A Christian Nation, Except Where It Matters

“Self-righteous liberals tell us that Jesus had a heart for the poor, which is undeniable. But Jesus never directed that government be the agency used to help the poor. He was talking about charity proceeding from individuals and His church.”—Sean Hannity, Conservative Victory, p. 207

         Don’t get Sean Hannity started on the “Christian left.” Only a communist, or worse, would even suggest that Christ’s injunctions to take care of the poor and vulnerable had anything to do with government. Those who believe such nonsense, he concludes, “would do well to remember the scriptural commandments against stealing and coveting.” Taxing me to give food to a hungry person is a violation of two of the Ten Commandments. True religion is not about who you feed; it’s about whether or not we can post all ten commandments above our lockers.

         I have argued before that the contemporary Tea Party movement mixes and matches positions from the Founding era to create an ideological mishmash that any Founding Father would have seen (for different reasons) as ideologically incoherent. But the historical incoherence of the movement pales in comparison to the theological incoherence of trying to hold, simultaneously, that

1)    America is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles by Christian Founders who always intended that religion remain an important part of public life. Liberals who accept a false notion of “separation of church and state” are actually persecuting Christians and ignoring the Founders by trying to disallow prayers in public schools, nativity displays on municipal property, and public postings of the Ten Commandments.

2)    America has no business trying to use the government to feed hungry people, give shelter and clothing to the poor, or provide educational opportunities and health care to those who cannot afford it on their own. This is the responsibility of private charities and Churches. Jesus never said that the government was supposed to do these things.

Each of these propositions contains a hidden theological assumption that Christians must question before drinking the Hannity-Beck-Levin Kook Aid.

The first proposition—that America’s Christian heritage means that we must allow minor expressions of religion in the public square—dramatically overstates the importance of, well, minor expressions of religion. To listen to Hannity and others defend the right to post the Ten Commandments on a school wall, or to put up a crèche display at city hall, one would think that these were vital to the free exercise of religion—that Christians could screw up their salvation by failing to walk underneath the 3% of the Jewish Law represented by the Ten Commandments.

But guess what? Most Christians don’t post the Ten Commandments anywhere (they being Jewish laws and all). And most denominations believe that Christians can go to heaven even if they lived all their lives in towns that didn’t display nativity scenes on public property. These things really aren’t that important to the Christian tradition.

Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and all that stuff, however, is REALLY important to the Christian tradition. This was not an incidental component of Jesus’s earthly mission; it WAS his earthly mission, and He made it pretty clear that it is supposed to be our earthly mission as well.  

         But you say (if you happen to be Sean Hannity), Jesus still doesn’t say that we are supposed to use the GOVERNMENT to do all of this feeding and clothing and visiting. This is what they set up the Church to do.

         I have a hard time imagining that any adult could read the New Testament and think that it had anything to do with dividing responsibilities for the poor between Church and State—concepts that nobody at the time could have understood. An essential part of the Christian message is that societies have a responsibility to care for their most vulnerable members. We do not do this because it is spiritually ennobling for rich people to give their money to the poor; we do it because the poor and the vulnerable need taking care of. How we do this, really, is up to us, with the implication that the best way to take care of them is the way that takes care of them the best.

         What Hannity & Co. tell us (when they are talking about money) is that Jesus imagined a great divide between what the government is supposed to do (Rome, we presume, but possibly Judea) and what “His church” is supposed to do. Taking care of people is good, if individuals do it by themselves or through a Church, but bad if individuals band together and structure a government that does it. (This logic does not, of course, apply to moments of silence in public schools).

One of the core assumptions of democracy, however, is that people have a right to try to structure their government in way that supports their values. Both liberals and conservatives believe this, but they believe it about different things. Most liberals (like most moderates and most conservatives) believe that their government should reflect the values of charity and compassion—values that can be found in all religious traditions as well as in most forms of secular humanism. The shrillest voices from the extreme right, however, see these things as outside of the government’s purview. They prefer that we focus our religious attention on graduation prayers, crèche displays, and making sure that schools give equal time to the dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.

