“They’re quite clear — that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments.”

But a review of the path blazed by Christians in both the colonial era and the nation’s early life is not so tidy. Christianity, as we know, arrived in the New World with Christopher Columbus, who crucified natives who failed to produce enough gold in rows of thirteen –one for Jesus and each of the disciples. The Spanish conquistadors also introduced the “Requerimiento” which demanded conversion to Christianity and threatened slavery and death to those who did not. (The Indian converts were enslaved and killed anyway.)

Here are a few more of the highlights of the path blazed by Christians that take a bit of the luster off the myth of America as a “Christian nation.” Most of them probably weren’t in your textbook.

-Fort Caroline Massacre (1565): The first real contact between Europeans in what would become America took place in Florida, near modern Jacksonville, where hundreds of French Huguenots, the real first “Pilgrims,” were massacred by the Spanish who founded St. Augustine for this purpose. The Spanish Admiral who led this search and destroy mission hung some of the survivors with a sign above them reading, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to Lutherans,” by which he meant “Protestants” or actually “heretics.” (This story is told in America’s Hidden History.)

-Mayflower Compact (November 1620): Usually cited as the kickoff point for the “Christian Nation,” the Mayflower Compact did indeed recognize the religious underpinnings of the new colony. It also recognized the sovereignty of the King.
And by the way: Sorry, “Goodie” Palin. You don’t get a vote.

-The Mystic Massacre: During the Pequot War of 1637, hundreds of women, children and mostly old men were killed or burned to death in a Puritan attack on a Pequot Indian village. Governor William Bradford would later write that “horrible was the stincke and [scent] thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them….”

-The Boston Martyrs: On October 27, 1659, two Quakers, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, were executed in Boston, the Puritans’ “shining city upon a hill,” under a 1658 law banning the Society of Friends as a “cursed sect.” In June 1660, Mary Dyer was executed and a fourth “Friend” was hung in 1661.
Religious dissenters Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had also been banished from the Bay Colony for their opposition to the Puritan “theocracy.”
And Catholic priests were banned in Boston, where for many years November 5 (Guy Fawke’s Day in England) was celebrated as “Pope Day” on which rowdy, brawling and usually drunken mobs wheeled an effigy of the Pope around Boston and ended the day by setting the carts and effigies on fire.

-Baptists arrested in Virginia: Between 1768 and 1778, Baptists were persecuted and arrested in Virginia, where the Anglican Church was the official church supported by public funds. (In New England, the Congregational Church enjoyed that support.)
The sight of Baptist preachers being arrested troubled a young James Madison who would later spearhead passage in 1786 of the landmark Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1779. (The law is one of only three accomplishments Jefferson instructed to be put in his epitaph.)

-Ben Franklin’s Prayer Request: At a deadlocked Constitutional Convention in 1787, Ben Franklin –as many religious conservatives and advocates of public prayer like to note—suggested beginning the day’s deliberations with a prayer. Alexander Hamilton worried that if people heard that they would think the delegates were desperate. Another delegate pointed out that there were no funds to pay a chaplain. There the discussion ended as Franklin notes, most thought prayers “unnecessary.”
(By the way, Jesus, though no Constitutional scholar, took a dim view of public prayer. Saying that only “hypocrites” pray in public, Jesus advised, “pray to the Father in secret.” [Matthew 6: 5-7])
Contrary to Sarah Palin’s statement –“Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant” – the U.S. Constitution does not mention God, the Bible or the Ten Commandments.

-Burning of the Ursuline Convent (1833): A combination of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment led a mob of self-described “Sons of the Tea Party” to torch a convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts, not far from the recently dedicated Bunker Hill Monument.

- Philadelphia’s Bible Riots: Over the course of a few weeks in May and July of 1844, dozens of people were killed, hundreds of houses burned and churches destroyed in the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic “Bible Riots.” I recount this event and the Ursuline Convent burning in my new book A NATION RISING.

-“Church and Slave State”: Abolitionism had its roots in Christianity. But so did American slavery, which cited biblical justifications for the “peculiar institution.” In the 19th century, this divide led to splits within three Protestant denominations that divided North and South: the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. (In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for its racist past and support of slavery, 140 years after the split.)

Of course, this is a mere handful of the landmarks in this so-called “Christian Nation.” We haven’t even gotten to the Mormons and the violence that confronted them in the early 19th century.
And of course, it would be quite easy to list a great many nobler moments in American Christianity. But the point is that calling America a “Christian Nation” is simply another myth – history as “bedtime story” or wishful thinking. History and Christianity deserve the truth –which after all, the Bible tells us, “will set you free.”

