The Sins of a Nation

The United States is not the greatest nation on Earth. It’s not a great nation among many. In moral or ethical terms, it’s not even a good one. While there is indeed much that is positive about who we are as a nation and what we stand for — personal liberty; democracy by the people, for the people; hard work; perseverance; and innovation — from the context of history and current events, we are and have been, a failure.

And I am going to elaborate on this troubling reality, not to needlessly slam the country and its legacy, but because I genuinely want us to be better: more compassionate in our societal and political policymaking, more accepting of and loving toward everyone without exceptions and provisos, more open to progress, more concerned with leaving behind a bright future and a cleaner planet for future generations, more interested in science, more welcoming to immigrants and, perhaps more importantly, more embracing of our central axiom, “all men are created equal.”

Is America a Christian nation?

One of the main ideas that bring many to conclude that America is, indeed, a great nation is the set of principles that many hold dear, namely that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and by extension, this must make us inherently good. The idea comes mainly from Christian members of the Republican Party, but plenty of Democrats also believe it. Inherent in this argument, of course, is that the country is, by extension, morally upright because, well, how can a nation be founded on Christianity and not be moral?

I could make a completely different post arguing that the central tenets of Christianity, which include scapegoating, or letting someone else pay for the sins of another; compulsory love, God the father demanding that people love him or be threatened with eternal hellfire; and human sacrifice, are, in fact, hideously evil and come down to us from a barbarous age. You can click the links for more of what I’ve already written on the subject. Take these three evils, along with the Bible’s shameful record on mass genocide and slavery, and powerful evidence to conclude that neither Christianity or its god are a source of goodness. It’s actually the other way around. It is the people who believe in Christianity who are good in spite of what their religion teaches in a holy book. Yes, of course, Jesus supposedly said some nice things, but oddly enough, the Republican Party, which routinely claims for itself the moral high ground, has abandoned most of them.

Our second president, John Adams, rejected the idea that the United States was founded on Christianity, and so did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. And so do I.

The Founding Fathers were a mix of deists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and other denominations. The Declaration of Independence, which is not a legal document and shouldn’t be construed as such when arguing about the religiosity of America, contains only a couple vague references to a deity and has no mention of Jesus or Christianity. Almost every public document in this time period contained similar nonspecific references to God. The Constitution includes one reference to God, the customary “in the year of our Lord” sign off at the end, and anyone who claims this — the vaguest reference of all and the closest one can possibly get to having no reference whatsoever — as proof that we are a Christian nation or that the country was established on Judeo-Christian principles is grasping for straws in the dark.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, outright denied the wonderworking power of Jesus, going so far as to reconfigure the Gospels to his liking, leaving what he considered the good parts and cutting out all references to miracles and the supernatural. The other founders were mostly churchgoers, as was pretty much everyone in the 18th century, but nearly all of them hewed to a rather subdued brand of faith than what has been considered evangelical Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The First Amendment statute to protect people’s ability to worship, or not, as they saw fit was important to Jefferson and the other founders. As Jefferson said in a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.” Jefferson was said to have rejoiced when a proposal to insert “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia Statute preamble was defeated.

In his autobiography, he said:

(Freedom of religion was) meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s (sic) protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.

It is incontrovertible that we are now, as we were then, a Christian-majority nation, but the United States is obviously composed of many other religions and faith traditions, along with an increasing number of atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people in America who are irreligious has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1970s to 26 percent in the last couple years.

Nonetheless, it is still very difficult for anyone who does not openly profess their Christianity to get elected to public office. Even John F. Kennedy, who took a lot of heat just for being Catholic — in the mind of many evangelicals, he wasn’t the right “kind” of Christian — refused to allow his faith to influence his public duty to the nation.

During a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, Kennedy said:

I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

So yes, Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, and probably will be for decades to come, especially in the Republican Party. To this day, while many Democrats are certainly Christian, they tend to deemphasize their faith when it comes to making decisions, except in vague references to God in speeches or prayers, whereas Republicans usually wear their faith on the sleeves and openly use religion to influence how they govern, even though many of their own constituents do not follow the same faith.

To say that we are founded on Christianity full-stop, however, is to deny reality. Not only were we not established as such — our founding had more to do with the Enlightenment, governing principles from the motherland and political philosophy far predating the Revolutionary Era — we’re not a particularly moral nation either, and we never have been.

