The Virginia assembly is considering a bill, HJ537, which would amend the Virginia constitution’s provisions concerning religious liberty and disestablishment, provisions that were taken directly from Thomas Jefferson’s Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. Currently the Virginia Constitution, in Article 1, Section 16, contains the following language:

That religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other. No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

This language is taken directly from the text of Jefferson’s act. While he was in France, James Madison, his partner in so many battles for religious freedom and disestablishment, brought this Act up for a vote in the Virginia assembly and pushed it through, over the protests of Patrick Henry, who was pushing an alternative bill to allow the use of state tax dollars to support multiple establishments. In 1785, Madison composed a document called the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, one of the most powerful and compelling political arguments in our nation’s history. In this document addressed to his fellow legislators in the Virginia General Assembly, Madison argues against Henry’s bill, which would have assessed a tax for the support of multiple Christian denominations, and for the principle that no man should ever be forced by government to support any religious institution that he does not himself believe in. “Who does not see,” Madison wrote,”that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?” Madison’s argument won the day; Patrick Henry’s bill was defeated and Jefferson’s Act was enacted. The text above was incorporated into the Virginia constitution as a result. Now Charles Carrico, a Virginia delegate, wants to change that provision and add the following to it:

To secure further the people’s right to acknowledge God according to the dictates of conscience, neither the Commonwealth nor its political subdivisions shall establish any official religion, but the people’s right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including public schools, shall not be infringed; however, the Commonwealth and its political subdivisions, including public school divisions, shall not compose school prayers, nor require any person to join in prayer or other religious activity.

Such a shoddy and dishonest premise for the bill. The people, of course, already have the right to “acknowledge God according to the dictates of conscience” in Virginia, so there is no need to “secure” that right further. What they do not have the right to do is force others to do the same, or to support it with their tax dollars, or to sit through the religious exercises of others in a mandatory setting designed and intended for another purpose entirely, which is the only thing this bill would change. Each and every Virginia citizen is free to pray whenever and wherever they wish, in churches, in their homes and even in school; they just can’t expect that everyone else should have to stop what they’re doing to either join in or wait for them to finish before going about their work. Allowing prayer in schools does nothing to advance the cause of religious freedom on the part of those who wish to pray, as they already have that freedom, but it does inconvenience others, who then have to interrupt what they are forced to be there to do, which is to get an education, to wait for others to do publicly and collectively what they are already allowed to do individually and in privately.

The absurdity of this bill can be seen by asking one simple question. Are only Christian prayers allowed, or would others be allowed as well? I would suggest that whatever the answer is, we’ve got a problem. If the answer is that only Christian prayers are allowed, then you clearly do have an establishment of religion. I doubt anyone would argue that. But if the answer is that other prayers are allowed as well, imagine what would happen in a situation with a Muslim teacher and a class with numerous Muslim students. Can you imagine the reaction of the Christians in a community where a Muslim teacher decided to exercise their “right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property” by interrupting their teaching 5 times each day so his students could get out their prayer rugs, kneel upon them facing Mecca, and pray to Allah (which is merely the Arabic word for God)? Would you care to wager on the response from the same people who are for this bill? As I said, either answer is a problem. Either you are establishing Christianity as the official religion by allowing only those prayers to be said, or you would literally have open religious warfare in any school district with a mixture of religions represented in the student body.

As it turns out, Carrico is only really interested in allowing Christian prayers because that is our “founding religion”, and he bizarrely appeals to the example of Muslim theocracies as one we should follow! From the AP report on the bill:

The religious-freedom resolution found wide support for remedying what its sponsor, Del. Charles W. Carrico Sr., contends is a growing bias against Christians.

He said other nations upheld their founding religious tenets and compelled respect for them, specifically noting the Muslim culture of Arab countries as an example.

By all means, Saudi Arabia, or perhaps Afghanistan under the Taliban, are exactly the role models we should be emulating. Good lord, did this guy really get elected to public office? Even better than that, he also appeals to a false quotation from Patrick Henry, the man whose views lost in 1786:

Then, he quoted Patrick Henry in appealing for greater leeway for Christianity.

“I want to quote this phrase — [Henry] was a five-term governor of Virginia — (who) once said, ‘It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was not founded by religionists but by Christians,'” Carrico said.

There’s just one problem – Henry never said that. This is one of a long list of quotations that have been foisted on the public by the likes of David Barton, but even he reluctantly had to admit that this quote has never been found in Henry’s writings or speeches. But of course, even if he had said it, it would not be an argument in favor of Carrico’s bill. Even if Henry had said that the nation was founded by Christians, it would not logically follow that therefore Christians should be allowed to have special time set aside for them to say their prayers during school while everyone else has to watch or have their education interrupted. If you have to resort to such weak and illogical arguments to support your position, your position must be pretty hard to defend.

