A Liberal Dose, August 25, 2022 "The Role of Faith in the Early Republic"

 

A Liberal Dose

August 25, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“The role of faith in the early republic”

 

“The United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

That’s what I closed with last week. It is a quote from the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli (today the capitol of Libya). That’s where the line in the Marine Hymn comes from, “to the shores of Tripoli.” That treaty was initiated by George Washington, signed by his successor as president John Adams, and passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. I also referenced the “wall of separation between church and state,” a quote from Thomas Jefferson. After some discussion of the Founding Fathers and Christianity, I said this time I would explain what all this means.

It’s not that hard. When George Washington or Thomas Jefferson spoke about their own personal beliefs or opinions about God, the Bible, or Christianity, they were NOT stating that the Christian religion was or should be enshrined in law, or even in tradition, as the basis of the new government they were establishing -a government founded on principles of freedom, including freedom of religion. You can not have a government framed in freedom of religion if that government officially promotes, enshrines, or prioritizes one religion over others. And that’s exactly how I, and many, many others, still look at it: as an individual, I am a Christian, but that does not mean I want my government to force everyone else to be Christian, or to punish them if they are not.

Jefferson considered “The Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom”, which he wrote when he was governor of Virginia in 1779, to be one of his proudest achievements. In that bill he wrote that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,” and that any attempt to prevent a citizen from holding office or voting “unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously” of his “natural rights.” In 1782 he said “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.” In the same 1802 letter where he praised the Constitution for its “wall of separation between church and state,” he said that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.”

Let’s look at that treaty more closely. Tripoli was on “the Barbary Coast” of North Africa, and base for many independent pirates who were long tolerated, and even supported, by the Muslim government of that city-state. In fact, many of the pirates were actually privateers, financed by Tripoli. The treaty was an agreement between the U.S. and Tripoli that American shipping would be protected in the Mediterranean (which did not last long, but that is another story). The crux of the U.S. language was that this was NOT a case of a “Christian country” and a “Muslim country” who were naturally at odds because of religion, which is what the government of Tripoli was used to dealing with in relations with western powers. Here is the whole text, from article 11:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen (Muslims); and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan (Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

In other words: we are a secular nation, and don’t care what your religion is. It’s not an issue.

Next time we’ll talk about what all this means today, and in reference to Christian Nationalism.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE  

A Liberal Dose, August 18, 2022 "The Faith of the Founding Fathers"

 

A Liberal Dose

August 18, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“The Faith of the Founding Fathers”

 

Last week I talked about Christian Nationalism, the idea the United States was expressly established to be a Christian nation, that there should be no separation of church and state, that America is God’s Chosen Country, and that allowing space for other religions (or no religion) weakens the country and betrays what it stands for. I said it was not historical. Now I’m going to explain why.

First, I’m going to recommend a book: The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (2006, Oxford University Press).  Holmes, like many others before him, examines the context of those individuals’ public professions of faith -which many of them made, and which are used as evidence they intended their new nation to be a specifically Christian one. The “Founding Fathers” can be divided into three categories: traditional mainstream Protestants (most notably Patrick Henry, and also Samuel Adams), pure Deists (most notably, and vociferously, Thomas Paine), and the category most of them fell into- Christian Deists, who were somewhere in the middle. Now, to understand any of that, you have to know what a Deist is. I know that many of you do, but many do not, so here goes.

Deism is a philosophy that arose in the early 1700s, and was very popular among college instructors in the colonies (and remember, from an earlier column, that the majority of the Founding Fathers had college educations). It stated that reason alone demonstrates that there is a God, with no need for a belief in the supernatural (remember, this time period was called The Enlightenment, with an emphasis on logic and reason) -and therefore, no need for organized religion. A Deist, therefore, was a lot more likely to speak about the Creator, the Divine Author, Nature, or Providence than about “God.”

Most of the Founding Fathers encountered this idea at university and were influenced by it thereafter, in various degrees. Most did not follow the example of Paine, who went all-out on the notion and referred to all religion as fable. Rather, they continued their association with churches and thought of themselves as Christian -but you could not call them fundamentalist or evangelical (both of which were terms that arose later -Patrick Henry, though, was essentially a fundamentalist).  These “Christian Deists” -George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and many more -viewed church attendance as a good way to learn morality, ethics, and good citizenship, and often spoke publicly about their belief in God and the value of the Bible. But not in the way fundamentalist Christians of today (or then) would do so. Their form of Deism, and of Christianity, is sometimes called “The Clockwork Universe,” and it works like this:

God is the great Clockmaker. He designed the universe and set it in motion so that it would work perfectly, with all the attendant gears and springs propelling it along. And then He stepped back and is now just letting it run. From this point of view, God’s greatest gift to us is our power of reason -and it is up to us to use it, and solve our problems. So, when you read a quote by Jefferson or Adams about The Creator, you must remember they did not mean it the same way a fundamentalist preacher would. In many ways, Christian Deists were a lot like Progressive Christians are today -and that extends to religious tolerance.

Jefferson -who coined the term “wall of separation between church and state” -said he did not care in the least whether his neighbor worshiped one god, many gods, or no god: “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In fact, a 1797 treaty endorsed by George Washington, signed by President John Adams, and passed unanimously in the Senate stated that that “the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Next time we’ll talk about what that means.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE  

 

A Liberal Dose, August 11, 2022 "Why I Am Not a Christian Nationalist"

 

A Liberal Dose

August 11, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Why I am not a Christian Nationalist”

 

I’m going to start off this week by making a statement that would not have seemed the least bit controversial a few years ago, and in fact would have been considered self-evident (“duh,” as we used to say when I was a kid): Words matter, context matters, and history matters.

