these ideas and while they respected religion, they built our nation as a secular nation in the hope that we would eventually mature as a society beyond the factors that drove people to accept these bad ideas as religious doctrine.
- Protestant Christianity, as practiced in America[iii], not only condones slavery but encouraged slavery. They argue that they are “Christianizing” heathens. American racism is often justified (still today) with biblical references. In Genesis, we see Abraham owned slaves and the practice of slavery was so prevalent in ancient Judea that Leviticus has multiple dictates on how slaves are to be treated.[iv] In the New Testament, Paul even describes the need for slaves to be subservient to their masters, the demand to return runaway slaves, and the expectation to not rebel against their Roman overseers (Ephesians 6).
Slavery is a scourge in American history. Not only is it the proximate cause of the American Civil War, but also centuries of racial inequality for black and the cause of massive genocides committed against American Indians. The Founding Fathers accepted that the current economic situation forestalled a proper abolition of slavery from the founding of our nation but most expected it to come soon thereafter. Thomas Jefferson wanted to blame slavery on King George in the Declaration of Independence, but the reality is the pernicious institution of chattel slavery is Christian.
- Most of the Protestant sects that fled to the New World also saw themselves morally superior to everyone outside their sect. You see remnants of this today in the very nature of the evangelical movement where they seek to “save” and “reform” anyone who is outside their narrow definition of believers. When these sects came to America it was not only to be liberated from the strictures of the state church but also so that they could impose their own strictures and enforce their own religion on all in their midst.
In Massachusetts, we see anyone who does not attend the Calvinist church and anyone who voices dissent against the approved interpretation of scriptures[v] or the edicts of the elders, punished – often severely. This authoritarian theocracy doled out floggings and time in the pillory. They burned people for “witchcraft” which was often just herbalism or mass hysteria. They exiled Roger Williams, expelling him for advocating that Native Americans were people with rights. They became authors of the very atrocities that they emigrated from Europe to escape.
- As the Spanish pushed the Moors and Jews out of Iberia, we see a new hatred emerge – racial hierarchies. Initially, Jews and Muslims were expelled and persecuted because they would not adopt the Catholic faith which gave legitimacy to the reign of Isabella and Ferdinan but soon a more universal justification of white supremacy began to take hold.
Justifying their actions with passages from Genesis 9 (story of Noah), Spaniards, and later all Europeans, justified the abuse, subjugation, exploitation, and even genocide of non-white races (primarily Africans and Native Americans but also Asians and Indians) based on the “curse of Ham.” This strange interpretation of Noah cursing Ham’s son Canaan to be a slave is used to justify everything from slavery to the genocides committed by Nazi Germany. It is particularly vexing because this hate has outlived legal slavery and manifest itself in Jim Crow Laws, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and all manner of hate crimes.
- Finally, Christian doctrine believes in exceptionalism, and they cling to the idea that only Christians are deserving of justice and rights. While Muslims, Jews, and most Eastern Religions accept there are many paths to enlightenment, Christians demand fidelity to their dogma and their practices. They vociferously evangelize, forcibly convert, chastise and discriminate against everyone who does not accept their zeitgeist.
In America this has resulted in religious tests for citizenship (overturned in 1793), religious oaths for office (sometimes expressing the tenets of specific sects), “reeducation” and genocide against Native Americans, slavery of both Africans and Native Americans, and human trafficking of numerous others for unregulated labor and illegal activities. It is this dogma of exceptionalism that resulted in centuries of discrimination and bigotry (not just racial discrimination but exploitation of anyone “foreign”), numerous hate crimes (and even fraternal societies dedicated to perpetuating that hate and xenophobia), and a false sense of national pride (actually hubris) that has held back American progress for most of the last half of the 20th and all of the 21st Centuries.
Now there are always individual counterexamples. The overwhelming evidence, however, is clear – Christianity destroys democracy. This was well understood by the Founding Fathers who were schooled in the founding principles of the Protestant movement, the history of the Spanish Inquisition, Cotton Mathers abusive rule of Massachusetts, and the numerous religious wars of Europe. Furthermore, most of the Founding Fathers were slave holders or worked with slave holders, so they fully understood the logic behind the clause Jefferson added but Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence.[vi] Prior to the American Revolution, every attempt at a people centered republican democracy fell to religious mobs and moral extremism, with one exception – The Dutch Republic.
Madison knew this and as he drafted the US Constitution, he PURPOSEFULLY OMITTED any and all references to God and religion. Madison was very devout in his religious observance, but he knew that if government and religion were allowed to comingle both would suffer. Politicians may be guided by their individual religious and moral precepts, but the state must be independent of bishops and popes. Likewise, people should be free to exercise religion as they see fit without oversight, restriction, taxation, or other interference from the government. He sincerely thought just leaving it out was good enough but in 1793, he made that exclusion explicit in the Bill of Rights. Like the Dutch, we tolerate all religions and give official preference to none.
Freedom FROM religion and Freedom OF religion are one in the same, and without it, our nation descends into the same sort of theocratic rule that plagues modern Iran. As you go to the polls in November, consider where some of the worst ideas of the Trump Administration come from. What is their justification, really, for spending huge amounts of American treasure to expel “foreigners” from our country? What is their justification for stripping voting rights from women? Why do they pursue a pointless war on Iran? Why do they care about homosexuality and transexuals? When you dig deep you will find a very narrow, very jaded and hateful expression of Christianity.
Christianity is meant to be a wonderful religion focused on love and charity. It has its roots in the teachings of Hillel and Jesus who only wanted people to treat each other with kindness and forgiveness, not hate and vengeance. When governments become religious, however, they lose those ideals. Trump would label Jesus a Communist and argue for his crucifixion – sound familiar?
In November, we have the opportunity to send a clear message. WE HAVE A REPUBLIC (NOT A MONARCHY!) IF WE CAN KEEP IT! We are a secular nation where everyone is welcome, and everyone has a role. We don’t want to change that; we want to keep the US Constitution and enforce it. We are religious people who do not mix sully that religion by mixing it with religion.
[Full disclosure, the author is not Christian]
[i] Jews, Catholics, and Muslims also came to America but in much smaller numbers.
[ii] Catholics in Spain expelled Jews and Muslims in order to gain political hegemony. Prior to this, they were restricted by other laws demanding separation not suppression.
[iii] All colonies not just British North America
[iv] Interestingly, the Pennsylvania Legislature strategically truncated Leviticus 25 when they inscribed the Liberty Bell, omitting the jubilee manumission of slaves.
[v] Ironically, challenging the approved interpretation was one of Martin Luther’s theses.
[vi] “He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation 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 for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
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Michael Carver -- Historical Interpreter/Reenactor 