Make America … Good Again?

I have outlined why we aren’t a Christian nation or a good nation based on the dominant religion. What about based on history? I’m afraid the nation also gets an F in that category. Here’s a far-from-exhaustive laundry list of our “sins” (The word “sins” is in quotes because the idea of “sin” is a construct of religion, but it has value here in showing the seriousness of our collective crimes).

The United States and the founders protected the extension of slavery for 20 extra years in the Constitution. Many of the founders owned at least one slave. John Adams, bless his soul, owned none.

Our government subjugated native Americans after the colonists arrived and killed off many of them with guns and European diseases.

The nation fought a bloody war over the right of the South to continue the institution of chattel slavery, on which its economy was built, and at one time, the entire national economy, which was largely built on the backs of black folks. The North as well as the South profited from the “peculiar institution.”

After Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Co. crushed the rebellion, slavery by a new name called the Reconstruction was established by which many black people in the South returned to their previous subservient positions.

On Good Friday, of all days, Abraham Lincoln, the man who brought emancipation to 4 million black people, was murdered by a racist named John Wilkes Booth, thus punctuating the fact that bigotry and sympathy for the Southern cause was alive and well after thousands fought and died for four years defending both.

After a brief flicker of democracy in the late 19th century when black men in America got the right to vote, Jim Crow took root. A full 100 years passed — replete with voter suppression, segregation and lynchings — from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when discrimination at the polls and segregation in schools and public places were officially outlawed, much to the chagrin of racists everywhere, like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who would be revered by conservatives in my home state for decades to come.

One of the brightest beacons of love, hope and equality the nation had ever seen was extinguished on April 4, 1968, handing racism yet another victory in the long, frustrating and bloody march toward ultimate emancipation. Martin Luther King Jr. brought a message of peace and solidarity among all men and women, and he was killed for it.

Americans watched and laughed at shows like, “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times,” and perhaps some people secretly thought, “We’re making progress on race” now that all these black folks are getting high-profile spots on television. Meanwhile, systemic racism took hold across the next five decades, no longer the bold, firebrand bigotry of old, but the more insidious, viral kind that seeps into schools, police stations, courthouses and public seats of power. The federal government, state governments and local municipalities were all complicit.

America watched with either horror, vague sympathy or apathy as Rodney King was beaten in the early 1990s by cops in Los Angeles. In the subsequent years, Americans watched as unarmed black person after unarmed black person was either choked out or gunned down by overzealous or racist police officers. Many of us stood with Black Lives Matter and demanded change in the justice system. Many of us, far too many of us, however, did nothing. Many of us, like the current president, stoked racial tensions, and many of us dug in our heels on how our whiteness was superior to their blackness. Many of us turned our backs on our fellow Americans, and we abandoned whatever moral compass we thought we had, and by doing so, we abandoned our own humanity. No less than 21 race riots have occurred in this country since 1978.

At the same time the BLM matter demonstrations have been occurring, we have seen the true colors of a disturbingly large segment of the population, most of them claiming to be Christians and Republicans, yet apparently caring little for their own health or for the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens by refusing to wear face masks. Racism has brought the nation the most shame throughout history, but anti-intellectualism and selfishness is closely behind.

These grievances and trespasses against morality and ethics, among a people who declare so vigorously that faith, which they say is at the very center of morality, is such an important part of our lives and the national conscience, only cover issues related to race.

If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already made sure to take whatever steps necessary to end or drastically reduce hunger, poverty and homelessness.

If we, as a nation, actually care about people, we would have already happily accepted a little more in the way of taxes to ensure that every person has access to free health care. We would have already neutered the unfair and grossly mismanaged insurance industry. We would have already placed stop-gaps on the pharmaceutical industry’s runaway price-gouging practices.

Like Canada and many Western European nations, we would have already put in place a string of provisions that improve the health of well-being of every person in the country, not just white people or privileged people or rich people. If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already rooted out each politician, Republican or Democrat, who did not support the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that every American should enjoy. It is a near impossibility to pursue any of them without fundamental things like safety, health and a fair wage.