Now, though… a lot of people tend to disagree with those thoughts. Definitions of words, meanings behind phrases, actual historic events, and even the most basic scientific facts are routinely tossed aside if they conflict with what certain people “feel” is true. This makes it hard to reason with such folks (which is, I suspect, the point).

I’ve been trying for years to help people understand the real meaning of words like nationalism and fascism, and still meet resistance. And now a lot of people are proudly proclaiming themselves to be Christian Nationalists… without knowing what that actually means. “Well,” some folks seem to reason, “I’m Christian, and I’m proud to be a Christian… I’m American, and I’m proud to be an American… so I guess I’m a Christian Nationalist. And if you tell me Christian Nationalism is a bad thing, you must be saying I should be ashamed to be a Christian and an American.”

Let me tell you a couple of things about myself. First: I love my little hometown of Sparta, and am proud to be from here. I love Tennessee, and I love the United States of America. I am proud of what this country can be when it’s at its best, and of what it was meant to be and could be and should be. This is why I am willing to work hard to do my part to make it closer to that ideal. I get teary-eyed when I talk about what America is supposed to be, and of how we need to all make sure it is that. I am a patriot. But I am not a nationalist.

I have studied a lot about various religions and spiritual approaches -I respect them, and find things to learn from them. I will take a firm and unyielding stand on behalf of anyone in this country believing and worshipping in whatever way they choose. That said, I am a Christian. When I was the age my students are now, I was doing mission work in South Florida and in New York City, working with Haitian immigrants and serving in French-speaking congregations. Both places were very dangerous in the 1980s. I walked in on drug deals in Florida, I was working in Brooklyn neighborhoods torn by racial strife, crime, and riots. My life was (very credibly) threatened on many occasions, but I believed I was helping people and doing God’s work. For the last eleven years (since my return to Sparta) my family has attended the Sparta First United Methodist Church- come visit us, or listen to our service on the local radio station Sundays at 11. Point is: I am patriotic, and serious about it, and I am a Christian, and serious about that. But I am not a Christian Nationalist. 

Christian Nationalism is the belief that America is and was meant to be a Christian country, with other religions tolerated at best (and maybe not even that), as long as they understand their subordinate position. It is the belief that America is, in fact, God’s chosen country -and allowing other religions equal standing is therefore betraying God (and weakening the country). It is the belief America should be a theocracy, with the government enforcing that.

That is not democracy, it is not freedom, and it is not Christian. Such thinking is, in fact, condemned by most mainstream churches. It is, though, authoritarian hyper-nationalism. That is also, by the way, the definition of fascism.

It is also not historically accurate. Which is why its ardent supporters would rather you not learn actual history.

More to come.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE  

A Liberal Dose, August 4, 2022 "Leave Teachers Alone and Let Them Do Their Jobs"

 

A Liberal Dose

August 4, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Leave teachers alone and let them do their jobs”

 

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking about public education -in the U.S. overall, and Tennessee in particular. I addressed the fact people have, for the last several years, been feeling free to treat teachers like garbage, to control their every move while taking away more and more of what they need to do their jobs, and generally using them as a political punching bag -as evidenced by the Hillsdale College guy’s incredibly insulting comments, and the fact our governor Bill Lee sat quietly by while they were made and still has not said one word to condemn them.

Last week I talked about the Founding Fathers’ support of public education -supported by taxes, NOT by charitable individuals, so that everyone has a stake in educating our children. I pointed out that public schools were well established in the North in the early 1800s, but did not appear in the South until more than half-a-century later… and, ever since, the South has had a dismal record of investing in education. Or in education for everyone, anyhow.

Today, if you look at the numbers (money spent per student) in all 50 states plus DC, the bottom ten are all “red” states. Tennessee is #49 of #51. That is about where we have always been. And yet our government blames everything on the teachers.

The Hillsdale fiasco MAY prevent Governor Lee from fulfilling his dream of tax-supported charter schools, not answerable to state and federal education laws, sucking all the funds out of our public schools and punishing working class families… but that doesn’t change the fact our state legislature has already passed laws designed to prevent public school teachers from talking about uncomfortable “divisive concepts” like slavery, racism, the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, and so forth. Well, technically, you can talk about them -you just can’t explain what they were, why they happened, or what the results were. Or say anything about anything that might make a student feel uncomfortable. The state legislature has even tried to extend that classroom control into our public universities, and would have you believe they succeeded -but it was only a partial victory. The recently passed “divisive concepts” bill is going to have a huge impact on what college administrations can do so far as promoting diversity or training non-teaching staff, but doesn’t reach as far as they wanted (or claimed).

The original bill had a long list of things professors were not allowed to talk about, and requirements for them to be written up on a first offense and fired on a second if they did so. When it seemed this was almost surely going to pass, I looked into what was being done in other states and started making plans. I lined up support from multiple education and civil rights organizations around the state, and from professors all across Tennessee, to coordinate with the ACLU and sue the state the minute that law passed. It didn’t come to that, because literally a day or two before the final vote some of the university lawyers were finally able to explain to the legislature that the courts guarantee academic freedom in higher education, that governments are not allowed to tell professors what topics they can discuss or how they do it when it is within that professor’s area of expertise and relevant to the class subject matter, and that they would successfully be sued if they tried (which is what is happening in other states). Right before the bill passed, all the language about restricting classroom activity and discussion was dropped from it. They are still counting, though, on college teachers being too scared to broach those topics now.

Well, I’m not scared to do my job, and neither is any other teacher in White County or Tennessee that I know, liberal or conservative.

Why are politicians so scared to LET us?

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE