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February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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February 25,
2002
Ashcroft, American History, and
Speaking in Tongues
By John Chuckman
John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United
States, recently repeated an old chestnut about America being
a Christian nation whose founders were Christian gentlemen.
The claim is common among the country's
fundamentalist Christians, but it is so ignorant of actual history
one wonders whether it should not be taken as another serious
indictment of American public education. Some readers may not
be aware that Mr. Ashcroft's background includes familiarity
with such arcane subjects as speaking in tongues. As for Mr.
Bush, who touched the same theme in China, perhaps no comment
on his grasp of history is required.
The late eighteenth century, following
on the Enlightenment and waves of reaction to the violent excesses
of the Reformation and counter-Reformation over the previous
two centuries, was perhaps the lowest point for Christian influence
ever. Virtually all educated people in Europe were deists and
many were open skeptics.
America was not free of this influence
despite its many Puritan immigrants. Indeed, many of the best
educated citizens at this time were educated in Europe, and the
small number of good libraries owned by educated people often
contained the works of Enlightenment authors. Virtually all the
ideas in the Declaration of Independence and even some of the
words of the Constitution derive from these European sources.
It is due precisely to the unique qualities of the period that
we owe America's early embrace of religious tolerance. The immigrant
Puritans had displayed no religious tolerance, and in fact were
some of the worst fanatics from Europe.
George Washington was a deist. He was
a member of the Masons, a then comparatively-new, secretive fraternal
organization widely regarded as unfriendly to traditional Christianity
and reflecting European secular attitudes. He did attend church
regularly, but this was done with the aristocratic notion that
it set an example for the lower classes, Washington being very
much a planter-aristocrat (he used to refer to the independent-minded
Yankee recruits in the revolution, who had had the practice of
electing their officers before he was appointed as commander,
as "a dirty and nasty people."). This was a time when
there was an established church in Virginia, and it functioned
as an important quasi-political organization.
Washington always used deistic terms
like Great Providence. His writings, other than one brief note
as a very young man, do not speak of Jesus, and he died, knowing
he was dying, without ever calling for prayer, Bible, or minister.
There is a story given by some of his best biographers shedding
light on his church-going. He apparently never kneeled for prayer
nor would he take communion. When one parson brought this to
his attention after the service, Washington gave him the icy
stare for which this aloof, emotionally-cold man was famous and
never returned to that church.
Thomas Jefferson was accused publicly
of being an atheist. More than any other founder, Jefferson was
under the spell of European (and particularly French) thought.
His writings, and references to him by friends, certainly make
him sound like a private skeptic. He belonged to no church. He
explicitly denied the divinity of Jesus, viewing him as a great
teacher of human values. At best he was a deist referring in
his private writings to God as "our god."
Jefferson who, despite high-sounding
words, was something of a hypocrite on many aspects of civil
liberties and particularly on slavery, was at his best on the
need for religious liberty. Despite his free-thinking reputation,
he formed alliances with groups like the Baptists, who deeply
resented paying taxes to the established church in Virginia and
won a long battle for a statute of religious liberty.
Thomas Paine, whose stirring words in
Common Sense contributed greatly to the revolution, was often
accused of atheism because of his religious writing, but deism
is closer to the truth. His later writing done in Europe, "The
Age of Reason," was regarded as scandalous by establishment-types.
France, during the terror under Robespierre, turned to a new
kind of state religion. This, the very brave Paine, living in
Paris, also rejected, writing,
"I do not believe in the creed professed...by
the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church,
by the protestant church, nor any church that I know of. My own
mind is my own church."
The great Dr. Franklin, who incidentally
lived about a quarter of his life on diplomatic missions in Europe
and who as a very young man had run away from a home where rigid
religious principles were imposed, was a typical deist of the
period. He was an active member of the first Masonic temple in
America. His attitudes were so amicable to French intellectuals
and society, he was embraced, as no other American has ever been,
as a national figure in that country.
Alexander Hamilton, undoubtedly the most
intellectually gifted of the founders other than Franklin, paid
lip service to religion, but he was known during the Revolution
as a rake. Later, his distinguished career in Washington's cabinet
was marred by a great sexual scandal. Generally, Hamilton used
religion to promote his political aims, ignoring it whenever
it was convenient. In this respect, perhaps he qualifies as a
thoroughly modern American version of a Christian.
Gouveneur Morris, who wrote the draft
of the Constitution we all recognize from the notes of others,
was an extremely worldly and aristocratic man. He was also one
of Washington's most trusted confidants. He was perhaps the most
rakish, womanizing diplomat America ever sent to Europe, sharing
at one point a mistress with Talleyrand, the most amoral ex-cleric
who ever practiced statecraft. In general, Europeans were astonished
that a man so worldly and so arrogantly patrician in temperament
represented the young republic for a period in France.
Abraham Lincoln, while not a founder,
is the most beloved of American presidents. Lincoln's closest
friend and most interesting biographer, Herndon, said flatly
that Lincoln was a religious skeptic. This has always so upset
America's establishment historians that Herndon has been accused
of writing a distorted book, a rather ridiculous charge in view
of a close friendship with his subject and twenty years spent
collecting materials.
Lincoln never attended church and when
he refers to God in speeches during the Civil War, it is always
with words acceptable to secular, educated people who regarded
the King James Bible as an important cultural and literary document
apart from any claims for its sacredness.
There is reason to believe that as the
bloody war continued, Lincoln, who suffered from severe depressions,
turned to the Bible for consolation, especially to the story
of the struggle of the Hebrews.
Lincoln was also an extremely astute
politician who used every means at his command in the great battle
with secession, and his references to the Almighty may well have
been part of his psychological artillery. He certainly did not
invoke the name of Jesus.
Patrick Henry, who incidentally opposed
ratification of the Constitution, was a Christian, but he was
once described by Jefferson as "an emotional volcano with
little guiding intelligence."
Just a little brush up on history...
John Chuckman
lives in Ontario and writes for YellowTimes.
He encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.ORG
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