Claiming The Founders
by digby
Bill Maher had a fun riff last night on the Tea partiers and the Founding Fathers:
That’s pretty funny. But the reactions from the right wingers is even funnier. This one’s from Hot Air:
I hate to break it to you, Bill, but the majority of the Founding Fathers were religious. And those who weren’t orthodox in their beliefs, at least had a healthy respect and appreciation for religion. They didn’t want to force others to believe as they did – certainly – but they respected religion, and the Bible, nonetheless. Even those more critical, such as Thomas Jefferson, believed the Bible contained important lessons – lessons wise men should take to heart. There may have been a few, like Thomas Paine, who held religion in less high esteem, but they were the minority, not the majority.
Furthermore, unlike what Maher seems to believe, the Founding Fathers weren’t big fans of a welfare state. At all. In fact, they considered the government the greatest potential threat to freedom. They understood that an intrusive, activist state always limits a people’s freedom. That’s why they wrote the Constitution in the first place: they wanted to guarantee Americans specific rights, the government could not take away.
The Tea Party continues this tradition. They too stand for individual liberty, over collectivism and social engineering. They want the government to get out of the people’s business – out of their health care and out of their pockets. If there’s one thing they demand, it’s to be left alone to live their lives as they please. Not as it pleases Maher and other cocky liberals who mess up their own lives in virtually every respect, but who nonetheless believe it’s up to them to tell others how to live.
Perhaps that Maher can do what he seems to value so much – get a good education – before spouting his mouth off again about things he has little to no knowledge of. If not, he’d do us all a favor if he’d just keep his deliberately humiliating mouth shut.
No, Maher is right and they are wrong. but there’s no telling them that — this is a foundational myth of the Tea party.
It’s true the founders didn’t want to force everyone to believe as they did. How refreshing it would be if the Tea Partiers would follow their lead. They refuse to even recognize the legitimacy of any political opposition much less other religions — or lack of religion. I posted this the other day, but it’s worth doing again in this context:
“It’s a movement about the Founding Fathers and what their faith was to this country, and how they brought faith over to this country,” she says.
Smith is describing a “civil religion” that seems to appeal to many Tea Partiers: the idea that America was a divine experiment, that the Founding Fathers were Christian men who created a nation on biblical principles. She says America in 2010 has lost that.
“That’s what started this whole downfall of America — taking God out of everything, and political correctness,” Smith says. “We were founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and its like ‘What’s happened? Why aren’t we fighting to save that?’ They fought hard for that so why aren’t we? So we’re out here trying to fight for those principles.”
And then there’s Michael Giere, a mortgage banker and evangelical Christian. “We are a Judeo-Christian country, and I don’t care who says we’re not, we obviously are,” he says.
Giere says religious conservatives are the sleeping giant in the Tea Party.
“The discussion of the day is on economics, but when you start peeling back that onion, there is devout faith spread throughout the Tea Party and spread throughout the Tea Party leadership,” he says.
Polls show that Tea Party members are far more likely to be weekly churchgoers and conservative Christians than the population as a whole.
That is what Wendy Wright, president of the evangelical Concerned Women for America, has found. And she says she believes the Tea Party is prompting Americans to look closely at their religious heritage — in particular, at the faith and early writings of the Founding Fathers.
An August poll of nearly 800 Tea Party supporters revealed that a larger percentage than the general U.S. either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they were white evangelical Christians.
These people believe that the Constitution is a “Judeo-Christian” document. They are simply wrong. It is as secular as secular can be, designed explicitly to keep the government out of religion and vice versa. The Founders, religious and atheist alike, were very familiar with the 500 years of bloody religious wars in Europe and understood this mix of religion and politics was lethal.
And I don’t think the founders were too worried about social engineering and collectivism in their time. They were worried about tyrannical monarchy, which I suspect the Tea Partiers would have no problem with as long as the King promised to lock up all the people they hate too. (They never seem to be too worried about the authoritarian state when it comes having a couple million people in jail, illegal warrants, a corrupt justice system or any of the other things the Founders actually were worried about.)
Let’s face it, they would have been Tories. You know they would have. That’s what Republicans are.
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