The Founding Myth  ## Metadata - Author: [[Andrew L Seidel]] | [[3. Resources/Authors/Andrew L Seidel|Andrew L Seidel]] - Full Title: The Founding Myth - Category: #books - Kindle: [Open in Kindle](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JN4K3PY) - Document Tags: [[Faith]] ## Document Notes ## Highlights - “Judeo-” is a sop, a fig leaf, tossed about to avoid controversy and complaint. It is simply a morsel of inclusion offered to soften the edge of an exclusionary, Christian movement. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=303)) - History had proven to the framers of the US Constitution that religion is divisive. They separated religion from government to avoid the mistakes of past regimes. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=311)) - The single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or even political party; it was believing the United States is and should be a Christian nation. ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=322)) - Project Blitz encapsulates the problem Christian nationalism poses. First, it seeks to alter our history, values, and national identity. Then it codifies Christian privilege in the law, favoring Christians above others. Finally, it legally disfavors the nonreligious, non-Christians, and minorities such as the LGBTQ community, by, for instance, permitting discrimination against them in places of public accommodation or in employment. ([Location 342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=342)) - PATRIOTISM HAS NO RELIGION. ([Location 471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=471)) - The Christian nationalism ideal fuses two identities, Christian and American, so that to be one, you must also be the other. ([Location 477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=477)) - President John F. Kennedy explained to Yale’s graduating class of 1962 that “the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears…. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=521)) - Religion did not create slavery—war, economics, racism, poverty, and many more explanations for slavery have been advanced. But religion did provide a moral justification for American slavery. ([Location 593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=593)) - true Christian nations—the colonies—founded on Christian principles. Those Christian governments were so tyrannical that they became examples for the founders of how not to build a nation. ([Location 624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=624)) - despotic governments can and should be overthrown. ([Location 1223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=1223)) - people are the source of governmental power and must consent to their government. ([Location 1223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=1223)) - Samuel Adams worried about this as well: “no foreign Power can consistently yield Comfort to Rebels, or enter into any kind of Treaty with these Colonies till they declare themselves free and independent.” ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=1252)) - THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE is an anti-Christian document with snippets of religious-sounding language as window dressing. ([Location 1305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=1305)) - When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=1424)) - As we’ve seen, Christian nationalism operates like a ratchet or a noose; once the separation of state and church is violated, it tightens its hold and the violation becomes nearly incurable. It is then used to justify other violations, which has happened here. Congress ignored sound legal analyses and did what it was accustomed to before state and church were separated. Currently, Congress pays close to a million dollars a year for two clergymen and their staff, whose only job is to pray once a day over their proceedings.35 This is unconstitutional, as the only framers, including Madison, Father of our Constitution, to offer a legal opinion on government prayer argued. ([Location 2049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2049)) - The Plymouth Pilgrims and the Massachusetts Puritans were not seeking religious freedom. They were seeking the ability to form a government and a society dedicated to their particular brand of religion. ([Location 2071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2071)) - The Mayflower settlers were looking for a place to practice their religion and force others to practice it too. That is not freedom. It is dissent from the ruling religion and a desire to impose your own. They wanted a theocracy. ([Location 2073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2073)) - The dichotomy between religious freedom and a religious government is conspicuous in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans too. They banished Roger Williams—who would go on to establish the Rhode Island colony, which actually practiced tolerance—and Anne Hutchinson, among many others, for theological disagreements. ([Location 2095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2095)) - When religion, the Christian religion included, unites with the civil power, this kind of violence is typical: a recipe for genocide, land theft, and consigning the enemies of a god to a “fiery Oven.” A tendency toward theocracy is also a tendency toward violence. ([Location 2106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2106)) - In the American Southwest, conquistadors and Franciscan monks forcibly converted thousands of Natives while trying to extend the “Holy” Catholic faith by extirpating the Native religion. European settlers were not practicing religious freedom, but religious violence. ([Location 2115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2115)) - The Mayflower Compact is often used to show America’s Christian principles, but it actually shows Christian intolerance. ([Location 2192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2192)) - In the first of The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” ([Location 2220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2220)) - For Jefferson, “concentrating [powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government.”19 Madison thought that such a concentration was “the very definition of tyranny.”20 The biblical vision of government supported in Isaiah is exactly what the Constitution ended. ([Location 2315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2315)) - Those two points aside, we know that the modern idea of separation of powers did not come from the bible. It came from Montesquieu, who never mentioned or referred to the bible in his discussion of three separate branches of government. ([Location 2318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2318)) - God’s law is unchangeable. American law is not. ([Location 2333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2333)) - Adams, writing a few years later as vice president, was more specific: “The Constitution is but an experiment, and must and will be altered.” ([Location 2336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=2336)) - The Constitution is meant to build a better country for the future, ensuring prosperity and freedom for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren down through the generations. ([Location 3023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=3023)) - A republic—res publica—is literally “a public thing,” a thing of the people. Not something divine, not something handed down from on high, and not something that could be maintained without effort—but a thing “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln so beautifully phrased it.29 ([Location 3103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=3103)) - The freedom of religion cannot exist without a government that is free from religion (nor can the freedom of religion exist without the freedom to choose no religion at all). True religious freedom depends on a secular government. ([Location 3442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=3442)) - The freedom of thought is the only absolute right protected under our Constitution. Every other right is limited in some respect. You have free speech, but can’t threaten others. The press is free, but the media can’t publish willful lies that destroy someone’s reputation. We have the freedom of assembly, but we cannot trespass on someone’s property to exercise that right. There may be a right to bear arms, but we can’t take those guns on planes or into courthouses. Even the free exercise of religion is limited. Every freedom we have is limited, except for the freedom of thought. ([Location 4681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=4681)) - “In God we Trust,” “one nation under God,” “God bless America.” These tidbits are not historical so much as they are rhetorical. Their tardiness precludes arguments that they somehow prove the founding ideology, but it is worth analyzing how the verbiage entered the American vernacular because doing so reveals something interesting about Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists take advantage of times of fear and use them to impose their god on everyone. When doing so, they often destroy earlier unifying messages with their new, divisive message. ([Location 5011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=5011)) - Nixon used religion to distract Americans from Watergate. ([Location 5627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JN4K3PY&location=5627))