George Washington planted vineyards, and also ran a distillery. Thomas Jefferson was a passionate wine collector, sometimes called “America’s first vintner,” who once confessed “wine from habit has become an indispensable for my health.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy,” observing that the elbow was perfectly designed, by the Almighty, to facilitate drinking: “Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom.”
Given this, and other related historical facts, it would be easy to argue that the United States was founded by a bunch of tosspots for the express purpose of facilitating inebriation.
It would take an honest, fair-minded person — they do exist — to survey, not the narrow range of grape-stained documents, but the whole of American history, to point out that subordination to Great Britain did not encumber consuming wine, and other factors inspired the quest for American independence, such as a desire for freedom.
A similar candor demands that a similar even-handed historical perspective be applied to last Sunday’s “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” the prayer orgy on the National Mall featuring top officials from the Trump administration celebrating the notion that ours is a Christian nation created by, and for, Christians.
Pretty to think so. For them. For others, not so much. But before we dive in, first consider the source — something the media is terrible at doing. We wake up every morning, shocked to discover a fiery object in the sky, muster our wits to gradually ascertain that, yes, it is indeed the sun, again, and then prepare to receive that day’s load of lies and crimes as similar bolts from the blue, as if they hadn’t appeared yesterday and the day before that, and the day before….
The proponents of the America-is-Christian canard are the same people who generally not only take pride in their woeful ignorance of the past but claim to feel bad if minor details like slavery or labor strife or mass immigration manage to nudge themselves into a textbook. Who pass laws to make sure succeeding generations are hobbled in a similar fashion, a kind of intellectual foot binding. Now, in their continuing quest to salve their inflamed egos, they claim America was founded especially for them as a Christian nation. It wasn’t. It was founded by Christians, true. But suggesting that their creation is therefore, by necessity, also Christian, is like arguing that Albert Einstein’s revolution in physics makes atomic energy Jewish (which the Nazis actually did claim, to their eventual sorrow).
Where to begin? It’s common to start with the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, where our nation spelled it out so plainly that even MAGA could understand, if they were into understanding reality rather than trying to mold it to their whims.
“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,” Article 11 begins.
The treaty was ratified by the Senate and signed by President John Adams. Though I don’t want to make too much of it — it’s one treaty regarding Barbary pirates; let’s leave cherry picking a single fact out of history and pretending your case is proved to others. Rather, I would point to the enlightenment agnosticism that produced our Founding Fathers.
Consider the opening10 words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” Yes, it doesn’t say that a would-be dictator can’t curry favor with fiery-eyed fundamentalists by paying them endless lip service. But the spirit is there.
Jefferson, when not guzzling wine and writing the Declaration of Independence, went to bat for the very religious tolerance our government is now vigorously trying to undo.
“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god,” Jefferson writes in Notes on the State of Virginia, “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Identifying people who don’t belong — Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, women, LBGTQ, Jews, it’s quite a list — then finding way to bully and harass those people sometimes seems the central activity of American government. It sure ain’t keeping the price of gas low.
The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence — whose pending 250th anniversary is the pretext for this swan dive into self-adoring false piousness — begins this way:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It seems the “all men are created equal” part sticks in somebody’s craw, and they are trying to spit it out. Patriotic Americans ought not to let them.