Also note that Carrico is actually arguing that not having the right to force others to observe your religious observances whenever you feel like having them is evidence of “a growing bias against Christians”. Isn’t it incredible how they think not allowing them to have exclusive right to push their religious views on others is “bias against Christians”, yet they refuse to admit that allowing them to do so constitutes bias against non-Christians? It should also be noted here that Carrico does not speak for all Christians, many of whom are staunch advocates of separation. And this was always the case, going back to the original debate between James Madison and Patrick Henry. In a letter to James Monroe, Madison noted that the churches were divided over Patrick Henry’s proposal for establishment in that day as well:

The Episcopal clergy are generally for it. . . . The Presbyterians seem as ready to set up an establishment which would take them in as they were to pull one down which shut them out. The Baptists, however, standing firm by their avowed principle of the complete separation of church and state, declared it to be “repugnant to the spirit of the Gospel for the Legislature thus to proceed in matters of religion, that no human laws ought to be established for the purpose.

Let us hope that the good people of Virginia put a stop to this nonsense. One could only wish that there was a Madison today, a man who could, through the sheer power of his words, convince his fellow citizens that they are headed down the wrong path. The principle of separation that were so brilliant advocated by Madison and Jefferson have served America and the state of Virginia well for 220 years; to allow a man like Carrico to invalidate them on the basis of such facile arguments would be a disgrace.

A couple days ago, I received an email from a correspondent named Nick, a man I’ve encountered in a political chat room before as well. He’s one of those really hardcore religious right types who, as you will see, absolutely glories in his ignorance, and he was bound and determined to “educate” me. His initial e-mail simply said this:

I know you are smarter than all of these folks but maybe you can learn something

And then it had a link to this article on someone else’s webpage. There’s nothing original in the article. It is the same article that has been emailed around a million times, so perhaps you’ve seen it. In fact, in December of 2003 I did a line by line refutation of this very same article, which I had traced back, naturally, to the Worldnutdaily. The article is literally full of falsehoods and irrelevant arguments to prove that the US is an officially “Christian nation”. Here was my reply to Nick’s initial email, detailing only a few of the outright falsehoods in the article:

The page that you sent me to is full of one false claim after another, and it is one that has been circulating on the internet for years. In fact, I wrote a line by line refutation of it in December 2003 on my webpage. You can find that refutation here. By my count, there are at least 3 documents quoted that are forgeries. There is no “George Washington’s Prayer Journal”, he kept no such document. Every single Washington scholar says it is a fraudulent document that is nothing more than copies out of the anglican Book of Common Prayers. The quotes from Patrick Henry are completely irrelevant to the question of the basis of our government because Patrick Henry didn’t have anything to do with the Constitution. He refused to go to the Constitutional Convention specifically because he knew he was in the minority in wanting to establish a Christian theocratic government. He campaigned AGAINST the passage of the Constitution, partially on the grounds that it was a Godless document that would bring down the wrath of God upon us all. So citing him as evidence of the purpose of the Constitution is pretty silly, don’t you think?

The quote from Jefferson claiming to be a real Christian is actually two entirely different quotes put together, neither of which was written “in the front of his well worn bible”. Both are in letters to friends, and the context shows what he meant by a “real Christian”. Jefferson rejected completely the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, all claims of miracles, the resurrection, the atonement, and so forth. He said so quite explicitly many times. He even denied that Jesus had ever claimed to be divine at all, arguing that the apostles distorted his mission, which Jefferson argued was a completely human one. He believed that Jesus was nothing more than a philosopher and that he had created an excellent system of ethics, but that is all.

The quote that is allegedly from George Washington’s farewell address is also a complete forgery. Nowhere in it do the words “it is impossible to govern the world rightly without God and the bible” appear in that speech. You can look up the full text of the speech online.

The claim that John Adams was the president of the American Bible Society is also, surprise surprise, entirely false. The American Bible Society wasn’t even formed until 1816 and Adams never had any involvement at all with the organization. Neither did his son, John Quincy Adams, as the document claims, and the quote attributed to him about the revolution the “indissoluble bond of civil society and Christianity” is also a forgery. You can find the whole list of forged quotations here, including the admission by Christian nation apologist David Barton that those quotes have never been found in any of the writings or speeches of the men they are attributed to.

