A number of erroneous myths pervade the typical American’s understanding of our history — from our early educations and through the repeated assertions in our media.
Among the more cruel of these was that the U.S. was first settled by Europeans from England — the Puritans and the Mayflower and all that at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Nice try (and apparently even my earliest great, greats were a young couple that arrived, met, married and moved on westward at some point where our immediate family recollections were of a farm boy born and raised in Palmyra, NY.).
In fact, as the arrival date of Columbus in 1492 indicates, the Spanish first settled large portions of the U.S. — Florida to California and much in between more than a century earlier — as the original Spanish place names indicate. The Anglos in charge grabbed many of these territories from the Spanish by devious means — e.g. trumped up wars, such as the U.S. Mexican War of 1846-48: http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/index_flash.htmlÂ
If justice were to be done, we should be assisting Mexican immigrants in returning to their own lands which we stole rather than barring them as illegal immigrants.
Another tall tale and the one to which the subject heading refers is the false notion that the U.S. was founded by Christians. In fact our founding fathers were for the most part either atheists or deists (who believed in an ordered universe, but not the G-d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). Another of my possible collateral relatives on my mother’s side, Ethan Allen, not only fought the battle of Ticonderoga, but also wrote one of our earliest atheist tracts:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0043-5597(199710)3%3A54%3A4%3C835%3ANRADIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J
I am really indebted to the fine course that I took with Robert T. Handy on American church history for a fuller understanding of the twists and turns of our religious traditions. On the strength of the Puritan originals, such Ivies as Yale and Harvard were first started to educate Protestant clergy. But by the time of the revolution the great bulk of our American intellectuals had departed theistic beliefs for a deistic sense of the order of nature (theist derives from the Greek word for god — theos — and deist, from the Roman — deus). Ben Franklin was archetypal among these folks with his kite experiments amidst thunder storms to elicit lightening strikes. By the time of the revolution in 1776 and the writing of the Constitution the vast majority of students at Yale and Harvard proclaimed themselves to be deists heading for other pursuits than theists serving the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The rest of the American religious story is not exactly something for Christians to be boastful about. The Civil War divided denominations between North and South — the former sometimes for abolition and the latter defending the horrendous institution of slavery — thus the latter day Christian-based racism which was still setting up private ‘Christian’ academies to avoid the strictures against segregation of the Brown decision in 1954.
And the current right wing make-it-up-as-you-go-along hate stuff emerged from nineteenth century middle America’s anti-intellectual religious hucksters who traveled from town to town preaching hellfire and damnation and passing the hat to frightened sinners before heading on to the next unsuspecting community. See Richard Hofstader’s classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter
The sad outcome of this phenomenon is the hate stuff now directed by the right wingers against gays, their anti-Semitism which proclaims the imminent destruction of Israel and most of the Jews with it, and their denigration of women through their attack on abortion rights. None of the above have anything to do with the gospel (good news) preached by Jesus of Nazareth.
It is too bad that our media don’t know history. They could do much to enlighten us as to whence we have come to give better insights into where we should be going. Thank G-d for the First Amendment which reined in the religious frauds and nuts with its no establishment clause. I served for several decades on the ACLU’s church/state committee which dealt with such matters and which was all too enlightening as to the fraudulent religious pack rats running about loose in the land.
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“A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope.” (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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2 users commented in " The U.S. Was NOT Founded by Christians "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYes, this country was founded by Christians. Your anti-Chrisitian bigotry is large and borders on hate. Did you every hear of the Pilgrims? They too were persecuted by people like you who did not like true Christians.
Ed-
I see where you are coming from here, certainly. The claim that the U.S. was founded by Christians or based on specifically Christian principles does not withstand close scrutiny, and you are right to point out that many of the “founding fathers” did not think of themselves as Christian theists. While religious (predominantly Christian in this country) people and ideas have and will probably continue to play a role in our society, our government is (thankfully) a secular institution that at least in theory tries to serve the people, be they Christian or not (on how things work in practice, there is obviously more to be said). I do not agree with ‘RevSpitz’ at all – he does not appear to have even read your article, as he asks if you have heard of the Pilgrims, who you explicitly mentioned. And he also betrays his ignorance of history by painting the ‘Pilgrims’ as a persecuted group, when in fact they, like many early settlers, committed numerous atrocities against Native Americans. This lead me to my next point:
There is at least one important thing you left out, and that is that America was not discovered, settled, or anything else by Anglos or Spanish or anybody, and Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America. There were already millions of people (recent scholarly estimates range in the tens of millions in what is now the U.S.) here, who had been here long before anyone from Europe. It is actually striking how racist our histories are in this sense, and how they almost completely ignore the genocide of the original Americans. I have just finished reading a great anthology on this subject called Eating Fire, Tasting Blood; check it out if you get the chance.
Also, have you ever read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States? It tells a much different and largely ignored history of native Americans, African-Americans, the working poor, women, etc. – hence the name. It also includes some good analysis of the biases of historians on these issues:
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/PeoplesHistory_Zinn.html
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