Nationalists Don’t See What Is Special About Our Biblical Nation

Imagine writing an entire op-ed alleging a "biblical" something or other as an organizing principle of the United States, but not mentioning that James Madison authored the First Amendment as well as copious clarifications of exactly what he meant by it.

I think that we can safely say that we are a nation founded on and grounded in slavery. We used slaves to do the dirty work of building our nation. We had apartheid long before South Africa. Nearly every social welfare program is designed to keep African Americans out or at a disadvantage. Just look at what jobs were excluded from Social Security when Roosevelt signed it into law. If we ever were a Hebraic nation we would have freed slaves after they had worked for us for 7 years. That never happened. After the Civil War we continued to find ways to keep the plantation mentality in effect. We're still treating African Americans in situations similar to whites with far less compassion than we should. The Bible is relevant because it was written by men (and maybe some women too). It has stories in it that pertain to life, death, how to live, how to forgive, etc. The Bible may be based in ancient history but the stories are modern. In fact it might be a good idea to teach some of those stories to students in literature classes and in history. When it comes to cruelty we do seem to adhere to the Bible quite well. We imprison people at higher rates than almost any other nation on the planet. We do believe in an eye for an eye, etc. 9/9/2019 6:20pm first submit

How many Old Testament passages define women as lesser than? And how many articulate very specifically how one should select and treat one's slaves? How many characters raped and murdered their own children on the instructions of "god"? Our nation will never come close to its potential until we shed this magical thinking.

Amazing how so many writers with this capacity to deploy fine words are still captive to an Old testament which is so obviously, in a well informed 21st century, a complete work of fiction. I couldn't finish this article. I have no interest in the thoughts of someone who thinks like this.

Lincoln relied on the Psalms of David to aid his prosecution of the Civil War, noting with resignation that war doomed him to order the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens and thereby doomed him to blood guilt and the shame that goes with it. He avoided the Christian homilies and hypocrisies that justified slavery for two hundred fifty years, trusting the Hebrew Bible as the mostly true history of the Jewish people. While most of the founders embraced Christianity half owned slaves and in a tortured irony slavery begat, Washington admonished his wife when she suggested stopping all religious practices among their slaves, reminding her by letter than he fought the Revolution for religious freedom and so he didn’t care if the slaves practiced Hinduism or Islam or Judaism or any other worship. Today’s embrace of the Hebrew by Christians is to urge the End of Times, trumpets and so forth that will leave Jews like me and mine as doomed as Lincoln to the underworld he believed in since Homer believed in it. Today’s Christianity is no more Christ’s church than Netanyahu’s Israel is Solomon’s kingdom.

The important thing I get out of this article is to appreciate religion’s virtues enough to confront the misuse of religion by those who want to enforce theirs on others rather than confrontation against all religions which often means against the one you hate the most. Ignorance is no way to fight ignorance or hate.

It’s the 21st century. Anyone can travel virtually anywhere on Earth; anyone can communicate instantly with virtually anyone else, no matter how distant. We move mountains, smash atoms, create life in test tubes and devices that can analyze more information in seconds than a thousand people could process in a lifetime. All of the humans living on this globe are one species; any one of us can reproduce with anyone else, from anywhere. We are one. What in heaven’s name are we doing trying to find guidance in ‘scriptures’ written thousands of years ago, in pernicious superstitions that have provided the pretext for the most horrific atrocities in human history — from economic exploitation to torture to war and genocide? Why are we still trying to count the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin? Time to wake up from the fever dream called ‘religion’ and get in touch with reality. The survival of humankind depends on it, and this is just wasting precious time.

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." - Thomas Paine

Someone better read than I please confirm or deny the following for me: Is not the foundational American doctrine that it is “Manifest Destiny” that the American People conquer and dominate this continent from ocean to ocean an echo of God supposedly telling the ancient Hebrews to invade, conquer, and settle the land of Canaan, doing whatever violence was necessary to the indigenous people to achieve that goal? Is the full breadth of the American continent understood by advocates of Manifest Destiny as a new echo of the Hebrews’ Promised Land?

Oh, please, STOP with all this religious stuff from a thousand years ago. Let's have a nation based on reason, logic and our common humanity. Tired of all this nonsense!