That said, imagine Jesus looking out over the multitude of 5,000 hungry people before him, which, if the story even took place, was probably more like 10,000 or 15,000 because women and children didn’t count as people. Imagine Jesus seeing the people holding out their baskets in quiet desperation to sate their gnawing appetite. Imagine that he opens his mouth and says, “I can help you, but I won’t. You will have to fend for yourselves,” as he turns away and leaves them to languish in starvation and destitution. From a political standpoint, by failing to meet people’s basic needs with all the resources in the world to make it happen, this is essentially what we have done.

In ethical terms, we’re starving. We are supposedly the richest and most sought-after nation in the world, yet we routinely fail the most vulnerable among us. We fail the working class. We fail the poor. We fail the sick. We fail the uninsured. We fail immigrants. We fail children. And most of all, we fail black people. And we have failed every single one of these groups of Americans under the leadership of people who say they are Christians. This is even more true with evangelical Republican politicians, many of whom have presided over some of the most callous and harmful pieces of legislation the nation has ever seen in our 244-year history.

How good are we, really? How much do we, as a nation, actually care about people? I don’t mean some people. I mean all people. How has our status as a supposedly “Christian nation” moved the needle? It has not, and in some cases, it has moved the needle in the wrong direction.

I don’t offer any easy prescriptions; I am simply diagnosing the illness. The cure can be found in doing the opposite of all that I have laid out: in continuing to fight systemic racism, firebrand racism and subtle racism; in establishing compassionate economic and sociopolitical policies that raise all of the boats in society; in following the path of science and free inquiry; and in abandoning anti-intellectualism once and for all. When religion in the United States peters out or becomes irrelevant — and it will one day — the path forward toward a more just and ethical society will be found in secular humanism.

[Cover photo: A modified version of “Cross” by DeviantArt user Steinn-Hondkatur.]

Mark Levin: ‘Trust me.’ Sure.

Loving news talk, but not having satellite radio, I purposefully subjected myself to about an hour or so of the Mark Levin Show on the way back tonight from covering something for work. Levin, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the many current fear-mongering talking heads dubbing themselves “Constitutionalists,” and his show is aired on this new radio station in Northeast Georgia on the 103.7 dial. The radio station airs the usual cast of Levin, Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage. This is no surprise, given the location, but several months ago, I actually e-mailed the station and said something to the effect of that, while I appreciated the fact that we now had a talk radio station in Northeast Georgia, I find the content they’ve chosen to air to be disingenuous and destructive to any kind of constructive political conversation. An official with the station replied back that, as programming manager, he must strike a balance between the kind of content offered versus what is marketable. Basically, he was saying something along the lines of, “This is what is popular right now, and this is what sells and people in this region want to listen to.” While that may be true, that fact certainly doesn’t give the station any credibility as a real news source. Of course, in radio and many news outfits today, credibility isn’t the important thing, now is it?

But back to Levin. His usual shtick, in which he condemns Obama of having some sinister socialist mind and agenda, was very much evident tonight (Actually, a taped episode from Oct. 29), as in every other episode to which I have listened. Tonight, right in line with the theme of his book, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, available in fine book stores everywhere, Levin seems to equate the Obama administration and everything certain Democrats and progressives are trying to accomplish as tyrannical efforts, efforts such as bolstering the effectiveness of government programs and, well, helping those who can’t help themselves.

Here is Levin from Oct. 29:

Conservatism is the only antidote to tyranny because conservatism is our founding principles (sic). Conservatism is a recognition of the value of the individual human being. That’s the bottom line. All these other models, all these other philosophies, political philosophies, they’re not about the individual human being. They’re about some centralized power where masterminds, whereas I decided to call them, stateists (?), decide what’s best and isn’t best, but I don’t care how they dress it up. Tyranny is tyranny.”

The audio:

[audio:http://www.jeremystyron.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Levin10292010_A1.mp3|titles=Mark Levin, Oct. 29]

Might I remind Levin that some of the most important Founding Fathers, namely Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, would today probably have been Democrats for their belief in a strong centralized government. For what is the point of having a government at all if it’s not to be a strong one, and I think Hamilton and Madison understood this. Do we really want a weak or measly federal government? What would be the point of that? State governments surely can’t be expected to regulate international commerce, markets and provide for the common defense and welfare.

