The Books of My Life: The Godless Constitution

 

Sometimes when I am deep in my almost daily book reading I find myself getting into a kind of thematic groove. I have been in one of those thematic groves recently which is why, after reading Jill Lepore’s empirical take down of the twentieth century American Tea Party and its selective historical literacy (The White’s of Their Eyes) I decided to read another book in the same vein, Isaac Kramnick's and R. Laurence Moore’s The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (New York: Norton, edition with a new chapter, 2005). 

Like Lepore’s The White’s of Their Eyes Kramnick’s and Moore’s book is a mixture of empirical history and rational empirically grounded polemic. In The Godless Constitution Cornell professors Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings of the US Constitution just as Lepore attempted to correct the historical misreadings of the right wing American Tea Party, if in a more conventional narrative way. Where Lepore attempted to correct misreadings of the US Revolution by the American right, Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings by many on the intellectual and populist right, the latter generally mimicking what the former mouth with a little bit of help from their right wing friends in the demagogic and sensationalist red faced and fear mongering media, of the US Constitution.

Right wing mythhistory, like that which Lepore, Kramnick, and Moore attempt to correct, of course, has a long history as the parodic and satirical National Lampoon 1964 high school yearbook published in 1973 with its parodic and satirical excerpts of a high school history text points up, a long history that stretches back to the beginnings of the nation itself, actually even before there was a nation called the United States of America. So, it should be no surprise to people in the historical know, save for those wedded to an Enlightenment perception that education has or will put such mythic rabble into the rubbish bin of history once and for all, that mythhistory is still alive and well and living in intellectual secular right and intellectual religious right American minds today.

Kramnick and Moore do an excellent job of exploring the real as opposed to the mythhistorical origins of the US Constitution. They note right off the bat that the US Constitution does not mention god once and mentions religion only once in order to mandate that no religious test for office be mandated in the new United States in its original form. In its expanded form, of course, thanks to the addition of the Bill of Rights, something that was added to the Constitution to assure its passage, religion is mentioned only, as Kramnick and Moore note, in order to mandate that there be no theocracy in the United States, something that on one side of the coin separates religion and the American state and on the other separates the American state from religion. The founding fathers, after all, knew the dangers of theocracy not only because of its long European history—Christianity as a state religion in what became Europe goes back to the Roman Empire—and reality but because many of the American colonies were theocracies as well, theocracies where, for example, Quakers, were murdered because they were not “orthodox” Puritans.

Kramnick and Moore are also very good at exploring the ideologies of American’s founding fathers in relation to religion. They note rightly that founding fathers like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, who many on the right have turned into secular "orthodox” Christian saints, were not the nationalist Christians who are so prominent in America and American politics today. Many of the founding fathers, in fact, were Deists, those who denied the Trinity, the Christian notion that god has three faces, god, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. They note that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers and writer of the early drafts of the American Declaration of Independence, made his own version of the New Testament, the Christian Bible which was added to the Jewish Tanakh, in which the miracles and other supernatural elements were removed, in order to produce a Jesus who Jefferson thought was more real, a Jesus who was a kind of an Enlightenment figure before the Enlightenment (akin to how Joseph Smith made Jesus a Mormon before Mormonism in the Book of Mormon). They note that James Madison, the author of the US Constitution, played a significant role in helping pass Jefferson’s Virginia's Statute of Religious Freedom, a statute written in 1777 and passed in 1786, which mandated religious freedom in once theocratic Virginia (Anglicanism was the colonial state religion in Virginia) thanks to his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, which, in turn, argues for religious liberty and against theocracy, documents that made religion in the US a private not a public or state matter. 

Where Kramnick and Moore are wanting is their failure to explore how this secular constitution written by Enlightenment philosophes who, while using a language about god that was very similar to those who regarded themselves as “orthodox” Christians, gave different meanings, more deistic meanings or twists, to that language, something those wedded to a literalist and fundamentalist reading of language often fail to get or refuse to get (thanks to political and ideological correctness). They fail to explore the fact that one variant of American Protestant Christianity became the unofficial state religion of the United States beginning with the second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, an unofficial theocracy that lasted well into the twentieth century, and an unofficial theocracy that many on the right point to as evidence that the US was and always has been a Christian nation.  

