With God on their side

The UK Guardian ^ | 03-06-02 | Duncan Campbell

[vannrox]

Don't expect sweetness and light from the US government's latest religious phase, writes Duncan Campbell


Tuesday March 5, 2002


On his recent visit to China, President Bush informed his hosts that "95% of Americans", including the president, believed in God. While those figures may be accurate in the same way that the Florida presidential election results in 2000 were accurate, he is right in saying that a much larger percentage of Americans believe in God, heaven and hell than most other nationalities do.


The attorney general John Ashcroft, who comes from the extreme Pentecostal wing of the Christian church, informed a recent gathering of Ultra Christian broadcasters that "civilised people - Muslims, Christians and Jews - all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the creator." Since the current war is being fought on behalf of "civilisation", this would seem to indicate that those 5% who do not believe in God should now also be classified as the enemy.


Certainly, faith in God has often been linked to patriotism in the US through the pledge of allegiance, which contains the words "I pledge allegiance to the flag ... one nation under God."


But God is, in fact, a relative newcomer to the pledge and was only included in it because of a right-wing religious lobby's efforts during the McCarthyite era.


The original pledge was written in 1892 by a Baptist socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, and was first published in a magazine called the Youth's Companion. The magazine's editor had hired Bellamy after the latter had been sacked by his church for delivering controversial socialist statements from the pulpit. Bellamy had even considered including the word "equality" in the pledge but knew that the state superintendents of education would be unwilling to endorse something that hinted at equal rights for women and blacks.


It was more than 60 years later, in 1954, that Congress, at the height of the anticommunist McCarthy period, added the words "under God" following a campaign by a rightwing Catholic organisation, the Knights of Columbus. Bellamy's grand-daughter later said that Bellamy would have resented the words being added, not least because at the end of his life he had become disenchanted with organised religion and had stopped attending church in Florida because of racial bigtory.


I learned all this from a reader's letter in the Santa Ynez Valley News. The person who wrote the letter, Jim Farnum, turned out to be a local businessman and community activist in the small town of Los Olivos, in southern California. He explained that many Americans believed that the pledge had been written by the founding fathers.


What is disturbing about the way in which people's beliefs - or lack of them - are being drafted into the national debate is the level of assumptions that are taking place. The "civilised people" in John Ashcroft's phrase and the 95 per cent of the president's believers include many who are highly selective about the commandments they obey - thou shalt not kill being the most obvious example.


But perhaps an indication of the dangers inherent in marrying church to state came from a very unexpected source over the weekend: the late President Nixon, who himself had come to power in the wave of 50s McCarthyism.


Nixon received much succour during his time in office and his prosecution of the Vietnam war from evangelist Billy Graham, perhaps the one person seen as closest to God by Americans and a man who threw his weight behind the war in Vietnam.


The release of old tape-recorded conversations between the two men reveal Graham to have been an antisemite and a hypocrite.


Graham talked about what he saw as a Jewish domination of the media and complained about the way Jews "swarm" around him: "this stranglehold has got to be broken down or this country's going down the drain," he told the then president, who agreed with him and complained that he could not say so in public.


"But if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do somthing," said Graham, who apologised last weekend for his remarks, which he did not recall making. Interesting what "civilised" people get up to when they think no one is listening.

[Sci Fi Guy]

On his recent visit to China, President Bush informed his hosts that "95% of Americans", including the president, believed in God. While those figures may be accurate in the same way that the Florida presidential election results in 2000 were accurate, he is right in saying that a much larger percentage of Americans believe in God, heaven and hell than most other nationalities do.

This joker could not care or perhaps comprehend why Bush made that statement. The fact that the President was taking time to identify with brutally opressed people of China does not matter to this guy.

[F16Fighter]

How can we expect an liberal, atheistic, Marxist British writer to understand the dynamics and history of 'God' as a pretext to American Independence from his brethren, to the greatest country on Earth?

[lockeliberty]

How can we expect an liberal, atheistic, Marxist British writer to understand the dynamics and history of 'God' as a pretext to American Independence from his brethren, to the greatest country on Earth?

By the grace of God alone.