{"id":17864,"date":"2013-09-19T18:02:27","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T22:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=17864"},"modified":"2013-09-19T18:04:08","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T22:04:08","slug":"everybody-blazing-saddles-religious-pluralism-and-the-american-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/09\/19\/everybody-blazing-saddles-religious-pluralism-and-the-american-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Everybody’: Blazing Saddles, religious pluralism and the American Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The history of America is summed up in one brief scene of <\/a>Blazing Saddles<\/a>,<\/em> Mel Brooks\u2019 ridiculous, exuberantly rude 1974 masterpiece.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve linked to that video without embedding it because, like any minute-long slice of Blazing Saddles<\/em>, it\u2019s Not Safe for Work. The scene \u2014 watch it here<\/a>\u00a0after the kids are in bed\u00a0\u2014 includes two ethnic slurs, one curse word, and one sacrilegious joke involving masturbation (so overall, it\u2019s pretty tame compared to the rest of the movie).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The white citizens of Rock Ridge have only one night to accomplish a nearly impossible feat (building a life-size replica of the town in order to \u2026 nevermind, it\u2019s silly and too complicated to summarize, just watch the movie sometime if you haven\u2019t already). They need help to survive, and help arrives in the form of black, Chinese and Irish railroad workers \u2014 people despised by the cheerfully racist white townsfolk. The sheriff, Cleavon Little, convinces them that they need the workers\u2019 help, and that all the workers\u2019 \u201cask in return is a little plot of land they can call their own to homestead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Olson Johnson (played by the Big Lebowski himself, ubiquitous character actor David Huddleston) speaks on behalf of the townspeople: \u201cAll right. We\u2019ll give some land to the [black workers] and the [Chinese workers]. But we don\u2019t want the Irish!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The workers reject this compromise, and Johnson relents. \u201cAwww, prairie-s\u2013t,\u201d he says. \u201cEverybody!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a crude, yet weirdly layered little joke mocking our capacity for prejudice, but it also captures the great American story. The idea of equality arose not just as an ideal principle, but as a grudging concession to necessity, a pragmatic recognition that we need each others\u2019 help to survive. But regardless of how we arrived there, once we bound ourselves to this ideal of equality, we were bound to its expansive, inclusive logic and to recognizing \u2014 even if it takes us a while \u2014 that equality is meaningless unless it includes \u201cEverybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent essay for <\/a>The Washington Post<\/a>,<\/em> Charles C. Haynes describes how something like this scene from Rock Ridge pushed America toward the religious liberty and religious pluralism that equality requires:<\/p>\n

Drafters of the Constitution took the radical step of founding the first nation in history with no established religion.<\/p>\n

Truth be told, they had little choice.<\/p>\n

Religious divisions among the many Protestant sects in 18th-century America were deep and abiding. Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists and many others fought bitterly over what it meant to be \u201cChristian\u201d \u2013 although almost all could agree that \u201cPapists\u201d (Roman Catholics) were followers of the anti-Christ.<\/p>\n

In other words, religious diversity at America\u2019s founding made a necessity of religious freedom because no one group had the power or the numbers to impose its version of true faith \u2013 Christian or otherwise \u2013 on all others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Haynes notes that initial hostility to \u201cPapists\u201d \u2014 a literal expression of \u201cBut we don\u2019t want the Irish\u201d that lingered for centuries. Jews, too, were initially seen by many as beyond the scope of legitimate religious diversity \u2014 even despite George Washington\u2019s own defiant affirmation of their religious freedom in his \u201cTo Bigotry No Sanction<\/a>\u201d letter. And the same has been true for every religious minority \u2014 free-thinkers, Mormons<\/a>, Muslims, Pagans, and every other group that could be regarded as Other by the Protestant Christian majority.<\/p>\n

Many Americans still insist on making exceptions and exclusions \u2014 \u201cBut we don\u2019t want the atheists\u201d or \u201cBut we don\u2019t want the Muslims.\u201d And some imagine that their sect or their alliance of sects might even now have the power or the numbers to cast aside the ideal of equality entirely and claim a right to impose its version of true faith on everyone else.<\/p>\n

Haynes notes that this nonsense is particularly popular among evangelical Christians, but not exclusive to them:<\/p>\n

A majority of the American people (51 percent) believes that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the\u00a0State of the First Amendment survey released last month by the First Amendment Center.<\/a><\/p>\n

Because language about a Christian America has long been a staple of Religious Right rhetoric, it\u2019s not surprising that acceptance of this patently false interpretation of the Constitution is strongest among evangelicals (71 percent) and conservatives (67 percent).<\/p>\n

But even many non-evangelical Christians (47 percent) and liberals (33 percent) appear to believe the fiction of a constitutionally mandated Christian America is historical fact.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His response to that is blunt and to the point:<\/p>\n

Forgive me for being snippy, but\u00a0read the Constitution<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a good response. Or we could just quote Olson Johnson: \u201cPrairie-s\u2013t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The history of America is summed up in one brief scene of Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’ ridiculous, exuberantly rude 1974 masterpiece. It’s the story of how “But we don’t want the Irish!” slowly evolves into “Everybody!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[13,17,77],"class_list":["post-17864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-church-state","tag-equality","tag-justice"],"yoast_head":"\n'Everybody': Blazing Saddles, religious pluralism and the American Constitution<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The history of America is summed up in one brief scene of Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks' ridiculous, exuberantly rude 1974 masterpiece. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"'Everybody': Blazing Saddles, religious pluralism and the American Constitution","description":"The history of America is summed up in one brief scene of Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks' ridiculous, exuberantly rude 1974 masterpiece. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}