What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (31 page)

So ask yourself—what made the United States something
new
and
different
in 1776? What made it a revolution and not just a breakaway republic? It wasn’t an embracing of Christian values. Nothing new there. The countries the colonists left back in Europe had been officially Christian for a thousand years. What made America different was its
rejection
of traditional Christian values, at least when it came to government.

From the fall of Rome right up to the American Revolution, European governments were established on Christian tradition. Monarchs reigned by divine right. Most kings ruled in the name of God. Armies marched in the name of Christ. There were official churches, religious tests for high office, persecutions against heretics, limits on scientific inquiry, plus the regulation of speech, writing, and personal behavior—all based on somebody’s understanding of God’s holy plan. Your place was to shut up and believe.

The American Revolution threw all that out the stained glass window. The government of the United States became the first secular state of the modern world; its
lack
of religiosity is what made it unique. Its entire purpose was worldly, not otherworldly, as the preamble to the Constitution makes clear:

We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

 

The Constitution is concerned with national defense, liberty, justice, and the rule of law. Nothing in there about God, Jesus, the Bible, faith, salvation, commandments, exorcism, crackers that turn into flesh, or sodomites boiling in the fourth circle of hell. If you want to go with all that, it’s your own personal goop.

Tradition said that a Christian monarch was the rightful lord of the realm. If he ruled in the name of Christ and observed the commandments, God would bless him with success in war and politics. There was no lack of faith on the king’s part. Quite the contrary; tradition said God gave him his job.

America’s founders didn’t like God’s choice of who would rule them. So, building on a couple centuries of English law and politics, the founders kept God out of the leader-choosing business and put man in his place. A leader’s authority would come from the people below, not from heaven above, through a pagan ritual called voting. God could still dwell in the hearts and minds of the voters; he just couldn’t work for the government.

When you read it, you discover the U.S. Constitution is essentially a set of instructions on how to organize human decision-making, in this life, on this planet. It tells us how to choose our leaders and how those leaders should do their jobs when they’re not kissing babies or taking bribes. It explains what they can do to us, and what they can’t.

The Constitution wasn’t divinely inspired. Haggling humans cobbled it together while competing for power and cutting deals. It is not holy writ—that’s why it can be amended. You can’t do that with the Sermon on the Mount. And do you really want to credit God with the idea that slaves counted as three-fifths of a person? Didn’t think so.

Values Test

The Constitution is certainly based on a set of values, but exactly which values? There are all kinds of values: religious, moral, personal, political, economic, artistic. But conservatives bring up terms like “Christian values, “moral values” and “Family Values” more often than runway models bring up lunch. Maybe we should sort them out and discover, once and for all, which values made America…America.

Christian Values

I may be going out on a limb here, but it seems to me that Christian values are those that were taught by Jesus Christ: namely, that Jesus was the son of God who sacrificed himself for our sins. Believe in his resurrection, love your fellow man, and get through life without being a complete crapweasel, and you’ll have eternal life. It sounds great.

But some folks assign the “Christian values” label to
any
idea that appeals to them. If a congressman wants to legalize automatic weapons, he’ll try and fuse it to Christian values. But to really earn that status, an idea must either be unique to the Christian faith or essential to its teaching. Last time I checked, being armed to the teeth wasn’t one of the Beatitudes.

Loving God through Jesus is perfectly nice, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution. I can be a loyal American even if the only Jesus I know is my car mechanic. Ideas essential to Christian belief are found nowhere in that document and the values that
are
found in there
do not
derive from Christianity. Read on.

Personal Values

Personal responsibility, hard work, honesty, affection for your children, loyalty to your (heterosexual) spouse, respect for your friends, and love for your country. These are what preachers and politicians usually talk about when they hawk Christian values. Christians certainly advocate them and Scripture does teach most of them.

The problem is that
none
of them originated with the Bible. They were around long before Jesus, or Moses, or even Abraham. They’re moral no-brainers, and they’re observed today in places where the people wouldn’t know a crucifix from a scarecrow.

What’s more, whether you call them Christian values or not,
none
of them are in the Constitution. Yes, the framers would have recommended that you be a responsible, industrious family man. But the laws they wrote don’t require it. You can be a lazy bullshitter who cheats on his wife, loathes his kids, and skips work to attend a flag-burning, and still be a law-abiding Yankee Doodle. Is this a great country or what?

Of course, there’s no shortage of those who’d like to see the government
enforce
these values and demand that each of us be a loyal spouse, a doting parent, a motivated worker, and a dutiful patriot. But then we’d have to call it the People’s Republic of China.

American Values

Representative government, free elections, free speech, free press, freedom of assembly, due process of law, the right to bear arms, the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, the right to own property, and official neutrality toward all religions.
These
are the values we should be talking about—the ones that made the United States something new and different. The values that are actually
in
the U.S. Constitution and which were the basis for the new government.

And guess what?
None
of them originated with Christian belief, nor were they observed much by Christian governments over the previous 1,500 years. That’s why they were written down. Kings tended to forget them, and religious leaders traditionally opposed them.

