RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia (Disinformation Central of the Global Warmists), needs to hand back her diploma.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10081/pub_detail.asp

In her article, “The Wilful Ignorance that has Dragged the US to the Brink,” she attacks the Tea Party and its religious candidates and tries to fob them off as the end-all and be-all of “conservative” thought. She takes a stick to a straw man and thrashes it wildly. She focuses on the alleged oversights and ignorance displayed by the more vocal Tea Partiers who happen to be God guys. Granted these people misrepresent not only the Constitution, but the Founders. But she displays her own bias and ignorance.

She claims that the Founders were “pro-taxation.” Excuse me? One must really wonder about such elevated people like Churchwell when she permits herself this kind of writing, which occurs throughout her article:

“The Tea Party version of the American Revolution is not just fundamentalist: it is also Disneyfied, sentimentalised, and whitewashed. It rests on a naïve, solipsistic and exceptionalist faith that for America it will all work out in the end, because America is “the greatest nation in the world”. They take solace in tautology: America is great – this they know – because Fox News tells them so.”

Is this, or is this not, a smear? A sticking out of her tongue? As puerile and contentless (except for the malice evident in it) a statement as a New York Times editorial praising President Obama?

Now, true scholars of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary periods will tell you that the religious element in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence is largely secondary and mostly bunkum. The iconic painting of George Washington praying at Valley Forge, for example, is apocryphal, but that hasn’t stopped pseudo-scholars from writing thick tomes “proving” that the Founders meant the U.S. to be founded on Christian principles. Unless Arnold Friberg, the painter, had a time machine at his disposal and traveled back from 1992 and asked Washington to pose for the picture, it, too, is largely bunkum. But it is that secondary role of religion which Churchwell chooses to focus on, and not on the authentic roots of the Revolution. She is angry with the Tea Party for blocking a debt deal, forgetting that it is not the debt “ceiling” that is the issue, but government spending. Cut government spending – fire all the troglodytes of the TSA, the goons of the DEA and ATF, end Stimulus and other welfare programs, get out of the education racket, the propaganda racket, the various regulatory rackets, and the ceiling would drop all by itself.

Without dissecting her article sentence by sentence, which is not possible here, allow me to clarify some facts. The chief fact, briefly, is that the colonists rebelled against the assumptive, absolute power of the Crown – not specifically against George III, they were still toasting to his health right up to Bunker Hill – but against Parliamentary power to tax and regulate the colonies for the Crown’s exclusive and mercantilist benefit. Parliament was behaving as arrogantly as our Congress has for the last one hundred years, treating the colonists as though they were enterprising but troublesome offspring who needed cosseting and hall-passes and moral guidance. Their rights as Englishmen were dismissed. And neither the Crown ministers nor most of the colonists believed that representation in Parliament was practical. The Crown insisted on taxation without representation. The colonists said no.

It took over a century for the ideas of the Enlightenment to circulate and germinate in European and British colonial minds, and then coalesce into a hearty individualism in British America hardly glimpsed in Britain and totally unknown on the Continent. This occurred especially between the 1720s and 1770’s. These ideas had little or nothing to do with God or religion, except to delineate the relationship between man and his preferred creator, a private affair, and between man and the state, which was as far away as possible. Yes, most of the Founders entertained some religious beliefs; some were agnostics, others probably closet atheists in a time when to publicly deny the existence of a supreme being was to court ostracism and social opprobrium. The Founders went to great pains, however, to define and enact the proper relationship between state and man, and that was to forbid the establishment of a state religion or church. So, Churchwell is right to thrash that straw man.

However, she chooses to also ignore the philosophical and political developments which underlie the Declaration and the Constitution (as the Founders wrote it, not as their distant successors have diluted, abridged, and nullified it with statist amendments). She does not dwell on them. She addresses a completely different agenda, which is the perpetuation of a reckless, spendthrift, authoritarian government. She indulges in a pseudo-tautology without representation of the facts.