There are many more falsehoods contained in that document, and I’ve documented them all in the essay I linked to above. You have, like millions of others, fallen for a document riddled with factual errors and lies, and every one of them has been thoroughly documented as such. You’ve simply been lied to.

Now, someone who actually cared about whether the beliefs he had were true or not would have read this and thought, “Hmmm. Maybe I better do some more research here.” At the very least, they would have followed the links I provided to see what the evidence was. But my intrepid emailer, predictably, doesn’t really care about silly things like evidence and logic. His reply, in total:

You really have a hangup on religion and try to mask it with your self agrandizing (sic) pompous fake intellectual posturing -it is clear to me what you are -you aways (sic) say -I wrote a paper on this or that -and the whole world is wrong -no -you are clearly an athiest (sic) with hateful intent

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the average religious right voter. I have run into people like this time and time again, enough that I believe it is pretty much the norm in the religious right (which does not mean everyone in that group fits the description, only that most do). He doesn’t care about the truth a bit. He won’t even look at the evidence. To this mindset, the world is a very simple place – Christians are good, everyone else is bad, and any suggestion that there is anything other than those two simple categories is nothing but high fallutin’ fancy talk from the overeducated. They positively revel in their ignorance, actually proud of the fact that they don’t know much (You can see it the way they use the word “intellectual” almost as a curse), and they have built an impenetrable wall around their beliefs to insulate them from all need to think about them once they are formed.

For such people, the world functions as little more than a cartoon, everything drawn in simple black and white to distinguish between the good guys and the bad guys. They don’t just internalize their beliefs, they build their entire emotional security around their beliefs so that an attack upon their beliefs constitutes an attack on them. That is why the immediate response when confronted with evidence is to pronounce that you are an evil person (an “athiest”, as he put it) and therefore nothing you say is worthy of consideration. It’s a perfect force field to keep all rational thinking out because, if your beliefs are intertwined with your self image, if your beliefs turn out to be fraudulent, then you do too.

This kneejerk anti-intellectualism among the hard right rank and file is clear to anyone who has observed them. Thinking is bad, evidence is even worse, and the whole thing is probably a trick of the devil. HL Mencken, as usual, captured the mindset perfectly:

They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.

Mencken, of course, believed that to be true of all religious people. I do not, as I simply know too many brilliant men and women of faith to whom it does not apply. But it is undoubtedly true of a sizable portion of the folks in the pews, who have been spoonfed lies for so long they don’t know the difference anymore between lies and truth. And most sadly, they don’t really care.

Jon Rowe has a new post hammering yet another badly reasoned article against church/state separation. The article in question is written by Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. As is very common for such articles, it includes a number of quotes that have been falsely attributed to the founding fathers. Such quotes are passed around among the religious right like fruitcakes at Christmas, and most of them simply do not exist. Of the four quotations he has in his article, 3 are completely fictitious, but traced to William Fedderer and, more recently, to David Barton.

Barton is the founder of Wallbuilders, a religious right group that pushes the Christian Nation meme around the country. He’s also the deputy chairman of the Texas Republican party and was hired by the Republican National Committee as a campaign consultant to work on behalf of the Bush campaign in reaching out to evangelical ministers. He is also the primary modern source for a long list of such fraudulent quotations, as his books and videos have been widely distributed among the religious right and in churches nationwide. When he was confronted by scholars who showed him that they were frauds, he put out a sheet of “questionable quotes” and admitted that they could not be found in the writings of the men they were attributed to. But the damage had already been done, a fact easily shown by how often they show up to this day despite his admission. Millions and millions of people got the fake quotes; only a small percentage of them have seen the retraction. Hence, they continue to show up on a daily basis in op-ed pieces and letters to the editor and in articles like the one Rowe demolishes.

It turns out that our suspicions were entirely correct and Steven Williams, the teacher in Cupertino, California who is suing the school district because the principal requires him to get her approval before handing out any supplemental material to his class, is one hell of a proselytizer. Here is a picture of one of his supplemental handouts, dealing with Easter. There is only one thing on it that is in any way relevant to teaching American history, and that is highly distorted. The rest is pure proselytizing. A public school teacher cannot assign his students to read the bible, interview a Christian family or church worker to find out about their beliefs, or “review the famous teachings of Jesus”, especially when teaching American history (perhaps in a comparative religion class in high school). Looking at that handout, it is immediately obvious why the principal requires that teacher to get all such handouts approved first. The teacher clearly has no understanding of what is appropriate or constitutional in a public school classroom.