Another stereotypical depiction of ‘the Pilgrims’ ‘girding their loins’ before ‘saving/enlightening’ the ‘savages’ ... ‘for the lord’, of course!

Boring. Bible studies are boring. Biblical examples and quotes are boring. The Bible is boring. The only thing that isn't boring is the fact that when John Adams was president his wife had a pet dog who she named 'Satan'. Can you possibly imagine how scandalous it would have been in that puritanical day and age to have Satan in the White House? Passersby would hear her calling Satan when his dinner was ready. Satan! fetch Satan, fetch. Satan, Satan, where are you? Come here, Satan!

I hope the author didn't hurt himself bending over backwards to make this narrative fit.

At the dawn of the 21st century if we are incapable of formulating a set of ethical guideline divorced from 2000 years of religious dogma, and by all indications we most certainly are, then we richly deserve the coming social, political and environmental hell the old morality hath wrought upon us.

The Mosaic tradition loomed large in the African American experience “...when Israel was in Egypt land...let my people go.” And any number of Negro spirituals. Also American place names are more biblical than anywhere outside of Israel: Shilo, Manassas, Moab, Zion...

What really makes us unique is that the authority of our governance is derived from the will of the people, not somebody's god. It was a radical idea for the time, an age of Enlightenment. In no prior time could such a system of governance have been created. We learned that the Earth is not the center of the universe. The scientific method was advancing. The guy that wrote the Declaration of Independence rewrote the Bible to be more to his liking. Our Founding Fathers were not conservatives, they were radicals and pioneers ready to step into a Brave New World. We threw off the yoke of the King that was granted his commission by his god. It was our escape from religion, and a formalized feudalism, that allowed us to keep the governance down here on Earth.

Whether the "Christian Nation" folks like it or not, 1) The USA was founded, and has remained as a secular nation, with no established or preferred religion - instead, all religions are welcomed and accepted so long as they conform to the laws of the land, and none is permitted a role in governance, and 2) In fundamental ways, the USA is one of the most secular countries on the planet: the average person in the street pays lip service to religion but in practice it has limited influence over their day to day actions, which are very often diametrically opposed to their professed beliefs. If one wishes to see what a nation based mainly upon religious concepts looks like, try Saudi Arabia or any of many other Islamic countries. Mixing religion and politics is like mixing gasoline and matches: people are bound to get burned, often very badly!!

I truly cannot buy this argument As opposed to the general population the Founders were educated and very familiar with Locke, Livy and much more. They did an extensive review of political systems to see what had and had not worked in designing ours. In fact, when problems with our first system arose, the Founders abandoned the Articles of Confederation and proposed the Constitution. The design of the Constitution was very much influenced by that best seller of 1776 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations As to religion in government Goldman seems to forget that the U.S. proceeded on a federal as well as state level of organization. A federation of the states could not have come into existence except by barring religious tests for federal office because of the different religious practices and beliefs in the various states; in other words the Founders were pragmatic. Yet on the state level religious tests for office continued in some states until the Age of Jackson - which is also when universal male suffrage was also achieved The paradox is that religion thrives more in the U.S. than many other places because the government is prohibited from being involved. Despite this reality too many continue to argue for bringing religious values into government and using government to promote religion Why are they so intent on destroying what has proven successful is the real question?

Religions demand faith, which pretty much boils down to obedient belief despite fact and reason. Lots of people, especially those in power, insist that every citizen should embrace the same kind of faith in government. Fortunately, most do not.

It's hard for the secular nation that the US has become to understand the perspective of the Christian people who created the USA. Many of the ideas of church self governance that existed among Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed were key instruments in helping to create the democratic framework for the states and later for the national government. I agree with this article that the hatred of centralized power has its roots in the history of Israel and Judah, as well as the European settlers more recent experience of oppression by the European monarchies. Within the USA, they were able to form a national identity that powered the USA all the way to Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War, the US divided into two hostile camps. Those two hostile camps seems to continue their fight in more bitter terms every year. The aftermath of the Civil War seems less bitter.

