Category: Culture
Sightings
Martin Marty’s, “Sightings” this week is a reminder about the “why” that quality public education is important. Critical thinking skills are a necessity in an age when the ability to misquote and revisionism for effect are everyday activities in political, marketing, and religious life.
David Barton’s Jefferson
— Martin E. MartyOur premier historian of late colonial and early republican America, Gordon Wood, while reviewing a book on Roger Williams warms up readers with references to Thomas Jefferson. “It’s easy to believe in the separation of church and state when one has nothing but scorn for all organized religion. That was the position of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s hatred of the clergy and established churches knew no bounds. He thought that members of the ‘priestcraft’ were always in alliance with despots against liberty. For him the divine Trinity “was nothing but ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘hocus-pocus’. . . Ridicule, he said, was the only weapon to be used against it.”
If you wanted to promote the idea of “a Christian America,” one which would privilege one religion, a version of Christianity, and de-privilege all others, and if you want to get back to roots and origins, the last of the “founding fathers” on whom you’d concentrate would be Jefferson. Yet the most ardent public and pop advocate of privilege and virtual establishment, David Barton, cites Jefferson for Bartonian positions which are directly opposite of Jefferson’s. Never heard of David Barton? Most of the historians you would ever meet never heard of him, and if you told them about him and his positions, they would yawn or rage about listing him among those who deal honestly with Jefferson.
Sightings does not over-do ad hominem and sneering references, so we leave to others all the disdaining that Barton so richly merits. Do note, however, that he has invented a case and product which serve his viewpoint and draw him enormous followings among “conservative” factions which oppose separation of church and state in most cases except those they choose. Listen to Mike Huckabee or Glenn Beck or rightist cable TV and you will find Barton showing up everywhere.
His favorite founder seems to be Jefferson, of all people. How does he work his way around to the prime builder of “a wall of separation between church and state,” in the metaphor that would not be my favorite. Sample: Thomas Jefferson, razor in hand snipped all supernatural references out of his copies of the Gospels (in the four languages he read in White House evenings), to keep Jesus as a pure ethical humanist. This spring Barton is publishing The Jefferson Lies, which most historians would title Barton’s Lies about Jefferson. Astonishingly, he twists a slight reference to Jefferson’s book on Jesus and turns it into a tract which, Barton says, Jefferson would use in order to convert the Indians to Christianity. Reviewer Craig Ferhman in the Los Angeles Times found all that Barton found to be “outrageous fabrication.” On TV, Barton even said, with no evidence, that Jefferson gave a copy of his Jesus book to a missionary, to use “as you evangelize the Indians.” Had the Indians been converted with that text, their heirs would have had no place to go but to what became the humanist wing of the Unitarian-Universalist church.
Why does any of this matter? One, basic honesty is at issue; do American religionists need to invent such stories in order to prevail? Two, what if they did prevail? Most of the founders thought that religion was most honest and compelling when its leaders and gatherings did not depend upon lies about the state and, of course, upon the state itself. “Separation of church and state” is admittedly a complex issue, dealing as it does with inevitable conflict and messiness in a free and lively republic. May debates over it go on, but with honest references to Jefferson and his colleagues and not on the grounds David Barton proposes.
References
Gordon S. Wood, “Radical, Pure, Roger Williams,” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012.
People for the American Way, “David Barton’s ‘Outrageous Fabrication’ about Thomas Jefferson,” Right Wing Watch, January 9, 2012.
Friday at Sea
This is the second year that I’ve been at sea when Christendom remembers, celebrates, what we call Good Friday. It’s an odd experience to be away from Church life and particularly so during the significant ritual times. Advent, Christmas Eve, Holy week and Easter. This morning my companion and I watched one of the cable news channels talk with a Rabbi, and Catholic representatives of Christianity. It is the northeast so an awareness of whom would speak for Protestantism probably does not register because, in fact, there is not one voice that speaks with the authority of a Catholic Bishop within common Protestantism however one might define it. I’m thankful they didn’t call Franklin Graham, Falwell Jr, or some other TV evangelists to represent the Protestant point of view in a conversation about Passover and Easter being at the same time.
Here at sea, a day from land and returning to the busy nature of our existence, it was again odd to watch the sunrise over a Friday that our rituals call “good.” The sunrise was beautiful, breath taking, and blinding as it broke the horizon of another day on this side of the world. If anything in Christianity, this is Passion Friday or injustice Friday or imperial execution Friday, but those are too harsh for the dominant theology and they do not fit neatly into the sacrificial atonement theology at the heart of traditional and even “emerging” Christendom.
Breath taking, beautiful, and blinding. I think back to a day when we descended into the depths of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to a room where there is a drawing of a boat and inscription on a rock. The inscription says something like, “Lord, we were here.” It is believed that this was a sight where the first believes and followers of Jesus gathered to remember his death. Some theorize that the pilgrims must have traveled by boat to Jerusalem or maybe the boat represented the one that contained disciples that is storm tossed, frightening, with one or two persons willing to step out into the sea. No one really knows.
Right now, Friday is blinding and more significant for me than Easter morning. There are many living through the same conditions that Jesus of Nazareth lived through in his time. There are plenty of “apostles” providing the definition to what that suffering and injustice means . I’m seeing the room stewards, waiters, and maintenance staff differently today. Down there in the crew quarters is where Jesus is shouting for a different economic system while the folks working on this ship are simply trying to make a better life for their families by “serving” those of us that can afford to be here. It would have been more symbolic for the 12 to 15 foot seas to have been today rather than yesterday, but maybe that represents Christendom well. We come to the Maundy Thursday table with mixed feelings of grief and gratitude. Our emotions pitch and roll about what we know is going to happen and our participation in those systems. Our wondering, “Will I betray or deny you?” It is that sick feeling in the stomach when God asks, “Where are you?” Alas, we are soothed by the smooth waters of what has become “good” Friday rushing to meet a risen Christ. Some call it the mystery of our faith. This Friday at sea I’m wondering, “Where is God?”, and how I might join my voice with the ancients in the room so long ago and proclaim, “Lord, I was here.”