Secret Theocratic Organization Infiltrates the Government

From Alternet:

Meet 'The Family'
by Anthony Lappé, Guerrilla News Network

Posted on June 13, 2003

Printed on March 21, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/16167/
It sounded like a reality show on the PAX network: Six conservative politicians living in a DC townhouse owned by a fundamentalist Christian organization. What happens when you stop being polite and start finding Jesus?
In April, the AP broke the story that six U.S. congressmen were paying the bargain rate of $600 a month each to live together in a swanky DC townhouse owned by a secretive fundamentalist Christian group known as the Fellowship or the Foundation. Many, understandably, were curious. Who is this organization, and what is its agenda?
The group, the AP reported, is best known for holding the annual National Prayer Breakfast at the White House, which offers scores of national and international heavy hitters the opportunity to praise God in close proximity to the President. In the article, the congressmen boarding at the house denied owing any allegiance to the group, and several professed ignorance of even the most basic facts about the organization. Little else was reported about the group's history, motives or backers.
There is a reason for that. The Fellowship is one of the most secretive, and most powerful, religious organizations in the country. Its connections reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government and include ties to the CIA and numerous current and past dictators around the world.
Last month, Harper's magazine published a rather extraordinary article by Jeffrey Sharlet, editor of the irreverent web site killingthebuddha.com and co-author of the upcoming Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (Free Press). The piece chronicled Sharlet's three-week semi-undercover stay at Ivanwald, the Fellowship's mansion:
Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as "the Family." The Family is, in its own words, an "invisible" association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as "members," as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.).
Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards and collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities. The organization has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation. These groups are intended to draw attention away from the Family, and to prevent it from becoming, in the words of one of the Family's leaders, "a target for misunderstanding."
The Family's only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C. Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can "meet Jesus man to man."
If this all sounds like something out of a conspiracy theorist's wet dream (or paranoid nightmare), you're right. Sharlet's account of his three weeks of "man to man" interaction can only be described as disturbing and downright bizarre. In fact, it was so creepy many accused him of making the whole thing up.
So what did Sharlet find?
GNN: You went undercover into this house. Who were you posing as and what were you trying to find?
SHARLET: Actually, I was posing as myself. I write about religion. A friend said go check it out, it's an interesting place. I went not knowing the politics. Within a few days I began to see things were not at all what I expected. This was connected to a pretty vast political network. Still it was quite a pleasant place to live. These people had a different approach than I did, but I was interested in learning. As time went on I started hearing more and more disturbing talk.
That's when I started keeping my ears open. I didn't go in undercover, but I suppose I left undercover. But I told them who I was, I never told a lie.
GNN: Some people have called your story a hoax.
SHARLET: I've got lots of letters from people saying this has got to be a hoax, or please tell me it's a hoax or curiously from people who know a little too much to be saying the things they were saying.
GNN: What are some this group's core ideas and what level of secrecy is involved here?
SHARLET: The goal is an "invisible" world organization led by Christ -- that's what they aspire to. They are very explicit about this if you look in their documents, and I spent a lot of time researching in their archives. Their goal is a worldwide invisible organization. That's their word, and that's important because it sounds so crazy.
What they mean when they say "a world organization led by Christ" is that literally you just sit there and let Christ tell you what to do. More often than not that leads them to a sort of paternalistic benign fascism. There are a lot of places that they've done good things, and that's important to acknowledge. But that also means they might be involved with General Suharto in Indonesia and if that means that God leads him to kill half a million of his own citizens then, well, it would prideful to question God leading them.
GNN: Who are these guys, and how many are there?
SHARLET: The only estimate was made by Charles Colson, Nixon's chief dirty tricks guy who went on to become the head of Prison Fellowship Ministries. Right before he went to prison the founder [of the Fellowship] Doug Coe turned him on to Christ. Colson said there are about 20,000 people involved in the U.S. But you aren't really supposed to talk about it.
I always say to interviewers, "This is not a conspiracy." There's no secret badge or anything. It's much looser. This is how the vast right-wing conspiracy works, by being associates, friends.
GNN: But they speak of themselves as operating in terrorist-like cells.
SHARLET: Yes, they do. Inside your cell, you might know six or eight guys.
Let me give you a real quick history. In 1935, Abraham Vereide starts it. By the 1940s he has about a third of Congress attending a weekly prayer meeting. In the mid-50s, he gets Eisenhower's support.
[According to a 2002 Los Angeles Times article, during the 1950's Vereide played a major role in the U.S. government's anti-communist activities: "Pentagon officials secretly met at the group's Washington Fellowship House in 1955 to plan a worldwide anti-communism propaganda campaign endorsed by the CIA, documents from the Fellowship archives and the Eisenhower Presidential Library show. Then known as International Christian Leadership, the group financed a film called 'Militant Liberty' that was used by the Pentagon abroad." Showing Faith in Discretion, Lisa Getter, The Los Angeles Times, Sep 27, 2002]
It's sort of stabilized now. By the mid-60's, they sort of realized they didn't want too many people. Too many people dilute the organization.
One scene I saw was Congressman Todd Tiahrt, Republican from Kansas, who seemed as if he was interviewing to be in the organization. He was very nervous. The leader of the organization was asking him questions, sort of leaning back and testing him. I think he wanted into this network, and he would fumble a little by talking about abortion. They don't really care about abortion. They are against it but they aren't really concerned about it.
GNN: What are their core issues then?
SHARLET: The core issue is capitalism and power. The core issue they would say, is love. There are a lot of different things love means. They will always work with both sides of the issue. I saw some correspondence with Chinese officials before Deng Xiao Ping was in power. They had some very clandestine associations with senior Chinese officials, and were told Deng was a guy they could do business with. So that was fine with them.
GNN: When you say 'do business,' was it all about actual business deals?
SHARLET: I wouldn't say it was all about business deals. But if you happened to be praying with someone and you were done praying and said, "Hey, I have some F-16s to sell..." They would deny there is any connection.
They are pretty careful about those kinds of things. They will never say, "We are out here to help set you up in business." They will always help out their friends. "Let me introduce you to someone. The Prime Minister of Malaysia is coming."
GNN: It sounds to me like some sort of extended Skull and Bones, an Old Boys Network crafted onto a religious context.
SHARLET: The religious context is real. The Old Boys Network is about business. This is about more than business. This is about maintaining a certain kind of power, a certain view of how power should be distributed. The Episcopalian Old Boys Network was a lot more easygoing than this. This is a lot more militaristic. Really at its fundamental core, almost monarchist. We would be told time and time again, "Christ's kingdom is not a democracy" This is their model for leadership. They would often say, "Everything you need to know about government is right there in the cross - it's vertical not horizontal."
GNN: In that vein, reading your article I got the impression they are praising guys like Adolph Hitler and Ghengis Khan -- a lot. Is that a fair assessment of your intention?
SHARLET: In fact, Harpers made me cut back on that stuff. [They said] 'We know it's true, but this is already so much to absorb.' That's why I included that line at the end of the story. The leader of the group is having dinner with the younger members of that group and is talking about the bond, the covenant. And he says, "Can anyone think of someone who had a covenant?" And the answer, of course, and everyone knows it, is "Hitler."
This goes back to the 1960's, Vereide was instructing young men by having them read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich -- "Look at what those guys did." But they will say, "We are not trying to kill Jews." What we are talking about is imagine if you took the "Hitler Concept," and they'll use that phrase, the Hitler Concept, to work for Christ, or the Mao Concept. We're not right wingers, they'll say. You can use the Mao Concept.
GNN: Define what they mean by Hitler Concept.
