LIARS for JESUS Volume I

LIARS FOR JESUS Volume I LIARS FOR JESUS — The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History — Volume I CHRIS RODDA Published by the author somewhere in the Garden State 2006 Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History ©2006 by Chris Rodda Not too many rights reserved. The use of a reasonable amount of the content of this book is fine with me, provided that it is used for the purpose of correcting the historical myths and lies of the religious right – wherever they may be lurking or may appear. By a reasonable amount, I mean as much as is necessary to thoroughly and successfully disprove a particular lie or list of lies, whether that is one paragraph or ten pages. In other words, use what you need, but don’t go copying entire chapters onto your website or anything. ISBN: 1-4196-4438-6 The Liars For Jesus website, www.liarsforjesus.com, contains a footnote archive, allowing those reading this book to view images of the documents cited in its footnotes, as well as links to the many books cited that, thanks to a number of recent digitization projects, are now freely accessible online. This book is dedicated to everyone working in any way to combat the religious right’s revisionism of American history. Table of Contents Acknowledgements . i Foreword . iii Introduction . xiii 1. Congress and the Bible. 1 2. The Northwest Ordinance . 31 3. Indian Treaties and Indian Schools . 71 4. Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen? . 123 5. Thomas Jefferson and Public Education . 157 6. Did Prayer Save the Constitutional Convention? . 251 7. Treaties with the Barbary States. 281 8. Treaties with Christian Nations . 319 9. James Madison’s Detached Memoranda. 325 10. The Election of 1800 . 357 11. More Lies About Benjamin Franklin . 411 12. More Lies About Thomas Jefferson. 425 13. Jefferson, Madison, and Blackstone?. 461 Index . 497 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I’d like to thank my parents, Jim and Anne, for all their support and encouragement, and, most importantly, for paying my rent so I wouldn’t have to finish writing this book on a laptop plugged into my car lighter. I’d also like to thank everyone else – particularly Debbie, Michele, Ricky (a.k.a. Tito from the Bronx), Ron, and Al – who helped me pay my bills, bought the books and other stuff I needed, got my electricity turned back on so I could keep writing, and bought food for me and Mac. I’m guessing that my thanks alone probably aren’t enough reward, and that they’ll all be expecting me to pay them back now. I’d also like to thank Bill (who wrote the foreword) and everyone else who, for some reason, thought I could write a book. Apparently, they were right. Also indispensible in getting this book written were all my friends and neighbors who proofread, made suggestions, and gave me ideas – particularly my friends (as well as a few of my adversaries) from the message boards. And, last but not least, I’d like to thank Mac for all the times he patiently waited to go outside while I finished just one more paragraph or looked up just one more thing. i ii LIARS FOR JESUS Foreword The work that you hold in your hands has been a labor of love and of will. It has taken almost three years to come to print. Along the way there were many preliminary working deadlines. Many of us closest to Chris Rodda’s work yearned for those deadlines to be met and the promise of her work to be fulfilled. This was for very selfish reasons. We wanted a credible and thorough way of addressing the numerous lies and misrepresentations being spread by some Christians and their leaders concerning the faith and religion of our Founding Fathers. The deadlines we pressured Chris to meet were more often temptations because of the political climate than realistic expectations. The Newdow Case concerning the Pledge of Allegiance coming before the Supreme Court of the United States of America, the emergence of Faith-based Initiatives, the battle over Roy Moore’s rock and the post- ing of the Ten Commandments in “his” courtroom in Alabama, and the election campaigns of 2004 with the increased mixing of religion and politics in public policy: these were all used for political gain and/or turning out the vote of well-intentioned and often misled Christians. With those temptations resisted, the book you have in your hands is far better and far more thorough than the original con- cept, plus there are now more volumes to follow. Chris was impassioned by the cause of confronting those who dis- tort and reconstruct history to the shape of their own political and religious goals. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled iii iv LIARS FOR JESUS to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Chris heard arguments over and over again from radical, conservative Christians about the lives and intentions of the Founders – arguments that contradicted her recollections of their work. Chris Rodda loves primary source research. She loves reading old and difficult script manuscripts and finding bits and pieces of a puz- zle long forgotten by others. On numerous occasions she would Instant Messenger me asking if we could talk about some new and exciting piece of information that drew a clearer and clearer picture of just how strong the wall of separation conceived by Jefferson and Madison was meant to be. How much I came to love and appreciate her digital signature clause, “What Would Jefferson Do?” whenever I saw it. Most often, Chris was responding to someone who had bought in to the polemic she, generally, referred to as the “Liars for Jesus,” regurgitating via cut and paste something from David Barton’s Wall- Builders or some similar website. Chris and I disagreed about and debated her use of the term “Liars for Jesus.” I felt using the term in the title might alienate some of the very people who most needed to read her work, but she has stood by her convictions. Whatever our opinions about religion and political causes, the Founding Fathers had their own, forged in the midst of a mixture of faiths and philosophies much like our own. The religious mix of their world included Christians: many of whom considered other Christian denominations nothing less than heretics. There were the New Eng- land Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Anglicans of Virginia. There were Lutherans, Reformed, and Moravians among the German immigrants. There were Roman Catholics and Quakers. There were Jews and the Musselman or Mohametan (as the Islamic faith was known in their time). And there were the philosophical deists and Unitarians, the secret Masonic societies, and even rationalistic atheists. As the Founding Fathers lived in the midst of this diverse world experience, they reflected on the knowledge of the political and religious conflicts lived out on the European continent in the preceding centuries. They read and debated the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and other rationalists and empiri- cists. Then, personally religious or not, they made a choice to create a separation between the public life of law and politics and the private realm of personal religious life and practice. They separated the FOREWORD v process of governing under the Constitution into three branches of government and secured to the people the protection of personal life under the Bill of Rights. Religion was never to be used as a test for fit- ness to serve in public office, nor was government ever to make law suppressing religious activity of any particular faith. What was good for one was to be good for all. So why would any Christian pastor write a foreword to a book entitled “Liars for Jesus?” As I said above, I debated the title with Chris and argued against it. Nonetheless, I understand and support her efforts to establish strong arguments from the historical record and primary source documents concerning the political and religious truths about the Founding Fathers. That some people have tried to obscure and manipulate these events and writings to their own end will I believe become clear as you read her work. Besides the obvious implications of the eight or ninth commandment, depending on the enumeration of one’s particular faith community, and with a belief that nothing good or permanent can be built on deception or misrepre- sentation in good Trinitarian tradition, I will give you three answers; 1) A conviction that religion is a deeply personal issue and one that falls to each person to practice for themselves, privately or corporately, with or without favor, support, or restraint of the government. 2) A deep respect for the Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the work of the framers; 3) A equally deep belief that the strength of religious life in this country is the direct result of that freedom of religion so care- fully constructed by the framers and recognized for two centuries by the Supreme Court. The American experience has been marked by a deep and abiding religious content. From the landing of the pilgrims and my ancestors with them at Plymouth to the religious right political wars of today, religion has been a consistent catalyst for judgment and division. The pilgrims had no interest in philosophical concepts of religious freedom. Their pursuit was for a religious freedom for themselves and vi LIARS FOR JESUS they were quite prepared to enforce their concepts of right behavior on all other members of the community.

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