“Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.” – Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791)
Christians are no more
persecuted in America than strictly observant Shia Muslims loyal to “the
system” are in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Christians here who complain that they are being persecuted are like the
slave owners, and wannabe slave-owners, in the antebellum Old South who
constantly complained that their rights were being violated by those who wanted
to abolish slavery, or their Jim Crow successors who complained in the mid-20th century that their rights were being violated because they couldn’t
discriminate against African-Americans.
The Treaty of Tripoli
Much has been made by both
sides of Article 11 in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli between the new United States
of America and the Bey of Tripolitania (essentially Libya) that, “The
government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian
Religion.” The treaty was negotiated by
Consul-General John Barlow with full authority from President Washington, a
fact with which then Vice President and later President Adams was completely
aware and in full agreement.
It is irrelevant to the
mind of Congress and of the President at the time of its passage that this
treaty was later superceded by another and that the English translation of the
Arabic original may not have been the best.
The word-for-word accuracy of Consul-General John Barlow’s English translation
of the Arabic original he himself had written does not matter. Whether the Article 11 of his translation
exists in that Arabic original is immaterial.
The one thing which does count is that Consul-General Barlow’s
translation was the one presented to the Senate, read aloud in chambers to the
entire body, approved unanimously, signed into law by Pres. John Adams, and
published in every major newspaper in the country to little but yawns in
response.
Christian Dominionists and
other theocrats doth protest too much.
On the other hand, the opposing position, that the treaty and its
Article 11 establish under the law that America was not founded as a “Christian
Nation” is equally flawed. And also
unnecessary, since history already does that better than any single piece of
legislation could do.
Religion in the English Colonies
The colonization of North
America by the kingdom of England rested in the hands of two stock
corporations, Plymouth Company (later succeeded by Massachusetts Bay Company)
for the northern territories and London Company for the southern territories,
both owned by the greater Virginia Company.
Yes, investors bought shares with money which the companies used as
capital for the colonization ventures, and for one reason and one only: to make
a profit. Had not the stock companies’
capital existed and had they not expected to make more money than they had
invested, none of the colonies would have been established.
America may have been
colonized by both pulpit and profit, but the latter weighed much more in
importance.
True, the colony at New
Plymouth counted among its founders English Separatists (Calvinists who wanted
to separate completely from the Church of England), but the entrepreneurs and
soldiers who were mainline Anglicans that came with them, “The Strangers” as
they were called by the Separatists, made a 60% majority. That majority was recruited and paid by the
Merchant Adventurers of London.
The earlier colony at
Jamestown had a religious component too, but it was mainline Church of England
and its entrepreneur element was overwhelmingly dominant.
The later colony at
Massachusetts Bay established a government which restricted its electorate, and
most of its profits, to the Puritan sect of the Church of England. Puritans were Calvinists much like their
Separatist cousins but considered themselves Anglicans whose duty it was to
purify their church and force everyone else to worship their way. But even there, and in its spin-offs, the
profit motive trumped the desires of the pulpit.
Celebrations, even the
observances of, Christmas and Easter were forbidden by law with harsh penalties
attached in the colonies of New England, by the way. The Puritans, both here and on the other side
of the Great Pond, launched the original “war on Christmas”.
Besides the 19 unfortunate
persons hanged, the one tortured to death because he wouldn’t make a plea, and
the 50 who were thrown in prison under such harsh conditions that 5 died during
the Salem witch hysteria, Massachusetts Bay Colony also persecuted Christians
of other faiths, hanging 4 Quakers and imprisoning countless others.
In Puritan New England, there
was no singing of anything but hymns unaccompanied by instruments, no dancing
whatsoever, no toys for children and especially not dolls, no education but
religious education, nothing but work and church and more work. They did, however, drink beer and later rum
in moderation, carrying over from Europe where no one in their right mind drank
water (nearly all sources were polluted).
The overwhelming majority of weddings occurred because of pregnancy, but
kissing one’s spouse after six months at sea in public could land a man in the
stocks for three hours.
In 1775, all the southern
colonies of the kingdom of Great Britain (Georgia, South Carolina, North
Carolina, Virginia, Maryland) had the Church of England as their established
church, while in New England were nearly all Congregational (as the Puritans
had become), the one exception there being Rhode Island. The Church of England was also established in
New York, but the colony there also had a long-established tradition of
tolerance for differing, including non-Christian, creeds. Pennsylvania and Delaware had no established
church; the former never had and the second had none after becoming part of
Pennsylvania (it was first New Sweden, and later part of New Netherlands
beforehand).
However, the basis upon
which English (later British) colonies were founded and governed, including
what status religion had within them, has no bearing whatsoever on the
foundation of the United States of America as a separate free and independent
nation. As a matter of fact, only 7% of
Americans had any church affiliation by the end of the Revolution, largely due
to a lack of religious interest, particularly in orthodox denominations. Many of the “sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God”
Calvinists in the New England states had become Unitarians, Universalists, Transcendentalists,
and Spiritualists, for example.
Not one of the first six
U.S. Presidents was an orthodox Christian.
George Washington was a practicing Episcopalian but his personal were Deist
and Freethinking and fit in with what is called the Broad Church that had
existed in the Church of England (and the rest of the Anglican Communion) since
the 17th century. John Adams
was a Unitarian who started as an orthodox Congregationalist. Thomas Jefferson grew up Church of England
and was technically an Episcopalian, but his own ideas were Deist and
Unitarian. James Madison and James
Monroe were both Deists who attended the Episcopal Church. John Quincy Adams was, like his father, a
Unitarian. Andrew Jackson didn’t join a
church (Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.) until after leaving office.