SHARLET: A loyal leadership cadre, which is interesting because guys like Hitler and Stalin were famous for purging, but they seem to focus on a couple of guys. "If two or three agree" is a phrase they use a lot. If you can get together and focus you can accomplish anything. You don't need to sway the electorate. You don't need to convert everyone to Christ. Everyone doesn't have to believe in Christ, and that's where they differ from other fundamentalists. Some fundamentalists really distrust them for that. [They say] "We need to convert everyone, the high and the low." The Family says, "No we don't need the high." All these guys Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden is another guy they cite a lot, are guys who understood the power of a political avant garde. That's what they mean by the Hitler Concept. Also keeping your message simple, and repeating it again and again because there is only one message and it is "Jesus Loves." You can express lots of different things with that term.
I always try to play the devil's advocate. They are not the traditional right wing bad guys. They have been able to do what they do for so long because no one has been looking for this kind of thing.
A lot of this is already in the culture, take [the book] "Ghengis Khan Business Secrets," for instance, the admiration authoritarian leaders.
GNN: Here's where I'm confused. To me they sound like Nietzsche. They don't sound like Jesus Christ. They sound like they are creating the Nietzschean superman above the moral universe the rest of us slaves live in.
SHARLET: I don't think I mention Nietzsche in the article, do I?
GNN: I don't think so.
SHARLET: That's really perceptive of you. Many of them love Nietzsche. They think he's fascinating.
GNN: But he hated Christianity. He was the ultimate amoralist.
SHARLET: I know it's weird. There is one really wacky fundamentalist group that thinks Doug Coe could be the Anti-Christ. They're not sure yet, they might need to shave his head and see if he has the mark of the beast.
They have gotten into trouble with a lot of evangelical groups. They invited Yasser Arafat to the National Prayer Breakfast.
They've boasted, and I don't know if it's true, that they had special permission from the State Department to bring anyone they wanted to the Cedars, that they'd brought some Sudanese on the terrorist list to their mansion headquarters and they'd love to get Osama bin Laden down there.
GNN: But where does Christ fit into all of this? This seems like a lot of Old Testament stuff, not the new [Testament], meek-shall-inherit-the-earth Jesus part.
SHARLET: That's an interesting point. For them, Jesus is just a regular guy, a buddy, a guide, the standard evangelical stuff, no sex. It's sort of a weird hipster puritanical view. If you met them you wouldn't think they were uptight.
GNN: Actually, they sound like complete homophobes to me.
SHARLET: They definitely think homosexuality is a sin.
GNN: But they seem like they can't stand women.
SHARLET: They're just not that interested. It's a very gendered point of view. Jesus is everywhere. Jesus is right there with you on the basketball court.
But at the upper levels there is this weird emphasis on the Old Testament. It's in the story, they talk about King David, who in some ways was a really bad guy. They are really interested in the biblical concept that whether you are good or bad it doesn't matter, what matters is whether you are chosen. That's part of the Hitler Concept. It doesn't matter whether Hitler was good or bad, Hitler was chosen for leadership. That was part of God's plan. Nothing happens that isn't part of God's plan.
GNN: Let's cut to this house where these six congressmen are living on C Street in DC. What is the connection, if any, to the Bush Administration? The White House seems to have its own relationship to religion and people who are influencing them on religious issues. Is there a relationship here?
SHARLET: Yes, though I will say it is not exclusively Democrat or Republican. They say there are six guys at the C Street house, there were eight when I was there. They say there is one for members of Parliament in England, and I think there are similar ones in other capitals. The house is constantly rotating. Steve Largent used to live there. John Elias Baldacci, a conservative Democrat who is now the governor of Maine. As for the Bush connection, there is Ashcroft. I discovered in their archives a correspondence between Ashcroft and Coe that began in 1981. Al Gore at one time referred to Doug Coe as his personal hero, which is easy to believe. Doug Coe is an incredibly charming man.
The Bushes have visited the Cedars many times, but all presidents have. Bush Sr. when he was Vice President was hosting dinners for Middle Eastern ambassadors there. There are going to be people at all levels.
GNN: When you say someone "is a part of it" what does that mean? Are you in or out, or is it a loose thing?
SHARLET: It's a loose thing. But there are levels of participation.
GNN: Are they codified like the Masons or something?
SHARLET: There is an inner core group that is codified in their documents, called the Core. I don't know who is in it other than Doug Coe. The documents I saw only went up to the late 80's with senators, congressmen, and a lot of military men. Before he died, Senator Harold Huges was Core. Former Senator Mark Hatfield used to be Core, and may still be. In the AP article, there is an Air Force officer who I hadn't known about. Then there are associates, usually about 150 associates and they are the key individuals in their areas, and then there are the people who are in a cell with an associate and they are very close. And then there are close friends. Senator James Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, is frequently, for instance, referred to as a close friend. President Museveni of Uganda is a close friend. There is no membership card. In all of their letters there is a paragraph that says this is a private, confidential relationship and we don't talk about it when they are recruiting a new person into the group.
GNN: Are there formal events and meetings, other than this national prayer breakfast?
SHARLET: There are literally thousands of governors', mayors', prayer breakfasts around the country. Some of those probably launched forty, fifty years ago and have long since lost their connection to the mothership, as it were. But that's the idea. They're part of the movement. The system is in place, that we should turn to God to make all our decisions. Up until the 1970's, they had Core meetings around the world, but that's as far as I saw in the documents.
GNN: So how scared are you of this group? Are they a force for fascism or some sort of cult-like group with big connections that comes and goes?
SHARLET: I think they are definitely a force for fascism. I think a lot of the way the world looks is a result of their work. They were instrumental in getting U.S. government support for General Suharto, for the generals' juntas in Brazil. Just take those two countries alone, they are two of the biggest countries on Earth. Those countries might have been progressive democracies a long time ago had it not been for U.S. support for those regimes ...
GNN: But don't you think the CIA and the U.S. government's own agenda had a lot to do with those decisions?
SHARLET: Yeah, but they made those connections.
GNN: What are the connections between the CIA and the Fellowship?
SHARLET: A lot of their key men in a country would be the intelligence officers in the American embassy. Throughout their correspondence, that's the kind of guy they would like to have involved. They always had a lot of Army intelligence guys involved, Pentagon guys.
Doug Coe in the early 70's was touring the frontlines in Vietnam with intelligence officers and South Vietnamese generals. That's the level of connections they are talking about, like the Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova [convicted by a Florida jury for the torture of thousands] and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez [a minister also linked to the CIA and death squads]. They are the people who brought those people in. They said you need to meet this person. That's how it works.
Their diplomacy can affect some good things, like the truce in Rwanda. They had a lot of connections with the South African [apartheid] regime, where they were generally a moderate, even a progressive force. But it's kinda hard to name a nasty regime around the world that doesn't have really well-documented connections to them. Franco was a hold-out. So they started winning over a bunch of ministers in the Franco regime and then they went to Franco and said this is a good group, we can do business with them.
GNN: Why hasn't there been more mainstream press on this?
SHARLET: Lisa Getter of The Los Angeles Times, a Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter, did a piece on it, but there was no follow-up. I got a little press out of it when my article came out. There is a big reason there hasn't been a lot of press about it and that's the war. On the other hand, and this isn't a conspiracy theory, if they can't see it then it's not there. I mean if you read that your local congressman is sitting there saying Hitler is a leadership model, the local paper should at the very least call up and say, "Congressman Tiahrt do you believe Hitler is a good leadership model?" If he had said, "Noam Chomsky is a great philosopher" then there'd be an investigation in a minute.
Why they are not following up on it? I don't know. Partly because it's so crazy, and partly because there is this idea that religion and politics are separate and religion is a personal thing. The media has always been pretty dumb when it comes to religion. In the New Yorker profile of John Ashcroft they talk about his weekly prayer breakfast, Steve Largent, [former congressman from Oklahoma] in The New York Times, same deal. I think they interviewed him while he was living at the house. The reporter never asked, "Hey, how did you get involved in this? Is this something that existed before you?" The reporter sort of implied it was Largent's idea for the weekly prayer breakfasts.
It hasn't been that secret. The New Republic did an expos� in the late 60's, early 70's, and no one really followed up. Robert Scheer did a piece on it in Playboy in the 1970's.
GNN: Any fallout from the members?
SHARLET: I've talked to several who swear we are still friends.
One guy did say, I'm paraphrasing, 'You're a traitor and you'll be dealt with as a traitor.'

