by David Oates
In the short month since the first installment of this exploration, the news has returned to our theme. A few days ago (at this writing) a new squabble broke out over America’s supposed “Judeo-Christian heritage,” this time in Boston itself, seedbed of our original revolution. It seems the city government has rejected a request to fly a “Christian flag” outside the city hall. The reasoning offered for this request (if repetition of cliches based on historical fantasy can be called “reasoning”) was that it sought to “enhance understanding of our Judeo-Christian moral heritage.”
I would suggest that the cultural conservatives who try to rebrand America as a “Judeo-Christian” culture are not, in fact, conservative – since our founders were explicitly not interested in revealed religion as a basis for the new country. As Part I of this essay showed (if briefly!), the Founders looked to reason; they trusted the testimony of experience; they studied the ancient republics and democracies. There is no democracy in the Bible. That founding value came from elsewhere.
So these “cultural conservatives” are better described as reactionary fantasists. It’s the usual thing in backward politics – pining for an imaginary past. Read more »