The Bible told me so: History sheds light on the facts behind our ‘Christian Nation’

[COMMENTARY] One of the most common types of legislation passed by Congress is the non-binding resolution. These acts of Congress are usually innocuous, most of them being purely ceremonial acknowledgments of some legislator’s constituent. Representative So-and-So submits a bill to congratulate the local 4-H club on its 100th anniversary, the club gets a nice plaque commemorating its longevity and members get a picture with the congressman — that sort of thing. They’re usually passed without even a formal vote, just a “without objection, it is so ordered” procedure on the floor.

But sometimes such resolutions are advocated and debated solely for the purpose of political posturing. A perfect example is the “we like Christmas” resolution, submitted by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and passed by the House last Dec. 11. After a few perfunctory “Whereases,” the bill resolved that the House of Representatives:

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;

(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and

(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.

Continued -

The Senate, always the more serious of the two chambers of Congress, has yet to take up the resolution and likely won’t. The sole purpose of passing this resolution, of course, was political posturing. It allows Republican legislators to pander to their conservative Christian base by peddling feigned outrage that a whopping nine representatives voted against the resolution. This is the kind of emotional but totally substance-less hot-button issue that gets their dander up down at the church, and shrewd (if cynical) politicians routinely exploit such shallow outrage for political gain.

A week after that resolution was passed, a much more detailed and controversial resolution was submitted by Rep. James Forbes (R-Va.) with 23 co-sponsors, including Rep. Thad McCotter (R-Mich.) and Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). House Resolution 888 affirms “the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation’s founding and subsequent history” and it contains a dizzying list of dozens of “whereases,” most of them of the “famous American such-and-such once said he thought Jesus seemed like a swell guy” variety.

But sprinkled among those whereases are a number of highly dubious claims taken straight from the revisionist histories of folks like David Barton. Barton is the founder of a group called Wallbuilders, an ironic title since they spend all their time and energy trying to tear down the wall of separation between church and state (something Barton says is a myth). He’s also the co-chairman of the Texas Republican Party and a frequent guest on Christian TV shows. Barton is responsible for spreading more bad history in America than any three other people. Here is an example of how fast and loose these “Christian Nation” apologists can be:

Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible;

To anyone who has engaged the arguments of the Christian Nation crowd for any period of time, this claim is recognized instantly as one that is repeated over and over again in religious-right literature. The documentation it refers to is a study by historian Donald Lutz published in the American Political Science Review in 1984. It was first cited by a Christian Nation apologist in 1987 and has since taken off, appearing on thousands of webpages and in untold numbers of pamphlets, books and videos that purport to show that America was intended to be a Christian nation. For instance, in the curriculum put out by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS), whose advisory board is a virtual who’s who of religious-right leaders, it says:

“A study by the American Political Science Review on the political documents of the founding era, which was from 1760-1805, discovered that 94 percent of the period’s documents were based on the Bible, with 34 percent of the contents being direct citations from the Bible.”

But almost no one ever bothers to go back to the original source and see if the study actually supports their argument; in fact, it does not. The first thing one should notice is how vaguely these claims discuss what documents were actually used in the study. The resolution uses the phrase “the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era” and the NCBCPS statement uses “political documents of the founding era.” The implication is that these are documents written by the founding fathers about the Constitution, but that implication is false.

The documents that Lutz used in his study were simply documents printed for the public to read. Particularly popular at the time were pamphlets, about 10 percent of which were actually printings of sermons by prominent ministers. And those sermons were the primary source of all the Biblical references noted in the study. Lutz says so quite plainly:

“…From Table 1 we can see that the biblical tradition is most prominent among the citations. Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets; hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the era, amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations…”

Most important, the religious-right literature leaves out several key facts from Lutz’s study that tend to argue strongly against the conclusion that the Bible was an influence on the Constitution. Namely, it omits the fact that Lutz breaks down the whole period into two-year segments and found that during 1787 and 1788, when the Constitution was being debated and ratified, the references to the Bible in those documents printed for the public — many of which were printed to explain and defend the Constitution to the people — all but disappear. In his discussion of that two-year period, Lutz noted that there were only a few biblical references and none at all from the writings of Federalists (those who were advocating the passage of the Constitution). He concluded:

The Bible’s prominence disappears, which is not surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say. The Anti-Federalists do drag it in with respect to basic principles of government, but the Federalists’ inclination to Enlightenment rationalism is most evident here in their failure to consider the Bible relevant.

