HR 888 - flag, mom, apple pie... or not?

The information for this post comes from Troutfishing at Daily Kos in a call to contact our congresscritters and urge them to oppose HR 888.

Resolved, That the United States House of Representatives----

(1) affirms the rich spiritual and diverse religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history, including up to the current day;

(2) recognizes that the religious foundations of faith on which America was built are critical underpinnings of our Nation's most valuable institutions and form the inseparable foundation for America's representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures;

(3) rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation's public buildings and educational resources; and

(4) expresses support for designation of a `American Religious History Week' every year for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith.

Sound innocuous? God bless America and all that.

Look more closely.

"[T]he religious foundations of faith on which America was built ... form the inseparable foundation for America's representative processes, legal systems, and societal structures."

That "inseparable foundation" languages does more than make me uneasy. It creates a sense of dread and of outrage.

As a person of faith, I do NOT want anybody's religious interpretations overlaid on our representative processes, our legal systems, or our societal structures. Within societal structures may be any number of faith communities but faith is not a prerequisite for social structures or, in most instances, for participation in them.

It is not an accident that the United States Constitution does not mention God: any god or gods. Religious belief or the absence thereof is irrelevant to our form of government.

Many are busy trying to rewrite our history to assert that we are and have been a Christian nation. When that won't fly (because it is such an outright lie) they retreat to vaguer assertions about "the rich spiritual and diverse religious history of our Nation's founding." It sounds so very nice... until you think about it for half a second. That diverse religious history tells us about all the ills of mingling religion with government (theocracy ain't pretty in history) and why so many fled to this continent to get away from religious wars, religious oppression and intolerance, and to enjoy religious freedom (at least for themselves). From there we grew to realize that it's a good idea to have religious freedom (or freedom from religion) for everybody.

The "resolved" clauses of bills are the ones that count but the "whereas" clauses provide an interpretive framework that should not be ignored.

I am guessing that the third resolve in HR 888 is intended to preserve things like the Ten Commandments prominently displayed in courtrooms and other public locations. If we include alongside the Decalogue a copy of the Code of Hammurabi or perhaps some contributions from Solon and Magna Carta, I might be less suspicious. But let's face it, no matter how much the Decalogue has informed and shaped the western system of jurisprudence, the first commandment is "I am the Lord [YHWH] your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me." (Exodus 20:2-3) I just don't think this faith affirmation belongs in any secular law court. And I most certainly don't want this nation ruled by ecclesiastical courts (can we all say Sharia?).

As for the fourth resolve: I would prefer not to have such a week decreed by our government and leave the celebration and practicing of faith to the faith communities. I do believe that the religious (and non-religious) elements of our history need to be taught and taught well and that everything goes into a healthy and complete context but we need more than a week. In other words, this resolve is either inadequate and meaningless or somehow pernicious. Or both. I doubt that such a week would add any value to our national life but it may provide a convenient back door for the reinforcement of misperceptions about the role of religion in government.

The whereas sections have some gross distortions (may we call them lies?) about our history.
One example reads: "Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible."

This is based on excerpting some statistics from their context and using them to imply something that is simply untrue. Among public documents published within a certain period the Bible was the most frequent source of quotation. True. Most of those citations were in pamphlets of sermons, commonly distributed at the time. If you remove that source and consider instead governmental and legal documents, the Bible is cited no more than classical authors, as one might well expect in the writings of traditionally educated persons at that time. There is thus no privileging of the Bible as a source of thinking in this nation's founding.

It is distortions like these that are repeatedly used, rarely examined, and widely broadcast until the general populace comes to believe that the United States was founded on "Judeo-Christian principles" when it was founded upon Enlightenment thought and secular reasoning by persons who were mostly Deists who did not operate on what is nowadays generally considered a "Christian" set of assumptions.


Are you ready for a theocracy in the United States? Some folks dearly want it. I, for one, do not, thank you very much.

Read the whole article here. Check out Chris Rodda's good work debunking the crap in HR 888 here. We do not need legislation that promotes the distorted "history" found in Christian nationalist websites.

Then politely let your representative know that you are paying attention and don't want her or him voting for HR 888.

Yours for secular democracy in which faith and non-faith are free to flourish,
--the BB