Bring Out Your Dead
The "Rededicate 250" rally and the fight over a fictive American Founding
The Rededicate 250 prayer rally on the National Mall was barely over before the same argument started up again. Was the United States founded as a Christian nation, or wasn’t it? The right said yes, the left said no, and both sides reached for the same Founders to prove it, quoting the same documents to arrive at the conclusions they wanted before they started writing or recording and then posting.
This is how it usually goes. Some public event with a religious dimension lights the fuse, and the historical hyperventilating begins. The right reaches for Providence and the faith of the Framers. The left counters with the Treaty of Tripoli and Madison on liberty of conscience. Each accuses the other of distorting history, and on that point both are right.
What neither side will sit with is that they are both wrong, and wrong in the same way. The right is wrong that the Framers were driven by deep Christian faith to build a nation in that image. The left is wrong that the Framers intended a secular democracy, one where freedom of worship carried over into civic equality, where liberty of conscience meant that a man’s religion had no bearing on his standing in political life. The lived experience of the eighteenth century does not support either claim, and the reasons matter more than the verdict.
