Prophets, not Profits

Tisha b’Av, the Jewish day of mourning has come and gone. Traditionally (though tradition and reality are not always congruent) both Temples were destroyed on the 9th of Av, the first by the Babylonians, the second by the Romans. The rabbis teach that Moses sent spies to scout the Promised Land who reported on its milk and honeyness. But the people wept at the prospect of entering such a formidable land full of giants. God declared, “You wept without cause; I will therefore make this an eternal day of mourning for you.” The day of course was Tisha b’Av. Other events associated with Tisha b’Av are the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt, the expulsion from England, the expulsion from Spain, the beginning of the First World War, the first of the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka.

A new reason to mourn is always available, this being planet earth. Our grief this time? The abandonment of basic Jewish principles by the Thatcherite State of Israel. Ol’ Margaret once famously said that “the problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” The problem with that aphorism is that the opposite is also true. After a while the poor will run out of money for the rich to cheat them out of.

In Israel, as you may have read in the last issue of the Voice & Herald Tisha b’ Av was a day of mourning for the heritage of the earliest idealistic days of the new state, of the Yishuv that had preceded it, the Israel of David ben Gurion and the Histadrut and kibbutzim. The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netenyahu has drunk the Reagan/Thatcherite Kool-Aid to the last dregs, believing with them that it is a good thing for the rich to get richer and for the poor to shut up. Thatcherites like Netenyahu and Reagan trickle this treacle down more eloquently but in the end how else are we to interpret the American version that argues that in return for granting another 13 months of unemployment benefits, the super rich receive a twenty-four months re-authorization of the Bush-era tax cuts; more recently, in return for cuts in governmental services, many of which had benefited the growing poor and the shrinking middle class, there are no efforts to tax the rich.

In America we seem to take this lying down, we allow Republican ideologues who ignore the fact that our debt was brought about by Bush era tax cuts combined with a foolish war to trample the economic rights of working and middle class Americans. In Israel privatization has meant that a very few have acquired more money than you know Who. As Leslie Susser put it in the last issue, in Israel “Owners and a select few mega-salaried executives became richer and the middle class relatively poorer. It also led to the rise of the Israeli tycoons, who controlled a great deal of the country's wealth and power. Banks, energy companies, supermarket chains and media properties all were concentrated in the hands of a dozen or so billionaire families. Netanyahu's economic philosophy also entailed a reduction of corporate taxes… while the middle class saw the prices of everything from food to cars to apartments rise considerably. The system produced impressive economic growth but left wealth in the hands of the few. The trickle-down effect, middle-class Israelis said, had failed to materialize.” Of course it failed to materialize. It always fails to materialize. The trickle down effect is to economics what leaches were to medieval medicine. The result was the tent cities, the tens of thousands of young Israelis who demanded more equitable distribution of available resources. They were not violent; they made no demands that were out of line with the traditions of Eretz Yisrael. They want to be able to afford a place to live. After all, they are the conscript soldiers of Israel who daily place their lives on the line, willingly. And in return, the wealthier got wealthier, and they poorer. Jewish this is not.

Shall I quote chapter and verse here? The middle part of Tanach, the prophetic portion, never advocates trickle down economics, never proposes aggregate wealth. Instead Isaiah and Jeremiah, from whose books we’ve been reading the last several weeks as a lead in to Rosh Hashanah advocate the opposite, the care for the poorer classes; they bemoan the powerful’s ruthless exploitation of the poor. Gee, I hope they weren’t Socialists.

Norway and the Jewish Problem

Time has made the joke acceptable. Frequent usage has made it unnecessary to tell the whole thing, short enough as it is already. “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

On a recent Friday my wife, third son and I drove down to Scarborough Beach. It was a glorious day. We arrived a few minutes before high tide so the waves were crashing in, rolling one after another after another to the shouts of children and adults who threw themselves headlong into cresting waters or turned their back, trying to time perfectly when to jump towards land so that the water would catch and propel them forward. Over and over and over again we did one or the other in the great ocean that had seemed so frigid when first we entered but after moments was merely cool against our skin, and then we returned to our blanket and chairs and soaked up those rays capable of penetrating the slathering of SPF 70 sun block she insisted we wear while we read, raided the food locker and talked and laughed and enjoyed each other and the day.

