In April, some will recall that there was a major conference in New York called Examining the Agenda of the Religious Far Right. Z Magazine has just published an article about the conference titled “Taking on the Christian Right” that will be of interest to many. (The conference organizers, by the way, have produced a one-hour DVD of the conference which they will make available soon.)
The Z piece also mentions Talk to Action, a project that I have launched with a number of colleagues — including BooTribber Pastordan. We have been posting on a temporary blog site while preparing a far more ambitious interactive site that will function much like (but certainly not be a replacement for) The Daily Kos and Booman Tribune.
Meanwhile, my Talk to Action colleague Scott Isebrand has a fine inaugural post on his new Religious Right Watch blog site. Scott picks up on the theme we have been stressing regarding the need to reclaim American history from the bogus version peddled by Christian nationalists like Dr. D. James Kennedy and David Barton.
Isebrand succinctly concludes: “…the governing document of the United States, our Constitution, nowhere mentions God. The Constitution demands that there will never be religious tests for public office, and Jefferson’s ideals of the separation of Church and State were embraced by the day’s thinkers.”
“But this is no longer the case. These concepts dear to Jefferson are not self-evident any longer. They are not embraced by the majority of our nation’s Congressmembers, our President, or many judges. They are in danger of being forgotten and replaced by something altogether different, something anathema to the rational citizen.”
This is the kind of thinking and writing that will help to change the terms of debate in America.
If you had to prove to an otherwise informed, but open minded person that the U.S. was not founded as a Christian Nation, how would you do it?
Isebrand sources some of his post the excellent book, The Godless Constitution. I also try to answer this question in my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy. What are the simplest, best, and most convincing ways to make the argument? How would you tell the story of how the framers of the Constitution approached matters of religion? This is something that I expect we will be discussing a great deal (among other things) when we launch the interactive version of Talk to Action.
[Adapted from FrederickClarkson.com ]