Tag: first amendment

Onward Christian Soldiers: Trump’s War on Iran and Secular America.

In the year 1188 AD, both England and France imposed an income tax to help pay for the third Crusade.  It was called the Saladin Tax.  It was a first.  It was 10 percent.  Saladin was the general, the Sultan, who recaptured Jerusalem the year before, expelling Christan forces who ruled Jerusalem since the first crusade when a Christian army captured the holy city in 1099, butchering most inhabitants. 

Saladin captured the imagination of the West.  They even invented a European origin story for him; he was featured in western literature, to include in Dante’s inferno.  In 1920 when the French General Henri-Joseph-Eugene entered Damascus after the victorious allies divided up the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Mandates they called them – he visited Saladin’s tomb and allegedly said, “Mr. Sultan, we’ve returned to the Orient.” 

They drew new maps and new countries.  Syria and Lebanon came under French rule, Palestine and Transjordan went to the British empire.   Europe certainly did return and managed through their imperial hubris, ignorance, and contempt for the peoples of the region, set the stage for over a century of regional and global conflicts and wars over this land. To include Trump’s war with Iran

God, it seems, gets the both the blame and the glory.  Depending on who wins the day.

To listen to Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Trump’s war with Iran is a crusade.  He uses Christian imagery to portray American forces as soldiers of Christ.  His prayers ask that God and Christ guide American bombs, bullets, and missiles to kill evil enemies.  Onward Christian soldiers wearing God as his armor.  He stated that there would be no quarter.  The crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 offered no quarter.  Man, woman, child, struck down by sword and axes guided by Jesus and God.  

That notion of chivalry and God died on the fields of Flander, the Somme, and Ypres hundreds of years later.

Unfortunately, Hegseth is not an outlier in Trump’s world.  The White House increasingly compares Trump to Jesus, betrayed, and arrested.  At a recent private Easter event, Trump’s spiritual advisor Pastor Paula White-Cain compared the experiences of Christ’s crucifixion to Trump’s legal troubles, you know sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room or paying off a porn star to keep silent about an affair.  Although I think she must have forgotten about these secular trials.  I too see Trump and Jesus in the same thought, every time he opens his mouth or posts on Truth Social, I say, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did that idiot just say.”

It is not new in our history for American leaders to invoke God, especially after great tragedies or wars or other calamities.  America’s sense of its exceptionalism is deeply rooted in God. That shiny city on a hill.  It is new, however, for an American president to lay claim to divinity.  The Beatles were crucified, pun intended, when they claimed they were more popular than Jesus during a radio interview.

Trump is deliberately, cynically I think, erasing the line between him and Jesus.  Many of his adherents are in lock step with him, nonetheless.  For Trump to claim divine rule requires not only breaking down, but utterly demolishing, the wall between state and church.

Our country has a long history of keeping religion out of state and keeping the state out of religion.  For good reason as we can see by Trump’s insane comparison to Jesus. The Constitution does not mention “God.”  Not even the oath of office for president mentions God.  When asked why God did not appear in the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton famously quipped, “We forgot” or “We don’t need any foreign help.”  Whether these were apocryphal response, I don’t know, but they have a ring of authenticity.

In 1777, while a Delegate to Virginia’s General Assembly, Thomas Jefferson submitted a statute for Religious Freedom.  It was shelved given opposition from the still powerful Anglican Church members. That bill lay dormant of over a decade and was resurrected by James Madison in 1785 after Patrick Henry submitted a bill a year earlier calling for a tax to pay ministers of the Christian religion.  

In response to Henry’s bill, Madison wrote a Memorial and Remonstrance against the assessment.  In it he warned that the state should not support any religion.  That belief in God was between a man and his creator, that the state had no business interfering with such relationship.  He warned that once you support Christian ministers, what will stop a particular sect within Christianity from assuming dominance over the others.  Henry’s bill did not pass.

Virginia’s Baptists supported Madison’s Remonstrance and the Religious Freedom bill.  They had suffered heavily from Anglican Church violence in the 18th Century, especially during the Virginia’s Great Awakening in the 1740s.  Itinerant Baptist ministers were whipped or jailed and driven out of counties. Sadly, many Baptists today who support destroying the barrier between church and state have forgotten that history.

He was right.  In Texas, which provides tax dollars to both secular and religious charter schools, Islamic charter schools requesting public funding are being denied funding, claims leveled about terrorism.  Bashing Muslims has become sport in Texas amongst those Republicans running for office.  A proposed public school reading list contains the bible, but not the Koran.

In addition to the Remonstrance, Madison also resubmitted Jefferson’s decade old bill to Virginia’s General Assembly.  It passed.  Both Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s bill for Religious Freedom should be required reading.  Both argue that God doesn’t need the State:

“That Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitation, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness….”  Adding, “not to propagating it by coercion …but extend it by its influence on reason alone.” 

What became the first amendment to the constitution, written by Madison, were born in Madison’s Remonstrance and Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom (1786).  It clearly articulates that the government  could not establish a state religion or prohibit the free exercise thereof.  A careful balance.  

In 1802, President Jefferson, in a famous letter to the ‘Danbury Baptists,’ wrote that the 1st Amendment built a “wall of separation between Church and State.”  While Jefferson had no direct hand in the writing of the Constitution — he was the American Ambassador to France during the constitutional convention, and was not in Congress when the propositions were submitted by Madison which became the Bill of Rights — he and Madison regularly corresponded, explaining their thoughts and ideas of government and the constitution.  

