The Christian Nation We Never Were

 

Disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, disaster chow pitchman, is concerned that the Pride celebration at the White House means that the US is no longer a Christian Nation.  I would like to be very reassuring while I say this to him: We never were.  The original inhabitants of this nation were not Christians, and despite all the Christians who came to this land seeking refuge from their Old World persecution, you have to understand, actually being a "Christian nation" or the product of any one religion is a weirdly wrong idea to have about our founding. 

We are by no means a Christian nation. John Adams said as much in the Treaty of Tripoli.  There's a lot wrong with assuming that our founders were all of a mind about religion--which is exactly the reason to presume we are not founded on religious principles, but practical ones. There are ample statements from our founders that attest that freedom of religion was the only way to maintain an already-diverse religious population, Thomas Jefferson was proud enough of his religious freedom edict in Virginia that he had it made a part of his final epitaph. 

And I want it to also be understood that Jim Bakker is wrong in quite another way--I know gay and trans people who are devout! They worship their god despite being told by so many that their god doesn't love them, but they know in their conscience, that they were made for good. They are a part of Pride, but they aren't Prideful in the way of Satan--they were wonderfully, fatefully, awesomely made, by a wonderful and awesome God. And they aren't a problem to be solved, they are themselves a proof that LGBT people aren't against God--even if some people have conceived of a God who made them but is also against them. 

So, I wonder, when Ben Shapiro, tells his listeners that gay people aren't discriminated against because they are gay, but because they do gay stuff (like marry their life partners? form families? enjoy a happy gay life?) I wonder if he doesn't understand that some Christians would make the argument that they don't hate Jews, they just hate Jews doing Jewish stuff, like mutilating the penises of babies and having their own very specific diet like they were better than Christians. The argument of hate is always the same--it just chooses different targets, and you never, never, should decide "maybe some people..."

Because you are also "some people". 

The ministrations of the Religious Right (or Religious Wrong, as I prefer) has led to groups with names that have "Liberty" or "Family" or even "Moms" in them seem suspect--because they pervert those perfectly fine words to religious fanaticism. I don't think twice that Moms for Liberty is considered a hate group, any more than the Alliance Defending Freedom, the group that put up the 303 Creative case is considered an anti-LGBT extremist group. They very much are. (And Erin Hawley is the lead lawyer in some of these cases before SCOTUS, and Amy Coney Bryant was an instructor for that group--so wow! right?) 

Anyway, all humans in the US should be free in their conscience to rest under their fig tree and vine, with none to make them afraid. And my cause is for those who have no place to rest their head, and for those whose heads rest uneasy because they are the wrong type of believer. 

If we were a Christian nation, would there be unfed, unhomed, sick among us, untended by the people of this nation as the Good Samaritan would have done for them? Yeah--that isn't how we roll. We aren't making our government one with the message of the Galilean. 

You all get back to me when the love of your fellow man made in the image of God is as meaningful to you as whether they image God in the same way you do. Until then, and even past then, we are not a Christian nation. We are a nation of laws and ideals. And I have found many of those better than any religion I have sampled.