(12:35 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

"Poetry"

This post is basically a repeat from the Slacktivist, Fred Clark. It is a very bad poem by Judge Roy Moore, a man who is employed by the United States government to interpret and apply the laws of our nation in a fair and impartial manner. The only problem with this is that the man is clearly an idiot. I'll admit that I don't read a lot of poetry anymore, just mainly the poems in The New Yorker, but I know crap when I read it, and this is crap:

But with man as his own master we fail to count the cost,
Our precious freedoms vanish and our liberty is lost.
Children are told they can't pray and they teach them evolution.
When will they learn the fear of God is the only true solution.

Our schools have become the battleground while all across the land,
Christians shrug their shoulders afraid to take a stand.
And from the grave their voices cry the victory has been won
Just glorify the Father as did His only Son.

When your work on earth is done ,and you've traveled where we've trod,
You'll leave the land we left to you, One Nation Under God!

This is only the end of the poem. Here's the beginning:

One nation under God was their cry and declaration,
Upon the law of Nature's God they built a mighty Nation.
For unlike mankind before them who had walked this earthen sod,
These men would never question the Sovereignty of God.

It's obvious that he's referring to the Founders, but apparently he lacks any and all historical knowledge of their ideas and even their words. Ever since the Pledge of Allegiance debacle, everyone knows that the "one nation under God" thing was only added to the pledge in the 1950s, and that the pledge itself was only written in the 20th century. This clumsy attempt to make it a founding document, parallel with the Declaration of Independence, is transparently ideological. He probably also forgets that Jefferson, one of the most foundational of all the Founders, created his own edition of the Bible, excluding the miracles and preserving the sublime moral teachings. Apparently the idea of a liberal education, based on scientific knowledge rather than divine revelation, was very important to at least one Founder -- and the fact that he was selected to write the freaking Declaration of Independence shows that his ideas were probably not way out on the fringe. You can claim that education should be based on divine revelation, but to attribute that view to "the Founders" is just dishonest.

The sovereignty of God was also not a huge priority for the Founders, and one might argue that the sovereignty of God, as normally conceived, does not provide much room for democracy or pluralism. Clearly the good Judge wishes everyone would be the same kind of Christian he is, but if he would just casually browse through the Federalist Papers, he might notice that our form of government was created specifically so that the rights of minority groups would be protected. It was also founded on the idea that a vague kind of humanism was the best kind of "common ground" that wouldn't constitute the self-assertion of one group over all the others. In that day, humanism made token gestures toward some generic "God," but it wasn't necessarily talking about the God of Jesus Christ. It may be the case that generic humanism is just one more biased position oppressing all others, but to claim that the humanist "bias" in our education system somehow subverts the intent of "the Founders" is just dishonest.

Too many conservative Christian Americans are stuck on the past. Sometimes it makes sense to be stuck on the past, because sometimes the past was better than now and we need to find a way to get back. In this case, however, the past for which conservative Christians pine away never existed in the first place. Our nation was founded on post-Christian principles. One can claim that the secular, humanist principles of the American revolution are generally Christian in genealogy, but they make no direct claim to a Christian character and they never appeal to the specifically Christian revelation of God the Father in Jesus Christ, by the working of the Holy Spirit.

America is not and never has been a Christian nation. Maybe that's a bad thing, and maybe that needs to change--I doubt it, but maybe that is the case--but those who advocate for such a change do not help their case when they peddle this transparent bullshit of America being a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. A nation founded on Christian principles would have had some provision for guaranteed support of the poor written into its constitution, don't you think? It would have had some acknowledgment of Christianity's privileged character in its constitution, don't you think? It would have quoted scripture in its founding documents, don't you think? It would have invoked the blessing of God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in its founding documents, don't you think? I mean, come on! Christianity was and is tolerated by the government of the United States. Christian groups are given no more privileges than other religious groups as far as freedom to disseminate their message and freedom from taxation (the power to tax is the power to destroy, if you'll recall, and the government specifically disclaimed the power to destroy religion).

The United States always has been a secular humanist nation! GET OVER IT! I am really serious: I am sick of hearing about this. I'm sick of Christians disseminating lies in a transparent, and ultimately pathetic, grab for power. It seems like people who belong to a religion founded by an apocalyptic preacher who taught of the coming Kingdom of God would be a little more future-oriented and would not want to waste all their meager intellectual energies constructing some fantasy land, pretending that their fantasy land is actually part of real-live American history, and then acting like we're duty-bound to "return" to that past, or else God's going to be really pissed. What does that have to do with God becoming a man and dying on the cross? What does your desire to get your hands on power and impose your lifestyle choices on everyone in this great land (admirable though it may be on moral grounds) have to do with God becoming a man and dying on the cross? If we're going to spend our time remembering the past, how about we remember the past history of Jesus of Nazareth and of the apostles he left behind, rather than trying to shoe-horn a group of humanist political theorists and activists into the Bible?

Oh, and also, one of the essential elements of poetry is meter, dumbass. Maybe writing "rhymed couplets" where the second line keeps going until you can plausibly insert the necessary rhyming word is acceptable for a second grader, but not for an actual judge, who one hopes has some glimmer of intelligence and of command of his native tongue. And with this, I must confess that I wrote a lot more than Fred Clark did. This is because I think it's valuable to confront idiotic conservative ideas head-on, rather than simply dismissing them, because the dismissive attitude only encourages the characteristic conservative persecution complex.

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