On Levin’s statement about the value of individual human beings, I couldn’t agree more, in circumstances where said individual is, indeed, capable of finding and keeping a job and engaging in entrepreneurial enterprises, but we well know that many people in our nation are not capable of exercising their supposed “value” within the job market because of disability or education or economic disparagement. So, while Levin’s theory may work with economically upright Americans, it doesn’t work with others, and indeed, it’s a slap in the face to the thousands who need help and have nowhere to turn but the government. Sure, some abuse exists within the system, but to assume that the majority seeking government help abuse the system is a heartless exaggeration. And this heartlessness is, I think, at the heart of the current wave of Tea Party, constitutionalist movement. We are not an open prairie, agricultural society anymore, and I’m not sure we ever have been, except under the clouds of slavery, indentured servitude and sharecropping. So, I’m not sure what Levin and others are trying to achieve, but it seems that the world they seek is an illusion, anachronistic and irrelevant from modern America.

Couple hours with talk radio on Friday night

Thank goodness for fringe talk radio to keep me angry enough late at night so I’m not attempted to fall asleep at the wheel while returning from a lengthy trip Lexington, Ga., to cover a football game.

I’m not sure what radio host, Mark Levin’s, obsession is with The Washington Post (Levin calls it The Washington Compost) writer, Dana Milbank, but Milbank is linked on Levin’s Web site, and Levin, in usual form, went into a 10-minute rant about this column, appearing Friday in The Post. In it, Milbank detailed some of the more unusual features of a protest held Thursday on Capitol Hill by House Republicans and Tea Party supporters, who were rallying against the health care reform bill currently under consideration. To briefly point out some of what Milbank observed:

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to “Stop Obamunism.” A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

According to Milbank, also being displayed was a banner which read: “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945.”

Levin on the radio show claimed he saw none of this nonsense, and was quick to point to a 90-year-old veteran he saw in a wheel chair on the front row and the numerous American flags, etc, etc. Levin seemed to indicate that among 20,000 people (He must have had a different math teacher than Milbank, who only recorded about 5,000 in attendance), there were sure to be a few crackpot, zany signs and that you could pick out fringers anywhere, like Waffle House on any given day. But the tough news for Levin is that he is a fringer. In his long rant on the air tonight, Levin accused liberals of doing everything in their power to ridicule some of the strong, female leaders of the conservative movement, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. He awkwardly threw in the word “attractive” in his description, but I have no idea what physical appearance has to do with anything.

But the point is this. He accused some of ridiculing the intelligence and the very being of people like Palin and others, but leveled a barrage of belittling names Milbank’s way in response to the column. In his vitriol, in which by the end, Levin was for all practical purposes, screaming into the microphone, used the following choice words to describe Milbank (I wrote some of them down as I was listening): “jerk” (three times); “moron”; “propagandis,” and a “pathetic” one at that; “liar”; “coward”; “punk”; “hack”; “ass”; and “backbencher”. The liar and coward accusations begin teetering into slander territory. Regardless, what sort of person do you have to be to, in one breath, accuse someone of belittling or mocking Palin, while not more than two minutes later, to begin such a barrage of insults I just listed against another person?

I want to address one more thing. The use of the word “patriots” to describe Tea Party attendees or Republicans or anti-Obama zealots is just plain offensive to the spirit on which this country was built. One person who called in to Levin’s show described the attendees of the aforesaid rally as “citizen patriots,” whatever that means. This type of nonsense basically throws feces over the venerable graves of John Adams, Sam Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Hancock, George Washington and the thousands who fought from Massachusetts and the other colonies against the British to help us win independence. I’m not a patriot. Obama isn’t a patriot. Levin isn’t a patriot. Neither is Milbank. The New England Patriots aren’t even patriots. The dictionary definition of the word generally means anyone who loves her country, but look deeper, and the word originates from Greek root, patēr, meaning “father,” hence, as it relates to this country, Founding Fathers. Using that word so lightly after all that this country has been through in its 200-plus year history makes a mockery of what the above men worked to accomplish, and it’s personally offensive to me, and it should be to anyone else with a brain.

