February 19, 2023

By Chuck Ardo

Many Americans have embraced the myth of America’s religious founding despite irrefutable evidence that the high minded rhetoric wasn’t matched by our earliest settlers.   As Christian author and columnist Rachel Held Evans says “Some Christians in particular have so idealized our country’s “Christian heritage” that they shrug off American slavery as “not that bad” or an “unfortunate incident.” While the Smithsonian’s American Experience notes that “the self-serving concept of manifest destiny, the belief that the expansion of the United States was divinely ordained, justifiable, and inevitable, was used to rationalize the removal of American Indians from their native homelands.”

While the tragedy of African-American slavery is common knowledge, Native American slavery “is a piece of the history of slavery that has been glossed over. Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.” according to Brown University professor Linford D. Fisher.And Margaret Ellen Newell, a professor at The Ohio State University, claims “The colonial economy depended on slavery, many well-to-do households functioned only because of slavery, early colonial legal codes were devised to justify slavery and the Pequot War and King Philip’s War were fought in large measure to perpetuate slavery.”

And History.com reveals that “from the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians” and that “working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians' land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian Territory...” and that “by 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi...” Thousands of native American men, women and children who were forced to abandon their homes and walk along the “Trail of Tears” died of hunger and exhaustion. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our nation was born in genocide. ... We are perhaps the only nation who has tried, as a matter of national policy, to wipe out its Indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today, we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode."

In a review of historian Kevin M. Kruse’s book One Nation Under God, the Princeton University History Department writes that the idea of “Christian America” is an invention—and a relatively recent one at that. As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR’s New Deal.”  Much like the southern pastors who used abortion to galvanize believers because their true cause, protecting the tax status of segregation academies that skirted civil rights laws, couldn’t muster popular support, religious devotion is merely a cloak to white wash history.

So when we are told that “America has for so long been blessed and protected by God, because we were a nation that lived by God’s standards; Our forefathers, who put their very lives and fortunes on the line to build a nation that stood on Christian values and Biblical principles” as Wellspring Christian Ministries puts it, we need to ask what kind of Christian standards and values has this country really lived by.  An honest assessment of American history would reveal that we’ve failed them all.