The U. S. Is NOT a Christian Nation

 

A few days ago I received one of those annoying emails that circulate around the internet that encouraged the recipient with some urgency to forward it to everyone she knew.  The focus of that email was an ad by the Biden for President campaign directed toward Muslim Americans that encourages them to vote because that is the way change happens and that their vote matters.  The premise of the email, not specifically stated but implied by its urgent tone, is that our Christian nation is being overwhelmed by Muslims and encouraged by Biden to undermine our Christian values.  There is a link to that Biden ad with a breathless plea to watch all of it to see how far our Christian nation has strayed from its roots by catering to foreigners with different values. 

Usually I ignore these chain emails but this one came from a very conservative religious and lovely elderly lady who is a dear friend and she sent it to a lot of people we know in common.  Because of the urgency of the times and the dangerous spread of disinformation from domestic groups and meddling foreign trolls in advance of the election I concluded that I should respond.  Evangelical Christian assertions to the contrary, the fact is that the Founders consciously and intentionally established this nation to be free of and from religion.  They saw religion as divisive and wanted the new nation to be neutral with respect to religion so that each citizen could worship or not in accordance with his/her beliefs. 

The email in question said that every American needs to watch every second of Biden’s political ad and that it would make the hair stand up on your neck.  So I watched it—twice.  I did not see anything scary.  It was directed to Muslim Americans. It quoted from the Koran.  It urged all Americans to vote in accord with their values.  It seemed a normal political ad, similar to ads directed to specific groups to remind them we are in this struggle together for the soul of the nation—labor union members in the Midwest, or the Jewish community in South Florida, or Hispanics in the Southwest—and that their voice matters.

I replied to her, from which I quote some excerpts below, slightly edited:

As you requested I listened to every word.  What he said was that every vote counts and that EVERY AMERICAN whether they are Muslim, or Jew, or Christian, or Black matters and needs to make their voice heard.  He quoted selected peaceful quotations from the Koran, just as Christians quote selectively from the Bible.  He said that Muslim Americans have a right and duty to vote in a democracy.  Every political presidential campaign, including Trump, sends messages to select groups of voters whose votes it is seeking.  There is nothing that was said in that Biden ad that any American who believes in democracy, the right to vote, and a better and more caring world should disagree with.

I am concerned that there is a conscious and deliberate attempt by Trump and his supporters to fan racial hatred and to claim that Americans should not participate in the Black Lives Matter protests against the injustice of treating poor blacks differently than well off whites.  That is the not very hidden theme of Trump’s law and order movement, to limit and criminalize the right of Americans to protest and why it is so important that all Americans protect our civil liberties from the abuses and fascist tendencies of the current Attorney General, who tried to use military style tactics in the streets of Portland to deny protest and turn it into a war zone.

There are two things that seem to be implied by that forwarded email, that there was something wrong and disturbing about the Biden video because it sought to encourage Muslim Americans to vote in our Presidential election, and that the US is a Christian country endangered by Muslims.  The issue of the U.S. as a Christian nation has been argued before and is a matter clear in our history that has been intentionally distorted by Evangelical Protestant Christians since the 1950s who assert that the US was founded as a Christian nation.  It was NOT.  [I taught US history, back quite a few years ago.]

Many of the original 13 colonies were founded by religious groups, Puritans, ana-Baptists, Calvinists, Catholics, Quakers, etc. ALL WITH THE INTENT of getting away from Europe's oppressive church-state religions and insisting on the freedom to worship (or not) as they chose.  The Founding Fathers were clear--in order for the colonies of the new nation to exist peaceably with each other there could be no establishment of religion.  We would be a new nation established in freedom of and from religion, where the nation was neutral and the people were free to worship as they chose.  That is a fundamental premise of democracy.  [Here is an article I wrote on the U.S. as a Christian nation.] Most of the Founders, including Thomas Jefferson in particular, were not Christians, they were Deists.

These are troubling times and the danger of fascist solutions are tempting.  I hate that the Trump people are trying to sow discord and division and promoting racial hatred and White Nationalism under the guise of a narrow view of Christian religion that is amenable to limiting freedom.  Our country deserves better.  We need new national leadership that is committed to democracy, that has the will and the ability to solve our pandemic problems, and to re-establish our place in the world of free nations—not make things progressively worse.  It will take an election in November to achieve this.