Anthony Lappé is Excutive Editor of GNN.tv. He has written for The New York Times, New York, Details, and Salon, among many others.
© 2008 Guerrilla News Network All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/16167/

The Jefferson Bible

from mindfully.org

Jesus Without The Miracles
Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas
ERIK REECE / Harper's Magazine v.311, n.1867 1dec2005




Back when the WHAT WOULD JESUS DO bracelets were appearing on the wrists of young people all around the country, I found myself in an argument with an old friend, a fellow Virginian who, like me, is the lapsed son of a Baptist preacher. We had both fallen pretty far, far enough to spend many nights together in the local Irish pub, putting away Guinness and commiserating about how the Church had crippled our spirits and misunderstood our complicated souls. The crux of our argument was over the bracelets' merit and utility. My friend saw them as just another example of hollow piety. For my part, I said it would indeed be a positive step if Christians actually began to follow the teachings of the founder.
Something similar was no doubt on the mind of another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, when he took a pair of scissors to the King James Bible two hundred years ago. Jefferson cut out the virgin birth, all the miracles—including the most important one, the Resurrection—then pasted together what was left and called it The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth (fifteen years later, in retirement at Monticello, he expanded the text, added French, Latin, and Greek translations, and called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth). In an 1819 letter to William Short, Jefferson recollected that the cut-and-paste job was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." Jefferson mentioned The Philosophy of Jesus in a few other personal letters, but for the most part he kept the whole matter private, probably guessing that the established Church would see the compilation as one more example of his "atheism." Nor did Jefferson care to give Federalist newspapers another reason to remind him of alleged sexual relations with his slave Sally Herrings, an entanglement certainly out of keeping with the philosophy of Jesus.
But Jefferson's severe redaction was probably a retaliatory act, as much as anything, against priests and ministers—"soothsayers and necromancers," Jefferson called them—who had unleashed attacks on his character during the acrimonious presidential election of 1800. Jefferson believed that an authentic Christianity had long ago been hijacked by the Christian Church. The teachings of its founder had become so distorted as to make "one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." Jefferson would no doubt have agreed with Tolstoy that the Christian Church had supplanted the Sermon on the Mount with the Nicene Creed to create a system of beliefs that Jesus himself wouldn't have recognized, much less laid claim to. "I abuse the priests, indeed," Jefferson wrote to Charles Clay in 1815, "who have so much abused the pure and holy doctrines of their Master." By stripping away the gospelers' claim that Jesus was the divine son of God, and by strip-ping away the subsequent miracles they invented to prove it, Jefferson boasted that he had extracted the "diamonds from the dunghill" to reveal the true teaching of Jesus for what it was: "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."
Up until that point, Jefferson had claimed Epicurus as his patron-philosopher. Two thousand years earlier, Epicurus had taught that life would be much easier to endure if we stopped fearing God and death—about which we can know and do nothing—and followed instead a program of prudent self-sufficiency. "Everything easy to procure is natural," Epicurus wrote, "while everything difficult to obtain is superfluous." Such a philosophy certainly would have appealed to Jefferson's agrarian vision for the new American nation. But after suffering the personal attacks of the 1800 campaign, Jefferson discovered that the philosophy of Epicurus didn't go far enough. "Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves," Jefferson wrote to William Short, "Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others." Jefferson no doubt felt that not a few people owed him some charity.


Jefferson's tombstone at Monticello does not remind visitors that the deceased was once president of the United States. Rather it states that Jefferson authored the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. So it was fitting that in 1904 the Government Printing Office published 5,000 handsome, leather-bound copies of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth for the first time, one hundred years after Jefferson pasted it together.
To read the Gospel story—the "good news"—through Jefferson's lens is instructive in a number of ways, the least of which is its representation of Jesus' "life." Many New Testament scholars agree that the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke are pure myth. And no one has solved the mystery of the "missing years"—the two decades between when Jesus supposedly taught in the temple as a precocious child and when he came ambling along the Jordan river, asking to be baptized by the fiery zealot, John the Baptist. From then until his execution a few years later, Jesus' life was a combination of walking, eating with followers and social outcasts, preaching, fishing a little, telling stories that no one seemed to understand, and offering largely unsolicited diatribes against the powers that be. That is to say, the life of Jesus—if unconventional—was nevertheless ordinary enough. Thousands of homeless men and women do pretty much the same thing every day in this country. But to find the historic Jesus within the fabulous accounts of the four Gospel writers is indeed an exercise of looking for diamonds in the compost heap.
Jefferson's gospel could not solve that problem. Nor did it need to. The life of this itinerant preacher was much less important to Jefferson than what he taught. Somebody, after all, spoke the Sermon on the Mount, or on the plain, or wherever it was spoken, and somebody told fascinating parables that explained nothing and left everything up to "he who has ears." What's more, Jefferson's objection to the version of Christianity taught in American churches was precisely that it did put so much more emphasis on Jesus' life and, consequently, his sacrificial death. By excising the Resurrection and Jesus' claims to divinity from his private gospel, Jefferson portrayed an ordinary man with an extraordinary, though improbable, message.
Indeed, reading Jefferson's gospel one hundred years after its publication, it's hard not to become depressed, as did the Rich Young Ruler, about how nearly impossible Jesus' program would be to follow. To read the Gospel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. In that con-text, the actual teachings seem almost mundane. But to read Jefferson's version (what Beacon Press now publishes as The Jefferson Bible) is to face a relentless demand that we be much better people—inside and out—than most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspected, to this unfortunate conclusion: the relevance of Christianity to most Americans—then and now—has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.
But Jefferson's gospel also leads to an impressive clarification of what those teachings are. One can make a list, and it need not be long.
Be just; justice comes from virtue, which comes from the heart.
Treat people the way we want them to treat us.
Always work for peaceful resolutions, even to the point of returning violence with compassion.
Consider valuable the things that have no material value.
Do not judge others.
Do not bear grudges.
Be modest and unpretentious.
Give out of true generosity, not because we expect to be repaid. In all of his teachings, the Jesus that Jefferson recovers has one overarching theme—the world's values are all upside down in relation to the kingdom of God. Material riches do not constitute real wealth; those whom we think of as the most powerful, the first in the nation-state, are actually the last in the kingdom of God; being true to one's self is more important than being loyal to one's family; the Sabbath is for men, men are not for the Sabbath; those who think they know the most are the most ignorant; the natural economy followed by birds and lilies is superior to the economy based on Caesar's coinage or bankers who charge interest.
Above all, this Jesus cannot abide hypocrites. He has nothing but contempt for men who would kill a woman because of adultery when they themselves have thought about cheating on their wives, or for temple officials who tithe mint and cumin but would do nothing to help a poor woman with a child. "Stop talking about righteousness," this Jesus is saying, "and be righteous." It sounds simple. But of course nothing could be more difficult, as Jefferson's own life illustrates.
In his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Jefferson urged readers to resist the factory life of large European cities and stay on the land. "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue," Jefferson wrote in the famous chapter called "Manufactures." Farmers intuit the laws of God within the laws of nature, and so become virtuous, he reasoned. They are, by the nature of their work, resourceful, neighborly, independent. They are the elemental caretakers of the world. Nor do they succumb to the crude opinions of the masses. But the farmer is free-thinking and inquisitive. The manufacturer, by contrast, is a specialist, a cog, a wage slave. "Dependence," Jefferson concluded, "begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." A manufacturer cannot be a citizen of a democracy, only a consumer within an oligarchy.
Four years later, Hamilton submitted to Congress his Report on Manufactures, in which he dismissed Jefferson's agrarian vision in favor of developing industry, division of labor, child labor, protective tariffs, and prohibitions on many imported manufactured goods. Today, fewer than 1 percent of Americans work on farms, and many of those are huge, industrial farms that generate massive amounts of toxic by-products. That Jefferson's self-reliant farmer is so unrecognizable to us today is evidence enough, should we need any, that we have inherited Hamilton's America, not Jefferson's.
The difference between Jefferson and Hamilton is the difference between a version of Christianity based on Jesus' life and death and Resurrection, and one based on his teachings. Or to put it another way, it is a difference between where one locates basileia tou theou—the kingdom of God. Is it, as Luke's gospel says, "in the midst of you" (17:21), or is it, as John's gospel claimed, a reward saved for the sweet hereafter? To live by Jesus' teachings would be to live virtuously as stewards of the land; it would be to create an economy based on compassion, cooperation, and conservation; it would be to preserve the Creation as the kingdom of God. Jefferson was proposing a country of countrysides, a pastorale in which we would want to live; Hamilton was giving us a nation of factories from i which we would want—perhaps in the end need—to be saved.