Another thing wanting in Kramnick and Moore is a reflection on who this book is meant for. If it is meant for those already convinced of the fact that the US is a secular nation then it is simply made to order for an already present echo chamber. If it is aimed, at least in part, to those on the right who misread the empirical facts about the secular American Constitution it is doubtful that many on the right, particularly the Christian nationalist right, will read it in the first place and it is likely that if they do they will do what often times happens when cognitive dissonance occurs, should cognitive dissonance even occur in the first place, they will simply become even more convinced that the US was a Christian nation. After all, for far too many on the mythhistorical right ideology creates reality rather than the other way around, something proven yet again by the malreview of the book by one Dan Crawford on Amazon, a Pontius Pilate like corporation that refuses to weed out politically and ideologically correct reviews from fact based reviews. Crawford accuses, Kramnick and Moore of being "atheists", offering no evidence whatsoever for this claim, and maintains, despite empirical evidence to the contrary (see page 96 chosen at random, for example), that the authors do not quote the words of the founding fathers. It should also be noted that Crawford blissfully ignores the bibliography at the end of the book while making the claim that Kramnick and Moore offer no sources for their arguments. And so political and ideological correctness goes.

The Books of My Life: The Whites of Their Eyes

 

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, The Public Square series, 2010). Actually, if I am honest, I kind of know what to make of it. I feel a little of this and a little of that about it. I feel a little comme ci and a little comme ca about it.

Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes is interesting structurally. Like the Tardis (it is perhaps most like the Doctor Who episode "City of Death") the book bounces back and forth between the present, the present being 2009 in Lepore's book, and the past, the past being the revolutionary era of the so-called founding fathers of the American Revolution, the era from the late eighteenth century to the early 19th century. 

The 2009 present in The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a kind of ethnography, but not a very deep or detailed ethnography, of people associated with the latter day Tea Party in Boston and the current events related to this latter day Tea Party in Massachusetts. Their various political rallies at various historical sights in Boston and the Boston area is grist for Lepore's mill. Another 2009 present is grounded in Lepore’s critique of this latter day Tea Party and how it approaches and interprets the history of the American revolutionary era.

The past of The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a historical synthesis of what was happening primarily in Boston during the revolutionary era. So, we get a discussion of the American colonial reaction to the various taxes imposed by the British government on the American colonies, taxes meant to reduce the British debt which was incurred partly because of its defence of the Colonies (see the French and Indian War). The Whites of Their Eyes also explores colonial response to those taxes, which led to the Boston Massacre, when British troops stationed in the American colonies fired on and killed several protestors, and the Boston Tea Party, when some colonials dressed as American First Peoples boarded ships in Boston harbour filled with tea and dumped it in the drink. Along the way Lepore introduces a gallery of characters including founding father George Washington, founding father John Adams, Adam's wife Abigail Adams, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom, printer and newspaper publisher Benjamin Edes, founding father Samuel Adams, founding father Thomas Jefferson, the man who road himself into American history books Paul Revere, the Black man Crispus Attucks who was shot and killed during the Boston Massacre, and poet Mercy Otis Warren. Lepore uses this past, which also includes discussions of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, a discussion of the tensions over slavery during the era in Boston, a discussion of the founding fathers response to religion in the era, and a discussion of the difficult life of Jane Mecom financially and the mental health problems within her family, to try to paint a broader and less mythhistorical picture of this era in American history than that of the latter day mythhistorical modern Tea Party.

Lepore also uses this synthesised past to distinguish professional history from mythhistory, the historical sensibility that dominates the contemporary Tea Party. For Lepore the “history” of the contemporary Tea Party is grounded in a romanticism that decontextualises the past jerking it, in the process, out of its cultural, economic, and political contexts or frames, sanctifies it, making the events associated with it sacred and the founding fathers saints with hagiographies to be written about them, and recontextualises it in a present, doing injustice to the real history of these events and these people in the process. For Lepore, and I agree with her entirely here, the mythhistory of the 2009 Tea Party is a fundamentalist history, a cherry picked history that tends to leave out the social and cultural lives of those who aren’t the great men of history, of women, and of Blacks. The fundamentalist Tea Party history, in other words, is a history grounded in the present and the culture and ideology of the present and which reads a romanticised and selective contemporary history, culture, and ideology back into the past turning it into a mythic history of that past. As a consequence, as Lepore notes, the mythhistory of the Tea Party really isn’t history, a history grounded in empirical evidence and valid interpretation. It is a disneyfied or disneyfornicated, pollyannish, and manichean history, nor history, in other words.

