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I
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am in a foul mood this
bleak Saturday in the 12014th year of the Holocene Era. It’s cold
out here, and icy winds knock down boughs and powerlines outside. Inside it’s
not exactly toasty, but it’s quite warm, thank you, and I suppose I ought to
count my blessings.
And one of those blessings is this page on a website called
Reneland, “Where The Truth About Religion Is Told, Life In Los Alamos Is
Remembered and Crimes Against Women Are Acknowledged”. Reneland sounds like a
fun place—so how do I explain this inane entry, over two years old now, which
makes some extraordinary claims about US religious history.
The author gets off to a rocky start by confusing the foundation of
the nation (in the late eighteenth century) with the coming of the first
settlers (early seventeenth century). There is a considerable difference. The first settlers did not found a nation. They set up colonies. The work of founding the nation belonged to a later generation.
She goes on to say “The freedom our
founding fathers were in search of was the freedom to not be persecuted for
their religious beliefs by the Catholic Church. By religious beliefs I mean
Christianity, or better yet Protestantism.” This is bizarre. Puritans (for
example) fled religious persecution by Anglicans, Catholics fled religious
persecution by Huguenots, as well as various protestants fleeing Catholic
persecution.
She then randomly flails away at a straw man who claims that
the founders were not Christian—a belief held by nobody that I am aware of.
(But the world is large, and there are many false beliefs. Nobody of any significance
believes this anyway.) Yes, she is absolutely correct that the founders were
white Christian men. And so?
But the ludicrous frosting on top of this half-baked cake is
the following statement, made apparently in all seriousness:
There was no idea of any other non Christian religion, no religion,
pagan or Jewish religion to any documents written when the forming of our
government was happening.
I freely admit that I have no idea of what Reneland was trying
to say, but the founders were quite aware of a variety of nonChristian
religions, and wrote about them. George Washington, father of the country,
explicitly included Judaism in the religious beliefs that were held by right, not
by mere toleration. Other writers mentioned Hinduism and Islam as well. The
idea that non-Christian religions were missing from “any documents written when
the forming of our government was happening” is, to use one of her favorite
words, ignorance.
And now come the golden sprinkles on this festive offering. “Let
me give you some examples in the form of quotes by our founding fathers”
Reneland writes. And of course you, my long-time readers (if any there be) know
what is coming. A rich offering of fake quotes, misattributions, and other
bizarrenesses. Let’s go:
First up, and by far the best of the offerings, are two
quotations from John Adams. (Or from my viewpoint the worst, as they are
legitimate. More or less.) The first:
I must not write a word to you about politics because you are a
woman.
I actually don’t know why this one is here, or what the point
of including it was. It comes from a letter to his wife Abigail (11 February 1779), and is part of an explanation of why he is avoiding a discussion of
politics:
I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a
woman.
What an offence have I committed! A woman!
I shall soon make it up. I think women better than men, in general,
and I know, that you can keep a secret as well as any man whatever. But the
world don’t know this. Therefore if I were to write my sentiments to you, and
the letter should be caught and hitched into a newspaper, the world would say,
I was not to be trusted with a secret.
Of course Adams had learned about the danger of intercepted letters, to his cost. And then we have this one, a familiar out-of-context
quotation from Adams’ 11 October 1798 reply to the officers of the first
brigade of the third division of the Massachusetts militia, slightly misquoted:
Our Constitution was made only for the [sic] moral and religious
people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
And now the real fun begins. Reneland lists three quotations
attributed to George Washington, of which one is legitimate. The first is an
over-familiar fake:
It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the
Bible.
As I’ve pointed out in the past, it first appeared in this
form in 1893, and rests only on the word of a lawyer who never met Washington.
Believe it if you like, but there’s no reason to think it authentic. This is
White Queen country here. Our next is a lightly-mangled excerpt from Washington's Farewell Address:
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be
maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect
that natural morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
Here is the authentic passage:
Let it be simply asked, where is the security for property, for
reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths
which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition
that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded
to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to
expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.
It’s close, at least. The third and last is a ring-tailed
doozy:
We are persuaded that good Christians will always be good citizens,
and that where righteousness prevails among individuals the nation will be
great and happy. Thus while just government protects all in their religious rights,
true religion affords to government its surest support.
As I’ve pointed out before, these are not Washington’s words
in the least; they are taken from a letter written to him—let me reiterate to
him—by a group of religious leaders. Washington is no more responsible for them
than for any other random assemblage of words directed to him in his long and
illustrious life.
Next comes a John Quincy Adams quotation, or rather, a slight
misquotation:
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this, it connected
in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles
of Christianity.
I’ve written about this one before. It’s basically legitimate,
though it would be better to quote it directly from Adams, rather than from
John Wingate Thornton. Also, John Quincy Adams isn’t really a founder.
Nor is James K. Polk, to whom this next mishmash is
attributed:
The Bible is the rock on which this Republic rests. Under the
benign act providence of almighty God the representatives of the states and of
the people are again brought together to deliberate for the public good.
The first sentence is something usually attributed to Andrew Jackson, though on no very good authority. (Need I point out that neither is
Jackson a founder?) The rest is legitimate, and is the opening of his fourth annual message to congress, 5 December 1848. Except, of course, the words “benign
act” should be the word “benignant”.
And last, my favorite punching-bag, the ultra-fake Patrick Henry “quotation” written in 1956, long after the fiery orator’s death:
It cannot be emphasized enough to strongly or to often that this
great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on
religions but on the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It’s misquoted, but that’s the least of its problems. It is
ignorance of the rankest variety to believe that Patrick Henry, or anybody of
his time for that matter, could have written this—this piece of idiocy.
And it’s really too bad because, honestly, Reneland is not a
bad place to visit. Just don’t drink the Kool-aid.