"Thomas" is the Aramaic word for twin. That Thomas Jefferson's version of Christianity actually found a twin gospel—one that included no miracles, no claims of divinity, but only the teachings of Jesus—hidden beneath an Egyptian cliff, and that this ancient gospel was also recorded by a man known as Thomas, makes for a remarkable story.
Sometime near the end of the nineteenth century, two British archaeologists, Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, were searching through an ancient trash heap along the Nile River, at a site known as Oxyrhynchus, when they found three small papyrus leaves. One of the fragments read, "These are the [ ] sayings [ ] the living Jesus spoke [ ] also called Thomas [ ]." New Testament scholars had long known that there once existed a Gospel of Thomas because in the third century Hippolytus denounced such a text in his Refutation of All Heresies. And because Thomas's gospel ran afoul of the early Church bishops, particularly Irenaeus, most copies of it were likely destroyed.
In 1945, 150 miles upstream near another river town called Nag Hammadi, an Egyptian farmer named Muhammad `Ali al-Samman was guiding his camel beneath the nitrogen-rich cliffs that line the Nile, collecting fertilizer for his fields. As he dug at the base of one cliff, Muhammad `Ali found a sealed jug, obviously ancient. Fearing a jinn but hoping for gold, he broke the jar open with his mattock. He found neither. What fell out were twelve books (codices), made from papyrus and bound in leather. Figuring the manuscripts might be worth something, Muhammad `Ali gathered them up in his turban and carried them home. According to New Testament scholar James M. Robinson, who has pieced this whole story together, Muhammad 'Ali's mother used some of the leaves from the books to ignite their out-door clay oven. Muhammad `Ali traded others for oranges and cigarettes.
Meanwhile, shortly after the discovery, Muhammad `Ali and his brothers hacked to death a man they claimed had killed their father six months earlier. But when local police started poking around, asking about the murder, Muhammad `Ali didn't want to answer any further questions about the codices. Since the manuscripts were written in Coptic, an Egyptian variant of Greek, he hid one at the house of a Coptic priest. The priest, in turn, sent it to Cairo by way of his brother-in-law to ascertain its value on the antiquities market. But someone tipped off Egyptian authorities, who then threatened to take the brother-in-law into custody and told him he could return home only if he sold the codex to the Coptic Museum, which he promptly did.
Here a one-eyed bandit named Bahij `Ali enters the story. Cairo's leading antiquities dealer, Cypriot Phocion J. Tano, had retained Bahij `Ali to acquire as many of the codices as possible. But again, the Egyptian government heard about Tano's acquisitions and pressed him to entrust the manuscripts to the Coptic Museum for "safe keeping." Tano spent much of the 1950s trying unsuccessfully to get the codices back.
In 1952 the French scholar Henri-Charles Puech realized that a tractate in Codex II contained sayings that matched the Oxyrhynchus fragments. Less than sixty years after Grenfell and Hunt uncovered hard evidence that a Gospel of Thomas did at one time exist, Puech was able to conclude that the entire text had been found.
When all of the remaining codices were accounted for, there turned out to he fifty-two separate tractates hidden at Nag Hammadi. How did they end up in this remote port town? In 325 C.E. the Roman Emperor Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, called for a conference of bishops in Nicaea. He charged them to come up with a short document that would unite Christians and eradicate heresy. The result was the Nicene Creed. Forty-two years later, one of the drafters, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, issued a letter to Egyptian monks calling for all heretical manuscripts to be destroyed.1 Scholars suspect that monks at the St. Pachomius monastery, near Nag Hammadi, refused the order, and instead buried the codices in a large jug.
Unfortunately, years of infighting among international scholars stalled the publication of what came to be called the Nag Hammadi library, and the European countries that controlled the publication rights showed a remarkable indifference to the task. In the end it was an American, James M. Robinson, who obtained photographs of the individual Coptic tractates and passed them on to a team of American translators. As a result, the first complete edition of the Nag Hammadi Library was published in English.
Perhaps because of this head start, much of the ground-breaking scholar-ship devoted to the Gospel of Thomas has come from Americans: Robinson himself, Stephen J. Patterson, John Dominic Crossan, Helmut Koester, Ste-van Davies, and Elaine Pagels. But I have another theory: it was Thomas Jefferson's Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth that prepared the Americans for what they would find in the ancient Gospel of Thomas. In some Borgesian way, Jefferson's gospel has become a predecessor to the Gospel of Thomas, though it was composed some 1,700 years later.
The similarities between the two gospels are remarkable, as much for what they do not say as for what they do. Like Jefferson's gospel, Thomas's ignores the virgin birth. Thomas's Jesus never performs a miracle, never calls himself the Son of God, and never claims that he will have to die for the sins of humankind. Instead he tells parables, he issues instructions, and, most alarmingly, he locates the kingdom of God in that one place we might never look—right in front of us.
On the topics of sin, sacrifice, and salvation—the real Trinity of mainline Christianity—Thomas's Jesus, like Jefferson's, is silent. In fact, what we find in the Gospel of Thomas is not really Christianity at all. There is no attempt in the Gospel of Thomas to tell the "story" of Jesus, and there certainly is no inkling of some impending Day of Judgment. Instead, Thomas offers a collection of 114 "sayings" that Jesus is remembered to have delivered in the presence of his followers and before anonymous crowds. These were compiled under the name of Thomas and were circulated throughout Syria among a group that scholars now call the Jesus movement.
As a literary type, the Gospel of Thomas bears kinship with the "wisdom literature" of late Judaism, such as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Wisdom of Solomon. But its closest counterpart is the sayings gospel Q (after the German Quelle: "source"), from which Matthew and Luke took much of their material. Many of the sayings in Thomas's gospel also appear in Q; almost half of the sayings in Thomas would be familiar to any reader of the New Testament. Such collections circulated around Hellenistic Palestine simply because they contained advice people wanted to remember. The advice in the Gospel of Thomas—like that in Jefferson's gospel—is extreme, however, so much so that Stephen J. Patterson has labeled it "counter-cultural wisdom."
This Jesus is especially hard on the rich. As in the canonical Gospels, he says that a man cannot serve two masters and that the poor will be the first to find the kingdom of God. He warns against lending with interest. He tells the parable of the rich man whose friends were too preoccupied to come to dinner, and so he sent his servants out to "bring back whomever you find."
But unlike Matthew and Luke, Thomas ends his story with this damning line: "Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my father."
This Jesus also has no time for empty ceremony, such as fasting and praying. Nor is he too concerned about sins of the flesh. "Why do you wash the outside of the cup?" he asks. "Do you not understand that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?" On the subject of circumcision, he points out, quite sensibly it seems to me, "If [circumcision] were useful, children's fathers would produce them already circumcised from their mothers." At one point he tells his followers that when they "strip with-out being ashamed," then they will be ready for the kingdom of God. The word "sin" occurs only once in the Gospel of Thomas.2
As in the canonical Gospels, this Jesus urges his listeners to abandon their families and follow him. In Thomas this charge takes the form of the succinct advice: "Be passers by." It's a phrase one might expect to find in the Tao Te Ching. Indeed, many scholars have noted the "eastern" feel of Thomas's gospel. Edward Conze has even suggested that the Thomas Christians intermingled with Buddhists in southern India. I suspect it is the spirit of "nonattachment" in Thomas that seems so Taoist or Buddhist. It isn't a concept American Christians have ever been too comfortable with, but it is the crux of Thomas's gospel. His Jesus is trying to convince "whoever has ears" to shake off all of the world's distractions and encumbrances so they might finally see something real. It is the same impulse that drove Henry Thoreau out to Walden Pond.
But what is it exactly they are supposed to see? A radically revised version of the kingdom of God. Throughout the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus' followers are clearly preoccupied with John the Baptist's vision of an impending apocalypse, at which time the Ultimate Arbiter will hear all grievances and right all wrongs. But in Thomas, Jesus openly ridicules such divine intervention or the promise of heavenly compensation for worldly injustice. In the third saying we read: "Jesus said, `If your leaders say to you, "Look, the kingdom is in heaven," then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, "It is in the sea," then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you."' We recognize in that last phrase a variant of Luke 17:21. But scholars have puzzled over whether Luke's Greek should be translated as "the kingdom of God is within you" or "the kingdom of God is in your midst." Thomas leaves no doubt. In his gospel's penultimate saying, when the followers ask yet again when the kingdom will come, Jesus replies, "the father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it."
When Jesus' followers ask when they will enter the kingdom of God, he replies, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one . . . then you will en-ter [the kingdom]." This idea of making two into one is central to the theology of Thomas. Unlike Paul's lawgiver and eternal redeemer, this Jesus rejects the verbal and psychological dualisms that divide the world into good and evil, black and white, heaven and hell, body and soul, male and female, straight and gay. Like Zen Buddhists, Thomas's Jesus believes that to divide the world up into abstract categories is to miss seeing the world as it is. At one point Jesus tells his followers, "On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?" When we come into being, Jesus seems to be saying, we are necessarily separated from the Creator, the One. What then? Jesus' question implies that we must rediscover the one, not by a return to some heavenly realm but by recognizing the world before us as an emanation of that One—an immanent wholeness, a kingdom of God.
This Jesus is obviously no savior, certainly no messiah, which alone would account for why early bishops would have ordered the Gospel of Thomas destroyed. But beyond that, they must have realized that while this teaching might serve the cause of the Jesus movement, an itinerant group of passers-by, it would never do as the basis for an established church. Unlike the Jesus of John's gospel, this arresting figure does not glory in his own divinity or brood over his sacrificial fate to save mankind. You can save yourself, he tells the crowds: "If you bring forth what is with-in you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you." What everyone has within is some fragment of divine light. That spark is proof of our kinship to the Creator—of our own divinity. But human vanities blind us to it. We walk around wearing all sorts of lampshades until we finally convince ourselves that such a light never existed at all. The Jesus of Thomas's gospel is simply trying to give us back something we already possess. Here is a crucial passage:
Jesus said, "Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the father's light. He will he disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light."Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will bear!"
There is an empirical way of knowing, and there is an intuitive way of understanding. The "father's light" exists within everyone and "will be disclosed," but we cannot know it intellectually—we cannot give it an image. Likewise, we comprise two selves—the one we see in the mirror, and the face we had before we were horn. This last paradoxical image exists in nearly all mystical literature—Zen koans, the Kabbalah, the Upanishads—and here, in the Gospel of Thomas. To "see" this imageless image, to know this original self, is to arrive at a nexus where the light within illuminates the world without, and finally shows it for what it truly is—the kingdom of God. For that reason, the kingdom must exist simultaneously within and without. When Jesus' followers ask him to show them "where you are, for we must seek it," Jesus replies, "There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world.