As an atheist, I've seen the whole "religeon is needed for a moral compass" argument before. I would direct attention to a couple of places with high populations of atheists: Australia and China. Their societies are quite different. Neither has a giant population of bisexuals. I don't see America's decrease in religiosity as a society-threatening issue. I think that a loss of relative standing in the world is part of what is driving our cultural malaise. I think that our position as financial and manufacturing linchpin is being eroded, adding further stress.

OK, the framers were (mostly) religious. But it doesn't follow that the republic they created is a Christian one. They could have done created one, but instead they deliberately chose to create a republic with no established church. They did this in order to preserve religious freedom in a religiously diverse republic.

Our rhetoric of exceptionalism has often been abused to justify costly and unnecessary wars, but also to cover economic and imperialist interests. The second Iraq invasion was to gain control of Iraqi oil under pretext of eliminating a threat from weapons of mass destruction; when these were not found, the official war justification was changed to freeing Iraq from a brutal dictatorship. We would up replacing a brutal dictatorship with an even more brutal series of civil wars and partial anarchies. We have rarely really tried to implement our principles of freedom and civic equality when these principles, or lip service to them, did not dovetail with economic and business interests. Truly implementing these principles would mean fomenting a secular revolution in Saudi Arabia, because of its oil wealth the greatest source of religious fanaticism and the oppression of women in the world. But we were not interested, even after the 9/11 attack, because of oil and our existing policies. So we continue our disturbed, disrupted sleep in the bed we have chosen.

This is the problem with identity politics of any stripe (and the problem is not limited to this op-ed. I've been reading a number of pieces in the NYT about how the current state of things is given meaning by America's formative years). Anyone can define our identity today as they see fit based on some things that happened in the past. The problem is, the definition is based on an obsessively narrow tunnel-vision; that is, the writer seems to see only the path from the past event to some current context. History weaves and interacts in complicated ways, so in reality, a path can be found from anything historical to anything current. Such tunnel vision is pointless except to serve the writer's ideology. This writer misses the bigger picture. In the context of the American Revolution, Christianity was still very central to most thought. That the founders phrasing included biblical references is unremarkable for the time. What was remarkable, however, was the new thinking of the enlightenment. That the founders pushed in that direction wasn't a detail. It was prescient.

Old and New, both Testaments can be used and abused to facilitate and advocate POVs on all sides of the divide. These are stories, fabrications, mythologies, national identity narratives and apocalyptic theocratic utopian manifestos. To take them other than metaphors and or dogmatic moralistic behavioral codes is iffy business. The world has changed a million times over since they were codified and million more times since 1776, yet the Torah and Gospels continues to be used and abused to justify human interaction on a personal and governmental policy. This habitual activity is a dead end to solve our human problems.

How is it that words from such a long time ago and such a different world remain considered? Aside from the rather obvious basics (thou shalt not kill) there's not much in them that has made sense for at least 200 years. Indeed, the vast proportion of influence from these words has been in the service of intolerance and butchery. Every contorted effort, like that in the essay, to give power in a modern context to the words of ancient, small, isolated, tribes ignorant of science into is merely grasping at straws. The world, interconnected as it is now by technology and economy and flight (and challenges like global warming), is becoming and should be post-religious.

What happened to tolerance, to 'live and let live'? When we should be partnering with other nations to address the existential threats of climate change, environmental degradation and pollution, mass extinctions and human overpopulation we're wasting time and energy dealing with nutty groups who deny science and evidence and want to force THEIR version of christianity and preferred lifestyles on the rest of us.

Let's just stop trying to govern - or not govern - based on millennia old mythology that bears no resemblance to the world today.

I've read the Torah. It's a very inspiring book both in itself and as the symbol of a people's struggle to maintain national unity for generations without national borders. I take all of that as given. But when people in the modern era use it to cobble together their own mythos about chosen peoples and higher callings, I can't help but feel concerned for the people they're excluding. It's one thing for Year 1000 BCE tribes to lock down and exclude everyone else. It's quite another for the most powerful country in the world 3000 years later. 3000 years since the Torah began to take the shape we understand today.