Jesus actually had an expression for just such a worldview. It had to do with swallowing a camel.  

Founderstein: How to Turn Eight Dead White Guys into One Political Monster

Anybody who spends enough time digging around in the graveyards of American political theory knows about “Founderstein”—an ideological monstrosity that, like Frankenstein’s monster, borrows bits and pieces from those safely dead—from, that is, the the speeches, published essays, letters, and journals of any number of different Founding Fathers slapped together with absolutely no concern for context, rhetorical intent, or the tremendous differences between the individual Founders.

The most common Modern version of Founderstein looks something like this:

·      Thomas Paine’s belief in small government

·      Patrick Henry’s religious devotion

·      Benjamin Franklin’s scientific mind

·      Thomas Jefferson’s classical learning

·      Alexander Hamilton’s support of business interests

·      George Washington’s leadership vision

·      John Adams’ incorruptible integrity

·      James Madison’s love of the Constitution

          One could certainly be forgiven a bit of idolatry in the face of such a political saint! That such a fellow never existed might dampen our enthusiasm a little bit, but this is pretty much the central-casting version of all of the “Founding Fathers” in books like Tim Lahay’s Faith of Our Founding Fathers, Larry Schweikart’s What Would the Founders Say? And just about anything by Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Sean Hannity.

            However, if we take these same eight men and combine another set of characteristics, we end up with a very different Founderstein—one just as monstrous as the first but designed for a different kind of political argument:

·      Thomas Paine’s strident atheism

·      Patrick Henry’s implacable opposition to the Constitution

·      Benjamin Franklin’s sexual adventurism

·      Thomas Jefferson’s deism

·      Alexander Hamilton’s desire for large, centralized governments

·      George Washington’s lifelong ownership of slaves

·      John Adams’ naïveté

·      James Madison’s shifting political allegiances

            But this creature never existed either.  “The Founding Fathers” were not all well-educated, devout Christians who sought to limit the power of government any more than they were slave-owning atheists who wanted to expand the power of government. They were actual human beings with insights and moral lapses, virtues and vices, and, perhapsm most importantly, little ability to agree with each other about much of anything. That is how human beings operate in this world.

The Founderstein phenomenon, however, does not come from this world. It comes from the world of myth, where virtues are amplified and disagreements are suppressed. And it is only by invoking the world of myth that anybody can say “the Founding Fathers believed. . . .” and end up with anything like a coherent argument. Other than a vague feeling that the American colonies were better off ruling themselves than being ruled by the British, there is not a single belief that can be attributed to everybody who can be reasonably termed a “Founding Father.”

The fallacy in the Founderstein phenomenon lies in the fact that it relies entirely on three false assumptions:

1.     That the term “Founders” represents a specific group of men (women need not apply) who have been universally recognized as the framers of the Constitution and the designers of the government that has endured for more than 230 years.

2.     That these men agreed with each other on all, or even some, of the major political issues of their day, thereby making a quote by any one of them adequate proof of “what the Founders believed.”

3.     That these men—some of whom lived into their 90s—held consistent opinions about important issues during their entire public lives.

These assumptions are not just false; they are all profoundly wrong. Together, they create an ahistorical, one-dimensional version of the Founding Fathers that is good only for creating proof-text arguments—strings of quotations that pay no attention to the ideological differences of the Founders or the rhetorical contexts of their words. Want to prove that the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians? Easy. Quote a line from one of Hamilton’s youthful love sonnets, a phrase from one of George Washington’s ghostwritten speeches, and something that ended up in the Kentucky Constitution that may have been put there by Madison. Want to prove that they were all non-Christian deists? Grab Franklin’s autobiography, Jefferson’s letters to Joseph Priestley, and quote liberally from Paine’s The Age of Reason.  It's easy, it's fun, and no matter which way you decide to go, somebody else has already looked up the quotes. All you you have to do is Google.

And reading is hard work.