The intuitive mysticism of the Gospel of Thomas would have made Thomas Jefferson nervous. He was a rationalist, a child of the Enlightenment, a student of Locke and Newton. But twelve years after Jefferson's death, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of Harvard's Divinity School, a speech that mightily upset many in his audience. If we set "The Divinity School Address" beside Jefferson's gospel, we can begin to understand how the sayings collected by Thomas present us with an oddly but uniquely American gospel.
Emerson shared Jefferson's concern that "historical Christianity" had muddied the message of its founder. But whereas Jefferson worked to retrieve the ethical teachings of Jesus, Emerson was mining the Gospels for something far more elusive—"the mystery of the soul." Standing before the small group of graduates on a summer night in 1838, Emerson advised the young ministers to renounce preaching the "tropes" of the Gospels and instead point their parishoners back toward their own "divine nature." The problem with the established Church, Emerson charged, is that it teaches our smallness instead of our largeness. "In how many churches," he asked, "by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?" Emerson, with breathtaking sweep, was replacing American Puritanism with transcendentalism, replacing the Church's emphasis on sin with the individual's concern for his or her own soul. Jesus, he said, was ravished by the soul's beauty—"he lived in it, and had his being there." He had climbed to the fountainhead, the fundamental intuition. "One man was true to what is in you and me," Emerson concluded. "He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World." Emerson did not, like Jefferson, deny Jesus' divinity; he simply said the same potential resides in every human heart. He was offering, without knowing it, the first American commentary on the Gospel of Thomas.


Because the of Gospel of Thomas presents a portrait of Jesus so at odds with the canonical Gospels, if one wants to argue, as I do, for the primacy of this version of Christianity, then one must date Thomas closer to its source—the talking Jesus—than any of the other four Gospels.
I am not a New Testament scholar. All I can bring to this debate is eighteen years of compulsory churchgoing and a master's degree in reading literary texts. But I am convinced by Stephen J. Patterson's claim that there is no pattern of dependence to suggest the Gospel of Thomas borrowed from Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Furthermore, there are, in Thomas, none of the "secondary accretions" found in the synoptic texts. The four canonical Gospel writers allegorize extensively, but Thomas almost always lets the sayings and parables stand, as Patterson says, "in forms that are more primitive than their synoptic parallels." For instance, Jesus' well-known remark about the impossibility of serving two masters stands alone in both Thomas and in the other sayings gospel, Q. Luke, however, who would have borrowed it from Q, positions this saying within his narrative to function as a direct attack on the Pharisees. But the compilers of the two sayings gospels presumably knew the context, and saw no reason to replicate it, nor did they try to distort it to fit their own purposes. Later, Matthew and Luke combined information from Q and Mark's gospel to invent their own narratives. But given the Gospel of Thomas's resemblance to Q as well as its independence from the canonical Gospels, there is good reason to believe, as does Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School, that it is older than the Gospel of Mark.
One question remains: who was Thomas, the author of this ancient collection of sayings? Was it the same Thomas who, in John's gospel, doubted that Jesus had risen from the grave until he saw the scars on his hands? John claims to be "the beloved" of Jesus; Thomas claims to he his "twin." Indeed, John himself makes three references to Thomas, "called the twin." Whether this is the same Judas Thomas, whom Mark and Matthew mention as the brother of Jesus—and whether he really was Jesus' twin brother—are questions that still keep scholars busy.
Trying to attribute authorship to ancient religious documents is a nearly hopeless task; too much mythologizing has gotten in the way. But in her most recent book, Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels argues that the author of this gospel is indeed the same Doubting Thomas who, significantly, appears as a doubter only in John's gospel. Pagels argues that these two inheritors of Jesus' teaching had reached profoundly irreconcilable understandings of that message, particularly with regard to the kingdom of God. John's Jesus is a divine savior, on his way to prepare a better place for those who believe in his redeeming power. Thomas's Jesus, as we have seen, is just the opposite. Pagels suggests that John actually preached his gospel to refute Thomas's teachings, which would explain why only John's gospel depicts Thomas in a poor light.
In the end, of course, John's savior Jesus, who could forgive sins and assuage our fear of death by promising an eternal afterlife, proved more attractive to the early Christians than Thomas's wandering mystic who called for voluntary poverty and spoke in maddening paradoxes. But along with John's "good news" comes the not-so-good news that we are all guilty, sinners by birth, consigned to serve out our sentence in this toilsome, fallen world.


