Dan speaks with author and constitutional lawyer Andrew Seidel. They discuss his new book, "The Founding Myth," and dissect the idea that the USA is a Christian nation.
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What's up y'all?
It is the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, and so we wanted to re-release some of our favorite episodes that have been unavailable for a while.
So today we have Dan's interview from a couple years ago with Andrew Seidel.
Andrew is a friend of the program, constitutional lawyer at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
and wrote a book called The Founding Myth that really debunks the idea that the United States is a Christian nation.
We thought this would be a great episode to release before the holiday.
I'm sure many of you will have conversations or things that arise along these lines, and so we thought it was the perfect time to put this in your earbuds.
So we hope you're traveling safe, we hope you are enjoying some time off, and we'll be back next week with new stuff, but here we go with Dan and Andrew.
Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I am one of your hosts.
I am Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College here in Southern Vermont.
And I am joined today by Andrew Seidel, who's a constitutional attorney with the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
And has just published a book recently, a few months ago, entitled, The Founding Myth, Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American.
And our listeners will know from the title of that book, our focus today is going to be on this theme of Christian America, Christian nationalism.
So, Andrew Seidel, I want to welcome you, and thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me on.
It's a true pleasure.
Great.
So I was going to start with a story of folly, and some of our listeners have heard these before, but once upon a time, Dan Miller was a young evangelical.
I had just graduated from college, my undergraduate degree in biblical studies at a Southern Baptist college.
I was freshly ordained, freshly minted, and I was one of two pastoral staff at a small church, an evangelical church, in Seattle, Washington.
But one of the interesting things that I may bring up later in our discussion is that I also came out of a Baptist background.
And once upon a time, as you will know but many of our listeners might not, Baptists were staunch advocates of separation of church and state.
Yeah, and they, you know, believed in that and supported that, and I did.
And so I had taken this class that really kind of blew up this myth of Christian America a little bit.
And the reason this is significant is I walk into the church office one day, and we had a secretary who was a little bit older, probably late 50s, who was listening to something on talk radio.
I'm not sure exactly what, but the theme of, you know, sort of Christian America came up.
And I, and this is the folly part of it, in my young, idealistic, 22-year-old, fresh-out-of-college, everybody-loves-new-ideas naivety, entered into this conversation about, well, you know, America is actually not a Christian country.
If you look at it, most of the founders were not Orthodox Christians.
And I said, Thomas Jefferson, if he were to walk into our evangelical church, wouldn't make a good member.
And I talked about why, and so on.
And I thought this would be enlightening, and I don't know what I thought.
In retrospect, this is ridiculous.
But she burst into tears.
And, I mean, not just sort of crying, not a tear or two.
She's sobbing, and she's telling me about her father who fought in World War II to defend Christian America, and our rights to do this, and my right to believe follies like that it isn't a Christian country, and so forth.
And I was really caught off guard.
And something, again, in retrospect, this is obvious that hit me was, wow, number one, how deeply, how deep this current is, this notion that we live in a quote-unquote Christian country, and the deep emotional investment that people have in that story.
And so I wanted to start, sort of with that as background, that one of the ways this story and this mythos of Christian America often comes out in sort of public discourse is this appeal to quote-unquote Judeo-Christian values or sort of shared Judeo-Christian heritage.
And so I want to throw it over to you and say, what's the problem with that?
And, or, related to that, why do you think it's a myth to say that America was founded as quote-unquote a Christian nation?
Sure, so there's a lot of fun stuff to unpack in there, and I can't wait to get down in it.
So let's just start with the term Judeo-Christian principles, or even just Judeo-Christian, because right there, you've got a big problem.
And really, it's a difficult term to pin down because it's fake, and I think from a scholarly standpoint, You know, there's no real solid definition of what the phrase Judeo-Christian meant.
And I think I get in, this is so important, I think I get into it on like page two of the book, The Founding Myth.
You know, Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity, and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism.
That's a quote that I threw in at the beginning of the book.
From, I think, a Jewish theologian.
The adding of Judeo onto Judeo-Christian, it's a sop.
It's a fig leaf thrown out to make an exclusive, an exclusionary term seem a little bit more inclusive.
And it was done, really the term gained a lot of strength after World War II when having an exclusionary Christian movement.
in the wake of the Holocaust, seemed pretty ominous and awful.
So that's really where you saw the term start to gain in popularity.
But really, it's just meaningless, and it's thrown out there to make Christian nationalism slightly more palatable.
But at its most basic level, Christian nationalism is the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation, that we are based on these Christian principles.
And most importantly, I think, is that we've strayed from that foundation.
Right.
We've gotten away from it.
And by using that narrative, Christian nationalists today can try to pass policies and laws that take us back.
to that Christian founding.
You know, really, I think that at its most basic level, the goal is to redefine what it is to be an American, so that to be an American is to be a Christian, and to be a Christian is to be an American, and then to redefine the law according to the Christian nationalist identity.
And I think that kind of wraps a lot of what you were talking about.
The emotional heft that this mythos has comes from that central push, really trying to redefine what it is to be an American.
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