Bring Back That Old-Time Religion

It warms the soul to read laments about the our nation’s wickedness for abandoning the “traditional Christian values, in which this country was founded upon,” to quote a recent letter to my local daily, which prints every signed missive that arrives and that a phone call might verify.

One traditional 18th Century Christian value was slavery. Through silence the Constitution ratified by the 13 states not only sanctioned slavery but also, for apportioning taxes and congressional representation, graciously counted each slave as three-fifths of a human. This was not just a sop for the South but also for parts of the North, where many such 60-percent persons toiled in bondage.

In the slave colonies fervent divines of most Christian stripes (but not Quaker) preached that God had willed some people to be slaves and others to be slave owners and both should be thankful for it.

The nation’s largest Protestant domination, the Southern Baptists, did not formally give up finding Biblical justification for slavery until 1995.

(They still find Biblical justification for subjugating wives to husbands. It’s no wonder they oppose homosexual marriages, for in those jointures which partner would subjugate the other?)

Indeed, another founding traditional Christian value denied women the right to vote or hold legislative or other high office and in many jurisdictions the right to own property in their own names. Today’s semi-emancipation of women has helped lead us to where we are, ethically speaking.

Yet another 18th Century value was forcing children, often as young as five, to labor in coal and other mines, in factories, on farms, and as indentured servants leased out to strangers, for five and ten-year terms.

When the nation formed, few religious took umbrage at hanging six and seven year olds for picking pockets or stealing bread or at giving them a good skin-stripping flogging before tossing them into prisons to amuse sexually deprived adult felons.

No doubt the reinstitution of all these spiritually salubrious practices would improve our country’s morals.

Certainly Republican candidates and office holders see that. They call frequently for larding the federal and state judiciaries with judges who will uphold the morals of the Founding Fathers (not of no-account Founding Mothers, of course): Slavery, child labor, female bondage and like virtues.

Eight will get you five, when the Republican convention opens, before 15 minutes is up, the keynote speaker will be pounding the podium about the values of the nation in 1787 and how we must go back them; and across the land the heads of the millions of constitutional experts who people this country (most have never read the Constitution and therefore keep a pure mind about it) will bob up and down in agreement before their TV sets.

Bring back the past. Make it our future.