With little formal education, he became a writer, printer, philanthropist, philosopher, political leader and scientist. Franklin, alongside Thomas Jefferson, was probably the best example of the American Enlightenment Man. And, like Jefferson and other men of his times, Benjamin Franklin was skeptical of organized religion.

But proponents of America as a “Christian nation” and those who favor public prayer often cite Benjamin Franklin’s entreaty that the Constitutional Convention –then seemingly at an unbreakable impasse– open its daily debates with a prayer. What they conveniently leave out is what actually happened following that suggestion.

Alexander Hamilton first argued that if the people knew that the Convention was resorting to prayer at such a late date, it might be viewed as an act of desperation. Nonetheless, Franklin’s motion was seconded. But then Hugh Williamson of North Carolina pointed out that the convention lacked funds to pay a chaplain, and there the proposition died. Franklin later noted,

The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary.

Late in his life, Franklin wrote what could almost pass for a modern New Age statement of faith:

“Here is my creed. I believe in one God, creator of the universe.
That he governs it by his Providence. . . . That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth. I think the system of morals and his religion . . . the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have . . . some doubts as to his divinity.”

He added, “I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments. . . . I hope to go out of the world in peace with all of them.”

Franklin died on April 17, 1790.
Here’s a link to a Library of Congress website celebrating Franklin on his 300th birthday in 2006.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/franklin/introduction.html

You can read more about Franklin and his accomplishments and impact in Don’t Know Much About History and America’s Hidden History

It’s a red meat issue that is good for ratings and direct mail fund raising. But the fact is, an increasingly secular America celebrates more than just Christmas at this time of year — so “Happy Holidays” is not only appropriate, it makes good business sense. And most religious displays are not banned. Courts simply direct that one religion cannot be favored over another under the Constitutional protections of the First Amendment. Christmas displays are generally permitted as long as menorahs, Kwanzaa displays and other seasonal symbols are also allowed.

In other words, the “War on Christmas” is pretty much a phony war.

But where did this all start? The “war on Christmas” screamers might be interested to know that the first laws against Christmas celebrations and festivities in America came during the 1600s –from the same wonderful folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials — the Puritans. (By the way, H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as the fear that “somewhere someone may be happy.”)

“For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.”

–From the records of the General Court,
Massachusetts Bay Colony
May 11, 1659

The Founding Fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were not a festive bunch. To them, Christmas was a debauched, wasteful festival that threatened their core religious beliefs. They understood that most of the trappings of Christmas –like holly and mistletoe– were vestiges of ancient pagan rituals. More importantly, they thought Christmas — the mass of Christ– was too “popish,” by which they meant Roman Catholic. These are the people who banned Catholic priests from Boston under penalty of death.

This sensibility actually began over the way in which Christmas was celebrated in England. Oliver Cromwell, a strict Puritan who took over England in 1645, believed it was his mission to cleanse the country of the sort of seasonal moral decay that Protestant writer Philip Stubbes described in the 1500s:

‘More mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides … What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used … to the great dishonour of God and the impoverishing of the realm.’

In 1644, Parliament banned Christmas celebrations. Attending mass was forbidden. Under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, mince pies, holly and other popular customs fell victim to the Puritan mission to remove all merrymaking during the Christmas period. To Puritans, the celebration of the Lord’s birth should be day of fasting and prayer.

In England, the Puritan War on Christmas lasted until 1660. In Massachusetts, the ban remained in place until 1687.

So if the conservative broadcasters and religious folk really want a traditional, American Christian Christmas, the solution is simple — don’t have any fun.

Read more about the Puritans in Don’t Know Much About History and America’s Hidden History

Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?

The famed story of a love affair between an aristocratic lady and her groundskeeper had been cleared for sale a year earlier in the United States.

In defining “obscenity,” Associate Justice Potter Stewart wrote in a famous 1964 Supreme Court decision,

I know it when I see it.

People have been arguing over obscenity and pornography (which in the original Greek meant “to write about prostitutes”), almost since there was writing. For publishers, the label has been a mixed blessing. Books have been burned, banned from the mails, and yanked from library shelves. But the phrase, “Banned in Boston,” eventually became a favorite selling slogan. And many books once deemed “dirty” are now bona fide classics.
Do you think you know obscenity when you see it? Unwrap the plain brown paper around this quiz about some notorious “obscene” books.

