‘Exploiting Religious Faith for Personal Profit,’ Trump Pockets $1.5 Million From Branded Bible
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
Common Dreams
By Julia Conley
The post ‘Exploiting Religious Faith for Personal Profit,’ Trump Pockets $1.5 Million From Branded Bible appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
White House wants Smithsonian to preach Christian nationalism, FFRF warns
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is condemning a new White House report that seeks to pressure the Smithsonian Institution to promote a Christian nationalist revisionist version of American history under the guise of restoring “truth and sanity.”
The 162-page report, “Saving America’s Story,” issued by the White House Domestic Policy Council pursuant to President Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” repeatedly faults the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for failing to portray Christianity as central to America’s founding and identity.
Far from offering an objective historical assessment, the report advances the same themes promoted by Christian nationalist organizations: that America’s rights derive primarily from Christianity, that museums should celebrate the nation’s “Christian roots,” and that any criticism of Christianity’s historical role constitutes ideological bias.
“The federal government has no business directing museums to promote a revisionist narrative of American history, especially not a preferred religious spin,” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “This report is not about historical accuracy. It is about using government power in part to privilege Christianity and promote Christian nationalist disinformation.”
Among its complaints, the report argues that Smithsonian exhibits improperly portray Christianity as connected to conquest and colonization while giving insufficient attention to what it calls Christianity’s “constructive role” in shaping America and its freedoms.
“Museum materials repeatedly suggest that Christianity functioned principally as an instrument of conquest, exclusion, or cultural erasure, while the constructive role of Christian belief and Christian institutions in shaping the Nation and its freedoms receives scant, if any, attention.”
It specifically criticizes museums for failing to emphasize Christian belief as foundational to the Declaration of Independence, constitutional government and the nation’s understanding of natural rights, broadly crediting Christianity for founding America and accusing The Smithsonian of treating “Christianity as a historical villain.”
The report attacks Smithsonian exhibits that critically examine the Pilgrims, Christian missionary activity and the role of Christianity in European colonization and the oppression of Native peoples. Instead, it argues that museums should portray Plymouth primarily as the birthplace of America’s Christian heritage and present Christian evangelism chiefly as the spread of “the love of Jesus Christ” and “the Gospel.”
“And describing early European conquest as motivated by ‘Christian religious fervor’ frames Christian evangelism and Christians’ flight from religious persecution in Europe as an intent to subjugate the New World, rather than flee life-threatening persecution, spread the good news of the Gospel, and share the love of Jesus Christ with those in this new land.”
The report ignores:
- the Vatican’s Doctrine of Discovery, which essentially decreed that non-Christians could be freely subjugated.
- the religious persecution in most of the original colonies, which led the Framers of the Constitution to separate religion from government.
- the godly doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” to conquer the continent and takeover Native lands; and the biblical basis for slavery.
Perhaps most troubling, the report faults museum exhibits for not sufficiently emphasizing that Americans’ rights are “granted by God, not men,” complaining that displays discussing the Declaration of Independence fail to adequately highlight “the divine source” of inalienable rights and the Creator referenced in the Declaration:
“And the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution are quoted selectively in ways that mute their claims about equality, ordered liberty, natural rights, and the divine source of those inalienable rights.”
Gaylor noted that the Declaration of Independence is a political, not religious, document that is profoundly anti-biblical in asserting the governed’s consent. Nevertheless, she added that the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence, is our governing document and it deliberately omits any reference to God or Christianity, prohibits religious tests for public office and establishes a secular government. This report attempts to erase that crucial constitutional distinction.
The report demands a government-approved religious history, one that elevates Christianity while minimizing or dismissing the experiences of religious minorities, nonreligious Americans and those harmed in the name of religion.
While religion undoubtedly influenced many individual Americans throughout history, the United States was intentionally founded as a secular constitutional republic with no established national religion, where religious and nonreligious citizens have equal rights.
“Our government should never become an instrument for promoting Christian nationalism,” concludes Gaylor. “Taxpayer-funded museums exist to educate the public through rigorous scholarship, not to advance the White House’s preferred religious or political ideology.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation will continue opposing government efforts to rewrite American history in ways that undermine the Constitution’s promise of religious neutrality and equal citizenship for believers and nonbelievers alike.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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FFRF warns Schumer against legitimizing Christian nationalist myth
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is urging Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to correct the record after he again attributed a fabricated quotation to the Founding Fathers in his Independence Day message.
In a July 4 post from his official Senate X account, Schumer wrote:
“The founding fathers called America God’s noble experiment. I believe in all three words to this day: we are one nation under God, we have clung to noble ideas for longer than any other nation, and we are an experiment always changing, trying to make ourselves better.”
Historians have found no evidence that any Founder ever called the United States “God’s noble experiment.”
“The Founders gave us something far more remarkable than ‘God’s noble experiment,’” said FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “They created the world’s first secular constitutional republic — one grounded not in divine authority, but in ‘We the People.’ That achievement deserves to be celebrated honestly, not obscured by invented religious mythology.”
In a letter sent Tuesday, FFRF notes that despite repeating the claim for more than two decades in speeches about judicial nominations, voting rights, Supreme Court confirmations and democracy itself, no contemporary source for the quotation has been identified.
“Historical accuracy matters, particularly when public officials invoke the Founders to explain our constitutional system,” FFRF’s Co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker added.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman recently observed that among the more than 100,000 documents contained in the National Archives’ Founders Online database, “No one uses the phrase ‘God’s noble experiment.’ No one.”
Adam Keiper, executive editor of The Bulwark, identified only one apparent use of the phrase “God’s noble experiment” outside of Chuck Schumer’s remarks: a 1939 review of Ray Billington’s “The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860” by a Hillsdale College historian.
FFRF warns that Schumer’s repeated use of the fabricated quotation inadvertently lends credibility to the same false historical narratives long promoted by Christian nationalist activists seeking to portray the United States as a nation founded for Christianity.
“False quotations about the Founders have become a hallmark of the Christian nationalist movement,” Gaylor and Barker write. “Figures such as David Barton have spent decades promoting fabricated or distorted historical claims in an effort to portray the United States as a nation founded to privilege Christianity.”
“For that reason, it is especially troubling to see the Senate Minority Leader repeating a quotation that appears to have no historical basis,” they continued. “Your repetition of this fabricated quotation risks legitimizing precisely the disinformation they have worked to disseminate.”
FFRF has a strong reminder for Schumer.
“The United States was founded by Enlightenment thinkers who deliberately established the world’s first secular constitutional republic,” the letter explains. “If the Framers had intended to create a Christian nation, they knew exactly how to do so. Instead, they adopted a Constitution that vests sovereignty in ‘We the People’ rather than a divine being, prohibits religious tests for public office in Article VI, and, through the First Amendment, bars government from establishing religion while protecting every individual’s freedom of conscience.”
The letter also cites George Washington’s explanation that the Constitution intentionally omitted religious references because “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction,” as well as the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, unanimously approved by the Senate and signed by President John Adams, which declares that “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
“At a time when Christian nationalists are aggressively rewriting our nation’s history to portray the United States as founded for Christianity, public officials have a special responsibility to rely on authentic history, not invented quotations,” FFRF concludes. “Americans deserve historical accuracy from their elected leaders.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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