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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ONE NATION, NOT UNDER GOD  
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Stephen Rohde
December 19, 2019
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book was first published in 2019 and is a classic whose
relevance has only grown over time. Reviewer Rohde offers a detailed
tour of this important work. _

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_The Founding Myth
Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American_
Andrew L Seidel
Union Square & Co.
ISBN-13: 9781454943914

“FROM THE TOTALITARIAN point of view, history is something to be
created rather than learned,” George Orwell wrote in “The
Prevention of Literature” in 1946. “A totalitarian state is in
effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its
position, has to be thought of as infallible.”           

Andrew L. Seidel chooses Orwell’s observation as one of two epigrams
(the other by James Madison) to introduce his brilliant, ambitious,
well-researched, and compelling new book,_ The Founding Myth: Why
Christian Nationalism is Un-American_. Calling the claim that America
was founded as a Christian nation (or, since the Holocaust, a
Judeo-Christian nation) a “fabrication” and “political
invention,” Seidel goes further: he demonstrates that
“Judeo-Christian principles, especially those central to the
Christian nationalist identity, are thoroughly opposed to the
principles on which the United States was built.” Christianity is
“un-American.”

 
He calls his book “an assault” and a “defense” — a defense
“of that quintessentially American invention, the ‘wall of
separation between church and state.’” And he calls himself “a
watcher on that wall.” Seidel, an attorney specializing in
constitutional law, works for the Freedom From Religion Foundation,
which handles thousands of state/church complaints every year.

Seidel is also very clear about what he is not arguing. He readily
acknowledges that our “government and laws are distinct from its
society and culture.” He is not arguing “that religion is absent
from our culture.” But his concessions stop there. He refuses to
assume that “religion is a positive influence on the world.”

I am an atheist with reasoned, thoughtful objections to religion. I do
not think religious beliefs should be immune from criticism, even when
analyzed from a historical perspective. Religious beliefs are ideas
like any other, though they are defended more fervently and can often
seem immune to reasoned argument. This book will treat religion like
any other idea: not with contempt but not with undue respect either.
Christian nationalism has succeeded in part because of Americans’
ingrained unwillingness to offend religious sensibilities. But
catering to these sensibilities limits our search for the truth, as
does religion itself. There is strength in throwing off those
self-imposed restraints.

¤

Based on Michelle Goldberg’s 2006 book, _Kingdom Coming: The Rise of
Christian Nationalism_, and his own extensive research, Seidel
characterizes Christian nationalists as “historical revisionists
bent on ‘restoring’ America to the Judeo-Christian principles on
which they wish it were founded.” They “believe that secular
America is a myth, and under the guise of restoration they seek to
press religion into every crevice of government.” For them,
“America was designed to favor Christianity” because “America is
a Christian nation founded on Christian principles, and promoting that
belief is a religious duty.”

Eager to get to the chief purpose of his book, Seidel offers only a
brief but chilling account of the recent success Christian
nationalists have enjoyed. He reports that according to research
conducted by Andrew I. Whitehead, Samuel L. Perry, and Joseph O. Baker
and published in a 2018 edition of _Sociology of Religion_, the
“single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald
Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or
even political party; it was believing the United States is and should
be a Christian nation.” As Seidel sees it, “Trump rode a wave of
Christian nationalism, fostered by fables and myths about America’s
founding, to the most powerful office in the world.”

Seidel recounts that in February 2016, a loose coalition of
conservative religious groups and Christian nationalists launched
“Project Blitz” with the goal of elevating “traditional
Judeo-Christian religious values” in order “to reclaim and
properly define the narrative which supports such beliefs.” As of
April 2018, Project Blitz had resulted in more than 70 proposed bills
nationwide recognizing “the place of Christian principles in our
nation’s history and heritage”; mandating the display of “In God
We Trust” in all public schools, libraries, buildings, and on
license plates; requiring “public displays of religious history
affecting the law”; and allowing discrimination on the basis of
religion against LGBTQ Americans, atheists, unmarried couples, and
others in businesses, adoption agencies, and places of public
accommodation.

