{"id":43,"date":"2010-07-27T07:29:01","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T07:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/tancredos-constitutional-revisionism.html"},"modified":"2010-07-27T07:29:01","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T07:29:01","slug":"tancredos-constitutional-revisionism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/tancredos-constitutional-revisionism.html","title":{"rendered":"Tancredo’s Constitutional Revisionism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Tancredo, the former  congressman from Colorado who briefly ran for
\nthe 2008 Republican presidential nomination on an anti-immigrant
\nplatform, has now thrown his hat into the Colorado senatorial<\/strike> gubernatorial ring, running
\nunder the auspices<\/a> of the Constitution Party. That party, among
\nother things, indulges in what has become all-to-familiar historical revisionism regarding the
\nreligious roots of the republic, to wit (from the preamble to its platform<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

This great nation was founded, not by religionists,
\nbut by
\nChristians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this
\nvery reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum,
\nprosperity, and freedom of worship here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American
\njurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal
\ngovernment to its Constitutional boundaries.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Some of those founders were hardly Christians. Thomas Jefferson, for his part, was denounced by Federalist pamphleteers in the 1796 and 1800 presidential elections as a Francophiliac atheist. But never mind that. The key claim here is that the United States was founded on the Gospel, and that this is the reason those of other faiths were afforded religious liberty.<\/p>\n

Let us stipulate that certain kinds of Protestant Christianity may have disposed some revolutionary-era Americans toward the principle of permitting all religious comers to worship according to their lights. That was not the kind that impelled the Calvinist powers-that-be in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to throw the likes of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson out of Boston. Or to kill the odd Quaker who had the misfortune of stumbling into their neck of the woods. But by the end of the 18th century, freedom of conscience was a widely accepted idea in the Anglo-American world.<\/p>\n

For the framers of the Constitution, however, this was a non-Christian Enlightenment point of view. George
\nWashington’s 1790 letter<\/a>
\nto the Jews of Newport could not be clearer that it was a secular principle of citizenship, not a Gospel gift of soul freedom that had been embraced in the Novus Ordo Seclorum:  <\/p>\n

\n

The citizens of
\nthe United States of America have a right to applaud
\nthemselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and
\nliberal policy, a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty
\nof conscience and immunities of citizenship.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

It is now no more that toleration is
\nspoken of as if it were the
\nindulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of
\ntheir inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the
\nUnited States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no
\nassistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should
\ndemean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their
\neffectual support. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The patronizing religiosity of the Constitution Party bears no relationship to the Constitution. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Tancredo, the former  congressman from Colorado who briefly ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination on an anti-immigrant platform, has now thrown his hat into the Colorado senatorial gubernatorial ring, running under the auspices of the Constitution Party. That party, among other things, indulges in what has become all-to-familiar historical revisionism regarding the religious…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nTancredo's Constitutional Revisionism - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/tancredos-constitutional-revisionism.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tancredo's Constitutional Revisionism - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tom Tancredo, the former  congressman from Colorado who briefly ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination on an anti-immigrant platform, has now thrown his hat into the Colorado senatorial gubernatorial ring, running under the auspices of the Constitution Party. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}