On the ride home we listened to the news on the radio and heard the shocking reports out of Oslo and Utoya Island. The joy was sucked out of the car as the grim reports came through the speakers, more and more and more dead, most of them children, the Oslo bombing probably merely a diversion so that Anders Behring Breivik could operate his death machine uninterrupted on the island. “Other than that Josh, how was the day at the beach?” It loses something in the immediacy, doesn’t it?

Breivik, his lawyer tells the world, is insane. This is either a legal strategy or statement of belief, possibly both. I’m sure that future historians will wade through Breivik’s 1,500 page on-line manifesto which announced his intentions and provided his motivation. I’ve not yet begun the task, leaving it to others for the moment, but it’s become apparent that there are elements in it that smack of pro-Zionist sentiments.

The Jews of Norway are nervous about the perception that Breivik’s anti-Muslim sentiments couched in pro-Israeli terms. (He warns, “If Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next.”) This in a country whose ambassador to Israel, Svein Sevje, was quoted in HaAretz as saying “We Norwegians consider the occupation [of the West Bank and Gaza] to be the cause of the terror against Israel.” It doesn’t really matter that Arab terrorism long preceded the Six Day War that brought these territories under Israeli control, that’s apparently the way Norwegians, certainly the government, see it. Local Jews are quick to point out that just because some whacko murderer says positive things about Israel doesn’t mean that Norway’s Jews are pro-whacko or that they do not mourn the senseless slaughter of children. They know that just the previous day those children discussed a boycott against Israel and pressed the country’s foreign minister to recognize a Palestinian state. But what of it? Whether we agree wit these ideas or not (and many Jews do) they are legitimate areas of discussion and should not diminish our grief over the slaughter of the innocents.

Michelle Goldberg (who I assume is Jewish) in The Daily Beast comments that “Breivik’s embrace of Israel, far from being unique, is just the latest sign of a great shift among the continent's reactionaries. Indeed, in European politics, fascism and an aggressive sort of Zionism increasingly go together.” (In another piece she sees the massacre as an assault on feminism.) The on-line edition of The Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. has a long riposte arguing that while Breivik often speaks of the importance of defending Israel, what he wants to defend is not the Israel of Zionism. “It certainly isn’t any of the values associated with Israel by those liberal Zionists [Breivik] frequently demonizes: democracy; open political discourse; the rule of law.” Rather, Breivik seems to perceive Israel as the frontline in a war all Muslims are waging against Jews and Christians.

My day at the beach ended when I heard the tragic news out of Norway. The children of Utoya Island had their lives snuffed out by an ultra-nationalist who has taken Israel as a hostage in his madness. In May 1974 Palestinian ultra-nationalists took more than 115 people (including 105 children) hostage in Ma’alot, Israel eventually killing Twenty-five hostages, including 22 children. Rest in Peace, children of Israel and Norway. When the über-nationalists come a-calling gone is your innocence, gone is your youth, gone is your life, gone is our hope.

A Plan That Won't Work

I don’t doubt the man’s loyalty, bravery or honesty, but I do think Ephraim Sneh whose op-ed piece “Bad Borders, Good Neighbors” in the July 12 New York Times is off the mark. Sneh, a retired general in the Israel Defense Forces, was Israel’s deputy minister of defense from 1999 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2007. His credentials are excellent; his proposal for peace between Israel and the Arabs is flawed.

Sneh advocates a Rube Goldberg plan of returning to the 1967 borders (with territorial concessions based on exchange of Israeli land to Palestine in return for land occupied by Jewish settlements on the West Bank), and a disarmed Palestinian state, and Israeli soldiers patrolling the border with Jordan—which he argues disingenuously would not violate Palestinian sovereignty—and a three-way Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian defense treaty. This “would bring about a dramatic, strategic change in the Middle East. It would remove the obstacle preventing moderates in the region from uniting against militant Islamist extremists and lay the groundwork for a new strategic alliance in the region, including the Persian Gulf countries, which are natural business partners for Israel, Jordan and Palestine. As a result, Israel would be able to extend its hand to new democratic and secular governments in the Arab and Muslim world. And those committed to Israel’s destruction would be confronted by a new alliance with enormous economic and military power.”