Seidel identifies the leaders of the Christian nationalism movement
and gives examples of the success they have already achieved during
the Trump administration, including, most prominently, naming Betsy
DeVos as Secretary of Education, which he calls “a dream appointment
for the Christian nationalist goal of dismantling public schools
through vouchers and school choice.” Although volumes could be (and
have been) written on the subject, Seidel does a good job summarizing
the problems posed by the rise of Christian nationalism.

¤

Seidel begins his frontal attack on the idea that the United States
was founded as a Christian nation with two strong arguments. First,
“the Constitution is deliberately godless.” There are no
references to any god, goddess, or divinity in the Constitution, which
one would surely expect to see if ours was founded as a Christian
nation. Instead of invoking a supernatural power as the origin of the
Constitution, the preamble begins with a human force, “We the
People.” Second, the Constitution actually _excludes_ religion. The
text at Article VI, Clause 3 expressly provides: “No religious test
shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public
trust under the United States.” According to Joseph Story, who
served as a Supreme Court Justice from 1812 to 1845 and wrote the
first definitive commentaries on the Constitution, the objective of
this clause was “to cut off for ever every pretence of any alliance
between church and state in the national government.” And to
reinforce that principle, the First Amendment precludes the government
from involving itself in religion (the Free Exercise Clause) and
precludes religion from involving itself in government (the
Establishment Clause). The first bill passed by Congress under the new
Constitution established the Oath of Office. (Seidel effectively
refutes the legend that George Washington added the words “so help
me God” and notes that none of the next five presidents did so
either. In 1881, Chester A. Arthur chose to add those words, and most
presidents followed suit as a matter of personal preference. The first
president to end a speech “God bless America” was Richard Nixon.)

Seidel then continues to marshal overwhelming historical evidence that
establishes that the United States was not founded as a Christian
nation. One particularly compelling example took place during
Thanksgiving in 1789. Presbyterian ministers complained to Washington
that when he issued the first Thanksgiving message he made no mention
of God. Washington forthrightly responded that “the path of true
piety is so plain as to require but little political direction. To
this consideration we ought to ascribe the absence of any regulation,
respecting religion, from the Magna Charta of our country.”

Seidel pauses to devote a separate chapter to the fall-back argument
of Christian nationalists that the moral, if not legal, foundation of
America is Christianity. He argues that “America is quintessentially
a human achievement” with credit going, not to God, but to the
genius of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton,
and thousands of others. Seidel rejects the “insidious rationale”
that “only Christians are moral.” He cites the findings of Phil
Zuckerman in an innovative 2009 study published in _Sociology
Compass_: the _least_ religious countries are the most peaceful and
prosperous; have the lowest rates of violent crime and homicide,
corruption, and intolerance against racial and ethnic minorities; the
highest quality of life; and greatest protection of women’s rights
and political and civil liberties. Within the United States, those
states that are the _most_ religious have the highest rates of
poverty, murder, violent crime, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, and
STDs; and the lowest percentage of college-educated adults.

Seidel finds ample support for the idea that one need not be religious
to be moral from Enlightenment thinkers including Baruch Spinoza, John
Locke, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin, whom he quotes for the
common sense advice that one “may find it easy to live a virtuous
life without the assistance afforded by religion.”

¤

Seidel next addresses the Christian nationalist argument that it is
the Declaration of Independence (with four references to God, the
Creator, the Supreme Judge, and divine Providence) which proves that
America was founded as a Christian nation. Seidel begins by reminding
us that while the Declaration declared independence — dissolving the
colonies’ ties to Great Britain — it did not create the government
of the United States; that was accomplished by the subsequent
Constitution, which, as he has already convincingly established, did
not create a Christian nation.

But Seidel goes further. He argues that the “Declaration of
Independence is an anti-Christian document with snippets of
religious-sounding language as window dressing.” This is one of
Seidel’s most original insights. “The Christian bible stands
directly opposed to the Declaration’s central ideas, including that
it is ‘the Right of the People to alter or to abolish [their
government], and to institute a new Government.” This revolutionary
idea runs directly contrary to Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans
13: 1–2):

 
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no
authority except that which God has established. The authorities that
exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels
against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted,
and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

This is no obscure biblical reference. In the face of the mounting
criticism of Trump, his closest evangelical advisor, Paula White,
claimed that he “has been raised up by God” and because “God
says that He raises up and places all people in places of authority”
it is “God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down. When
you fight against the plan of god, you are fighting against the hand
of God.” By this logic, impeachment would be a sin.