A New Order for the Ages
What is relevant in that
regard is the collection of documents upon which that Nation was founded: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles
of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights. In not one of those documents is Christianity,
or any other religion, mentioned or alluded to.
The sole one of those four in which “God” is mentioned (Declaration of
Independence) specifies “Nature’s God”, the Enlightenment concept of God held
by deists and other freethinkers rather than by that of any denomination of the
religion of Christianity or of any other religion.
In establishing a “New
Order for the Ages” (Novus Ordo Seclorum; one of the three mottos on the Great
Seal adopted in 1782), the Founding Fathers rejected the hereditary monarchy
and both its Lords Spiritual (religious prelates) and Lords Temporal
(hereditary nobility). If they saw
themselves as a light shining on a hill, it was as the light of reason in a New
Rome.
Indeed, when seeking a
location for a national capital, they seized upon the community of Rome,
Virginia, with seven hills and a river named Tiber. The Mall between the Capitol and the White
House was consciously built in imitation of the Roman Forum. In the Capitol itself, an eternal flame
burned in the basement could be viewed through a large circular hole with a
rail in the ground floor until the mid-19th century. The first Congress convened on 25 December
1789, Christmas Day. Mail ran seven days
a week, including Sundays.
The earliest document, the
Declaration of Independence of 1776, contains, as stated before, a reference to
“Nature’s God”, which is specifically a freethinking deistic concept of
God. There is also a mention of “trusting
in Divine Providence”, another deist concept.
But it does need to be highlighted that the Declaration of Independence
is not law.
The Articles of
Confederation of 1781, which preceded the Constitution, contained nothing about
religion at all, being too short.
It was, however, the
Congress of the Confederation which in 1782 adopted the Great Seal of the
United States which remains today. On
its obverse (front) side is a bald eagle with an olive branch in its right claw
and arrows in its left, with a banner in its beak which reads “E pluribus
unum”, or “From many one”. That was the
design and motto proposed. The
originally proposed design for the reverse, the Eye of Providence over a
thirteen-level pyramid, was also retained but its mottoes were changed. “Deo favente” (God favors) became “Annuit coeptis” (He approves) and “Perennis”
(Everlasting) was discarded in favor of “Novus
ordo seclorum” (New order for the ages).
Less religious theism in favor of more Enlightenment.
Despite what Christian
Dominionists and other theocrats who advocate that America abandon its founding
principles in order to erect a so-called “Christian Nation” mirroring the
Islamic Republic of Iran in all but name on the ashes of the Constitution
claim, nothing in the original Constitution of the United States of America of
1789 mentions religion, except to forbid religious tests for office or public
trust. Those who claim that Article 1
sets a provision for chaplains in one or both houses of Congress have either
not read the document or are outright lying.
While some might call the latter a “pious fraud”, it is nevertheless bearing
a false witness and therefore not simply lacking in piety but an affront to it.
The Bill of Rights of 1791,
in its Article 1 (aka First Amendment or Article 8 of the Constitution),
guarantees freedom of religion and forbids the establishment of religion. Neither of those are provisions which would
be welcome to the government of the current Islamic Republic of Iran, though I
know that many of its citizens, especially the sincerely religious, devoutly
wish to be governed under those standards.
Of course, the Bill of
Rights only applies to the government of the United States of America, but the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (aka Article 22) of 1868
guaranteed the rights of citizens of the United States to every citizen of each
of its constituent states and territories.
However, Thomas Jefferson oft-debated letter indicates the founders
probably intended those rights to extend to citizens of states as well as of
the nation.
Wall of Separation
The phrase “wall of separation between church
and state” as it is used in current American legislation and jurisprudence
comes directly from the 1802 letter of then President Thomas Jefferson to the
head of the Danbury Baptist Association in Virginia. Unlike many of their modern incarnations,
late 18th and early 19th century Baptists were
absolutists on church-state separation.
The Danbury group’s fears were that Virginia was about to declare the
Protestant Episcopal Church (successor to the Church of England) its
established church.
To them, Jefferson replied,
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people
which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus
building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Jefferson
borrowed the phrase from America’s first Baptist, Roger Williams, founder of
Providence Plantation, the first colony in Rhode Island. Williams, himself a victim of religious
persecution under the Puritan regime in Massachusetts Bay, stated in a 1644
book that there needed to be a “…wall
of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the
world.” In Williams’ colony, not only
was tolerance for all religions law, but slavery and other obnoxious practices
then current were abolished.
Regardless of where the
phrase “separation of church and state” came from, however, that is the law
under American jurisprudence, which follows its predecessor English common
law. In the 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education, Justice Hugo
Black writing the majority opinion for the Supreme Court included the
following: “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and
state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the
slightest breach.”
Jesus’ position
I’m going to list these
quotes without comment.
“Give to Caesar what
belongs to Caesar and to God the things that are God’s.”
“No one can serve two
masters, for either they will love one and hate the other, or they will hold to
the one and despise the other. You
cannot serve God and mammon.”
“My kingdom is not of this
world.”
“The kingdom of God is
inside each of you.”
“When you pray, go into
your room, close your door, and pray to your Father in secret.”
Would the man who said
these things be in favor of idols to the so-called “Ten Commandments” being
placed in courthouses and government squares?
Would the man who said these things want prayer in his name before
government meetings or public school sporting events? Would the man who said these things wish for
prayers and/or Bible readings over public school intercoms? Would the man who said these things like to
see the name of his father taken in vain with “In God we trust” emblazoned all
over our currency? Perhaps he would
reply that it is emblazoned on the only God that America really trusts.
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