U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama recently invited the Christian Broadcasting Network to send him some questions via email. In response, Obama noted that “[i]t was the forbearers of Evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they didn’t want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.” Obama also pointed out the painfully obvious fact that “[w]hatever we once were, we’re no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers.” The senator concluded that legislators should “work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community.”
Pat Robertson, money grubber of biblical proportions and CBN’s big cheese, unsurprisingly disagreed. Robertson called Obama’s comments “dangerous” and accused him of “selling out . . . the origins of our nation.”
The story is available here courtesy of AU.
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Comments
Glad to see someone standing up to Robertson.
“[i]t was the forbearers of Evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they didn’t want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.”
This is a ubiquitous li’l meme, all right, intended to shame or mollify the contemporary budding theocrats in the USA, but it rankles as revisionist (or at least expurgated) history. One of the upsides of Christopher Hitchens’ drunken ramblings about God is his observation that lots and lots of the religious colonists to America wanted precisely to establish theocracies, and interwove theology, civil law and criminal law rather freely.
Yeah, I can buy “expurgated.” It’s true that the proto-evangelicals counted quite a few staunch separationists among their number, but it’s also true that some states had established churches at the time their legislatures ratified the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those facts led Clarence Thomas to pontificate that the Establishment Clause was all about protecting state establishments from federal interference.
I think it’s the typical direction of the wording that rankles. As Obama puts it, and as it’s often put, it sounds like the religious Euro settlers of America had generally separationist motives or leanings. That there were evangelicals/post-Puritans among the separationists come constitution-time is one thing; it’s quite another thing (and false) that the reason early religious settlers went to those shores in the first place was to enjoy a polity that provided for all non-oppressive worships by enforcing the particular tenets of none. Which I know you know. I’m just unburdening.