A Few Myths About Religion in America

1, "This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values."

Well, not really. It was in the sense that the founders were white, and thus came from a Judeo-Christian background. By the same logic, Led Zeppelin was founded on Judeo-Christian values. So was the Geek Squad, the film "Happy Gilmore," and the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.

Cuz see, this country was actually founded on Enlightenment values. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion -- these are Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian ones. These are values created in opposition to the religious oligarchies that filled Europe at the time. At our country's founding, there were plenty of countries actually based on Judeo-Christian values, and none of them had any of the freedoms that form the basis of our country's greatness. These countries had state religions, and woe to those who didn't agree with them or with the monarchs.

The most illustrative example of this is to actually look at the Ten Commandments. I love when people want to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings, because they're a set of laws, and public buildings deal with sets of laws, right? And the Ten Commandments is older, so it must be the basis for what we have now. QED.

Try actually reading the Ten Commandments. Then compare them to the million gabillion laws, state, federal, etc., that govern our land. How many laws are shared by both? Two: Don't kill, don't steal. We're perfectly free to dishonor our mother and father, make graven images, covet our neighbor's ass -- eight of the Ten Commandments disallow things that we definitely CAN do, according to the highest law of our land, the Constitution. And the two that are shared by both sets of laws are also laws that exist in every country, and are certainly not unique to either the United States or Judeo-Christianity. Yeah, I think I could have figured out not to kill or steal without the Ten Commanments telling me. Doi.

I'm not a fan of American exceptionalism, in which we arrogantly think we're a beacon to the world and a moral authority to all and generally the bee's knees, but our Constitution really is an exceptional step forward in the evolution of society. And we can thank the Enlightenment, and our Enlightenment-minded Founding Fathers, for it. Not Christianity. Or even Judeo-Christianity.

2. "Our founders were deeply religious."

This is sort of a corrollary to the prevous one -- the Founding Fathers were actually so irreligious that they made the then-radical move of founding a country on Enlightenment values instead of religious ones. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, etc. threw God's name in here and there in their speeches, but most were deists, who had a vision of God as a watchmaker: God wound up the world and then left it alone ever after. God isn't watching over us, isn't judging us and punishing us, isn't favoring us if we pray to him before a football game, and generally isn't that interested in our daily lives.

Mind you, they were quite interested in the moral lessons of the Bible. They went to church, learned from the Bible -- but they also learned from the Koran, from John Locke, etc. They were bookish, wealthy intellectuals. Basically, they were the Liberal Elite. John Kerry would have been much, much more at home with the Founding Fathers than would George W. Bush.

3) "Today's Christian conservatives hearken back to the Puritans."

Well, sort of. Yes, in the sense that both groups are really freakin' Christian. But there are some important differences.

Modern Christian conservative groups, such a Pentacostals or what have you, base everything on a person's personal relationship with Christ. God speaks to them personally, and their faith flowers from this. This idea would have been extreme blasphemy to the Puritans. In fact, it was: In 1638, a firebrand revolutionary Puritan named Anne Hutchinson was exiled from the community for saying, among other things, that God was speaking through her.

I learned about this in Sarah Vowell's "The Wordy Shipmates," which is a fun book even if you're not that into history. It talks about how the Puritans believed that God only spoke to them through the Bible, so they studied it like crazy. They actually remind me more of modern Orthodox Jews, endlessly picking apart and analyzing every word of their text. They were generally very literate and bookish, constantly writing and reading everything they could get their hands on.

So they were as nerdy as the Founding Fathers, but they sure as heck weren't deists. They believed everything they saw was a portent. Vowell talks about one Puritan who saw a mouse beat up on a snake. What would now be a funny YouTube video was then seen as a extremely meaningful signal of the Puritans defeating the devil, or something.

And, for the record, the Puritans did believe in at least some measure of separation between church and state. Preachers were prevented from running for government posts, that kind of thing. But in reality there was a lot of influence running back and forth and a lot of unabashedly religious laws on the books.

Another revolutionary figure among the Puritans, Roger Williams, had an opinion about the separation of church of state that more closely matches our modern one. Williams believed that there had to be a huge wall between church and state -- not because he wanted government freed from religion as much as he wanted religion unsullied by government. He had seen Catholicism in Europe warped by political concerns, misused as an instrument of power, and spawn horrible wars, like the 30 Years War that was raging at the time between Catholics and Protestants.

Williams was an interesting guy. He was an arrogant ultra-religious blabbermouth, but he was also remarkably tolerant in a lot of ways. He would harangue you for days on end to become Christian, but he didn't believe in ever punishing anyone for not being Christian. He was also exiled from the Puritain communities because of his views, and went on to live amicably with the American Indian tribe the Narrangasett and become the founder of both Providence and Rhode Island.

Anyway, modern Christian conservatives are much more beholden to a religious movement called the Great Awakening in the 1800s. That's when you got the tent revivals and fire and brimstone and such.

In conclusion (that's how I always ended every high school history paper), sure, The United States has a long history of strong religious feeling. But let's not forget that it also has a long history of irreligious feeling. And the government is and always has been a bastion of that feeling. It's worked pretty well so far, so let's keep it that way.