1. Which hefty novel depicts a character reading “Titbits” magazine on the toilet, allowing “his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read”?
2. Which memoir did poet Ezra Pound once call “a dirty book worth reading”?
3. What Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, among the most frequently challenged books in American schools, was once banned in a Minnesota town for including the words “damn” and “whore lady”?
4. Which 1881 poetry collection, now considered an American classic, was withdrawn from circulation by its publisher under a District Attorney’s threat of obscenity charges?
Adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Answers
1. Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. The character described is Leopold Bloom.
2. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller. The novel was published in France in 1934, but banned in the U.S. until 1961.
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee.
4. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1881 edition). In 1865, Whitman had been dismissed from his day job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs after James Harlan, Secretary of the interior, found and read a working copy of Leaves of Grass and considered it obscene.

Here is a link to a brief D.H. Lawrence biography at Poets.org
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/37

But nobody understood the hard facts about the Puritans better than the Society of Friends, or Quakers. On October 14, 1656, the Puritans who ran Massachusetts enacted the first laws against Quakers. The penalty for being a Quaker was ultimately death.

And it wasn’t an empty threat. Late in October 1659, two Quakers were executed by hanging. A third, Mary Dyer, was executed in 1660. And a fourth was hung in 1661. A sister of dissident Anne Hutchinson also became a Quaker. She was spared hanging. The Puritans merely stripped her in public and lashed her.

There is an irony as this date also happen to be the birthday of the most famous Quaker in American history, William Penn, born in 1644. Precisely because the Friends were persecuted in England as well as Massachusetts, Penn received the charter to begin his colony as a haven for Quakers, and other religious dissenters. Under Penn’s liberal leadership which extended to politics as well as religion, Penn’s “Holy Experiment” flourished. (Unfortunately, his son and brother who eventually replaced him did not see things the same way and reversed many of William Penn’s enlightened policies.)
You can read Penn’s “Charter of Libertie” at the Yale Law School Collection of colonial charters and documents. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/pa03.asp

BTW, The man on that box of oats is not William Penn, according to the Quaker Oats company.
Could have fooled me.

“It’s the — the cross is the — is the most common symbol of — of — of the resting place of the dead.”

Those were the words of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia during a Supreme Court questioning session. The case involves a cross honoring veterans that has been placed on federal lands. The fuller context of Scalia’s exchange with an attorney arguing the case can be found in Professor Geoffrey Stone’s recent blog on the Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/justice-scalias-cross_b_314752.html
I’ll leave the legal aspects of this comment to others, like Professor Stone. But I am not sure if Scalia’s assertion is even correct. In many cemeteries –certainly many of those around old New England—a headstone, often devoid of any religious marking, is quite a common symbol of a resting place.

To be precise, we should say that a crucifix and not simply a cross is in question. The empty crucifix is, of course, the central symbol of Christianity as it represents the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I was pondering crosses before I read Scalia’s rather extraordinary remarks about the cross being such a common symbol.

Crosses –or crucifixes—come to mind whenever Columbus Day rolls around. One of the things they never told me back in grade school when we drew pictures of those three iconic sailing ships, was that Columbus used to crucify the natives –the people he misnamed “Indians”—in rows of thirteen; one for Jesus and each of the disciples. This technique was part of Columbus’s work incentive program. If the natives didn’t produce enough gold, he would cut off a hand. Crucifixion was the next step.

In the Caribbean, under Columbus, Justice Scalia may have been right. The cross was the symbol of the resting place of the dead. But I’m not sure that’s what Justice Scalia had in mind.

The catalog of the cruelty of Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors who followed in his wake has been well documented, even in Columbus’ own time. Far less familiar is the story of the French Protestants executed by the Spanish near St. Augustine, Florida on October 12, 1565. The spot where this atrocity took place is now marked by Fort Matanzas, a national monument whose name comes from the Spanish word for “slaughters.”

The point is not that the Spanish had any monopoly on religious cruelty or sectarian violence. The Protestant majority in America has a lengthy victims list as well –Quakers, Catholics, Mormons and other minority Christians and other groups of believers and nonbelievers have all felt the sting of secular violence. The litany of sectarian killings and religious intolerance that has been such a grotesque but significant piece of America’s “hidden history” is exactly the reason that some of the Framers thought the First Amendment was so necessary. George Washington said so himself to a group of people who did not recognize the cross – the members of America’s first synagogue:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

You can read more about Columbus and his impact in Don’t Know Much About History and the story of the Fort Matanzas massacre in America’s Hidden History.

Separated by more than century and a continent, they might seem like unconnected events. But these are two extraordinary moments in the history of a so-called “Christian nation” and –more to the point– its treatment of Native Americans.

Born in London, Roger Williams came to Massachusetts with the great emigration of Puritans who sailed to America, escaping persecution in England. But after speaking out for religious freedom and even more shockingly, dealing fairly with Indians, Williams was banished by the Puritan authorities from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in October 1635. The Puritans who came to Massachusetts sought religious freedom– their own, not anyone else’s.
Williams lived briefly with friendly natives, established a settlement at Providence, and later won a charter for the colony of Rhode Island.