He also has a handout that includes numerous false quotations from the founding fathers, including the famous non-quote from Washington (“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without the Bible”). Washington did not say that, and even David Barton, the uber-distorter of the religious right, had to remove it from his books and videotapes. Nor did Jefferson say, “The Bible makes the best people in the world.” Those quotes are invented out of thin air. They’ve been circulating among Christian Nation proponents for decades, but no one has ever found them in the writings or speeches of the men they are attributed to. In fact, one of his handouts contains a selection of quotes from “George Washington’s Prayer Journal”, a document that appears to be an outright forgery composed of excerpts from a far older document and falsely attributed to Washington. Franklin Steiner writes:

Some 30 years ago it was proclaimed that in his youth he composed a prayer book for his own use, containing a prayer for five days, beginning with Sunday and ending with Thursday. The manuscript of this prayer book was said to have been found among the contents of an old trunk. It was printed and facsimiles published. Clergymen read it from the altar, one of them saying it contained so much “spirituality” that he had to stop, as he could not control his emotions while reading it.

Yet, while this prayer book was vociferously proclaimed to have been written by Washington, there was not an iota of evidence that he ever had anything to do with it, or that it even ever belonged to him. A little investigation soon pricked the bubble. Worthington C. Ford, who had handled more of Washington’s manuscripts than any other man except Washington himself, declared that the penmanship was not that of washington. Rupert Hughes (Washington, vol. 1, p. 658) gives facsimile specimens of the handwriting in the prayer book side by side with known specimens of Washington’s penmanship at the time the prayer book was supposed to have been written. A glance proves that they are not by the same hand.

Then in the prayer book manuscript all of the words are spelled correctly, while Washington was a notoriously poor speller. But the greatest blow it received was when the Smithsonian Institute refused to accept it as a genuine Washington relic. That Washington did not compose it was proved by Dr. W.A. Croffutt, a newspaper correspondent of the Capital, who traced the source of some of the prayers to an old prayer brook in the Congressional Library printed, in the reign of James the First.

I have sent an inquiry to a noted Washington scholar to get more information on the legitimacy of this “prayer journal”. If that’s representative of his handouts at all, he’s going to lose his lawsuit and he’s going to lose badly.

You can see many of these handouts here. Hat tip to Liz Ditz.

Jon Rowe has an interesting post up about a new book, available online here, by Gary North, the Christian reconstructionist. The book is called Conspiracy in Philadelphia, and North’s primary thesis is that the constitution itself was an illegal document that overstepped the boundaries of the mandate given to those at the convention and replaced the Articles of Confederation without going through the process mandated under those Articles. His secondary thesis is that the constitution itself was a blatantly Godless and atheistic document that not only overturned centuries of tradition whereby Christianity and the state were wed together, but also overthrew the covenental conception of government (very important to Christian reconstructionists) for a social contract conception (which was a product of Enlightenment philosophy, not Christian philosophy). Hence, he views the constitution as a rejection of Christian conceptions of government, which puts him rather at odds with the David Barton/Jerry Falwell “the constitution is a Christian document” crowd. But the Barton/Falwell view is clearly historical revisionism given the fact that the religious right at the time of the constitution clearly considered the constitution to be a godless document that would bring down the wrath of God upon us.

Jon sent me a link to this book a few days ago because he knew I’d want to write about it too. We’re both fascinated by this subject. And as he points out, there is much that is accurate about North’s book. He is absolutely right to point out that the ban on religious tests for office in Article 6 of the constitution is an enormously important change in the history of government. At that time, all but two of the 13 original states had religious tests for public office, requiring that one be a Christian who believed in the Trinity and the truth of the bible (the wording varied by state, of course). Only Rhode Island, formed under the leadership of Roger Williams, and Virginia, under the leadership of Madison and Jefferson, did not have such tests, and Virginia had just gotten rid of them the year before with the passage of Jefferson’s Act for Establishing Religious Freedom.

But on the subject of the constitution having been illegally passed, North undermines his own primary thesis. He notes, for example, that the Articles of Confederation allowed for changes in the articles as long as the changes were “agreed to in a Congress of the United States and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every state.” But he admits, on page 15, that the Congress, having received the proposed new constitution from the Convention that it had empowered to propose changes to the Articles of Confederation, forwarded the new constitution to the state legislatures, which then voted to establish ratifying conventions that were separate from the state legislatures to decide whether each respective state would agree to the changes. A supermajority of the states, through those ratifying conventions, did of course agree to the new constitution.