Right. And grateful members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will throw rose petals at the feet of Israeli troops who bring them this new era of democracy and prosperity. Has no one learned anything from America’s Iraq and Afghanistan experiences?

Oh, and lest I forget, nowhere does the word “Jerusalem” come up in Sneh’s piece. I suppose he intends to re-divide the city if it’s 1967 borders he deems most viable, but he doesn’t say so. I can’t imagine why.

He does talk about Gaza, though, the worm in the apple of his argument he must deal with, but he never does so satisfactorily. Gaza he admits has been the launching pad for thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli towns and villages since Hamas wrested control in 2007. What he doesn’t acknowledge is that that Hamas could not have taken over the territory if Israel hadn’t unilaterally withdrawn in 2005. I’d like to add to the Gaza discussion. Hamas is in control and is unlikely ever to surrender the power it won in 2007. Those who disagree, please raise your hand. Seeing none, I’ll continue. So, with Hamas held Gaza to the West, and the heirs of Yasser Arafat in the East, just how secure can borders be? How united will this new Palestine be divided by Israel? How much resentment will being disarmed, unable to protect itself, will Palestinians feel? And those Israeli troops patrolling the border with Jordan? That’s going to fly?

And one more thing. Let’s look at the land exchanges. Base the new borders on 1967 lines Sneh argues, but with modifications to account for Jewish settlements. Fine. The 1967 borders were with Jordan and Egypt, not with a people not yet known as Palestinians. If it were up to me I’d give the territories back to the quasi-stable governments in Cairo and Amman before handing them over to Hamas. But that’s not going to happen. I know, I know. That the proposed new borders zigging and zagging in and out of the West Bank region would be impossible to defend Sneh does not mention, but the sound of snip-snap, as Arabs cut off the Jews of the West Bank and Jews cut off the Arabs in land that used to be part of Israel will most certainly be heard in the land. And there’s another question I don’t think anybody has asked, so let me be the first. Do Arabs living in Israel really want to leave a stable and prosperous land where, granted, they live as a minority, in order to revel for a while (and it will only be for a while until reality raises its ugly head) in the nationalism of an impoverished united Palestine? Has there been a secret ballot on this question or are advocates of the old borders with territorial concessions on each side merely assuming that the Arabs of Israel would prefer being the Palestinians of Palestine? Just asking.

Anthony Weiner and Jesus

As if Anthony Weiner doesn’t have problems enough. For a really, really, really smart guy, you’d think he’d know how to keep his pants and shirt on when in camera range and how to pronounce his own name. Clue: From the German, the diphthong “ei” is pronounced “eye” never “ee” as in creep or peep. I know it’s tough for him either way, but what with his lewd behavior and all it would be better to be a whiner than a … well, you get the idea. Then there are the lewd photos, the denials, the admissions. You know all about that. “Drat,” I thought when the story was breaking. This is supposed to happen to Republicans—the Governor of South Carolina, the Senators from Louisiana and Utah, the Congressman from upstate New York, the Holy Roller televangelists. These are the people of the party of family values, not a skinny Jewish Democrat from Brooklyn whose mother taught at Midwood High, a mile from my boyhood home. Yes, I know about Spitzer. Before all this broke Weiner was my man in Congress. Yes, Patrick Kennedy and then David Cicilline actually had the seat but Weiner was to the left of Obama, the one who chastised him for capitulating over and over and over again to the white Christian party on the health care bill. And now this.

But there’s more; it gets worse for Anthony. Apparently he’s going to Hell. Unless he makes one little life change. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky—the Southern Baptist Convention's flagship school, has taken it upon himself to give the Jewish fella some unsolicited advice. According to a tweet that Mohler sent to “Dear Congressman Weiner: There is no effective ‘treatment’ for sin. Only atonement, found only in Jesus Christ.” This may be true; but I’m pretty sure it’s not the kind of treatment the Congressman was thinking about when he asked for a leave of absence to get his life in order.

