Back in my debating days in high school, “affirmative fiat” was the assumption that the proposed legislation by the affirmative side (the one debating in favor of the resolution) would pass. The arguments had to be about the merits of the specific proposal to implement the resolution, not whether Congress would pass it or the President would sign it. It’s a wave of the hand to “make it so.”
In a parallel vein, at least one Congressman is trying to use legislative fiat to simply “make it so” with some historical blather related to how the US is really a Christian Nation from its very beginnings and throughout its history (and so, by extension, ought to be a Christian Nation today)..
HR 888, by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA), would declare all sorts of things “so” via a laundry list of whereas clauses, then concludes with a call for “American Religious History Week,” and a symbolic rejection of attempts to deny Christian history. It’s historical revisionism by legislation, academic argument by assertion, and declaration of the facts by fiat.
While it’s “only” a House resolution (it doesn’t spend any money or pass any laws), exercises like this are not just rhetorical point-earners for political careers. These sorts of resolutions in turn get pointed at by folks actually passing laws — “See? Congress declared it, so it must be true!” — on a federal and state and local level, as well as by folks writing (bad) text books looking for support for their views.
The annoying thing is that the “whereas” clauses are a mixture of the obvious and the fallacious. The obvious items — there are, in fact, many famous buildings and monuments in this land with religious symbolism and expressions on them — makes it clear that religion has been part of our national heritage, but are taken beyond that to interpret it as the cornerstone, along the lines of saying, “This building has a quote by Thomas Jefferson mentioning God. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Therefore this is a Christian Nation, QED.”
In multiple other cases, though (lovingly dissected here) the historical facts asserted in HR 888 are misleading and contextually dubious at best, just plain wrong at worst, and are all pretty much recycled from often-refuted Christian nationalist web sites.
The problem is that the intent here is not to actually assert that there is, in fact, a religious heritage in this country, or that religious expressions have been part of private and public life since the founding of the Republic — nobody out there denies that, not even the most “rabid atheist.”
But there’s a huge leap from there to the assertion that this nation was founded as a Christian one, or, put as the resolution does in its second item,
the religious foundations of faith on which America was built are critical underpinnings of our Nation’s most valuable institutions and form the inseparable foundation for America’s representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures.
America was built on far more than just “religious foundations of faith,” and America’s “representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures” owe much to many non-explicitly-religious impulses, especially if by “religious” one’s speaking of specific sectarian doctrine.
And it is a sectarian resolution. The examples given are Christian, explicitly (as the only religion mentioned by name) or implicitly (there are some Old Testament quotes, and a few references to Moses, but everything else is Christian). That’s not altogether surprising, since Christianity in some form or another has been the majority religion in this country since its founding. But the generic “religion” spoken of here is misleading, since it’s actually Christianity being discussed.
Worse, the argument from history prove nothing about the value of religious (or, more specifically, since those are the cases whereased, Christian) faith. One could, looking at history (and literature, and architecture) argue as well that this country was founded by and for white people. Or men. Or property-holders. While there are folks out there who might go for it, I doubt most people would support a “National Men’s History Week” where we are all taught that maleness was the foundation of our nation and its institutions.
Now, I wouldn’t actually mind a “religious history week” per se — it’s difficult to actually understand American history without understanding the religious component of the past 200-500 years. The problem is that such a week isn’t being presented here to discuss, or educate, or understand, or even recognize the role of religion in our society, past and present, but to glorify it inappropriately (and, for that matter, unBiblically) as something it’s not — the font from which all other aspects of what made this country flowed.
Preaching bad history is certainly not a virtue. Passing it into law is certainly not good government. But, I fear, it may be good politics.
(via Les)
I can’t even explain how crazy this ‘Christianization’ of America drives me when our country was specifically founded to allow complete religious FREEDOM!
Modern people think the founding fathers couldn’t understand the complexities of modern religious concerns. How quickly they forget that simple inter-sect differences just inside Christianity were large enough to lauch centuries long conflicts within Europe. The founding fathers knew their history VERY well and specifically wanted to avoid the pitfalls of any sort of State religion.
*sigh*
I wouldn’t say that the US was “specifically founded to allow complete religious freedom.” Rather, religious freedom was one of the causes the Founders sought to incorporate into the nation’s legal structure.
It’s something of a generalization — the Founders were a diverse group of guys, religiously. They certainly wanted to avoid the sectarian disasters of the Old World (and their echoes in the New), and had enough Enlightenment influence to acknowledge the existence of other religions and the need to tolerate them. On the other hand, they were certainly comfortable with (Christian) religious expression and its incorporation into the fabric of public life. Some of that was for public consumption, some from personal piety. I think there would have been a lot of debate amongst them as to the proposition that the US was a “Christian Nation,” but it was certainly recognized as a nation with a Christian heritage and mostly Christian society.
The problem being, of course, that current Christian Nationalists would argue that being a Christian Nation isn’t just descriptive (“there are a lot of Christians there, and Christianity is the primary religious expression in society”) but prescriptive (“Christians rule!”). The former is the world the Founders lived in and what they considered natural; the latter is not what they were creating in the US and the Constitution.
That said, I think there has been an evolution in the interpretation of the First Amendment over the years, due to the steady blurring and downplaying of Christian sectarianism over the years. The injunction against establishing a religion was focused on formal Establishment of a particular denomination as the state’s official, supported sect (Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, etc.). At the time, and in the recent history, it was not unusual for individual states (just as in England) to not only provide tax revenue directly to the official church, but also to limit office holders to baptized congregates, etc.
It would have been an incomprehensible subject to talk about “establishing” Christianity, since (a) Christianity was part of the social fabric already, and (b) there was no organized “Christianity” per se, just various denominational organizations that called themselves Christian, but that sometimes had grave doubts about the validity of the others calling themselves such, which extends even to the present with some folks’ opinions of Catholics and Mormons).
That said, the blurring of denominational differences in the US, and the establishment of interdenominational organizations, has over the decades and centuries made it clearly more appropriate for the establishment clause to draw that “wall” between church and state, since it does mean that Christianity can act with an ostensibly more unified face — though, ironically, the wall also helps prevent a reemergent sectarianism. The parallel to extending the definition of “cruel and unusual punishment” to punishment that the Founders would have considered quite appropriate and normal is clear.
The free expression clause was a reflection of the need for religious tolerance, and more clearly (from the Founders’ writings) included non-Christian faiths (or even those outrageous atheists), but again was most likely aimed at tolerance of other Christian sects — no fair picking on Quakers, or Presbyterians, or whatever. Again, those distinctions, as a basis for discrimination, have blurred, but the growth of other faith (and non-faith) traditions within the US are easily extended into the same set of protections, including the Constitutional elimination of any religious test (which I suspect was also thought to mostly mean other Christian groups).
And I’ve rattled on here far too long. In short — I think we’ve taken the principles of the Founders farther than they would have envisioned, but the revisionist Christian Nationalists are even less true to the Founders’ intents.
At work, a similar line of reasoning has been going around. The US is a Christian Nation because most Americans are Christian.
Heh.
I bet you didn’t know this was a Woman’s Nation, or a Brown-Haired/Brown Eyed Nation, or a Kerry Nation. Because, you know, the will of the majority is the only thing that needs to be taken into consideration in a democracy.
Which is why we have a constitutional republic, rather than pure democracy … 🙂
Of course, based on “this is a Christian Nation,” one could as easily argue that this is a *Catholic* Nation (since they’re the largest Christian denomination in the US, and thus are almost certainly a plurality of the population). That would probably make some of those Christian Nationalists spew coffee through their nose …