This mythic history of the present does injustice to the historical record as Lepore notes. It does injustice to the contradictory and situational attitudes the founding fathers of the past had to religion and the role religion should play in the new American state. Mythhistory, for example, leaves out the fact that the founding fathers said different things and meant different things about religion at the time and the fact that several of the founding fathers were not “orthodox” Christians at the time by the standards of what passes for “orthodox” Christianity today. As Lepore notes the founding fathers were diplomatic about religion (Washington), continually tinkered with it. Jefferson cut and pasted to take out the miracles of the Bible (the famous Jefferson Bible), and Madison defended it (in its natural religion not fundamentalist religion form). All of them did agree on one thing, as Lepore points out, however, that there should be no establishment of religion (theocracy) in the new United States. Additionally, as Lepore notes, the authors of the US Constitution specifically stipulated that there should be no theocracy in the new American state, that there should be no religious test for office holders, those running for office in the US did not have to be Christian, in other words, and that the civil rights of Americans was not to be grounded in religious ideology. She also notes that the treaty between the new United States and the Muslim “pirates” of the Barbary Coast stipulated that the US should not be a Christian nation though this reality has not stopped theocratic and generally nationalist Protestants from trying to make it in to one over the years (something that should tell you something about theocratic Christianity).

Mythhistory also, Lepore argues, does injustice to the fact that both Jefferson and Madison did not argue for an originalist position with respect to the US Constitution. Originalism or original intent theory is an ideology which tries to ascertain what the writers of the Constitution meant at the time. For founding fathers Jefferson and Madison, however, the Constitution was alive and had to adapt to changing times because times changed and animated minds had to change with the changing times if their minds were to remain alert and alive. For them history was progressive, moving in a direction that would invariably lead to improvements. It should also be noted that the originalist position that dominates so many legal minds these days, including at the US Supreme Court, really isn’t originalist since an originalist interpretation of the right to bear arms would have to rule that the arms Americans had the right to bear were only those present in late 17th century colonial America since that is what the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they talked about the right to bear arms. Originalists thus aren’t really originalists. They are actually proponents of the Constitution is a living document that can and should be amended given that times change position though they don't recognise it unable to see the motes in their own politically and ideologically correct eyes. They see the Constitution as a living document since they magically turn muskets into AK-47s, something the founding fathers simply did not have in their minds when they inserted the right to bear arms into the Bill of Rights.

By counterpointing the realities of the past with the political and ideological correctness of the Tea Party of the 2009 present Lepore shows that the history of the contemporary Tea Party is not the real history of the American revolutionary past. This is, of course, important and critical but it raises a fundamental question: will the Tea Partyers of the present (or their populist Trumpian children) actually read Lepore’s book? Personally, I doubt it. As my old religion professor said to me once, arguing with fundamentalists, in this case with the political and ideological fundamentalists, is akin to arguing with a brick wall since true believers, by and large, simply create their own political, economic, cultural, geographical, and demographic realities. And even if these politically and ideologically manufactured realities are challenged cognitive dissonance generally leads to few defections and paradoxically often ends up strengthening the attachment of true believers to the socially and culturally constructed "realities" that are a central part of their identity formations.

Like so many history books, particularly those aimed, as Lepore’s book is, at a popular reading audience, The Whites of Their Eyes is full of anecdotes including anecdotes about the disappearance of, for example, Thomas Paine’s bones, the Thomas Paine who was an agnostic and who Glenn Beck, one of the televangelists of the Tea Party who was briefly on Fox news, magically transformed into an exemplary “orthodox” Christian founding father. She provides information on when the Boston Tea Party was first referred to as the Boston Tea Party, 1834. Anecdotes like this, I am sure, play well with the general audience Lepore aims the book at. But? 

At the same time The Whites of Their Eyes provides excellent summaries of the significant Revolutionary history of the American colonies, summaries on the American Revolution, particularly in Boston, which was an important centre of revolutionary activities in the colonies at the time, explorations, if we can generalise from the stories Lepore tells about Mecom and Warren, on the history of women in the Revolutionary era, and summaries relating to the tensions over slavery in Colonial America and, again, particularly in Boston 

Lepore does make some important general theoretical points. She rightly points out that the mythhistory of the contemporary Tea Party is similar in form to the lost cause mythhistory of the post-Civil War US White South. Myths, she shows, and she is not alone in showing this, can be similar in form but different in content in that they can sacralise different tales whether of the American revolutionary past, the Southern post-Civil War past (the myth of the lost cause), the Canadian myth that it was the destiny of the nation to settle from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or the Australian myths associated with the great men who settled the Outback. She rightly points out that the Tea Party mythhistory is, because of silences about what their mythhistory elides, such as the stories of women and Blacks during the Revolutionary era, anti-pluralist. Its mythhistory is tales of "great" men, “great" White men. She rightly notes that mythhistorians fail to differentiate between opinion, the belief that the US was a Christian nation, for example, and the fact that it wasn’t as the treaty between the US and the Barbary “pirates” makes clear. She rightly notes that mythhistorians generally prefer politically and ideologically correct opinion to empirical fact. Cultural sociologists and, particularly cultural and social anthropologists, of course, have long been familiar with the fact that mythic symbols work this way still it is nice to know that some historians are cottoning on. 