At the time of the American Revolution, Robert Boucher, an Anglican
minister and a Maryland loyalist, opposed independence from the King
of England because it was against the will of God, arguing that “it
is our duty not to disturb and destroy the peace of the community, by
becoming refractory and rebellious subjects, and resisting the
ordinances of God.” Seidel points out that the biblical principle
that holds that governments are “established by God” is directly
contrary to the very text of the Declaration which declares that
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers
from the consent of the governed.”

But Christian nationalists argue that the Declaration was written at a
time when many colonies had official Christian governments. Seidel
readily concedes this is historically accurate but deftly uses this
fact against the Christian nationalists. In the name of Christianity,
many of these colonies were highly intolerant. They persecuted
heretics and religious dissenters such as Roger Williams, who was
banished by the Puritans from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and fled to
Rhode Island, where in his 1644 tract,_ The Bloudy Tenent of
Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference
between Truth and Peace_, he called for a “hedge or wall of
separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the
world” (coining a metaphor Jefferson would borrow more than a
hundred years later).

The Constitution was a _rejection_ — not an _adoption_ — of these
examples of Christian governments. “When the framers, like James
Madison, surveyed history,” Seidel writes, “they eschewed
theocracy and intolerance, condemning the ‘torrents of blood’
spilled in the name of religion.” Jefferson “looked back on the
‘millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined,
imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards
uniformity.’” Seidel concludes this analysis by observing that
“fter surveying this bloody history, the founders decided to build a
wall that would forever separate church and state. They disestablished
religion and abolished religious tests for public office. They
invented the secular state.”

¤

But Seidel isn’t done. He has two more major assaults to launch
against Christian nationalism. The first tackles the subsidiary claim
that biblical principles _influenced_ the founding of the American
nation, government, and legal system. Seidel notes that like
“Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, Aesop’s fables, and the legends
of Greek and Roman mythology, the bible has provided a common stock of
stories for the English-speaking world.” But, he continues,
influencing “the English language and American culture is not the
same as influencing the founding of the American laws and government
— our nation.” Seidel’s argument grows even stronger. Instead of
Christianity having a positive influence on the founding of our
government, Seidel argues it directly _conflicts_ with the fundamental
principles of our government.

Christianity’s view and treatment of its founding documents is at
odds with the American view and treatment of its founding documents.
God’s law is unchangeable. American law is not. The Constitution is
not perfect. The framers knew this, and none left the Convention
having secured everything they wanted.

Paul wrote to Timothy (2 Timothy 3:16) that “ll scripture is
inspired by God”; John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, called the
Bible “infallibly true”; and Catholics believe the Bible is
“without error.” In sharp contrast, the Constitution provides for
its amendment and has been amended 27 times and interpreted by the
Supreme Court thousands of times.

If the Bible influenced the creation of our government, Seidel asks
how Christian nationalists explain the research of University of
Houston professor Donald Lutz, who found that the Bible was cited only
about 0.3 times on average in a representative sampling of political
writings during the founding period and that when the Federalists
defended the proposed Constitution during ratification, they _never_
cited the Bible — not once. Seidel adds that during the debates at
the Constitutional Convention, the Bible was only cited _once_. So
much for influence.

¤

A cornerstone of the Christian nationalist argument that America is a
Christian (or Judeo-Christian) nation is the claim that the 10
Commandments was preeminent in the founding of America. As examples,
the Texas School Board altered its curriculum in 2014 to include Moses
and the 10 Commandments in teaching American History because of their
supposed influence on the Constitution. The 10 Commandments appear at
the Texas Capitol in Austin. When Bloomfield, New Mexico, lost a court
battle over a 10 Commandments monument displayed in front of its City
Hall (at a cost to the taxpayers of $700,000), the mayor expressed
surprise at the decision, equating the 10 Commandments with the Bill
of Rights. The 10 Commandments have been elevated to this stature
because the widespread misapprehension that they are the basis of
American law and morality has gone largely unchallenged.

