I saw that article when it came out 10 years ago. He’s definitely on the pessimistic side, and fails to consider how many millions of Christians are praying for America, and how God answers those prayers, and prevents judgment from overtaking us.

http://KevinCraig.us/religion/providence.htm

Actually, Americans should be allowed to swear in court on any holy book they desire. Koran is cool, if that is what Muslims desire. Certainly the Christian Bible is not their book. In the same way, Jews in America should not be made to swear over any Bible that contains the Christian New Testament, as the New Testament is anti-semitic and anti-Jewish. And yet, for centures, American Jews have made forced to swear oaths over this non-Jewish Bible. Why? Have there been any court cases where Jews in the USa asked for a bible that was just the OLD Testamewnt and did not contain any of that anti-semitic gospel stuff? Yes, everyone should swear oaths and allegiances under any God book they wish. Muslims too. Sure. USA is not a Christian country, never was.

The City of Bethel doesn’t http://ykalaska.blogspot.com/2005/06/re-city-govt-support-for-some-churches.html

["I for one would be tempted to swear my oath upon The HitchhikerÂ’s Guide to the Galaxy." I find large silk scarves are nearly as useful as towels.]

i think a “true mythology,” that is, refashioning the past in a relevant but accurate (this is a hard dance) way so as to inspire and shape the present is the best product politically motivated individuals can put on the market.

A problem with American politics is that the type of people who look towards independent thinking or potentialities (i.e. socialists and utopians and the such) rather than past precedent to justify their arguments have been systematically rooted out. And now all we have left are conservatives.

This is problematic even if you don’t support utopianism and the such (as I don’t), because the dialectic gets all f@#ked up and you get a lot of stupidity in the public discourse out of a lack of ideological diversity.

i am one who believes that truth should strive to be independent of norms, and that norms do not follow from truth (though the implementation of those norms to shape “a more perfect society” are “canalized” by truth). and yes, i also agree that many secularists create a false mythology.

in fact, to become typological, let me speak specifically of “the west.” i believe in the united states secularist intellectuals on the Left valorize athens. i believe christian and jewish intellectuals on the Right valorize jerusalem. but i believe both neglect the organically essential contributions of the germanic substrate and the roman exemplar (we are a republic after all!). to use examples, christian conservatives often seem to want to distill Western civilization down to the essence of christianity. many atheist Leftists seem to want to project the history of the West as the period after 1800 and the period between 500-400 BCE in athens. but there are many strands which come together, the growth and development of the civilization was a gradual process, a continuous flux between various strands (which waxed and waned).

of course, this sort of narrative is hard to sloganize, so it is difficult to push forward. to make an analogy with the south asian example, hindu nationalists and muslim radicals often try to recreate a past before 1900 that fits their own mythology of how south asians viewed their religious and ethnic identity.*

as for the relevance of such historical points to public policy, you could attempt to model the dialogue according to rawls’ a theory of justice, or nozicks anarchy, state and utopia. but such relatively a priori axiomatic state-of-nature narratives will have few takers. rather, i think a “true mythology,” that is, refashioning the past in a relevant but accurate (this is a hard dance) way so as to inspire and shape the present is the best product politically motivated individuals can put on the market. it’s been done before, though the american colonials to a great extent (in my reading) revolted for reasons of personal self-interest, and rhetorically justified their actions via the ‘traditional liberties of englishmen,’ the state which arose after the revolution modeled itself on ancient roman motifs, a res publica with a senate, balance of powers (thank you rome and montesquieu!) an executive with terms (traditionally limited by custom until FDR, and later limited by statute).

• note that i also am skeptical of subalternizing south asian history so that europeans became the sole drivers of identity formation after 1800, as if south asians themselves were passive, malleable clay without form or self-conceptualizing capacities. i believe there is a middle-path between acknowledging the importance of british culture as a catalytic force in identity formation and the indigenous trajectory of cultural development which served as the base for the transformative effects of british cultural imperialism.

I think you write with good balance here. I might research a little and nitpick about exactly how sharp a break this was given the options available (esp. considering that the French Revolution occurred almost contemporaraneous to this event and people like Tom Paine staked out more radical positions) and the extent to which the laws, administrative rules, etc. were imbued with a basis in various Protestant ethics and worldviews, but I generally agree.

My primary underlying premise in all this has been that, as with so many other things, the radical secularist types that have a public platform and mild popular support are scarcely more accurate in the historical basis they make for their ideological claims than the Christian right. Which is fine for now, but once they get into power, they’re going to be annoying and repeat the same farcical cycle of ideological conquest and disempowerment based on a shoddy or convenient misreading of history.