I have spent exactly half my life sitting in churches, listening to preachers enumerate my many sins and declare my inherent deficiency in the eyes of God. My father, however, was never one of those ministers.
He shot himself with his hunting rifle before I was ever old enough to sit with my mother in his congregation. I do not lay all of my father's problems on the steps of the Church, but I do believe it bears much of the blame. My father was also the son of a Baptist minister. My grandfather was a country preacher who, every Sunday, delivered a simple message about earthly hardships, mortal sin, and the crucial choice between eternal salvation or damnation. The atmosphere of guilt was so pervasive within my grandfather's fundamentalism that one didn't even have to do anything wrong. We were born with the mark of sin. Just being alive, just waking up in the morning became a dubious endeavor, a transgression of the flesh. For someone like my father, who was already given to long stretches of depression, such a psychological burden must have finally be-come unbearable.
I've come to see that disbelief, unlike the Christian "conversion experience," is not a cataclysmic event. I can't say exactly when I lost my family's faith in a redeeming messiah. But I do know that at some point during one of my own lengthy bouts of depression and self-loathing, I decided, however unconsciously, that I could best avoid my father's fate by abandoning my grandfather's beliefs. Of course losing faith is never that simple, and in my case it involved bitter recriminations and long, terrible silences between me and the rest of my family. When my grandfather died last year, we were barely speaking. And, of course, the problem with losing faith is that you never really do, not completely. You never quite shake off that internal surveillance mechanism that William Blake called the "mind-forg'd manacles" and Freud later termed the superego.
So when I first discovered the Gospel of Thomas about a decade ago, I was shocked to find a version of Christianity that I could accept and one that, moreover, could serve as a vital corrective to my grandfather's view that we live helplessly, sinfully, in a broken world. According to Thomas's Jesus, humankind never suffered an irredeemable Fall. The world only appears to be a realm of separation from the Creator and from one another. When Thomas's Jesus tells his followers that "Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you," he is implying that Adam's first sin was to take on the knowledge of good and evil—the knowledge that continues to divide the world into us and them. The stunning message of Thomas's gospel is that such divisions are arbitrary, destructive, and, finally, unnatural. Only the talking animals believe in them. Thus Adam's sin, ironically, was simply ignorance. True, that ignorance proved to be congenital, but it wasn't terminal and it didn't demand divine intervention. What it demanded was a realization on the part of each individual that he or she still possesses a divine light lodged within the heart, and that light can reveal the world to be a beautiful, undivided wholeness.
This teacher of reconciliation was the same Jesus whom Thomas Jefferson hoped to recover through his own gospel project. And whereas Jefferson found in Jesus' teaching an ethic for how we should treat others, Emerson found in it an alchemical light that transforms flesh into spirit. In some uncanny trick of history and geography, the ancient Gospel of Thomas combines these two visions of Jesus to give us what I would call a truly American gospel. By pulling the kingdom of God out of the sky and transposing it onto this world, Thomas's Jesus returns us, in effect, to Jefferson's agrarian America, where the farmer intuits the laws of God through the laws of nature.
Read together, as the world all around us sickens and dies from the poi-son discharges of Hamiltonian industry, these twin gospels suggest that it is time we inverted Pascal's famous wager to say not that we should believe in heaven because we have nothing to lose but rather that we should believe first in this world, because in losing it we may lose everything. And if we can somehow live justly, modestly, with generosity and compassion, we have everything to gain. Perhaps we do not have to wait for the kingdom of God.

NOTES
1 Athanasius's letter is the first known list of the twenty-seven books that now make up the New Testament.
2 "Jesus said to them, `If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.'"
Erik Reece's last article for Harper's Magazine, "Death of a Mountain," appeared in the April issue. His new book, Lost Mountain, will be published by Riverhead in February.
Harpers.org is the website of Harper's Magazine, an American journal of literature, politics, culture, and the arts published continuously from 1850.

Theocrats at the Helm

Several years ago, I read about a huge dam project in China. The project was taking longer than expected because the Buddhist construction workers would drop their shovels every time they encountered an earthworm or bird’s nest or whatever and gently carry the violated animal to safety; such was their devotion to all forms of life. This happened several times a day, but the project foremen could do nothing to convince the workers that this procedure was wrecking the completion schedule. So the dam took much longer than expected to complete. Although this practice must have been irritating to the workers who did not share the Buddhists’ faith, there’s no denying the inherent honor in Buddhists walking it like they talked it. They lived exactly according to the values of their religion, even at the expense of efficiency.

A few weeks ago, President Bush cited his religious convictions when he vetoed the stem cell research bill ratified by congress. There is something truly admirable about someone choosing moral rectitude over popularity—like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll taken in April, more than two thirds of the nation opposes President Bush’s decision, and yet he stood firm, guided by his faith.

As long as we have religion, we will never truly achieve the Founders’ intent to maintain a wall of separation between church and government. All we can do is try to be as fair and objective as possible, and to apply constant vigilance in our assault on our own hypocrisy. Leaving aside for now the scientific fact that no more embryos would be destroyed with stem cell research than are now being destroyed without it, one must respect a president’s decision that is based on personal convictions rather than economic or political interests, as is so often the case. President Bush made the difficult decision to follow his heart over the fierce opposition of the majority of his countrymen. Is this not precisely the mettle we long for in our leaders?

Well, isn’t it?

The obvious problem with that line of reasoning is that President Bush is cherry picking his religious convictions, which is what always happens in a theocracy. His devotion to embryos is not matched by his devotion to the 250 thousand or so fully gestated human lives his illegal war in Iraq has aborted. Nor was it matched by his devotion to the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) when he ruined the careers and reputations of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. Nor was it matched by his glaring disregard for the thousands of people killed or displaced by Hurricane Katrina. And on and on and on…you’ve already encountered the long, long list of Bush’s un-christian transgressions.

No, President Bush’s veto had nothing to do with religious conviction; it had to do with pandering to a tiny-but-powerful political bloc whose exit from the American electoral process—not to mention the planet—is long overdue. Like Peter Popoff, President Bush has tapped into the very heart of American ignorance, not to bring enlightenment to the backward and superstitious minority that progress forgot, but to exploit that minority for his own shallow avarice.

And once again, the working poor—in this instance, Buddhist construction workers—have demonstrated that their understanding of personal integrity is broader and deeper than that of the greedy self-absorbed nincompoops we have chosen to lead us.

Namaste

First Freedom First

First Freedom First
The Equality Alliance Mission
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
American Civil Liberties Union

The Wall of Separation

As frequent BDM visitors already know, church-state issues are a favorite topic of mine. Indeed, my second post as a blogger hammered the topic right between the eyes. So, since I already rant on this topic regularly, and since I have a lazy streak in me a mile wide, my contribution to the blogswarm will be a blogger-cop-out-linkfest. Click here and here and here to read previous BDM entries on the topic.

Sometimes, when a debate topic gets batted back and forth for a century or so like this church-state issue has, it’s easy to lose sight of who said what and what did they really mean when they said it and so forth. Luckily for us, those ponytail-sporting radicals we refer to as the Founding Fathers were pretty good writers and not as lazy as yours truly. The ringleader of these proto-Yippies, Tommy J., clarified the separation clause thusly:


To messers. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.
Gentlemen
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. (emphasis mine) Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.
Th Jefferson Jan. 1. 1802.

Many religious zealots claim that Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists Association doesn’t count because he dashed it off quickly in a shameless attempt to pander to a political bloc. But as this site demonstrates, Jefferson put a great deal of effort into the letter, composing multiple drafts, editing, removing, adding and replacing lines. He clearly intended it as a political statement clarifying his wishes for the future of Americans’ approach to religion.

It is interesting to note that Jefferson was addressing his remarks to Baptists, who at that time feared the emergence of the Church of England as a national religion. Jefferson’s predecessors, Washington and Adams, had declared days of fasting and thanksgiving to commemorate various events. As president, Jefferson put an end to this tradition.

Thank God.

Treaty of Tripoli

It's funny how history provides us with answers to modern questions. (Wasn't that Dr. Who's shtick?) Anyway, Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli provides concise answers to two of today's stickiest questions: Was America founded as a Christian Nation? And, what would the Founders think of our Modern Mideast Misadventures?