This separation of church and state, this wall, has informed the liberal American experiment that in a healthy democracy the role of religion and the role of government are better kept distant and respectful. 

That arrangement worked spectacularly.  Religion thrives in America because of this wall of separation.  It is a paradox then that America aims to finish off a despotic theocratic state in Iran while planting the very seeds of a despotic right wing white nationalist Christian theocratic state in America.  

MAGA voices like Gladden Pappin – who claims the Pope will appoint Melania as queen – and Rod Dreher want American to go back to the Middle Ages, where the church held power, where the Bible was the law of the land. They hate and despise the enlightenment and liberal ideals of democracy, human rights, and the freedom to enjoy a personal relationship with God, without government surveillance and dictate.

The conspicuous and dangerous allusions to Trump, God, and Christ in prosecuting Trump’s war against Iran are anathema to America’s founding ideals and over 250 years of history.  God help us all.

Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments: How The Supreme Court, Trump, and the Far Right intend to undermine the First Amendment

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments whether Oklahoma state tax dollars must be used to fund religious-based charter schools.  The state denied a Catholic Church school’s request for public funding.  During the arguments, most justices seem inclined to require that states provide taxpayer dollars to religious charter schools, if they meet all the other charter school requirements.  If the Court decides to require public funds go to support religious-based charter schools, this would be a fundamental reinterpretation of the 1st Amendment, what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation” between church and state in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

I don’t think it a coincidence that a week or so after the Supreme Courts’ arguments, Trump signed an executive order establishing a “Religious Liberty Commission.”  The purpose of the commission is outlined in the instructions:

“The Commission shall produce a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, the impact of religious liberty on American society, current threats to domestic religious liberty, strategies to preserve and enhance religious liberty protections for future generations, and programs to increase awareness of and celebrate America’s peaceful religious pluralism. Specific topics to be considered by the Commission under these categories shall include the following areas: the First Amendment rights of pastors, religious leaders, houses of worship, faith-based institutions, and religious speakers; attacks across America on houses of worship of many religions; debanking of religious entities; the First Amendment rights of teachers, students, military chaplains, service members, employers, and employees; conscience protections in the health care field and concerning vaccine mandates; parents’ authority to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children, including the right to choose a religious education; permitting time for voluntary prayer and religious instruction at public schools; Government displays with religious imagery; and the right of all Americans to freely exercise their faith without fear or Government censorship or retaliation.”

While the language seems religion neutral, we all know this is about Christian religious freedoms and establishing Christianity as America’s established religion.  I don’t see Islamic or Buddhist or Hindu religious imagery being displayed next to the Ten Commandments at public schools.  Do you?  Be very afraid.   Our founding generation was fearful of the establishment of a religious state.  This fear animated two of Virginia’s most influential writers and thinkers:  James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.  

When Virginia’s General Assembly wanted to impose a ‘religious assessment,’ basically a tax to support churches, Madison and Jefferson opposed the measure.  As did the Baptist’s who suffered intolerable abuse by the Anglican Church prior to the Revolution.  In the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” Madison penned a cogent argument that is a relevant today as it was in 1785.  

I think it one of the seminal documents in our history as both Virginians and Americans.  As such, I have summarized Madison’s 15 key arguments below. They are worth a close read.

  1.  Religious liberty was “in its nature an unalienable right….because the opinions of men, depending only upon the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men….  Religion is wholly exempt from the cognizance [of civil society].”
  2. “Since civil society itself had not right to interfere with religion, certainly the legislature, its creature, had no such right.”
  3. “It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties… Who does no see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same case any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”
  4. “The exercise of religion implies the right to believe in no religion at all, so even the most permissive tax to support religion might violate some consciences.”
  5. “Civil magistrates can properly neither judge religious truth nor subordinate religion to public purposes.”
  6. The Christian religion did not need civil support, it had often “existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them.”
  7. “’Ecclesiastical establishment,’ far from promoting religious purity and efficacy, had nearly always corrupted and stultified it.”
  8. “Rather than promoting order and freedom in civil society, religious establishments had ordinarily been malignant and oppressive.”
  9. “The assessment marked a first step toward bigotry, differing from the ‘inquisition…in degree,’ and would make Virginia no longer the asylum for the persecuted.”
  10. “Good and useful citizens would be driven from the state or deterred from coming there by a religious tax.”
  11. “Religious strife and violence would be encouraged by laws touching religion.”
  12. “The policy of the bill is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity…. The bill with an ignoble and unchristian timidity would circumscribe it, with a wall of defence, against the encroachment of error.”
  13. “An attempt to enforce a religious assessment obnoxious to many citizens would weaken respect for law and order generally.”
  14. “Evidence was strong that a majority of the people opposed the assessment.”
  15. “Because, finally, the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience is held by the same tenure with all our other rights…. Either we must say, that they may control the freedom of the press, may abolish trial by jury, may swallow up the Executive and Judiciary powers of the State, may that they may despoil us of our very right to suffrage and erect themselves into an independent and hereditary assembly: or we must say, that they have no authority to enact into law the Bill under consideration.”

The Bill did not pass and a year later, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious freedom passed into law.  We must remain vigilant against trespasses against the 1st Amendment.  It is the cornerstone of why religiosity thrives in America.  It is the absence of state control in public spaces that permits churches, and mosques and synagogues and tabernacles and temples to spread and flourish across this country.