Fred Clarkson summed this up very nicely in his Spring 2007 Public Eye Magazine article, History is Powerful: Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters.

"The notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is a central animating element of the ideology of the Christian Right. It touches every aspect of life and culture in this, one of the most successful and powerful political movements in American history. The idea that America's supposed Christian identity has somehow been wrongly taken, and must somehow be restored, permeates the psychology and vision of the entire movement. No understanding of the Christian Right is remotely adequate without this foundational concept."

I also want to again quote Jeff Sharlet's December 2006 Harper's Magazine article, Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Reimagining U.S. History, as I did in my post last year.

"It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the 'myth' of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America's God and Country -- a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men 'for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates' -- has sold half a million copies. 'Those who control the past,' Federer said, quoting Orwell's 1984, 'control the future.' History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny."

Both Clarkson's and Sharlet's articles are must reads for anyone who is not yet aware of just how important the dissemination of the Christian nationalist version of American history is to every sector of the Christian Right, whatever their individual causes or schemes.

As for my personal experience with this, I've had quite a bit over the past year. In fact, my present position as Senior Research Director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) actually came about as a result of my fight against historical revisionism. Last May, I wrote a piece entitled The Department of Defense -- Bringing Historical Revisionism to a High School Near You about the appearance in the JROTC core curriculum American history textbook of an essay by Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. One thing led to another, and through a MRFF volunteer, I was put in touch with MRFF's founder and president, Mikey Weinstein. MRFF needed researchers and I needed a job, so I started fighting the battle on a different front. What I didn't expect was that my work for MRFF and my ongoing fight against revisionist history were going to overlap to the extent that they have.

The appearance of that David Barton essay in the JROTC textbook was just the tip of the iceberg. I soon uncovered Christian nationalist revisionist history in base newspapers, known history revisionists speaking at military installations, etc. And, of course, many of the characters who promote this revisionist history, such as Chuck Norris and Stephen Mansfield, just happen to be among MRFF's biggest critics.

Recently, I discovered a litany of revisionist history in H. Res. 888, a resolution introduced on December 18, 2007 by Congressman Randy Forbes (R-VA), "Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as 'American Religious History Week' for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith."

So, what does H. Res. 888 have to do with MRFF? Well, in 2006, Randy Forbes, the founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus and a member of the House Armed Services Committee (the perfect combination), was instrumental in holding up passage of the 2007 Defense Authorization Act for several weeks over the Senate's removal of a military chaplain prayer provision authorizing chaplains to pray in the name of Jesus at military invocations. The guidelines for Air Force chaplains were rewritten in 2005 and revised in 2006 after Mikey Weinstein exposed the religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. In 2006, the Navy also instituted a new policy regarding prayers at command functions. The only issue on the Legislative Issues page of Mr. Forbes's Congressional Prayer Caucus website is "Military Chaplain Prayer."

As I said in the title of this piece -- It's All the Same F*cking Fight.