When rebuked by Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA TODAY for hitting a Jew when he was down Mohler responded that “he was simply stating the Christian doctrine that “every single human being is a sinner in need of the redemption that is found only in Christ.” But then Mohler claims that he never actually sent the tweet to Weiner, only to the 27,000 people who follow his twitters. “As far as I know, Rep. Weiner is not among my ‘followers’ on Twitter,” Mohler complained disingenuously. “I did not assume that he was reading my posting. My message was mostly directed at my fellow Christians as a reminder of this very concern—that the American impulse is to seek treatment when our real need is for redemption.” Strangely, though, the tweet was addressed “Dear Congressman Weiner”. Unabashed, Mohler continued: “I never mentioned Judaism. Rep. Weiner’s problem has to do with the fact that he is a sinner, like every other human being, regardless of religious faith or affiliation. Christians—at least those who hold to biblical and orthodox Christianity—believe that salvation is found through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him alone... We also understand that other religions claim ‘routes to restoring righteousness.’ But biblical Christians cannot accept that these ‘routes’ lead to redemption and the only righteousness that saves—the righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer, who is justified by faith in Christ alone.” Got that, sinner? Yes, you. Not only is Weiner going to Hell but you are too. The Rev. Mohler has it on good authority. This is the same Rev. Mohler who, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reminds, caused a stir in 2003 “with his staunch advocacy of evangelizing Jews. He had explained then that warning non-Christians of the ‘eternal danger’ they face in not embracing Jesus ‘is the ultimate act of Christian love.’” How sweet.

I really, really, really wish that the holier than thou crowd would love me less, that Evangelicals would stop trying to get us (me) to convert to Jesus. Jesus probably wishes that they would stop trying to convert me too. He was a good Jew after all, who never left the fold, living as a Jew, dying as Jew and most likely in Heaven as we speak, despite being the Jew that he was. Well, maybe I’m being cynical again. OK, no Rapture for me. Oh, wait a minute…

Bannning Brit Milah?

Have you heard about Moishe who walked by a store featuring clocks and watches in its window? He needed a repair so he went in and asked the proprietor how much it would cost to fix his watch. “We don’t fix watches here,” the man replied. “I'm a mohel.” “A mohel? Why do you have clocks in your window?” “And what would you put there?”

I remember the brit milah of each of my sons. The first time I was amazed that I burst into tears. The second time I was amazed that despite telling myself that I would not weep this time, I did again. The third time I steeled myself against such unmanly behavior and cried hardest. I’m a wimp, I guess. I was delivering these innocents pain. I’m their father; I should be protecting them from men with sharp knives about to cut them, not delivering them up to them. It was like a sacrifice each time. Yes, I knew it was part of an ancient ritual welcoming the boy into the community, an opportunity for friends and relatives to kvell and to eat and to sing and to dance. But to me it was, well, if I believed in psychology I might be tempted to say that it was a subconscious return to my own eighth day experience.

We read that God told Abraham to circumcise himself and all who were of this party and his son Ishmael and later his son Isaac on his eight day but we’re not told why this should be the everlasting sign of the covenant. Speculation abounds—that by marking the organ of reproduction we are initiating our children into the covenant from the moment of conception, that it was always intended as a health measure, that it was borrowed from other ancient societies, perhaps even from the Egyptians and the Canaanites (who waited until just before puberty to perform the ritual).

