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Let's start with a question you may never have even thought to ask: Why isn't there mail delivery on Sundays? For quite a while in America, Sunday delivery was not only viewed as entirely unremarkable, but as vital and necessary:
The above passage comes from a valuable article by Susan Jacoby, about "the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left." Jacoby points out that the intentional and very deliberate omission of God from the Constitution poses an insurmountable hurdle for those who would distort the intellectual roots of our nation's founding, and who would destroy a key element of its structure. Bill O'Reilly may be one of the crudest examples of those who insist on America's "Judeo-Christian heritage," but even many so-called "serious" commentators engage in the same lies.
And they are lies in the end, with regard to the political principles upon which the United States was based. Earlier Americans who condemned the Constitution's secularism and intended godlessness were far more open about their concerns:
My headline comes from the following passage. Jacoby notes the great danger represented by "a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history," and writes:
If I believed in His existence, I might ask God to forgive them for their sins -- not that they would thank me for the thought. But since I don't, I won't.
The degree to which a secular approach to government was accepted in early 19th-century America was demonstrated by Congress' refusal to abandon Sunday mail service, which it had mandated in 1810. The 1844 invention of the telegraph would eventually put an end to the commercial need for daily mail, but in the 1820s and '30s, business still depended on the government to keep the mails moving seven days a week.Oh, for the days when elected leaders discussed current controversies in terms of the principles involved. Those days are long gone now.
Nevertheless, powerful right-wing religious leaders waged an unceasing campaign against the sacrilege of Sunday mail, which some considered a more important moral issue than slavery. But evangelical Christians and freethinkers, who had joined together to write and ratify the godless Constitution, wanted no part of government sanction for a religious Sabbath.
In 1828, Congress referred the godly mess to the powerful Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads. Its chairman was Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson—a general, a hero of the War of 1812, and a devout Baptist. Johnson's report to Congress uncompromisingly declared that any federal attempt to give preference to the Christian Sabbath would be unconstitutional. He reminded his fellow legislators of the religious persecutions and intolerance that had impelled their revolutionary predecessors to draw a firm line—"the line cannot be too strongly drawn"—between church and state. (So much for separation of church and state being a recently invented lie of the left.)
The report also noted that many Americans, Christian and non-Christian, observed the Sabbath not on Sunday but on Saturday, and that the Constitution and its Bill of Rights were designed to prevent the majority from dictating to minorities. Johnson emphasized that the Constitution "gives no more authority to adopt a measure affecting the conscience of a solitary individual than that of the whole community."
The above passage comes from a valuable article by Susan Jacoby, about "the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left." Jacoby points out that the intentional and very deliberate omission of God from the Constitution poses an insurmountable hurdle for those who would distort the intellectual roots of our nation's founding, and who would destroy a key element of its structure. Bill O'Reilly may be one of the crudest examples of those who insist on America's "Judeo-Christian heritage," but even many so-called "serious" commentators engage in the same lies.
And they are lies in the end, with regard to the political principles upon which the United States was based. Earlier Americans who condemned the Constitution's secularism and intended godlessness were far more open about their concerns:
Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less than "an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in the wreck."I recommend you read the entire article.
The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People ... in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic statement that "all men ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It is worth noting here that the Declaration was a bold and impassioned proclamation of liberty, while the Constitution was a blueprint for a real government, with all the caution about practical consequences (such as divisive squabbles about the precise nature of divine authority over earthly affairs) required of any blueprint.
My headline comes from the following passage. Jacoby notes the great danger represented by "a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history," and writes:
Handed a tabula rasa by a public uneducated in civics, right-wing revisionists are free to ignore not only the strong anticlerical views of so many of the nation's first leaders but also their loathing of all entanglements between religion and government. "Oh! Lord!" Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. "Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would."We should also note these words from Thomas Jefferson:
The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."Yet today, the anti-secularists seek to obliterate all this history once and for all -- and with it, a crucial element of the considerations that gave rise to the miracle of America at its founding.
If I believed in His existence, I might ask God to forgive them for their sins -- not that they would thank me for the thought. But since I don't, I won't.