Seidel mounts that challenge. In the most ingenious portion of his
book, he convincingly vanquishes that false tenet. In illuminating
chapters on each of the commandments, he argues that not only are the
10 Commandments _not _the foundation of our law and government, but
they also “conflict with our American principles so completely that
they prove that our nation is not founded on Mosaic Law.” In
essence, Seidel is arguing that if the 10 Commandments were ever
enacted into law, they would be unconstitutional, violating numerous
provisions of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.

Beginning with the first commandment, Seidel argues that it would be
difficult to write a law that conflicts more with America’s founding
document, the Constitution, than this rule: “I am the Lord your God
… you shall have no other gods before me.” First, our Constitution
protects every citizen’s freedom to worship as they choose, chiefly
by requiring and guaranteeing a secular government. Second, the
people, not god, are supreme. The Constitution’s first words are
more poetic and quite obviously more reflective of American
principles: “We the People.”           

 
As John Adams put it, America is “founded on the natural authority
of the people alone without a pretence of miracle or mystery.”
Whereas the First Amendment protects free thought, free
communications, and the free exchange of ideas, Pope Leo XIII used the
first commandment to declare it “unlawful to demand, to defend, or
to grant unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, or writing, as
if these were so many rights given by nature to man.” Seidel
concludes that the “Judeo-Christian first commandment and the US
First Amendment fundamentally conflict. They are irreconcilable.”

In the second commandment, God prohibits the making of any “idol”
or “graven image” and threatens to punish “children for the
iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those
who reject me.” This commandment, Seidel points out, is in direct
conflict with the First Amendment, which protects anyone’s right to
create and worship any idol or image they choose, including those
considered blasphemous or sacrilegious. “It is specious to argue
that a command punishing the very rights protected by the
Constitution,” Seidel notes, “could have influenced it in some
way.” Furthermore, punishing innocent children for the alleged
misdeeds of their parents violates the provision in Article III,
Clause 3, which Madison summarized as prohibiting “extending the
consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author,” not to
mention Due Process and the presumption of innocence.

The third commandment, which prohibits taking “the name of the Lord
thy God in vain,” likewise is directly contrary to the protections
of the First Amendment. In 1814, Jefferson attacked blasphemy laws as
“an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational
beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot
stand the test of truth and reason.” The Supreme Court made it
official in 1952 when it expressly ruled that it “is not the
business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined
attacks upon a particular religious doctrine.”

The fourth commandment not only prohibits work on the Sabbath day, but
imposes that restriction on all family members, including “your male
or female slave.” To coerce attendance at church, many American
colonies, before the adoption of the Constitution, enacted Sabbath
laws requiring attendance. Under the 1610 Virginia statute, a third
violation was punishable by “death.” In 1785, Virginia adopted the
Statute on Religious Freedom, authored by Jefferson, on which the
First Amendment a few years later was based, effectively repealing
Sabbath laws. While the Supreme Court has upheld certain Sunday
closing laws, it has scrupulously based its decision not on
“religious sanctions” or “the promotion of religious
observances” but on what it calls “community tranquility, respite
and recreation.” In 1961, the Court held that any Sunday closing law
would violate “the Establishment Clause if it can be demonstrated
that its purpose is to use the State’s coercive power to aid
religion.”

The second portion of the fourth commandment, with its reference to
“your male or female slave,” is even more troubling. How can
Christian nationalists pretend, Seidel asks, that this commandment had
a positive influence on the founding of America by “contributing
significantly to our country’s long and shameful history of
slavery”? Here, Seidel develops two themes with extensive historical
and textual evidence. First, he explains how the Bible and Christian
history are rife with endorsements of slavery. (“Slaves, obey your
earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as
you obey Christ.” [Ephesians 6:5–8, et al].) Second, the
“American justification for slavery was inextricably tied to
Christianity and the bible.” The abolition of slavery in the 13th
Amendment renders the fourth commandment un-American.