The US Constitution prevents government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion (First Amendment). Nevertheless in two California cities, San Francisco this November and Santa Monica next, there will be a referendum decreeing that anyone who circumcises a boy under the age of 18 within city limits faces a $1,000 fine and up to one year in jail. The only exception would be for “compelling and immediate medical need.” To get on the ballot known as the “MGM [Male Genital Mutilation] Bill” 12,000 people signed a petition. Matthew Hess, who founded MGM Bill in 2003 and spearheads its legislative efforts, says he is trying to protect boys from what he considers a barbaric mutilation of their bodies. He became an activist in his mid-20s, he says, when he decided that his own circumcision as an infant resulted in diminished sexual sensitivity as an adult. “Freedom of religion stops at another person’s body,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

Ironically Hess is echoing the great medieval Jewish sage Maimonides who argued in his Guide to the Perplexed that “with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible… The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished.” Thus Jews have more time for study, less interest in lust as compared to uncircumcised Gentiles.

Opposing the ballot initiative is Nathan Diament, director of the Orthodox Union’s Institute for Public Affairs. He argues that “The stakes are very high. Circumcision is a fundamental aspect of Jewish ritual practice and Jewish identity.” In this he is joined by other Jewish groups and Muslim ones as well. The San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, with Abby Porth, the JCRC’s associate director in the lead, organized a wide-ranging coalition of religious, medical, legal and political leaders to oppose the ballot measure. The Council on American-Islamic Relations Bay Area director Zahra Billoo notes that CAIR rarely finds itself on the same political side as groups such as the Orthodox Union. “It’s the assault on religious freedoms that brings the two together,” Billoo said. “The civil rights of Jews and Muslims are being impacted,” she told the JTA.

On the legal front Joel Paul, professor of constitutional law and associate dean of the University of California Hastings School of Law, says the law likely would not survive a court challenge as it entangles the state in religious matters by putting the state in the position of judging whether a certain religious practice is permissible.

It’s very unlikely that the ban against circumcision will become a reality. Neither the votes nor the Constitution will permit it. But in any event, I’ve looked and have found no creditable indication that the proposed ban is anti-Semitic in origin. Nevertheless, passage of such bills, even if based exclusively on humanitarian considerations, would be a devastating blow to the Jewish (and Muslim) communities. My tears at my sons’ brit milahs ended; but ending brit milah would end Judaism as we know it.

A crazy week

What a week!

First there was the Rapture. Unless you have been living under the proverbial rock of ages you know that according to indisputable biblical prophesy, on May 21 all true Christians will have been wafted up to Heaven for all eternity whilst the rest of us would be subject to agonizing torments of biblical proportions until October 21 when the world itself would come to an end. I’m not sure if at that point we go to Hell or simply cease to exist, but in any case we give up our chance to sing psalms and strum harps and praising Jesus for the next 20 quadrillion years. If you are reading this without suffering the torments of Hell on earth the prophesy proved false. But millions were taken in by it and some of those millions, desirous of having their pets looked after, after they are in the hereafter paid enterprising atheists to look after their dogs and cats while they were gone. I don’t know how much cash changed hands but the whole story is proof to me that the sprit of Elmer Gantry is alive and well and living in the mouth of a false prophet somewhere beyond the New England/New York region.

Then there was the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. Maybe “affair” is the wrong word in this context. After all, when people have affairs there’s presumably a degree of mutual consent involved. But M. Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist head of the International Monetary Fund (and how that happened is beyond me if the word “socialist” still has any meaning. The IMF, that pillar of support of the capitalist system is the last place you’d expect to find a socialist in charge. Or maybe that would be in a $3000.00 a night hotel room.) In any case Mr. Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped a cleaning lady, this with the impunity and insouciance you might expect from one of his international standing, and was on a plane waiting to fly home to France when New York City policemen came aboard, cuffed him and escorted him via a perp-walk to Rikers Island where as of this writing he is ensconced wondering, no doubt, how he of all people could end up in such a predicament. American journalists have been congratulating the United States for not turning a blind-eye, as Europeans, especially French or Italian Europeans might. Of course American (and European) members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy have been turning a blind eye to the activities of pedophile priests for decades and as part of the weird week I might mention that after an exhaustive investigation a commission has concluded that priests trained before the 1960s were not properly prepared for the social upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s, so they made passes at little boys who wore glasses (and those who didn’t as well). Makes sense.