Nowhere in the Federalist Papers, for example — the 85 essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to explain and defend the proposed Constitution to the people of New York — does one find any reference to the Bible. Surely if the Bible was an influence on our founding document, those who explained its meaning and advocated its passage to a predominantly Christian public would have used the Bible to justify its provisions. The fact that they did not do so strongly suggests that there was no such influence; the fact that no one has ever managed to find a biblical analogue for the principles found in our Constitution confirms that.

There are many more myths and falsehoods among the statements in this resolution. For example:

Whereas 4 days after approving the Declaration, the Liberty Bell was rung;

In fact, the Liberty Bell was not rung at the time at all, much less in relation to the Declaration of Independence. By 1776, the belfry of the Pennsylvania State House had fallen into disrepair and the enormous bell could not be rung. As Chris Rodda notes in her critique of this resolution, the source for this story was a fictional account written in the mid-1800s.

The references to the Liberty Bell in this resolution are really quite odd, the sort of strange symbolism that is so common among the myths we often teach to schoolchildren. In reality, the Liberty Bell had nothing to do with the founding fathers or the Declaration of Independence. By sheer coincidence, it happened to hang at the building at which they met to deliberate the Constitution. The resolution also goes on to note that the bell is inscribed with a biblical passage:

Whereas the Liberty Bell was named for the Biblical inscription from Leviticus 25:10 emblazoned around it: `Proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof’;

But that inscription had nothing to do with the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It was chosen by a Quaker to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges. For that matter, it wasn’t even called the Liberty Bell at the time; it was simply the State House Bell. There simply is no connection between the bell and the founding fathers other than the pure happenstance of it hanging in the building where they met.

Another example of the shoddy scholarship that informs this resolution:

Whereas in 1777, Congress, facing a National shortage of `Bibles for our schools, and families, and for the public worship of God in our churches,’ announced that they `desired to have a Bible printed under their care & by their encouragement’ and therefore ordered 20,000 copies of the Bible to be imported `into the different ports of the States of the Union’;

This claim, like the previous ones, appears in various forms in untold numbers of religious-right webpages and documents. And like the others, it is a distortion of the truth. The quotes in the statement came not from Congress but from a letter written to Congress by three ministers requesting that they import 20,000 Bibles. And as Rodda noted both in her book and in the article cited above, the plan was tabled and no Bibles were ever imported.

One last example:

Whereas the 1783 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Revolution and established America as an independent begins with the appellation `In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity’;

This one borders on ironic. We had just fought the Revolutionary War against England, a nation with an established church; we would go on to form a new nation that forbids the establishment of a church, rejecting completely the notion that church and state were to be united. Because England was officially Anglican, they began all of their treaties at the time with those words; this had precisely nothing to do with the United States. (I’d change this a bit: After the first sentence: “The treaty was written by men from England, the nation we had just fought in the Revolutionary War. England had an established church; we would go on …”)

It is (no perhaps needed here) especially ironic that the resolution would cite a document endorsing the concept of the trinity given that most of the key founding fathers were explicitly anti-trinitarian. Thomas Jefferson bitterly mocked those who believed in the trinity, which he called “metaphysical insanity.” In a letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp in 1816, he wrote, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”

Jefferson argued that a concept so absurd as the trinity could only be spread through authoritarian brutality, so contrary was it to reason that no man could accept it freely. To James Smith in 1822 he wrote, “The hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.”

John Adams likewise scoffed at the notion of the trinity, often in his letters to Jefferson over the last decade and a half of their lives, but also in an 1816 letter to his son, John Quincy Adams: “An incarnate God!!! An eternal, self-existent, omnipresent omniscient Author of this stupendous Universe, suffering on a Cross!!! My Soul starts with horror, at the Idea, and it has stupefied the Christian World. It has been the Source of almost all of the Corruptions of Christianity.”

To cite a British treaty endorsing the trinity as proof of America’s religious heritage is both absurd and ironic, but much more so in light of the fact that the most important and influential founding fathers ridiculed that notion repeatedly. But this is the sort of cherry picking that is so common to this sort of shallow history. The resolution in front of the House does not make a law, so it might well be viewed as innocuous. But surely America deserves better than to have our representatives wasting their time endorsing revisionist claims of fake history, claims they have almost certainly never bothered to examine for accuracy.