While the fifth commandment’s instruction to “honor your father
and mother” appears uncontroversial, Seidel points out that on
further examination not all parents are worthy of blind honor or
respect. To insist otherwise runs contrary to American values that
protect children from abusive parents and encourages people to
question authority. “The US Constitution honors individual rights
over naked authority,” Seidel writes. “The fifth commandment is
about perpetuating religion, ensuring obedience, and venerating
authority. It had no influence on America’s founding.”

Seidel groups together the sixth, eighth, and ninth commandments that
prohibit murder, stealing, and bearing “false witness against your
neighbor.” He readily acknowledges that these admonitions resemble
American law but argues that this “does not necessarily mean that
they influenced those laws or the founding of this country.”
Prohibitions on murder, theft, and perjury are universal principles
that all humans understand, regardless of any religious affiliations,
exist in every society and are not uniquely or originally
Judeo-Christian. However, looking deeper into Christian history,
Seidel reveals that these admonitions were reserved for the Israelites
(“your people” and “a member of your community” [Leviticus
19:18]). According to 40 different passages in the Bible, shortly
after receiving the commandments the Israelites commit 70 genocides of
peoples who did not worship Yahweh. Research reported in Steven
Pinker’s _The Better Angels of Our Nature _indicates that “about
1.2 million deaths from mass killing are specifically enumerated in
the Bible.”

The seventh commandment declares that one “shall not commit
adultery.” Seidel concedes that Christianity did have influence on
legislating sexual mores, but “upon that history, shame, not a
country” was built. In practice, this commandment perpetuated sexism
and discrimination. Seidel points out that in the Bible a married
women and her partner were considered adulterers, but if a husband
slept around or took multiple wives (as did Abraham, Jacob, Solomon,
David, Gideon, and Moses) he was not an adulterer. According to _The
Jewish Encyclopedia_, adultery is “sexual intercourse of a married
woman with any man other than her husband.”

The 10th and final commandment encapsulates many of the
unconstitutional aspects of the preceding nine. “You shall not covet
your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,
or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to
your neighbor.” Covet is not a word in popular parlance. It means
“crave” or “envy” or “desire,” especially something that
doesn’t belong to you. Correctly understood, the 10th commandment is
a triple threat — it endorses slavery, treats women as chattel, and
punishes mere thoughts. By endorsing slavery, for the second time in
the 10 Commandments, this commandment is unconstitutional in violation
of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. And in treating women
on a par with oxen and donkeys, which the Bible repeatedly does in
reaffirming the subjugation of women, the commandment is
unconstitutional in violation of the Equal Protection doctrine and the
14th Amendment. In an article titled “The Degraded Status of Women
in the Bible,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that “t is not to
Bibles, prayer books, catechisms, liturgies, the canon law and church
creeds and organizations, that woman owes one step in her progress,
for all these alike have been hostile, and still are, to her freedom
and development.”

It is in explaining how this commandment creates a thought crime that
Seidel proves most ingenious:

The nucleus of the tenth commandment is “shall not covet,” which
prohibits specific thoughts. But the First Amendment protects —
absolutely — the freedom of thought. The right to believe whatever
one chooses is the only unlimited right under the Constitution. This
Judeo-Christian principle does the opposite, seeking to stifle thought
and enforce ideological uniformity.

Paul himself wrote, “We take every thought captive to obey
Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Seidel writes, “Religion must
maintain a closed information system to perpetuate itself. Religious
dogma cannot withstand the facts, scrutiny, or doubt that come with
exploration, discovery, and expanded horizons.” In sharp contrast,
the Constitution and especially the First Amendment zealously protect
freedom of thought. One cannot be punished for thinking about his
neighbor’s wife. Jefferson wrote that the “legitimate powers of
government reach actions only, & not opinions.” Amid the Red Scare
of the 1950s when a majority of the Supreme Court lost its way and
upheld an anticommunist oath that spineless labor unions imposed on
their leaders, in dissent Justice Robert Jackson wrote that “our
Constitution excludes government from the realm of opinions and ideas,
beliefs and doubts, heresy and orthodoxy, political, religious or
scientific.” Yet again, were the 10th commandment a statute, it
would be unconstitutional.