It would be much easier if everyone just showed their cards and let the chips fall where they may (and pursued some structural reform that would actually allow things to get done in this country in a speedier and more democratic fashion). There should be little relevance, imo, to contemporary political arguments that seek to justify themselves in terms of “the founders’” intentions. Even less so when those that make those arguments pretend it is “progressive” and rather than inherently conservative exegesis that leads to bad policymaking strategy and/or historiographically unsound reimagining that continues the glorification of these people that wrote the Declaration, the Constitution, etc., when they were really just imperfect people like the rest of us (even if some of them were smart and well educated). In either case, to look back two hundred years to resolve debates about women’s rights, regulation of the Internet, sexuality, or the importance (or lack thereof) of certain provisions of the Constitution and other traditions instead of looking outside the window makes little sense if you’re interested in understanding the present.

I say that with the caveat that if this country (the U.S.) actually had a viable Left, I would value the role of tradition (and other forms of conservative thinking) more in political thinking (and I do so even now in particular contexts).

well, a lot of this is semantics. i think the word anachronism is key: we need to understand the historical context. i don’t particularly care that none of the founders were atheists (that i know of), since atheism was an almost non-existent public position aside from a few outliers in the 18th century (d’holbach and bradlaugh for example). rather, in the context of the times many of the founders were intellectuals of their time (jefferson was a first rate scientist, adams a self-made humanist) in that they rejected revealed religion for natural religion and some form of deism, coupled with (in for example jefferson’s case) a reverence for cultural christianity and jesus the man as an ethical exemplar. i suspect that their skepticism of ‘old time religion’ explains their attitude toward the relationship (or relative lack of) between church and state in the early republic (also, locke, who was an inspiration for many tended toward asserting neutrality in his social contract stating, reserving discrimination only against atheists).

in the context of european culture at the time (pre-french revolution) this was somewhat peculiar. federick the great seems to have been a freethinker who rejected religion, but it wasn’t until the 19th century the idea of being “confessionless” (that is, without affiliation to the protestant or roman catholic confessions) was normalized in germany. remember, dissenters still suffered penalties (though they were tolerated) in 18th century england, and roman catholics were still disenfranchised, and england was a relative exemplar of toleration. the netherlands, it is true, long had a history of toleration, but it was also strongly dominated by the calvinist reformed church, who had over time rejected the more traditional (post-constantinian) idea of universal salvation of the nation for a more narrowly constrained somewhat radical protestant notion of a saved elect in the midst of a sinful society. the netherlands tolerated other religions (roman catholicism, liberal protestants, jews and radical protestants), but there was no religious equality (until later).

so i will sum it up with this: the founding of the republic was not a strike for revolutionary atheism. but, i do think it was a major discontinuity with the long tradition of state power sanctified by a particular church or religious tradition (just as it was a large scale republican experiment in a world dominated by monarchies). rather than a christian nation, it was a nation of christians (and remember, it is significant that jews were invited to washington’s inauguration, somewhat to the shock of contemporary observors). this is important because it goes to the heart of the critique of christian conservatives that this nation was founded fundamentally as a christian nation. it was founded as a christian nation (most people were professing christians after all!), but it was wasn’t fundamentally christian in its design. this in contrast to the british monarchy, where the head of state also commands the church, or the spanish monarchy which was solidified in large part by its status as a catholic monarchy (until the 19th century the spanish regions had their own customary laws and a great deal of autonomy, and their shared iberian identity was probably more based on catholic faith than anything else). and we all know of the power and venality of the french church which resulted in the outbreak of anti-clericalism (common to most catholic countries).

addendum: many of the founders of nationalist movements in the 19th century were against the established church in some way. simone bolivar and giuseppe garibaldi for example. i would argue that the populism (at least in its forms) of american democracy explains the piety of its political class: when most white males were allowed sufferage you see, in my judgement, a sharp trend toward political candidates affirming populist and orthodox religious viewpoints, while all the early presidents tended toward more elitist and heterodox religious attitudes. i think this is gotten even more extreme in the modern media era, william howard taft was elected in the early 1900s as a unitarian, something that couldn’t happen today-his son bob taft, senator from ohio, was non-practicing episcopalian, while his grandson (or great-grandson, i forget?) is a methodist (unitarians then weren’t as secular humanistic as they are today, but they were certainly not christian in the orthodox sense since they rejected the divine christ).

I don’t really think about Paine as a founder, since his internationalist and more radical views (to the limited extent I know them) were essentially written out of the Constitution. He didn’t actually participate in the process of writing or subsequently serve as part of the development of the system (as Jefferson did).

In any case, thank you for your insights. It’s good to be prodded into looking into this further. Look at the section entitled “The Bill of Rights and the Establishment Clause” in this paper (pdf). If it’s to be trusted, it makes a pretty clear case of the existence between tension between active promotion of religion and simple tolerance of it. It’s still hard for me to buy what I consider anachronistic arguments that politics has traditionally been fundamentally divorced from faith in the United States since the writing of the Constitution. I think a lot of the more radical secular positions came about in the last 50 years or so.

And of course, ‘meaningful’ objects can be actual objects like religious books, or even people – like when as a kid I used to pinch my adams apple (lightly) and take oath on my mother’s soul, I was entirely serious and NEVER told a lie following it. (this sounds weird written out, much simpler and ‘natural’ when doing it, trust me!)