This in-depth report in the New York Times Magazine asks just how Christian America’s founding fathers really were.  It’s an important question in the Lone Star State where the religious right is pushing the idea that America is a Christian nation founded by evangelical Christians for evangelical Christians.  Below, I have pasted a few quotations that recreate the gist of Russell Shorto’s ten-page article, but I encourage you to read the entire piece.  My own (highly unorthodox) take on the debate follows. 

Christian conservatives contend that Christianity has been written out of the public school curriculum:

Some conservatives claim that earlier generations of textbooks were frank in promoting America as a Christian nation. It might be more accurate to say that textbooks of previous eras portrayed leaders as generally noble, with strong personal narratives, undergirded by faith and patriotism. As Frances FitzGerald showed in her groundbreaking 1979 book “America Revised,” if there is one thing to be said about American-history textbooks through the ages it is that the narrative of the past is consistently reshaped by present-day forces. Maybe the most striking thing about current history textbooks is that they have lost a controlling narrative. America is no longer portrayed as one thing, one people, but rather a hodgepodge of issues and minorities, forces and struggles. If it were possible to cast the concerns of the Christian conservatives into secular terms, it might be said that they find this lack of a through line and purpose to be disturbing and dangerous.

Folks like Texas State Board of Education member Mark McLeroy place great emphasis on the founding documents of states like Connecticut and Massachusetts which were founded as unabashed Christian utopias.

Merely weaving important religious trends and events into the narrative of American history is not what the Christian bloc on the Texas board has pushed for in revising its guidelines. Many of the points that have been incorporated into the guidelines or that have been advanced by board members and their expert advisers slant toward portraying America as having a divinely preordained mission. In the guidelines — which will be subjected to further amendments in March and then in May — eighth-grade history students are asked to “analyze the importance of the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and the Virginia House of Burgesses to the growth of representative government.” Such early colonial texts have long been included in survey courses, but why focus on these in particular? The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut declare that the state was founded “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.” The language in the Mayflower Compact — a document that McLeroy and several others involved in the Texas process are especially fond of — describes the Pilgrims’ journey as being “for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith” and thus instills the idea that America was founded as a project for the spread of Christianity. In a book she wrote two years ago, Cynthia Dunbar, a board member, could not have been more explicit about this being the reason for the Mayflower Compact’s inclusion in textbooks; she quoted the document and then said, “This is undeniably our past, and it clearly delineates us as a nation intended to be emphatically Christian.”

The religious right wants American school children to see themselves as God’s chosen instument, a city set upon a hill.

One recurring theme during the process of revising the social-studies guidelines was the desire of the board to stress the concept of American exceptionalism, and the Christian bloc has repeatedly emphasized that Christianity should be portrayed as the driving force behind what makes America great. Peter Marshall is himself the author of a series of books that recount American history with a strong Christian focus and that have been staples in Christian schools since the first one was published in 1977. (He told me that they have sold more than a million copies.) In these history books, he employs a decidedly unhistorical tone in which the guiding hand of Providence shapes America’s story, starting with the voyage of Christopher Columbus. “Columbus’s heart belonged to God,” he assures his readers, and he notes that a particular event in the explorer’s life “marked the turning point of God’s plan to use Columbus to raise the curtain on His new Promised Land.”

The concept of the “separation of church and state” lies at the heart of the current debate.  Christian conservatives reject the idea as a dangerous heresy. 

If the fight between the “Christian nation” advocates and mainstream thinkers could be focused onto a single element, it would be the “wall of separation” phrase. Christian thinkers like to point out that it does not appear in the Constitution, nor in any other legal document — letters that presidents write to their supporters are not legal decrees. Besides which, after the phrase left Jefferson’s pen it more or less disappeared for a century and a half — until Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court dug it out of history’s dustbin in 1947. It then slowly worked its way into the American lexicon and American life, helping to subtly mold the way we think about religion in society. To conservative Christians, there is no separation of church and state, and there never was. The concept, they say, is a modern secular fiction. There is no legal justification, therefore, for disallowing crucifixes in government buildings or school prayer.

Mainstream scholars disagree, sometimes vehemently. Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College and writer of the documentary “Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham,” told me: “David Barton has been out there spreading this lie, frankly, that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation. He’s been very effective. But the logic is utterly screwy. He says the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ is not in the Constitution. He’s right about that. But to make that argument work you would have to argue that the phrase is not an accurate summation of the First Amendment. And Thomas Jefferson, who penned it, thought it was.”

Historians argue that the founding fathers were intellectual hybrids who had been influenced by both traditional Christianity and a rational worldview called “Deism”, then popular in Europe, that rejected most of the claims of “revealed” religion.  The Deist God created the world and set it in motion, but has little interest in political affairs and no master plan for individual humans or the human race.