If you know someone who has deeply imbibed American mythhistory but still has an open mind (open to quantitative and qualitative empirical and scientific research grounded in evidence) you might give them The Whites of Their Eyes to read. Whether they will have a road to Damascus experience or a gradual change of mind is an open question since, as social scientists have noted for some time, it is not easy to open the closed minds of most true believers. At the same time we know it is possible to open closed minds. Several members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example, have left, the Church something that shows that seeing the light is possible. That many Mormons who have left the LDS faith and become mirror images of themselves when they were Mormons, given that now instead of evangelising for Mormonism they are now evangelising for some variety of Mormonism was a fiction I was brainwashed into, shows that even those who leave retain some aspect of who they were (see, for instance, the YouTube videos of John Dehlin and Alyssa Grenfell). Moreover, it must be remembered that at the same time as some have exited the faith many still remain faithful members of the Westboro Baptist Church despite widespread polemical and apologetic and empirical criticism of them. And if the Westboro Baptist Church tells us anything it tells us that groups with a strong identity grounded in symbols associated with their own mythhistories often see criticism through the prism of persecution and see themselves as suffering servants of the Truth, making undermining their mythhistory with the facts difficult at best.

The Books of My Life: The History Wars (Mcintyre and Clark)

The culture wars and, in particular, the history culture wars, have been going on for some time. There was, of course, a cultural history war in the United States in the lead up to the American Civil War, a cultural history war in which the participants on both sides argued over slavery, including the morality of slavery, often in biblically infused terms. This history war, of course, resulted eventually in a hot war, the American Civil War.

Today there are culture wars in the British settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over a host of issues including abortion, smoking cigarettes in pubs, immigration, multiculturalism, and the academic curriculum, just to note a few examples. These cultural wars are fought out in similar ideological languages not only because of the similar political and ideological histories of these settler societies but because of globalisation and its attendant cultural globalisation thanks at least in part to the brave new digital technologies which link these societies and their ideological identity groups together.

Stuart Mcintyre and Anna Clark explore the history culture war primarily in one part of the world, Australia (though they also make limited excursions into the history culture wars in the United States, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Canada) in their book The History Wars (Melbourne, Victoria: University of Melbourne Press, updated edition, 2004). After exploring how professional historians do history in chapter two, Mcintyre and Clark take a largely chronological approach to the Australian cultural history war. In chapter three Mcintyre explores how British imperial and later Australian historians wrote the history of Australia. In chapters four and five Mcintyre explores how two of Australia's most noted historians, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey found themselves drawn into the Australian history wars on two different sides, the less mythhistory one in the case of Clark and the more mythhistory one in the case of Blainey. In chapter six Mcintyre looks at the culture history war battles over the Australian bicentenary in 1988, a battle that was reflective of the wider battles over Australian history. In chapter seven Mcintyre explores how the more mythhistorical Australian discourse on the history culture war changed thanks to their adoption and adaptation of the American language of political correctness. In chapter eight Mcintyre looks at how conservative and right wing historical warriors in Australia developed a discourse which accused the less mythhistorical historians of fabricating evidence of European violence against the Aboriginals thanks to a culture of guilt and the romanticisation of the "primitive". In chapter nine Anna Clark explores the strategies of conservative and right wing mythhistory warriors as they battled to gain control of the secondary school curriculum in Australia. In chapter nine Mcintyre explores the museum front in the culture war over history. In a conclusion Mcintyre's sums up his argument over the Australian historical culture war and in an afterward looks at the responses to his and Clark's book in the year between the initial publication of the book and the publication of an updated edition of the book.

