The Founding Myth Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE FOUNDING MYTH

  “Seidel, a constitutional attorney, provides a fervent takedown of Christian Nationalism in his furious debut. After support by far-right Christian nationalists helped Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency, Seidel worries that Evangelical political influence is increasing and dangerous. He argues that America was not founded as a Christian nation on Judeo-Christian principles, and thus Christian nationalists are inherently wrong…. His well-conceived arguments will spark conversations for those willing to listen.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In The Founding Myth, Andrew Seidel examines the beliefs and values of the founders of our nation and the framers of our Constitution to demonstrate that, contrary to the beliefs of many Americans, our nation was not founded as “a Christian nation.”…As he explains, those who established our nation were generally skeptical of traditional Christianity and were deeply committed to the separation of church and state. At a time when too many religious and political figures trumpet the notion that the precepts of traditional Christianity were built into our national values, Seidel persuasively demonstrates that such an assertion is simply unfounded. This is an important insight that Americans of every political and religious stripe should understand and embrace.”

  —Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Professor of Law,

  University of Chicago, and author of Sex and the Constitution:

  Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century

  “What if [‘Judeo-Christian’] values are not only not the foundation of our country but are actually in conflict with America’s bedrock principles? That is the stunning thesis of Seidel’s new book—and it’s one he backs up with ample evidence. This book is a game-changer. I can think of several politicians (and would-be politicians) who would greatly benefit from reading it.”

  — Robert Boston, Senior Adviser/Editor of Church & State, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

  “By meticulously dissecting the concept of a Judeo-Christian America, Andrew Seidel exposes it for what it is: a fabrication of those who would define America according to their own religious views, a political tool for those who see the Wall of Separation as a troubling obstacle rather than a foundational structure of our democracy. This book is a valuable resource for understanding the struggles of American secularism in modern times.”

  — David Niose, author of Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason

  “Andrew Seidel does a marvelous job debunking the ‘Christian nation’ myth. He reminds us that we’re not a country founded on Biblical principles and we should all be grateful for that. This book should be required reading for every member of Congress.”

  — Hemant Mehta, editor of Friendly Atheist, and author of I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist’s Eyes

  “Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth is a profoundly necessary book for our times. Armed with a thoroughly researched knowledge of history, Seidel adeptly picks apart the lie that the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values. Moreover, he demonstrates how American values present an open affront to biblical values, and why Founding Fathers like Jefferson and Franklin believed so strongly that no religion—including Christianity—should have any influence in public and political affairs. Seidel builds his arguments meticulously, fact by fact, resulting in a riveting and helplessly compelling read.”

  — Ali A. Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason

  “In a powerfully rendered account of the true principles grounding the nation, Seidel reveals the shameful extent to which religious interest groups distort and deface our secular heritage. Combining far-ranging scholarship with lively prose, this book is indispensable reading for lawmakers, activists, and all citizens alarmed at religious encroachment in our politics and revisionism of our history.”

  — Sarah Haider, Director of Outreach for Ex-Muslims of North America

  “There are legal experts on the Constitution and faith-based ‘experts’ on the Ten Commandments. Andrew Seidel is a legal expert who has brilliantly shown that the two systems of law are incompatible and mostly contradictory. After reading this well-documented book, you will not only cringe when you hear a politician or preacher refer to “the biblical principles on which our Constitution is based,” but you will also have no trouble debunking such claims.”

  — Herb Silverman, founder of the Secular Coalition for America, and author of Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt

  “With wit and brio, Seidel demolishes the Christian nationalist talking point that the United States was somehow founded on ‘Judeo-Christian’ principles (or on a list of nine or ten often offensive ‘Commandments’ allegedly delivered by a Near Eastern deity a few millennia ago). Along the way, his wide-ranging and well-researched narrative offers a much more inspiring vision of the American experiment than the bigoted exceptionalism of today’s mythmakers.”

  — Matthew Stewart, author of Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

  “Andrew L. Seidel takes readers on an informative and accessible journey through the thicket of maneuvers by which Judeo-Christian theocrats attempt to exert their influence on American society. The Founding Myth is a potent exposé of how those who most want to impose biblical values on Americans are often the ones who least understand or follow the Bible.”

  — Dr. Hector Avalos, biblical scholar and Professor of Religious Studies, Iowa State University

  THE

  FOUNDING

  MYTH

  Why Christian Nationalism Is

  UN-AMERICAN

  ANDREW L . SEIDEL

  foreword by SUSAN JACOBY

  preface by DAN BARKER

  STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  Text © 2019 Andrew L. Seidel

  Foreword © 2019 Susan Jacoby

  Preface © 2019 Daniel Barker

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  All trademarks are the property of their respective owners, are used for editorial purposes only, and the publisher makes no claim of ownership and shall acquire no right, title, or interest in such trademarks by virtue of this publication.

  Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

  Animal Farm by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1945) Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1949) Reproduced by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell.

  Excerpt(s) from THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED by Steven Pinker, copyright © 2011 by Steven Pinker. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-4549-3328-1

  For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or [email protected].

  sterlingpublishing.com

  Interior design by Susan Welt

  Picture credits – see page 338

  “It has been the misfortune of history that a personal knowledge and an impartial judgment of things, can rarely meet in the
historian. The best history of our country therefore must be the fruit of contributions bequeathed by co-temporary actors and witnesses, to successors who will make an unbiased use of them. And if the abundance and authenticity of the materials which still exist in the private as well as in public repositories among us should descend to hands capable of doing justice to them, then American History may be expected to contain more truth, and lessons certainly not less valuable, than that of any Country or age whatever.”

  — James Madison, in a letter to Edward Everett, March 19, 18231

  “From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.”

  — George Orwell “The Prevention of Literature,” 19462

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction: Prelude to an Argument

  Usage Note

  PART I

  THE FOUNDERS, INDEPENDENCE, AND THE COLONIES

  1 Interesting and Irrelevant, the Religion of the Founders

  2 “Religion and Morality”: Religion for the Masses, Reason for the Founders

  3 Declaring Independence from Judeo-Christianity

  4 Referrals: The Declaration’s References to a Higher Power

  5 Christian Settlements: Colonizing the Continent, Not Building a Nation

  PART II

  UNITED STATES v. THE BIBLE

  6 Biblical Influence

  7 Christian Arrogance and the Golden Rule

  8 Biblical Obedience or American Freedom?

  9 Crime and Punishment: Biblical Vengeance or American Justice?

  10 Redemption and Original Sin or Personal Responsibility and the Presumption of Innocence

  11 The American Experiment: Religious Faith or Reason?

  12 A Monarchy and “the morrow” or a Republic and “our posterity”

  PART III

  THE TEN COMMANDMENTS v. THE CONSTITUTION

  13 Which Ten?

  14 The Threat Display: The First Commandment

  15 Punishing the Innocent: The Second Commandment

  16 Suppressed Speech: The Third Commandment

  17 Forced Rest: The Fourth Commandment

  18 On Family Honor: The Fifth Commandment

  19 Unoriginal and Tribal: The Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Commandments

  20 Perverting Sex and Love: The Seventh Commandment

  21 Misogyny, Slavery, Thoughtcrime, and Anti-Capitalism: The Tenth Commandment

  22 The Ten Commandments: A Religious, Not a Moral Code

  PART IV

  AMERICAN VERBIAGE

  23 Argument by Idiom

  24 “In God We Trust”: The Belligerent Motto

  25 “One nation under God”: The Divisive Motto

  26 “God bless America”: The Diversionary Motto

  Conclusion: Take alarm, this is the first experiment on our liberties

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Picture Credits

  Foreword

  Andrew Seidel’s The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American could hardly arrive at a more propitious moment, as a nation based upon the world’s first secular Constitution—a document that never mentions any god and derives its authority from “We the People”—must cope on a daily basis with an administration in thrall to what is best described as Christian nationalism. President Donald J. Trump never displayed any intense interest in religion of any kind in his public persona before he began running for the nation’s highest office. But he owes his election to far-right Christian nationalists, whom he has rewarded with an unprecedented number of cabinet appointments and judgeships galore (the latter certain to outlast Trump).