In fact, the founders were rooted in Christianity — they were inheritors of the entire European Christian tradition — and at the same time they were steeped in an Enlightenment rationalism that was, if not opposed to religion, determined to establish separate spheres for faith and reason. “I don’t think the founders would have said they were applying Christian principles to government,” says Richard Brookhiser, the conservative columnist and author of books on Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington. “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, ‘We put our faith in Jesus Christ.’ ” Martin Marty says: “They had to invent a new, broad way. Washington, in his writings, makes scores of different references to God, but not one is biblical. He talks instead about a ‘Grand Architect,’ deliberately avoiding the Christian terms, because it had to be a religious language that was accessible to all people.”

The curious thing is that in trying to bring God into the Constitution, the activists — who say their goal is to follow the original intent of the founders — are ignoring the fact that the founders explicitly avoided religious language in that document.

The folks who are injecting a religious vision into Texan textbooks know they enjoy widespread public support.

Americans tell pollsters they support separation of church and state, but then again 65 percent of respondents to a 2007 survey by the First Amendment Center agreed with the statement that “the nation’s founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation,” and 55 percent said they believed the Constitution actually established the country as a Christian nation. The Christian activists are aware of such statistics and want to build on them . . .

The article hints that religion, per se, may not be the controlling issue in this debate.  Consider this:

“BROWN BEAR, BROWN BEAR, What Do You See?” It’s not an especially subversive-sounding title, but the author of this 1967 children’s picture book, Bill Martin Jr., lost his place in the Texas social-studies guidelines at last month’s board meeting due to what was thought to be un-American activity — to be precise, “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.” Martin, the creator of 300 children’s books, was removed from the list of cultural figures approved for study by third graders in the blizzard of amendments offered by board members.

I wish Shorto had chosen to elaborate on this theme.  Conservative revisionists embrace a worldview organized around the semi-divine status of the free market.  America, to this way of thinking, was created and commissioned to share the gospel of free market capitalism to a lost and benighted world.  America is a chosen and exceptional nation because she keeps the corrupting hands of government off the free market.  Americans are blessed when they adhere to free market orthodoxy and punished when they stray into the thickets of socialistic reform. 

It is very difficult to find a place for the Jesus of the New Testament in free market fundamentalism, of course.  The itinerant preacher and healer who had nowhere to lay his head has his adherents in the great state of Texas, but they aren’t the folks calling the shots in Austin.  The true religion of America is the power of positive thinking, a doctrine deeply rooted in the tenets of free market fundamentalism.  Here’s how it works.  If you conform to the dictates of the market (get a marketable college degree, enter a hot field and work hard) you will be blessed.  Sure, there will be a little turbulence along the way (such as the current turmoil on Wall Street), but the free market will bless you in the long run.  This is God’s way in the world.

The downside to this doctrine is troubling.  If you refuse to conform to the dictates of the free market (you fail to obtain a marketable degree, you can’t find a place in the job market, and you don’t work hard) the markets will punish you.  You may get by okay for a short while, but the wheels will inevitably come off.  This reality check is designed to teach you the error of your ways and call you back to the dictates of the free market.

Socialist reformers (and in this view, all reformers are socialists) damage the po0r by softening the market’s proper punishment.  When we help the poor, the reasoning goes, they will never learn the error of their ways.

How does free market fundamentalism impact the criminal justice system?  It’s simple.  Positive thinkers who live in accordance with free market principles are true Americans (also known as “Real Americans”); losers who skirt the harsh realities of the free market have rejected their birthright as free Americans and forfeit the constitutional protections that citizenship confers.  Poverty is unAmerican.  When a poor man is arrested he is guilty by definition.  He may be innocent of the alleged crime, but he is guilty of flouting the God-ordained principles on which this great nation was founded.  Otherwise he wouldn’t be poor.  If he can’t afford to hire a lawyer, that’s as it should be.  When he dies, the fires of hell will provide a fitting postscript to a ruined life.

Free market fundamentalism is the sworn enemy of grace.  Grace is for Americans only.  The statement “God is love” cannot be squared with this religious vision.  God is love if you are a Real American who shows his faith in Jesus by trusting in the free market system.  No one else need apply.

I am giving you the blunt, uncut version of free market fundamentalism, something you rarely see in print.  I am intimately acquainted with this religion because I have spent thousands of hours in evangelical Sunday school classes (where the dictates of free market fundamentalism were cobbled together free from biblical constraint) and because I have spent the past ten years immersed in the ruthless rhythms of the criminal justice system. 

The American justice system, in theory, is a marvel.  The gap between theory and reality is created by the heartless doctrine described above. 

I was a bit annoyed by Russell Shorto’s tendency to describe the Christian Right as representatives of the “Christian” position.  Shorto knows that mainstream church historians are harsh critics of the Texan campaign to inject a peculiar version of “Christianity” into the textbooks of Texas (and the 46 other states that follow the Lone Star state’s lead when purchasing textbooks).  The Religious Right may speak for Texas (that remains to be seen); but they don’t speak for Jesus and they don’t speak for me.