In The History Wars Mcintyre argues that there have essentially been several paradigm shifts in the dominant perception and writing of Australian history since the early 20th century. Initially most historians saw Australian history as a species of British imperial history. As Australia became more independent from the "mother country" many historians, particularly those of the radical nationalist school of Australian history, developed a more independent from Britain version of Australian history. The effervescence of the 1960s saw the rise of new approaches to history in general and to Australian history in particular as social history, often quantitative in form, and cultural history, generally qualitative in form, in the Australian historical profession. Both of these, Mcintyre argues, replaced the radical nationalist school of historiography as dominant or hegemonic. 

At around the same time, Macintyre argues, there were reactions to these new histories, rending the consensus that characterised the writing of Australian history asunder, both within the academy and beyond it in intellectual and populist culture. The new social and cultural histories often focused on British imperialism and the impact of British imperialism on Australia and its indigenous population. They also focused on minorities like women and Asian immigration into Australia after the demise of the White Australia policy in the 1960s and 1970s (something that is paralleled in the US and Canada). These new social and cultural histories of imperialism, violence against Aborigines, women, and immigrants touched a boosterist nerve among some historians and in the conservative and right wing press. As a consequence the traditional reliance on evidence and reasoned debate in history and in Australian intellectual culture was sometimes replaced by a politically and ideologically correct culture (something the populist right shares with many liberals and many leftists) in far too often the language of ad hominems, Needless to say, this ad hominem approach was found not only in Australia but also in the post-Thatcher England, the post-Reagan United States, the post-Harper Canada, and in the New Zealand of the late 20th century and early 21st century. 

Critics of Mcintyre have accused him of being a history warrior himself and of, as a consequence, being emotionally attached to one side of the history culture war in Australia, the black or black armband approach to Australian history as right wing mythhistorians have come to call it. That said a lot of the current invariably politically debate over the impact of European and particularly British imperialism on indigenous Australians is, not surprisingly, inherently emotional and and one can't help but reflect on the moral aspects of British imperialism and its impact on Australia's indigenous population if one has a modicum of humanity left. Given this fact it is not a surprise that the debate has touched humanitarian and boosterist nerves. I suppose one can debate, and academics do continue to debate, whether what happened in Australia after 1788 was genocide. That debate aside there was certainly a policy, unofficial or official (including of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink variety), of extermination, extinction, and extirpation against Aboriginals. Smallpox certainly impacted the indigenous population in deadly ways but it is also true that generations of Aboriginals were stolen or taken supposedly for their own good so they could be more integrated, at least rhetorically, into the population. It is also true that land was taken from hunter-gatherer peoples with little understanding, on the part of the Europeans, of the differences in conception of land "ownership" between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and was not always done legally (though we should never forget that power often makes the illegal legal). All this happened in the United States and Canada as well, of course. Should contemporary generations feel guilty for this? Gee I would hope so. On the other hand, subsequent history suggests little was learned of lasting value from the Holocaust except about how genocide could be leveraged morally and politically.

Let me conclude by coming clean. I regard myself as a secular Calvinist. In my many years of observation and study I have become convinced that history is not teleological and that humans are, to put it nicely, fallible (one of Mcintyre's great realisations in the book is that the Cold War realist right traded in its pessimistic Calvinism for a best of all possible worlds optimism in the post-Cold War era, a best of all possible worldism in which free market capitalism became the utopian motor of end of history). At the same time, I think the scientific method with its emphasis on empirical evidence, allows for humans to make valid and reasonable generalisations about human society and culture, overcoming in the process, to some extent, the realities of human fallibility, since such an approach allows for verification or falsification. 

The application of such a method has shown me again and again that it is the right wing populists with their optimistic, some might say, given the evidence, overly optimistic version of history (something they paradoxically share with the best of all possible world liberals and leftists not to mention Hollywood) that is problematic. These right wing populists tend to prefer mythhistory (yeah rah ethnic, nationalist, civilisational history) to more empirical history and often replace rational and reasonable debate over the interpretation of evidence with ad hominem "zingers". They tend to engage in such obfuscation and such childishness because they seem to want to obtain power at any cost and will use any means to achieve it because they think that they and only they are right (something again they share with some liberals and some on the left not to mention a host of theocrats around the globe) and they know that playing up myths and using mythic and celebratory discourse plays well with a significant segment of the public. The fact, however, is that imperialism, for example, in all its forms is real and indigenous peoples suffered not only from the diseases but at the hands of these imperialists. Anyone with even a basic understanding of real history knows this and no amount of happy faced ain't we wonderful or at least some kind of wonderful rhetoric will change this reality.  All this is some of the reason why I find Mcintyre's and Clark's dispassionate analysis of the history war in Australia much more compelling than that of their critics.