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"Liars For Jesus"
Would self professed spokespersons, in the name of Christianity and whose words are routinely broadcast to millions around the United States and the globe, attend public events in honor of, and present awards to, politicians who have derived financial profit from a regime of forced abortion and sexual slavery ? Well, yes. Might the leader of a major world religion have conspired to cover up the sexual molestation of thousands of children ? The answer, again, is yes.
So, it is no great stretch to suppose that Christian historical revisionists might - in the words of author Chris Rodda - "Lie For Jesus" and, in her new book "Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History" (the first of two in the series) Rodda undertakes what an entire generation of professional historians, burrowed in and tenured in America's finest universities, has largely failed to do: acknowledge, confront, and refute the emergent school of Christian historical revisionism that amounts to the construction of an entire fictitious parallel history of the United States - with numerous interwoven and self-referential accounts claiming that the intention of the founders of the United States was to create an expressly Christian nation.
One might envision such an enterprise to springing from pages written Jorge Louis Borges or Philip K. Dick, but no - it is quite real. And it is also deadly - for that mythology has become firmly lodged in the minds of millions of Americans and so propels the political advance of Christian nationalism. |
That failure of contemporary historians - to confront the miasma of distortion, misrepresentation, misquotation, and bald fabrication that characterizes the historical myth of "America, the Christian Nation" - stretches even into complicity. A few outside the hallowed halls of academe have stood up, however, to challenge the veneer of Christian Nationalist pseudohistory descending over America, and Chris Rodda is one. One could characterize the project as a form of patriotism, or a passion for truth : in four hundred painstaking pages of analysis extensively footnoted and tied to numerous original and sometimes never before cited source documentation, Rodda methodically traces and debunks the references of alleged works of history by leading Christian nationalist authors and, in the end demonstrating them to be rooted in vanishingly little truth and extensive artifice, calls into question the entire revisionist oeuvre.
At four hundred pages, "Liars For Jesus" is not an easy or a quick read, but Democracy itself is neither easy or quick and - as Benjamin Franklin's alleged words challenge us still ( to paraphrase ) We have our republic... but can we keep it ?.
Thanks to the work of a few such as Chris Rodda, we may yet do that.
"Liars For Jesus" | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
"Liars For Jesus" | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
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