Williams pioneered two central ideas:
-Civil authority should not have religious authority. He coined the phrase “wall of separation,” later used by Jefferson.
-People should have freedom of conscience in religious matters– what he called “soul liberty.”
He would write:

God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.

These ideas later found expression in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Followers of Junipero Serra, the Franciscan priests who founded a mission that later developed into San Francisco, had very different ideas about both religious authority and Indians. Anchored by a church, the mission included a presidio –or frontier fort– and an agricultural settlement. The chain of California missions begun by Serra were essentially forced labor camps in which Indians –”neophytes”– were required to convert. The death toll in missions such as San Francisco was appalling. Disease, harsh treatment, severe punishments and the commonplace rape of Indian women by Spanish soldiers took a devastating toll on California’s native population, practically wiping out California’s original inhabitants.

Of course, the natives of New England ultimately did not fare any better than those of California. Roger Williams’s enlightened approach to native Americans did not take hold. But these two very different chapters in “America’s Hidden History” speak volumes about a past that has been sanitized for the tourist trade and textbooks.
Here is a link to the Roger Williams National Memorial in Rhode Island–
http://www.nps.gov/rowi/historyculture/index.htm

Here is a link to some San Francisco history resources:
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=SETTLEMENT_OF_SAN_FRANCISCO_%281776%29

In real fact, the trial began as a sort of small-town  publicity stunt. But the argument at its center, between the Bible and Charles Darwin, still isn’t settled in many minds. This is one issue that just won’t go away.

The drama began when Tennessee made it a crime to teach Darwin’s evolutionary theories in Tennessee schools under a 1925 law called the “Butler Act.

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Seizing on the law as an assault on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union –then neither as famous nor infamous as it is today– posted a newspaper notice offering its services to defend anyone who wanted to challenge the law. Some local boosters in a Dayton, Tennessee drugstore thought that such a trial would be a great way to drum up publicity for the town which had seen better days. They sought out a young substitute science teacher named John Scopes. And with the cooperation of the school superintendent and two local attorneys who were friends of Scopes, the 24-year-old Scopes was arrested and charged with defying the Butler Act by using a textbook that introduced Darwin’s theories.

The key to the national attention the 8-day trial received was the presence of William Jennings Bryan, a politician who had run unsuccessfully for the Presidency three times (in 1896, 1900 and 1908) and was renowned for his skill as a stump speaker. A fundamentalist and populist known as “the Great Commoner,” Bryan was leading a crusade against Darwin, in part to keep his public profile high. Bryan joined the prosecution team. Opposing him was the most famous defense attorney of his day, Clarence Darrow.

Quickly nicknamed the “Monkey Trial,” the proceedings inspired a carnival-like atmosphere, just as the Dayton boosters had hoped, attracting thousands of spectators to the small county courthouse, along with journalists from around the country. Among them was H.L. Mencken, the iconoclastic Baltimore newsman, who had called Bryan the “Fundamentalist Pope.” Live updates from the proceedings were also broadcast on the radio, a first for a trial.

The culmination of the trial was the seventh-day exchange between Darrow and Bryan after Darrow called the fundamentalist leader to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. He then dismantled most of Bryan’s arguments regarding the literal truth of the Bible.

After this withering exchange, Darrow actually asked the judge to convict Scopes. He hoped that the case would go to a higher court where Darrow could appeal the decision on philosophical and Constitutional grounds. Scopes was duly convicted and fined $100 –but not jailed.

A few days after the trial, William Jennings Bryan died in Dayton.

The case was appealed, as Darrow had hoped, but the conviction was overturned on a technicality rather than the Constitutional reversal that Darrow and the ACLU sought. And as recent history surely bears out, the argument  did not end there. Creationist advocates –later using the term “Intelligent Design”– continued the assault on teaching of evolution into recent times. In one of the most decisive modern cases, in Dover, Pennsylvania, Judge John E. Jones, a Republican appointee, handed the forces of “Creationism/Intelligent Design” a stinging defeat on December 20, 2005. In his 139-page ruling, Jones wrote;

Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Here is the New York Times report on the decision. It includes a complete text of the decision: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/education/21evolution.html?scp=1&sq=dover%20pa%20decision%20creationism&st=cse

The 1925 courtroom drama in Dayton was fictionalized in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, later made into a 1960 film starring Spencer Tracy, and remade on television several times.

Extensive documentation about the case can be found at the website of the Law School at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm

The “American Experience” (PBS) aired a documentary on the Scopes Trial. Information at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/