The religious right’s historical fraud

It’s very telling that, in a debate earlier this week, Christine O’Donnell seemed not to know that the separation of church was in the Constitution.

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Jonathan Miller

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The wider point is that the religious right, which underlies the Tea Party movement (as a recent study shows), is built on a skewed version of American history. It depends on the pretence that the nation was originally, and is naturally, a theocracy. It claims that, as in ancient Israel, or a Muslim state, religious law is the rightful basis of politics. This was the ideology of the Calvinists who came over in the Mayflower. But this vision was rejected by the nation’s founders, who were various sorts of liberal Protestant. They daringly created a more-or-less new phenomenon: secular political space.