Tonight, Emily and Ashley, presented me with a present. They were visiting a church in Kirksville, and the produced for me a booklet called If My People…: A 40 Day Prayer Guide for Our Nation. The cover features the title and an American Flag. No Bible. No Cross. No Jesus. These folks didn’t even try.
Each day features a Scripture and a prayer, and peppered throughout the book are excerpts from prayers or speeches by former Presidents who were all :: ahem :: Christian. Some – like Reagan – I have no doubt were genuine (though I have some personal disagreements with his praxis), and some – like Lincoln – were pretty awesome believers that I greatly admire.
And then, they included Thomas Jefferson. Now, at best, Jefferson was a Deist. he even edited the Bible, taking out all references to the Supernatural and ‘correcting errors’ he decided the Gospel writers had made. You can still purchase copies of the so-called Jefferson Bible (here for just $10.00 hardback!).
And this is my problem with the Religious Right. They’ve mythologized our origins, baptizing everyone who lived then as some sort of giant superhero believers, when most of them (and certainly the most influential of them, like Jefferson and Franklin) were not what any Evangelical would recognize today as a Christian.
The Right has appropriated history, remythologized it and bent it to serve their own religio-political agenda. And that’s sad. Because I’m pretty sure Jesus said, “You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.”
It’s time for us as a nation to start being honest about our history and quit idealizing it as some sort of Golden Age. It’s not. And that’s okay. Let’s learn our lessons and grow.
