I wonder if it occurs to right-wingers that most of the early white settlers to these fair shores were fleeing religious persecution and religious wars.
William Penn, for example, was expelled from Oxford, disowned by his father, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and arrested several more times before being granted land in America as a way to rid the British Isles of the pesky Quakers. And he’s hardly a hard-luck case.
There’s a reason people fled Europe in droves to come to an unsettled country across a deadly sea:
The major impact of the Thirty Years’ War, in which mercenary armies were extensively used, was the devastation of entire regions scavenged bare by the foraging armies. Episodes of widespread famine and disease devastated the population of the German states and, to a lesser extent, the Low Countries and Italy, while bankrupting many of the powers involved. The war ended with the Treaty of Münster, a part of the wider Peace of Westphalia.
During the war, Germany’s population was reduced by 30% on average. In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two thirds of the population died. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third. The Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns. Huge damage was done to monasteries, churches and other religious institutions.
There’s a reason that Thomas Jefferson wrote the following in 1782 in his Notes on the State of Virginia:
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity…
“…But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
The idea for America was that we would not fight and kill each other over our religious differences anymore. But that doesn’t mean that some of us wouldn’t enslave people because of them.
America as we know it would not exist without religious war and persecution because it wouldn’t have been necessary. And America wouldn’t have been riven in two if Christianity hadn’t served to both justify and to condemn slavery.
And if right-wingers want some evidence that Christians have killed even one person in recent months over their religion, they can go look at Breitbart News’ coverage of the conflict in the Central African Republic:
After Djotodia’s coup took place in March 2013, Muslim Seleka militias began committing atrocities, particularly targeting the Christian constituencies of the deposed Francois Bozizé. In December 2013, French Foreign Legion peacekeeping troops arrived to disarm the Seleka militias, but then the Christian anti-balaka militias “rushed into the vacuum,” and began committing atrocities in 2014, for revenge against the Selekas.
Here’s a less biased source:
By Sudarsan Raghavan February 7, 2014
BANGUI, Central African Republic – Tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing to neighboring countries by plane and truck as Christian militias stage brutal attacks, shattering the social fabric of this war-ravaged nation.
In towns and villages as well as here in the capital, Christian vigilantes wielding machetes have killed scores of Muslims, who are a minority here, and burned and looted their houses and mosques in recent days, according to witnesses, aid agencies and peacekeepers. Tens of thousands of Muslims have fled their homes.
We can quibble about “who started it” but the reality is plain enough.
Thomas Jefferson would recognize this as quite familiar, but I can’t imagine what he’d think of Fox News and Eric Bolling.