The answers are "No," and, "They wouldn't approve." Check it out:

Have you ever wondered why the first verse of the Marine Corps Hymn references "the shores of Tripoli?" It's because America's first foreign military excursion took place along the southern Mediterranean coast, possibly presaging the direction our county was to follow. Pirates based in the Muslim city-state of Tripoli, now the capital of Libya, had adopted the policy of disrupting American trade by raiding cargo ships in the area. American naval and marine forces were dispatched to the region to punish the offenders and to rescue American captives. (For a more detailed history, click here.)

At the close of hostilities, just six years after adopting the Bill of Rights, the Treaty of Tripoli was signed after having been read aloud on the floor of the US Senate. It was ratified unanimously and approved by President Adams in 1797. Of the treaty's 12 articles, Article 11 sheds the most light on our early government's frame of mind.

Article 11, reads:

"As the Government of the United States of America 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 Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan 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."

So I think it's safe to say that our non-Christian forbears would vehemently disapprove of the current administration's "character of enmity against the tranquility of Mussulmen." But of course, Adams & Co. didn't foresee the impact of oil.

Shortsighted bastards.

Sunday Sermon

There is a phenomenon occurring with disturbing regularity in the comment sections of lefty blogs: religious intolerance.

It seems some commenters are finding it difficult to maintain their open-mindedness in light of the current administration’s exploitation of certain weird Christian sects emanating from the American Southeast and the Colorado Springs area. But it’s important to keep in mind that, just as a succession of Soviet dictators exploited socialism in order to satisfy their own hunger for power, the current administration is exploiting Christianity (and, for that matter, Judaism & Islam) for the very same purpose.

Nothing even remotely like socialism occurred in the Soviet Union. It was a dictatorship in which a tiny minority had money and power while the vast majority languished in intellectual, emotional and economic poverty. Similarly, Bush’s shameless manipulation of religion bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Sermon on the Mount or any other genuine religious text. As a result, there is nothing even remotely like Christianity occurring in the White House.

But to use Bush or Jimmy Swaggart or Jim & Tammy Fay or the ghetto storefront charlatan as an excuse for religious bigotry is inexcusable. We don’t dismiss all of capitalism because of the “clapper” or the Popeil Pocket Fisherman, so we shouldn’t dismiss all of religion because Pat Robertson claims he can leg-press a ton. As Blue Gal demonstrates in this post, most Christians — indeed, most religious people — are honest, productive citizens who are embarrassed by these childish extremists.

It is not difficult to see why this is happening. If you’ve ever had a roommate or significant other with a slightly annoying habit — leaving dirty socks around the apartment, say — then you’ve encountered this problem before, albeit in a microcosmic way. The problem seems minor, and it is. Someone else believes something that you don’t. It could be that they don’t think dirty socks are any big deal; or it could be that they think a virgin gave birth to the messiah. It’s neither here nor there as far as you’re concerned, and yet it’s annoying. But it shouldn’t be. So rather than express your annoyance early on, you clam up and let it build and build until something awkward happens. Your co-workers come over for drinks one evening, and — YIKES — there are filthy socks everywhere.

GODDAMMITWHYTHEFUCKDON’TYOUCLEANTHE
MOTHERFUCKINGAPARTMENTONCEINAFUCKINGWHILE....

Well, the incident didn’t really deserve that, now did it? But, you see, by not having the slightly uncomfortable discussion when the difficulty first presented itself, you insured the occurrence of a huge fucking blowout later on.

But there is another dynamic involved. For decades, the devout in America have enjoyed the luxury of publicly pronouncing their faith, and even attempting to convert others to their faith, without any significant challenge from non-believers. Many of these efforts even take place on Public Property, which, some argue, is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Sometimes, as with Luis Palau, they even employ deception as a means for luring the innocent into their clutches. Palau festivals, such as CityFest in Houston, feature pop stars, skateboarders and, often, a video message from President Bush himself, to attract folks who would probably stay away if they knew in advance that it was a Christian event. Notice how it’s called CityFest and not ChristianFest or EvangalismFest? CityFest makes it sound like Taste of Chicago or Summerfest in Milwaukee, not a Christian revival. Of course, for me to point that out means to many that I am practicing religious intolerance, and since I know that will be the response, usually I don’t say anything. So, as with the dirty sock thing, my annoyance grows into frustration, which grows into anger, which grows into…

WHYDON’TYOUSUPERSTITIOUSFUCKWADSPULLYOUR
MOTHERFUCKINGHEADSOUTOFYOURASSESANDGROWUP?!?!?!?!?!?!

Ahem.

There are frequent attempts by Christians to advance the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation, and that assertion is often used in defense of things like Houston’s CityFest. But nothing can be further from the truth. By the time of the Declaration of Independence, the so-called Founding Fathers had developed a pronounced animosity towards religion in general and Christianity in particular. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to a friend, “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, the Adams bros., among others, had suffered at the hands of Puritans and Calvinists in their younger years; and in adulthood, the King’s inherent divinity made honest intellectual debate impossible when it came to public policy. That is why the very first amendment to the Constitution protects both the freedom to worship as we choose and the freedom to talk about it. Jefferson had perhaps the most crystalline understanding of our Constitution. He should — he wrote it. Here is what he said about the First Amendment: “All men shall be free to profess AND BY ARGUMENT to maintain their opinions in matters of religion.” (Emphasis mine) The argument is never held, though, because polite society views religious debate as religious intolerance, and as a result, people who should know better get to repeat and repeat and repeat the nonsense that America was founded as a Christian nation. One result of this is that non-believers throw the gloves off when at last there appears a forum in which they can reveal their true feelings about religion. Then, of course, the good Christians — by which I mean most Christians — feel rejected from the larger struggle for justice. Justice, after all, was what Jesus was all about, even if Jesus exists only on the pages of some book. By dividing ourselves into believers and non-believers, those of us who long for justice ensure that what we will receive instead is ‘just us.’

So instead of dividing ourselves into believers and non-believers in God, we should be dividing ourselves into believers and non-believers in justice. As Ben Franklin, perhaps our founders’ most rigid non-believer, put it, “Morality or Virtue is the end, Faith is only a means to obtain that end; and if the end be obtained, it is no matter by what means.”

Why are christians so fucking dumb?

Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.
On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