  Who will ever forget former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s biblical rationalization for Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents? Sessions turned to a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Christianity’s first great proselytizer admonished every soul to be “subject to the governing authorities; because there is no authority except that which God has established.” (A federal judge thought otherwise, however, and ordered the government to reunite the families—thereby deciding that the Constitution, not a first-century evangelist, is a higher authority on the making of public policy.) And let us not overlook Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, who was raised a strict Calvinist and has devoted much of her lifetime and her family’s fortune to promoting private over public schools. When DeVos made a trip to New York City, which has the nation’s largest public school system, she did not visit a single public school but put in an appearance at two Orthodox Jewish schools and a fundraising banquet where she was introduced by New York’s Roman Catholic cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan. Above all, there is Vice President Mike Pence (who, presiding over an evenly divided Senate, cast the deciding vote for DeVos’s confirmation), whose far-right evangelical rectitude is so stringent that he will not attend any event if alcohol is served unless he is accompanied by his wife. Nor will he dine alone with a woman except his wife—even for business purposes. Indeed, Trump chose Pence as his running mate precisely because he does wear his moral purity (as defined by the religious right) on his sleeve and therefore provides an antidote to the president’s record of well- publicized serial affairs and serial marriages. I would be remiss, given the head-spinning turnover of Trump appointees, not to mention the possibility that any cabinet member might be gone by the time Seidel’s book is published. Pence will definitely be around, since presidents cannot fire their elected vice presidents. In any case, it is assured that any new Trump appointees, given their boss’s immense political debt to the religious right, will continue their attempts to privilege religion, especially Christianity, in as many public programs as possible.

  This political environment, in which the separation of church and state is treated as a kind of heresy rather than the real rock upon which our government stands, is what makes the timing of Seidel’s book so fortuitous.

  As an attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization dedicated to battling all attempts to breach the wall of separation between church and state, Seidel is well acquainted with the legal and political battles over the entanglement of religion and government, ranging from Washington to small towns across the nation. The great virtue of his book, however, is that he focuses not on the individual battles but on the overarching myth that the United States is a nation founded not on Enlightenment values and our secular Constitution but on “Judeo-Christian values” as embodied in the Bible.

  Seidel makes a powerful argument that the term “Judeo-Christian” is basically a twentieth-century, post-Holocaust, made-in-America formulation designed to sound more inclusive than it is for those who really pay attention only to the “Christian” half of the hyphenated fabrication. This subject is seldom discussed, because it can make both Christians and Jews uncomfortable in a society wishing to pretend that all religions (and ethnic backgrounds) are equal. What makes a believing Jew a Jew and a believing Christian a Christian is that the former does not acknowledge Jesus as the son of God, God, or the Messiah and the latter does. Or, as Philip Roth noted in a speech 1961, “The fact is that, if one is committed to being a Jew, then he believes that on the most serious questions pertaining to man’s survival—understanding the past, imagining the future, discovering the relationship between God and humanity—he is right and the Christians are wrong.” Seidel, who, like many freethinkers of many generations, has taken the trouble to learn a great deal about various religions and their sacred books, takes pains to discuss the ways in which the Ten Commandments (which actually are a part of shared Judeo-Christian tradition) emphatically do not form the basis of American law. If the founding fathers had observed the first commandment’s prohibition against graven images, for example, we would have no portraits to tell us what these august “Judeo-Christi
ans” looked like. Just kidding. The founders—all of Christian descent, insofar as genealogical research reveals—were mainly deists. They believed in a divinity (often called Providence) who set the universe in motion but subsequently takes no part in the affairs of men. Many of these deists were freethinkers who might call themselves agnostics or atheists today but who definitely did not believe in the civil primacy of any religion. (The word “agnostic” was not coined until the nineteenth century. Some of the most prominent deists among the founders, like Thomas Jefferson, were called atheists by their contemporary political opponents because deists rejected the supernatural and did not belong to any church.)

  The essential argument of The Founding Myth is that one might as well describe the United States as a nation founded on Hammurabic-Judeo-Christian-Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-humanist values as on the values of the Hebrew and Christian bibles. This is, of course, a ridiculous statement—but not as obviously ridiculous to many Americans as a claim to national legitimacy based on the oxymoronic Judeo- Christianity. All religions and all societies have laws against murder, for instance, but the big problem—now playing out in the American debate over legal abortion and physician-assisted suicide—is that different religions and different cultures define murder differently. You may think abortion is murder and I may think it is a legitimate medical choice, but the commandments handed down on Sinai will not help us resolve the question of how this issue is to be decided in a modern democratic society defined by religious pluralism.

  Another important point of The Founding Myth is that many of the pieties Americans now take for granted and attribute to the founders are really artifacts of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I know, from having spoken at many universities throughout the nation during the past twenty years, that large numbers of students attribute the Pledge of Allegiance to the revolutionary era. In fact, the pledge was written in 1892, and the phrase “under God” was not added until 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era. The addition was intended to draw a distinction between pious America and atheistic communism. I well remember the nuns in my parochial school telling us that Russian children could be shot for simply saying the word “God.” Seidel recounts the history of the relatively recent origins of the public sanctimony that many Americans now take for granted, including the routine use of the phrase “God bless America” at the end of presidential speeches—something that was not a commonplace when I was growing up in the 1950s.