Revising US History
I've finally gotten around to reading Jeff Sharlet's feature article for Harper's Magazine ("Through a Glass, Darkly : How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history", December 2006) , and I thought it a very valuable contribution to furthering comprehension of the mostly inscrutable fundamentalist mind. It is an in-depth consideration of how fundamentalists look at history, particularly American political history, through fundamentalists eyes, and how different that can be from how the rest of us see history.
At its foundation, fundamentalist history attempts to see everything "though His eyes", putting the Christian spin on everything imaginable — plus some less imaginable. Over all it is an approach to revising American history — or uncovering actual history, as the fundamentalist might insist: America was founded as a Christian nation, but the evidence has been suppressed by secularists, so the fundamentalist story goes. Separation of church and state is, at best, a misunderstanding. There's also space in the article to consider, among other consequences, the movement for home schooling as a way to indoctrinate youngsters with these ultrachristian myths.
I had hoped for a short quotation that would summarize and portray the entire article, but it was hard to be selective, so I've settled for two, somewhat lengthy quotations. In this first excerpt, Sharlet tells about a conversation he had on his way to a fundamentalist rally. Do be sure to read from beginning to end so as not to miss the punch-line.
It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984, “control the future.” History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman, which was what he’d wanted to be: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in one of the nation’s most expensive congressional races, forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a providential outcome.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.
Then, at the rally, he has a confessional moment with Pastor Rusty, which emphasizes the concern with which fundamentalists continue to worry about "child sacrifice" and "sodomy":
On the Danbury village green Pastor Rusty gripped my arm and pulled me close, tears streaming from hazel eyes as he confessed that he had betrayed God. The rally had migrated from the hilltop to the town’s center, an historic patch of grass next to a redbrick parking garage. A stage had been erected, and on it a series of preachers sermonized about God and American history for a small crowd of parents and children sitting on blankets and in lawn chairs. Rusty and I talked back by the literature tables. He had something he wanted to explain. He had neglected the twin sins, he said, the two wicked acts that fundamentalists believe to be the collective responsibility of the entire society in which they occur. “Child sacrifice”—by which he meant abortion—“and sodomy. Any nation that condoned those behaviors? That did not challenge them, that did not prevent them from happening? It will be reduced to rubble.”
He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. The church had allowed women to murder their children and men through sodomy to damn themselves and all their brothers. It was his fault more than theirs because he knew the “blueprint of God’s Word.” He had pored over the Bible and the Constitution and the Mayflower Compact, had memorized choice words from John Adams and John Witherspoon and Patrick Henry, Jeremiah and Nehemiah and John the Revelator. Scripture and American history are in agreement, he had found: beneath God, family, and church is the state, with only one simple responsibility: “The symbol of the state is a sword. Not a spoon, feeding the poor, not a teaching instrument to educate our young.” Rusty stepped back, fists clenched. “And the sword is an instrument of death!” he yelled. He twitched his Italian loafers in a preacher two-step. He shook out his neck like a boxer. Then sorrow slumped his shoulders. He had failed to wield the sword. He had failed the widows and orphans. He had failed his brothers lost to sodomy. “There’s nobody clean in this,” he whispered.
As has been said many times — and repeated by me on more than one occasion — it matters not whether what they believe is true; what matters is that so many believe it so fervently.
Is it dangerous? It depends on numbers in some cases, and the willingness in other cases for some to do what they hear their god telling them to do, from beating up a few fags on a Saturday night to bombing abortion clinics and murdering doctors.
Consider for a moment that the current president likely ascended to office on a wave of messianic fervor and what a mess has resulted from his ideas about conducting domestic and foreign policy as He would have it. Consider further the keen disappointment of many of W's former supporters that, alas, the president has not been fundamentalist enough to suit them.
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
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on Thursday, 25 January 2007 at 04.03
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"Federer . . . wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a 'one-way wall,' designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around."
A wall divides whatever it divides into two areas. The concept of a one-way wall is whacko nonsense on its face. But then, his claim of reading the mind of someone a couple of centuries deceased should warn away anyone with two brain cells to rub together.
I suppose people who buy into such nonsense have no problem with revisionist history. P.T. Barnum knew whereof he spoke.