The Assembly 2007, being held April 26-29th, is technically part of the official festivities. Yet not all Americans are invited to attend. The Robertson wing of the religious right i seeking to rally people who have come to see themselves as the True inheritors of the once and future Christian Nation. Speaker after famous evangelical speaker will say so. What God intended. What the Founding Fathers intended. What great things are expected of ordinary people in these extraordinary times. As Blanchard told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper, "They did come ashore dragging a cross... We were started as a Christian nation and I feel it's God's purpose we stay a Christian nation."

The event looms large in the imagination of a growing dimension of the religious right that doesn't get much media attention: Christian nationalism. The idea that America was founded as a distinctly Christian nation, and that Christians of a particular sort should, as Robertson once put it, "rule and reign," has been a central animating idea of this part of the Christian right for a generation.  Followers regularly consume a growing body of counter-cultural literature and films and see that their children are indoctrinated in this revisionist rendering of American history. They will also get to watch coverage of Assembly 2007 on Christian TV. And The Landing, (a film that treats the Jamestown landing as a Christian story), produced by Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, will air on ABC's mainstream Family Channel as part of the Jamestown extravaganza.

Those traveling to Virginia can attend a "Consecration Conference" at a local megachurch, which will weave worship services with politics and indoctrination in Christian historical revisionism. Or they can go to the beach for a costumed reenactment of the landing and plant white crosses in the sand -- the crossbars emblazoned with One Nation Under God, are available for $14.95 for planting at home as well.

This dramatic ritual is intended to show that "you dedicate your church, family, and nation to God!"  in commemoration of "April 29, 1607, [when] a young Anglican chaplain, Robert Hunt, planted a cross on what is now known as Cape Henry, dedicating the new land for the purposes of God."

Despite the historical revisionism, the colony was far from a Christian mission to Virginia. The London Company, which was behind the venture, pooled investors interested in making money. For years, it floundered badly. Eventually, the company gave up the commercial charter and control reverted to the Crown. The gauzy view of Christians claiming the land for Christ and King is clarified by history.

And far from creating a haven for religious liberty, as Joe Conn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State notes after pulling out his history books, "the London Company's November 20, 1606 'Articles, Instructions, and Orders' did, indeed, demand that the prospective American colony 'provide that the true word, and service of God and Christian faith be preached.' But the charter added that the 'true word' must be 'according to the doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within our realme of England.'"

Thus, the business venture was made in cooperation with the England's established Anglican Church, which was headed by the King. The colonial government was to enforce religious conformity - sometimes with the death penalty -- not religious freedom.

More than a century and half later, Thomas Jefferson, himself a member of an Anglican parish, summarized this bitter history in his book Notes on the State of Virginia :  "The poor Quakers were flying from persecution in England," Jefferson wrote -- only to be persecuted in the New World, their assemblies and books banned, and neighbors prosecuted for invited Quakers into their homes. There was even a three strikes and you're out death penalty provision for "any master of a vessel to bring a Quaker into the state."

Given Jefferson and other revolutionaries' concern about government sanctioned churches, they ensured the Constitution of the United States in no way declares a covenant with God, acknowledges a god, or in any way infers America as a distinctly Christian nation. The founders were very clear in the need for religious freedom and equality under the law.

And yet the Assembly blurs that history: "We acknowledge that the Bible is itself the government of the People, by the People, and for the People" the organizers proclaim in their official document American Covenant. "We realize, however, that we are a nation of differing and often competing faiths, a body politic comprised of freemen, rather than a religious dictatorship imposed upon the unwilling."  

To say the least, these claims stand in dramatic tension with one another. What's more this group ignores the more than 150 years of overt religious persecution in Virginia that stands as the clear context of how and why the Constitution and the First Amendment were written the way they were. One cannot learn the lessons of a history ignored or indeed, whitewashed.

[This post is adapted from my article, "History is Powerful," in the Spring issue of The Public Eye].