¤

Seidel provides an excellent example of a constitution that would
indeed have created a truly Christian nation: the Constitution of the
Confederate States of America. After secession, the confederacy
essentially copied the Preamble to the 1787 US Constitution but added
one clause: “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”
Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, declared that slavery
“was established by decree of Almighty God. It is sanctioned in the
Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation.” The United
States fought a bloody civil war to defend its secular Constitution
and adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to eradicate slavery.
If the Constitution had created a Christian nation, the confederacy
would not have needed to alter it.

Toward the end of his book, Seidel captures much of what has gone
before in a powerful statement Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1989 in
a piece for _The New York Times_ entitled, “The Opening of the
American Mind”:

As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the
Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for
human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their
indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were
notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality,
exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of
slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture,
genocide.

Seidel has written a masterful book. No one henceforth can attempt to
discuss the claim that America was founded as, and is today, a
Christian nation without seriously addressing his work. Seidel’s
scholarship, on religion, history, law, and the Constitution, is
prodigious, wide ranging, authoritative, and comprehensive. At times,
his impatience, sarcasm, and revulsion toward religion is gratuitous
and can alienate some readers who, coming to these questions for the
first time, might otherwise be persuadable. But his arguments are well
articulated, inventive, amply documented, and convincing.

The threat of Christian nationalism, which frequently promotes white
supremacy, racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and
bigotry, poses serious risks to our constitutional democracy. Seidel
has effectively exposed and unreservedly debunked the myth that
America was founded as a Christian (or later Judeo-Christian) nation.
Indeed, he has made a powerful case that the fundamental principles on
which Christianity is based are entirely antithetical to the
Constitution and to the government it established.

But this isn’t just an academic subject to be debated by scholars
and historians. The Christian nationalist campaign to subjugate the
Constitution to religious dogma has clear and present consequences as
the Trump administration is demonstrating in spades. As this review
was being written, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to allow a 40-foot
Christian cross, commemorating the veterans of World War I, to remain
on public property at public expense at a busy intersection in
Blandenburg, Maryland (_American Legion v. American Humanist
Association_). Conceding that the “cross is undoubtedly a Christian
symbol,” Justice Samuel Alito Jr., relying on “history” and
“tradition,” wrote for the majority that the “passage of time
gives rise to a strong presumption of constitutionality.” Did
history, tradition, and the passage of time make racial and gender
discrimination constitutional? In a sharply worded dissent, Justices
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that the decision
“places Christianity above other faiths.” Politically and
culturally Christian nationalists have convinced not only five
conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents (including
two by Trump), but two moderate justices, Stephen Breyer and Elena
Kagan, appointed by Democratic presidents, to uphold an admitted
40-foot Christian symbol erected on public property and maintained at
public expense, thereby placing “Christianity above other faiths.”
That’s a big victory for Christian nationalists.

This very recent and dangerous Supreme Court decision makes Seidel’s
book even more timely and urgent. And it makes his concluding words
even more imperative. He implores us to be prepared to refute the
myths perpetrated by Christian nationalists both “factually and
vocally.” He submits that this book “provides the first half of
that recipe” and we “are responsible for the rest.” Quoting
Madison, he insists that “outspoken resistance” is the “first
duty of citizens.” Christian nationalists “have successfully
persuaded too many Americans” — and one might add, too many
Supreme Court justices — “to abandon our heritage, to spurn our
secular foundations in favor of their myth.” “It is time to
reclaim that heritage and refute these myths,” Seidel writes, and,
citing John Kennedy, “We need to remind Americans that our
Constitution demands absolute separation between church and state.”
“We must raise hell when the wall of separation between state and
church is breached,” he pleads. “We must, as Madison warned, take
‘alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.’”

¤

_Stephen Rohde is a retired constitutional lawyer, lecturer, writer,
and political activist._
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* Christian nationalism
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* secularism
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* The First Amendment
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