I’ll probably have more to say on Levin later when it’s not 2 a.m. after having worked 12 hours. …

Our forward-thinking Founders

I recently finished reading “Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention in 1787” by Christopher and James Lincoln Collier, and for anyone who has not read it, I would highly suggest it as an introduction to what happened behind closed doors that summer, which eventually resulted in what we know as the document that binds us and guides us as a nation.

The book’s conclusion, which included a brief explanation or thesis about how the axioms presented in the U.S. Constitution fit into and implicate how we conduct business as a nation in modern times. It’s conclusion reminded me of a discussion I had with (seemingly) the entire bloc of Tea Party supporters, of which, that post can be found here.

My main premise in that post was to suggest that no one really knows what the Tea Party movement is about. Is it about a strict adherence to the Constitution? Is it anti-tax? Anti-big spending? Anti-Democrat? People showing up in 18th century garb at rallies across the country didn’t exactly clarify matters. Another point that I hope was clear in my post and in other posts on this blog, here and here, is that it’s awfully hard to know precisely on which side of current national issues the Founding Fathers would have come down on. We can probably get close, but they were people of their own times attempting to forge a document that would live beyond them. And they most certainly did, but to say that we can take modern questions like, should we bailout the automakers or should we offer universal health care, and place them onto the Founders, seems to me anachronistic and reading back onto them modern concerns. The truth is, as I see it, they would likely be extremely surprised to see how much liberty we have taken thus far with their — our — document. The authors of the aforementioned book acknowledged this problem.

Take the Colliers’ interpretation of how the Founders would have viewed the modern incarnation of the Supreme Court:

The power of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution is what has given the document the flexibility necessary to deal with changing conditions. Yet it is certain that the delegates would have been horrified to see how broadly the Court has used its interpreting power. They believed, at bottom, that if final power had to lie anywhere, it ought to be in the legislature, which they saw as the primary voice of the people. They certainly did not expect the judiciary to be dealing with day-to-day details of school ssytesm, prisons, and fire departments as they do today.

Also, after FDR, we see a string of presidents taking military action and intervening in affairs overseas with troops without first asking for Congress’ approval. George W. Bush would obviously be the worst agressor in recent years.

Here is what Encarta says, which notes that Congress in years past has simply “relinquished” powers to make war to the president:

U.S. presidents after World War II have assumed most of the authority to send U.S. troops into battle. The Korean War (1950-1953), for example, was regarded by the U.S. government as a police action rather than as a war, and President Harry S. Truman never sought a declaration of war from Congress. And in 1964 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which effectively ceded to President Lyndon B. Johnson the ability to wage war against Vietnam. Congress passed a similar resolution on January 12, 1991, authorizing President George H. W. Bush to use force against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.

And the Colliers’:

What, finally would the Founders have thought of the tendency of recent American presidents to commit troops to battle without formal permission from Congress? They would almost certainly have been astonished and outraged. They were determined not to give a potential tyrant an armed force to use as he wished. (Not to call him a tyrant; that would probably be inaccurate, but this is precisely what George W. Bush did). Had they seen a president sending troops out on his own in pursuit of his foreign policy objectives (Again: See Bush) they would have taken immediate action to stop him.

My larger point is this: If we want to take a literalist reading of the Constitution and say such things as, ‘It’s socialism that the president will now be the largest shareholder in GM or that it’s socialism to attempt to bailout the banks,’ we might as well begin taking the entire building down brick-by-brick. Or, even that such things as Medicaid and Social Security are unconstitutional (as some in my debates with the Tea Party supporters were claiming), we might as well start from ground zero and begin the country over again. We are one of the country’s the world looks to for leadership, and it’s much too late, centuries late, to begin debating, off the rantings of Glenn Beck and others, that the entire edifice is now faulty and unconstitutional.

The Framers, Madison, Washington, Gouvenor Morris, Hamilton, Gerry, Randolph, the Pinkneys (Charles and Charles Cotesworth) and many others were some of the greatest minds to ever land on this soil. Though they might have been astounded or enraged that we would now make some of the policies that we are making, they were forward thinking enough to realize that circumstances in the 18th century would not be the circumstances in the 21st century, including some of the very provisions they laid forth in the Constitution. That’s why they made it flexible enough to be amended and interpreted.  They, I think, trusted that great minds would also follow their own, doing what was best for this country and, subsequently, for the international community.