Thanks to Michelle Goldberg for her timely book on religious nationalism. I’ve had the book on order for a while and it was great to get a taste of its content since it won’t arrive till next week. It certainly goes a long way in explaining why some of us don’t get misty eyed over a judge being booted from the bench because he wouldn’t remove a Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse.

I seem to get a lot of forwarded emails these days from family and associates (most of which are probably authored by the agitprop arm of the Heritage Foundation or others of that ilk) lamenting the fact that God is supposedly not allowed in schools. Or attacking the so called ‘dirty, godless humanists’ for trying to take ‘In God We Trust’ and “One nation under God” from the dollar bills and the pledge of allegiance. I try to point out to them that that both of those bon motts are later interpolations (“One nation, under God’ was added in the 1950’s in response to the cold war) but secularism has been so demonized by the right that my words just smack of more godless, liberal drivel (as an aside, this is the topic of Ann Coulters latest yet to be released tome ‘Godless: The Church of Liberalism’. It seems that we liberals are not just elitists anymore; we’re godless elitists now-- and heaven knows that’s the worse kind!).

I also received a letter from a woman recently stating that the U.S. was founded on the Christian Faith- to which I replied with the words from the Treaty of Tripoli: "…As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…” It was written by John Adams and ratified by Congress in the late 1700’s: The treaty is no longer valid of course but it gives you some insight into the thinking of our founding fathers and their emphatic intentions to create a secular state. After all they were all well-read students of history and very aware of what happens when the reigns of civil power are held by the clergy or religious interests. It’s interesting to note that many of them were even opposed to putting the work ‘God’ in The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution at all! (Most of the support for adding ‘God’ was from the Southern delegates; the same group of white men whose worldview justified slavery, lynching and later the Civil War. Not a particularly august intellectual pedigree to lay claim to). It seems that many of our founding fathers were prescient enough to know what a loaded word ‘God’ can become in a world with so many religions and multiple Christian denominations (Besides, many of them were deists whose concept of ‘God’ was far from the omniscient, bearded, superhero many envision today).

I originally come from the State of Utah and find it particularly alarming than some L.D.S. people (Mormons) have jumped onto this anti-secular bandwagon and in some cases have even unwittingly allied themselves with the factions of the Christian nationalist movement. This does not bode well for Mormonism! Especially since most of these groups do not consider Mormons to be Christians and will therefore not include them in their ‘reindeer games’ in the future. It is also alarming since the early Mormon Church leaders were as emphatic about a separation of church and state as the founding fathers were. They too were students of history and realized that this separation was a well-warranted safeguard for their own survival as a church.

I think this goes to show just how powerful the propaganda arm of the Christian fundamentalist movement is. They have been effective in mobilizing other religious denominations and even other religions to back up legislation, which is not even remotely in those other religions or denominations interest in the long run. They have accomplished this by getting the so-called ‘God-fearing’ set to rally around universal yet ambiguous catchphrases as ‘family values’, and ‘God’ in hopes of winning support for a much more pernicious agenda.

Chad Bagley

P.S. While I’m at it let me put in a plug for Kevin Phillips new book, ‘American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century’. It’s well worth the read.

Hey No Name Given, what kind of pathologies do you think fuel the so called military industrial complex?