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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Thu, 24 Feb 2005
Our Godless Constitution
It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of
George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian
precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the
one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you
repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his
Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having
been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on
Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the
picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously
absent.
Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was
too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of
Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According
to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of
"foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But
as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot
anything important.
In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is
mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as
Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the
Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to
"the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men
being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More
blatant official references to a deity date from long after the
founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until
the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of
Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton,
"The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].
In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship
between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of
Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of
Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:
As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense
founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no
character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of
Musselmen--and as the said States never have entered into any war
or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared
by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions
shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between
the two countries.
This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and
President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification;
the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this
was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it
was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no
record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in
full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there
were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.
The whole
article is well researched, excellent, and deserves wide
attention.
Posted at 10:57 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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True Believer
(Via Patriot Boy.)
Posted at 10:35 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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