The most chilling thought
about America's future is a Cindy Jacobs as President.
Some walls exist to keeps things in. Some walls
exist to keep things out. But one wall stands to help other walls fall: the
wall of separation between church and state. It keeps the bigots at bay and
gives us time to assess their bigotry and belie their hatred.
There is a movement afoot to erase the
separation of church and state: it's boldly proposed by the "lunatic
fringe" - people like Cindy Jacobs who has fashioned herself and her
colleagues as "New Apostles" (the NAR , or New Apostolic Reformation), but
it's more prevalent in the "We Are A Christian Nation" circles headed
by pseudo historian David Barton.
"We Are A Christian Nation" - therein
lies the seeds to dark times ahead. For Dominionists like Barton neglect to insert an
important word into the slogan: "only." America is to be a Christian
ONLY nation: we caught a glimpse of the vehemence with which Dominionists and Reconstructionists hold their "truths to be self-evident"
when Pastor Dennis Terry's introduction of Rick Santorum created a firestorm, telling liberals,
atheists, Muslims, Buddhists to "Get Out!" Terry's subsequent
backpedaling of "I was misquoted. I'm a Christian, so of course I
love everyone," fell on deaf ears - only his congregation believed him.
It is ironic to think that the very reason for
America's freedom of religion is the thing that today's Christian Right is
trying to destroy: without separation of church and state there can be no
freedom of religion, only freedom of a few Christian sects to worship the One
True Religion. They say that wouldn't be so, but given an inch, and a mile of
hatred for other sects, other religions would be taken: there would be nothing
to stop them.
Perhaps the best reason for Separation of Church
and State is that the fighting between Christian sects and denominations should
be kept among themselves. We've already seen how - in disregarding the wall -
candidates' "Christianity" has come into play and how, if left to
certain denominations (like the Southern Baptist Convention), candidates would
be disqualified simply because they are not "their" kind of
Christian. They want to build a theocracy, but not on the shoulders of someone
like Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum got as far as he did with his campaign
simply because he painted himself as more righteous than the Catholic Church -
something that pleased the Protestant Christian Right immensely.
The Wall, properly in place, would eventually
disqualify the disqualifiers .
Jefferson, The Architect of
The Wall
David Barton's latest tome, The
Jefferson Lies has been
widely criticized as one of the most disingenuous books ever written about
Jefferson, valiantly trying to convince people that Jefferson was really VERY
Christian, he could not have fathered Sally Hemmings' children and that - most
importantly - he was never a critic of Christianity or religion. And never
really meant that crazy idea about separation of church and state.
But some people have believed Barton's fictional
look at our third President. It's considered a bestseller.*
The problem with Barton's revisionist history:
quotes, especially Jefferson's. You can't change them, nor can you give them
too much of a relativist slant. They're there for all the world to judge them
on face value, and with Jefferson's quotes, with writings from the man who
constructed the "Jefferson Bible" because he did not believe in the
miracles of the New Testament, Jefferson himself belies any attempt to make him
into a founder of a Christian Nation.
- History, I believe, furnishes
no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.
This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as
religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.
- Millions of innocent men,
women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been
burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch
towards uniformity.
- Christianity neither is, nor
ever was a part of the common law.
- In every country and in every
age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with
the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
- (...and the one to which I
identify most): Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against
unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act
upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the
mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of
Jesus."
- - Man once surrendering his
reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and
like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.
And the coup d' gras :
"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world,
and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming
feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology."
Back To Barton ... and his ilk.
The bigotry displayed by David these last several years is
undeniable: when rendering everything good as "Biblical" and
everything else bad as "secular" Barton has himself set up a wall of
"Us vs Them" and ramped up religious bigotry to new levels:
Barton, who has warned the public schools are
trying to "force"
students "to be homosexual" through
" homosexual
indoctrination ," concurred with host
Diana Crews said that she sees "Hitler" in "the likes of Kevin Jennings," whom
she claimed is promoting a "very dangerous that the agenda is really leading
kids away from God." He went on to attack California's SB 48 and claim that
textbooks there will teach kids the debated claims that George
Washington Carver and Abraham
Lincoln were gay, contending
that "public schools are more into indoctrination than they are into truth or
knowledge."
How many are in Barton's group? Unfortunately,
enough to make Freedom of Religion very difficult and put other freedoms (e.g.
women's reproductive rights) in
jeopardy. It's a group that could decide that any theocrat, no matter how
inane, would be better than none - and a good start to establish a true
Reconstructionist state.
Without a Wall of Separation Between Church and State, immense walls of bigotry could force us to face the fact that someone like Cindy Jacobs could indeed become President.
*The criterion for "bestseller" still stands at overall
bookstore and online sales, regardless of any one group buying it en masse .
If, for example, a book about the state of Texas were to become wildly popular
with Texans, and sell, say 75,000 copies in one week, it could conceivably be
termed a "national bestseller."