There are obvious limits and risks to relying on scripture for formulating policy – witness the “scriptural” defenses of slavery, racism generally, and homophobia. However, one clear (and consistent) admonition from the Hebrew scriptures seems to have been ignored by the current administration in its handling of immigration issues: "Do not mistreat or oppress an alien, for you were aliens in Egypt." Exodus, 22:21

What biblical nation? Instead of turning swords into plowshares and turning the other cheek, we're busy invading Korea, VietNam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most of the Middle East and Afghanistan. Instead of honoring the 6th commandment, "Thou shalt no kill", we are peddling guns on the street corners and witnessing mass murders on a weekly basis. The principal virtues of America have nothing to do with Christianity. The virtues that guide this nation are greed and hypocrisy.

It was Dutch Reform Protestants who took the Bible's believe that God created all people, who led the opposition to slavery. This movement eventual went to England and America.

You are fighting with windmills.

You want Old Testament? How about Leviticus 25 that's right there on the Liberty Bell? It calls for freedom throughout the land, which means freedom from debt. You see, along the way someone changed "forgive us our debts" to "forgive us our trespasses". Back in the couple millennia before Christ, rulers periodically cancelled debts so that citizens would not become so indebted that they lost their land and became debt servants. Today many are overburdened by the affects of compound interest.

I agree with something Lewis Black, the comedian, said in one of his sets: "Gentiles should not read the Old Testament. They don't understand it. They don't understand that it is basically Jews arguing with God." All religions began with a simple premise; God is love and so we, in turn, should love his creation and nurture it. If we want to begin to reconnect as a United States of America that would be a good place to start.

Not sure of the point of this piece. Goldman seems to be flailing around looking for justification of a nation's "exceptionalism." He mentions Israel and the USA. What Lincoln failed to acknowledge when he said "“there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” was that mysterious "something" was greed and the promise of wealth presented by exploitation of the "new" world. And let's not forget that Jefferson had many slaves and fathered children with them. Anyone who has an interest in the USA's relation to Christianity should read "The Christian Paradox" by Bill McKibben which is both clearer and more profound than this article.

Great article. Thank you.

Mark Twain: "Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion."

How does Manifest Destiny, slavery and the genocide of Native Americans qualify as upholding "universal principles"?

Perhaps the author should research the Haudenausee, the Conferation of Native Tribes who were the first modern government in this "country". Religion: the exercise of tortured justification for one's own irrational beliefs.

The national religion of America is Freedom.

Always cherry-picking the Bible.

All of the United States' current problems are unsolvable until the country puts religion back in its box, by which I mean, getting religion out of schools, courts, governments, and back into churches only. As long as a substantial minority of the population -- and quite likely a majority of active voters -- believes that the world was made and controlled by some Invisible Sky Daddy, there's not even the possibility of rational discussion.

Perhaps it is time to accept that the language of universal human rights employed by the founders in 1776 was essentially PR to get the support of broad swaths of the population to support what was essentially an unpopular elite rebellion.

I'm American, and want religion to be no part of the definition of our nation, other than specifying the freedom to follow whatever faith you choose, or to hold no faith at all. I'm offended by the 1952 "one nation under god" addition to the Pledge of Allegiance, too; I've never said that, and never will.

Many countries--Israel, but also many nations in Europe--give special consideration to members of their nationality. It's easier to gain citizenship in Greece, Germany, and many other countries if you are of the Greek or German, etc., people (part of the diaspora, so to speak). This does not contradict universal principles of liberal democracy. All persons have human rights, yes, but we come together as peoples/nations to form communities to protect those rights. The self-determination of peoples (defined by some combination of history, geography, ethnicity, language, culture, religion, and above all by a view of themselves as a people) is an important principle of international relations. Universal, abstract rights, without membership in a nation/people organized to protect them, aren't worth much. The United States will never be, nor should it be, defined by one ethnicity or religion. But I miss the days when we felt like one people.

The history of organized religion, simply put, is the history of one group of individuals using irrational beliefs and "faith" to justify the slaughter of other groups. Modern thinkers realize, just as some of the Founders did, that policy cannot be based on faith in things that cannot be justified via reason or science. Because as soon as a political body starts down that slippery slope, the pursuit of absolute power can be justified by any means necessary and convenient.