It seems to me that this is quite a strained argument for the constitution amounting to an “illegal coup”. The Articles of Confederation said that the federal legislature and the state legislatures had to both agree on proposed changes. The federal Congress accepted the proposal of Washington that the changes be put to a plebiscite before the people and they sent those changes to the states for ratification. The state legislatures chose to transfer their power of assent to state ratifying conventions to give the people a larger voice in whether to accept the new government, and the people decided to accept it, but not before demanding some changes in it, particularly the addition of a bill of rights. This, it seems to me, is pretty much how a deliberative democracy is supposed to work. This was not a dictator imposing his will on the people, the proposed changes were put to a vote, the people had their say and affected some major changes (the bill of rights that resulted was arguably the most powerful limitations on any government ever proposed and has formed the backbone of our entire legal system of limited government), and voted to ratify it.

To call this an illegal coup requires a highly technical and legalistic reading of the Articles of Confederation, a deliberate downplaying of the role of the federal Congress (which could have voted down the changes but chose instead to put this choice before the state legislatures), and a deliberate downplaying of the role of the state legislatures (which could also have voted down the changes but chose instead to put this choice before the people through ratifying conventions). If anything, the manner in which the constitution was ratified was more deliberative and more democratic than it would have been had the federal and state legislatures not decided to hand their power over to the people themselves to decide the future of the country.

North goes to great pains to portray the writing of the constitution as a con played on the public, in particular by pointing out that the negotiations were all done “in secret”. It is of course true that when the Constitutional Convention met, they met in private and did not allow the press to report on everything that went on. But the fact still remains that the final document was put to a vote in each and every state and it won. The framers wrote a constitution, they put it before the people, there was a long and detailed public debate in each state that included the writing of both the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, the people had nearly 2 years to hear the arguments of both sides and discuss it among themselves, and they voted for the proposed Constitution. And along the way, they demanded and received limitations on the new government. What more would North want than that? Well, he wants his theocratic government back.

I think the real issue here, unspoken by North, is that the people voted for a secular Constitution that did away with religious tests and demanded religious freedom for everyone, not just for orthodox Christians. North prefers the state theocracies that destroyed religious freedom for everyone but those like him to the federal secular republic that protected religious freedom for everyone, including him. His real objection is that he is on the losing side of history, that the Enlightenment rationalists who opposed theocracy won and he lost. Rather than accept that, he has to make the winners out to be usurpers of the popular will. But the history of ratification that he himself admits to undercuts that claim and shows it to be special pleading.

There is an e-mail making the rounds with a set of arguments alleging to prove that the US is a “Christian Nation.” The entire e-mail was taken directly, word for word, from this webpage: http://www.errantskeptics.org/hold_quotes_2.htm, which was in turn taken from an article in Worldnetdaily, and which is quoted verbatim on what seems like hundreds of other webpages. I’ve put the original in italics and my responses in normal text.

We are a Christian nation.

A loaded beginning right off the bat. This statement could mean two very different things, and has been used to mean both things depending on who is speaking. Does this mean we are a nation made up mostly of Christians, whose culture has been highly influenced by Christianity? No one in their right mind would deny that very obvious truth. Or does it mean that we are an officially Christian nation, a nation whose government should endorse Christianity in a de jure or de facto manner? That is a far more controversial statement, one that even most Christians would likely oppose. Since the first one is painfully obvious to everyone, and thus pointless to argue on behalf of, we can safely assume that the author here is advocating the second option.

Immediately after creating the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress voted to purchase and import 20,000 copies of Scripture for the people of this nation.

Not quite true. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776. The decision to import the bibles was not made until a year later. Some of the members of the Continental Congress were not even the same people who signed the declaration a year earlier. A little background here is important. After we declared independence from England, we lost access to nearly all imports from England, which was our primary source for English language books. A group of Presbyterians was concerned that there was no longer a source for English-language bibles and petitioned the Continental Congress to find a new source from which to import them. They began to look around and had settled on a source in Holland, but it never happened because the British took over Philadelphia and the Congress fled. An American printer began the job of printing them as a business decision, without any government prompting or money behind it.

More importantly, the Continental-Confederation Congress governed the US from 1774 to 1789 and wrote the articles of confederation, the first “constitution” of the US. The Articles of Confederation contained no provisions whatsoever preventing the government from declaring an official religion or endorsing a particular religion. But the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the US Constitution, written in 1787 and ratified in 1789. The US Constitution did contain clear language forbidding the federal government from declaring or endorsing a religious belief. So while the statement is true that the Continental Congress did this, it’s also true that the constitutional system that allowed the action was changed by some of those same men to forbid it a few years later. Something obviously changed in the conception of government between 1777 and 1789. What was it?
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