Then Mahmoud Abbas published in the New York Times a statement justifying the Palestinian Authority’s decision to approach the UN to ask for recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state. According to his view of history “the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states.” By “our homeland” he means all Palestine west of the Jordan River. (If he still thinks of all Palestine as west of the river than Israel has troubles. So does J Street.) Then, according to his distorted perspective, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened.” I guess it was a lucky coincidence that fully mobilized Arab brigades were at the border ready to invade.

The week continued with a counter blast from Danny Danon, deputy speaker of the Knesset. In his op ed piece he says if the West Bank/Gaza Palestinians declare themselves an independent nation, Israel will (or should) declare all Jewish settlements in the West Bank part of Greater Israel, and deny Arabs living in those zones Israeli citizenship. While Danon concedes that there would be international uproar over this he feels it will soon pass. I am not a believer in the two-state solution for reasons enunciated from time to time. But this is crazy. Danon and Abbas deserve each other, the one with no sense of the past, the other with no sense of the future. But if they deserve each other, why should we suffer?

As I’ve said, it was a crazy week.

More foolishness on the founders scene

Does anyone read the Constitution anymore? I mean, yes it has embarrassing elements (Article 4, Section 2, clause 3 allowing vigilantes from the South to come up North to retrieve run-away slaves comes to mind immediately. But we got rid of that one. It cost us a Civil War with 620,000 deaths, but we got rid of it.) But there are some gems. I particularly like the phrase in Article 6 that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Many of the framers then went on to sit in the first Congress which passed and sent around to the states a dozen amendments for ratification including one that contains this little piece: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Which brings me to David Barton. He belongs to that school of unprofessional historians known as Christian polemicists. At a recent conference on church-state relations held at Roger Williams University (full disclosure – I organized the conference) Professor Matt McCook of Oklahoma Christian University (which I do not believe is a hotbed of radical leftists) defines Christian polemicists as suspicious of professional historians whom they believe make too much of the Enlightenment and deny the fundamental Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Instead this group argues that the founders were devout Christians who wanted to create the United States as a Christian nation. Other conferees took it as a given that the founders, even if some were religious, did not want to make America a Christian nation and one pointed out that the Constitution is godless (in that God is not mentioned at all).

Barton, according to a recent story in The New York Times (May 5), has been consulted by several potential Republican presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee who extols Barton as “maybe the greatest living historian on the spiritual nature of America’s early days,” Newt Gingrich, who believes that “American freedoms are divinely granted,” and Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann. All praise his work dedicated to the argument that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and is on the road to ruin because we have forgotten this and abolished prayer in school.
As do all of his kind, Barton has a problem with Thomas Jefferson’s argument in his famous 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association which called for a wall of separation between church and state, the basis (along with actual words of the Constitution) of the principle that there should be a wall of separation between church and state. According to Barton, Jefferson’s “wall” was meant only to protect religion from the state, not the other way around. It was intended to keep “Christian principles in government,” not prevent religion in the public sphere. Sadly, there’s nothing in Jefferson’s letter or in his life to substantiate this. Jefferson was an atheist, convinced that within a generation all Americans would be Unitarians (another way of denying Jesus’ divinity).

At the Roger Williams conference mention was several times made of different tiers of founders. There were those who participated in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and those who didn’t. Patrick Henry is an example of the latter. He was a devout Christian who advocated taxation to support religion, and limiting public office to Trinitarian Protestants. But the people who actually wrote the documents that define America rejected Henry’s ideas.

Even ignoring the fact that Barton twice spoke before neo-Nazi groups (he claimed not to know they were neo-Nazis) his distortions ought to offend Christians and Jews (and Muslims and atheists). America’s radical departure into modernity was acting upon what it learned from Europe – to separate church and state. When the state creates a preferred religion, the state will be engulfed in civil war, learning will be stifled, dissenters will be jailed (or worse) and society will stagnate.

God gave the United States a nonsectarian Constitution – I know because Newt Gingrich tells me so. But if we allow the David Bartons of this world, based on cherry-picked quotations and a misreading of the past, to convince us that America was intended to be a Christian nation, America will not be strengthened; it will be destroyed.