--H.L. Mencken, Homo Neanderthalensis, June 29, 1925

Wine into water? The parting of the Red Sea? A virgin giving birth? These are events that only a school child could believe in – and a stupid one at that – and yet millions of educated adults continue to harbor these and other ridiculous beliefs. Here’s the news, folks: THIS SHIT NEVER HAPPENED! It’s an unholy hoax designed to keep you in your place. Don’t you know that?
The enormity, the boundless immensity, the incomprehensibly colossal stupidity that is christianity’s defining characteristic is almost too vast for the mortal mind to grasp. How ironic! One almost needs the intellect of an infinite being such as god (who doesn’t exist, by the way) even to come close to understanding the utterly titanic imbecility that is christianity.
Of course, this observation can be made about religion in general, but since christianity is the dominant form of superstition here in AmeriKKKa, I will limit my remarks to it for now.
There are so many examples of christianity’s incalculable damage to human progress that it is difficult to know where to start. Science? Art? Literature? Medicine? Diplomacy? Education? Christianity has left its awful mark on every school of thought and field of endeavor. Where might we be today without the constant encumbrance of christianity’s irrational dread of human development? How many lives have been wasted in misery and fear of a vengeful, man-made god?
It might be helpful to examine the origins of religion, and to more fully understand how we got to this regrettable point in human history.
When considering early humans’ relatively limited ability to explain the natural world, it is easy to see how superstitious belief systems could emerge. Thunder, lightning, rain, floods, droughts, fires, starvation, disease and privation all required some sort of explanation. How could this peaceful patch of land be ravaged by seemingly limitless torrents of water one day and consumed by insatiable infernos the next? Why is food sometimes in great abundance, but at other times as scarce as can be? What – or who – was behind the earth-rattling thunder that scared the bejeezus out of us? Or the flash of lightning that illuminated the night sky and set the trees ablaze? Or the thunderous herds that trampled everything in sight? Clearly, someone was fucking with us. Well, who the hell was it? And what did he want?
He was Thor. And Odin. And Isis. And Poseidon. And Tlaloc. And Zeus. And Shiva. And he wanted temples and shrines and burnt offerings and human sacrifices and crazy dances…
And he wanted followers. Lots of obedient, bovine followers, some of whom possessed just enough moxy to lead the rest of the dolts into some unnecessary battle or pointless, demeaning servitude.
How did the majority of humanity come to embrace this folly? I’ll tell you. But if you would simply put down the bible and pick up a fucking textbook, you’d know it already. Here’s the answer. Are you ready? Here it comes. Ready?
THE FRONTAL LOBE.
That’s right, the frontal lobe. How many of you rubes even know what that is? The frontal lobe is the portion of the brain that allows conceptualization. I know, I know. That’s a big word. Sorry about that. Conceptualization is the ability to picture oneself in other places or situations. In prison, say, or at war, or in old age, or in poverty, or in luxury.
Or dead.
That’s the big one. Death. We can’t seem to cope with the fact that all this struggle is meaningless. Hunger, pain, sorrow, loss, landlords, bosses, cops, lawyers, plea bargains, elections, plane crashes, earthquakes, tornadoes, disease – none of it means a goddamn thing. Life is meaningless. You’re born, you struggle, you die. That’s it. You have no purpose. Your only purpose is to survive long enough to reproduce, just like all the other animals. The only problem is we know it. The “lower” animals don’t know it because they don’t have the frontal lobe, or at least not much of one. They live in the present. If they get hungry, they look for food. If they see an enemy, they fight or flee. If they see the opposite sex, they fuck. The end. Simple, right? Right. That’s why they’re so much happier than we are. They aren’t consumed with the thought of their own impending doom. They aren’t burdened by the foolish notion that life means something; that some punishment or reward awaits them upon their departure from this mortal coil.
So where did this newfangled frontal lobe come from, anyway? That’s simple. It came from the same place that giraffes’ long necks came from. Or kangaroos’ pouches. Or wasps’ stingers. It was a fluke of evolution. When a species starts dying off, the hitherto recessive genes become dominant in a desperate effort to keep the species alive. If the new thing works – that is, if it enables the mutant giraffe, for example, to find food and reproduce, then the new thing becomes de rigueur. It becomes necessary for survival, and the short-necked giraffes die off.
With humans, the evolutionary fluke that spared us from extinction was the frontal lobe. Think about it. We’re not fast. We’re not strong. And from a design perspective, our bodies have many flaws. Our genitals and internal organs are exposed to attack. We suffer from foot, ankle, knee, hip and back problems due to the uneven distribution of our weight. Our relatively hairless skin provides little warmth. The one thing that allows us to overcome all these deficits is our cleverness. We can fashion tools and weapons, form spoken and written language, harness the forces of nature, build shelters and domesticate animals. We can even find ways to minimize and remedy the aforementioned bodily flaws.
Unfortunately, our gift is also our curse.
Not all concepts emanating from the frontal lobe are helpful. And humans everywhere have shown an inability to relinquish poor concepts even after they have been proven harmful or ill conceived. The evolutionary fluke that gave humans the Cassini space probe, the polio vaccine and the Great Gatsby has also burdened us with bigotry, superstition and privatization. It seems that for every brilliant concept – penicillin, say, or democracy – we produce several bad ones – the hydrogen bomb, the multi-national conglomerate, the mini-van. Do you know where the word faggot comes from? A faggot is a bundle of sticks used for building fires. It’s also what for centuries was used by superstitious christians to burn homosexuals whenever there was a flood or a drought or some other natural disaster. Fortunately for homosexuals, rank and file christian dipshits often targeted Jews, blacks and “witches” instead.
Yes, of all the stupid, dangerous and pointless concepts encumbering human progress, christianity stands proudly at the top of the heap. Christianity is to thank for the notion that women and people with dark skin tones are somehow inferior to white, penis-wielding humans. Environmental destruction, too, has its roots in christianity, as do country & western music, Michael Landon TV shows and third-world sweatshops. And why must we spend ourselves into the poor house every December simply to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior?
Of course, not all christians are evil. Most of them, in fact, are actually good people. Our wisest leaders, our most brilliant scientists and artists, our most heroic defenders of justice have sprung mainly from christianity – Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Bishop Tutu, Gregor Mendel, Galileo de Galilee to name a few. But these champions of fairness and reason emerged in spite of christianity, not because of it. Christianity’s greatest sin, in fact, is its suppression and persecution of the good people trapped within its walls. How much more could Mother Theresa have accomplished, for example, had she been allowed to provide cheap, safe birth control to the desperate citizens of Calcutta? How many bishops stood in silent complicity with South Africa’s system of apartheid before Tutu found his nuts and spoke up? How much more quickly might we have mapped the human genome had christian dogma not interfered with Gregor Mendel and other early geneticists?
And this christian hegemony continues to hinder human progress. How much have anti-abortion activists done to save the 40,000 or so American babies who die of malnutrition each year? Do they really want to save babies, or is that just politically motivated rhetoric disguised as religious conviction? As abortion clinic bombings, the Terry Schiavo melodrama and Pat Robertson’s assassination demands demonstrate, American christians are less concerned with following Jesus’ message than they are with consolidating their power at any cost, no matter how ironic this approach to (self) righteousness may appear.
The latest salvo of christian idiocy is emerging in the form of new monkey trials aimed at returning christian dogma to public school science classrooms. In Dover, Penn., eight families have sued the school district in an attempt to prevent creationism disguised as “intelligent” design from being treated as science. School boards in Kansas, New Mexico and elsewhere are facing similar debates.
These episodes raise an important question, one that christians should be asking themselves: Why is the growing body of evidence in support of natural selection so threatening to them? Could it be that they already suspect the truth – that eternal paradise is not waiting them at the end of this entire pointless struggle? After all, no one is telling them what to believe. Freedom of religion is still the law of the land. Science is simply telling us what the evidence shows. Christians’ difficulty in reconciling observable scientific evidence with their religious beliefs is just that – their difficulty. They externalize their own difficulty by making false accusations regarding the so-called effort to secularize America. America was secularized from the beginning so that the sectarian violence that had washed Europe in blood for centuries would not reach these shores.
In closing, I will give the last word to a christian, David J. Langum, the former president of the Alabama chapter of the ACLU. (Hat tip to John Scalzi):

I am a lawyer, law professor more precisely, and the immediate past President of the ACLU of Alabama. I am currently on the ACLU of Alabama Board of Directors and additionally serve on its Executive Committee. And, yes, I am a Christian.
I know of my own personal knowledge that the ACLU brings just as many lawsuits under the Free Exercise clause supporting various religious groups (including Christian churches as shown earlier in this thread) in their ability to practice their faith, as it does under the Establishment Clause attempting to prevent the overt endorsement of religion by government.
The true client of the ACLU is the Constitution of the United States. We represent specific, individual clients in order to promote constitutional rights. When we act to defend helpless individuals against oppressive government (a common scenario), I believe the ACLU acts in a truly Christian manner (although this is not intended as such, and my non-Christian colleagues on the ACLU Board would distance themselves from this). After all, Christ enjoined us to help the least among us, and often the ACLU finds itself representing the friendless and the scorned.
For myself, my beliefs are not so fragile that they require blaring public pronouncement, and especially public pronouncement by less-than-honest politicians. So what if there are no public statues or monuments to any particular religious faith? Of what value is a belief system that needs such constant reinforcement?
I also ask myself what I would feel if I were a Muslim or a Hindu, living in the United States and constantly being made to feel second-class by virtue of the religious prattle that comes out of the mouths of public officials. I would not want that for myself, and, as Christians, how can we possibly force onto others that which we would not want for ourselves?

-- David J. Langum