Not buying any of this? Let’s go down the list.

Democracy—In Zeus We Trust

Democracy is an idea that owes nothing to the Bible. Neither the word nor the concept appear anywhere in Scripture, and it was never suggested by God, Moses, Jesus, Paul, or Jezebel as a way to organize human beings. It wasn’t advocated by the ancient Hebrews or the medieval Christians. The only ones in the Bible who did practice any sort of democracy were the Greeks and the Romans, and they were the bad guys.

Democracy is a secular value, and it got its start in ancient Athens around 450 B.C., five centuries before Jesus dropped in. Back then, voters were free adult males who participated in the people’s Assembly. It met about forty times a year and had some 6,000 members. It must have been like passing laws at Woodstock. There were no speaking restrictions based on religion, tradition, or class—which also sounds like Woodstock. Hopefully they avoided the brown acid.

More to the point, democracy’s creators worshipped the pagan gods of Mount Olympus—the frat house of deities that felt at home at a wine-soaked toga party. Gods Gone Wild. Christians were nowhere to be found and would probably have left the festivities early.

None of this stopped America’s founders from borrowing the democracy idea directly from Athens. This is why the buildings of Washington D.C. look like the pagan temples of ancient Greece and not the Christian cathedrals of medieval Europe. It’s why the key values of our government—Liberty, Justice, Democracy—are symbolized by pagan goddesses and not by Jewish prophets or Christian saints.

Of course, neither Athenian leaders nor America’s founders were sold on
pure
democracy, which they saw as rule by the rabble. Their vision was more aristocratic. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever seen face-painters at a Knicks game, the principle of “the people” governing themselves can be pretty scary. But the ancient Athenians tried it, and it worked for 140 years in a world full of theocratic dictators and skin-wearing barbarians.

Democracy does not depend upon religious belief. That’s why it travels so well. Today, it works in Catholic Italy, Protestant England, Jewish Israel, Muslim Lebanon, Hindu India, Shinto Japan, pagan San Francisco, godless New York, and anarchist Texas. You want to get choked up about the roots of free debate and citizen government? Put away the Bible and pick up Aristotle’s
Politics.
Yes, it does lack miracle stories, and it reads like the warranty to your Blackberry. But it makes it clear that America’s cornerstone values have secular roots.

Free Speech—a.k.a. Heresy

Contrary to popular belief, free speech is not a priority in the Bible. When the Israelites bitched to Moses about being dragged across the desert, they were gobbled up by the earth or hit with a plague. When Job complained about his misfortunes, God gave him a tongue-lashing you could hear from Jerusalem to Alpha Centauri. As mentioned, Jesus famously said, “the truth will make you free,” but he was talking about the soul’s freedom from sin, not political free speech.

Jesus had no problem with free expression, but for the next 2,000 years, plenty of Christians did. The Catholic Church, of course, has a glorious history of silencing (or jailing or torturing or executing) people who spoke out of turn. Protestants did this as well, especially when fighting Catholics. Both faiths have undergone a big attitude adjustment over the past two centuries. But for most of their histories, genuine free speech was regarded as a
bad
thing.

This is why free speech was encoded into the Constitution—to stop all this. If I can’t tell the honorable Reverend Blowdry where he can stuff his diamond-studded cross, I’m not free. Religion is not about free speech; it’s about sitting up and nodding politely when the reverend speaks. No matter which faith you’re talking about, if
it
has the last word,
you
don’t.

Free Press

Technically, there was no press in biblical times, though Christians are sometimes credited with the invention of the codex—what we call books. They were much easier to flip through than scrolls. But let us also remember who history’s most ardent book-burners were. Churches were so anti-free press you couldn’t even own a Bible in the early days. Throughout history, writing could get you in as much trouble as adultery, and it’s a lot less fun. Believe me.

The Right to Bear Arms

This is certainly an American right and, for some, a psycho-sexual obsession. But what does Jesus say about arming yourself against evil-doers?

“…all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” [Matt. 26:52]

 

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” [Matt. 5:43–44]

 

“Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also…” [Matt. 5:38–39]

 

“Judge not, that you may not be judged.” [Matt. 7:1]

 

It’s hard to find a mandate for the NRA in all that. As we established earlier, Jesus didn’t think you should harm anyone for any reason. Not in war. Not even in self-defense. How would his own story be different if, on the night they came to arrest him, he was packing heat? “Go ahead. Maketh my day.”

Private Property

Property rights are dear to Americans, especially the more entrepreneurial among us. But, as we saw back in the
Jesus on Economics
section, Jesus was not too worried about worldly wealth. It is better to give than to receive. The poor are blessed, while the rich have a tough time getting through the pearly gates. To this we can add:

“For the love of money is the root of all evil…” [1 Timothy 6:10]

 

Capitalists don’t talk like that.

Religious Tolerance

It’s real simple. If you pass laws to enforce a religion’s values, it means no one else’s religion gets that same favor. This works well in a theocracy. In a democracy, not so much.