History is Powerful -- And PBS Gets It Wrong
Frederick Clarkson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 01:47:42 AM EST
The six part PBS miniseries God in America that began on Monday features a glaring error that merits highlighting and correcting.

God in America seeks to present a fresh narrative of the story of religion in America -- including how that story shaped the writing of the Constitution. While the first two chapters, presented back to back seem good, (albeit overly slanted towards the role of evangelical Christians), there is a glaring error (partly of omission, partly of commission) I want to highlight that goes to the heart of the story of religious freedom and the right of individual conscience. Getting this important element of our history right helps us to answer the Religious Right's theocratic aspirations as well as claims the various claims of Christian nationalism.

That this PBS documentary joins the Religious Right in eliding this important part of our history is disturbing.

So let's correct the record.

The film and the related web site contradicts itself each time the role of religion in the Constitution is mentioned:

The section on the drafting of the Constitution on the web site's "time line" of religious liberty is headlined:  "U.S. Constitution drafted; no guarantee of religious liberty."

The discussion under this headline states:  

God and religion are scarcely mentioned in the document. Wanting to create "a more perfect union," some of the Constitution's framers fear that statements on religion would be divisive.

While it is true that there was concern about how best to approach the matter of religion, in fact there was a major statement regarding religious liberty in the Constitution thus it was not "scarcely mentioned" nor can anyone fairly say that there was "no guarantee of religious liberty" when in fact, Article Six made an extraordinary and unprecedented first cut at doing just that. (The First Amendment came later.) It meant that for the first time in the history of the world, what one believed or didn't believe, or if one changed one's mind, would no longer be official criteria for determining eligibility for public office. (And while it took a long time to make that principle real, and arguably, we are still working on it, that only underscores how deeply radical Article Six really was.)

But even the claim that religion is "scarcely mentioned" is more accurate than what is stated in the film itself. The transcript states:

NARRATOR: And when, a year later, the Constitution was being drafted in Philadelphia, Jefferson and the Baptists hoped that their hard-fought principle of separating church from state would be part of the country's founding document. But when the Constitution was presented in September 1787, in not one of the seven articles was there any guarantee of religious liberty or other individual rights.

But this is a semantic spin on the facts.  Article Six of the Constitution declared:  

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

This was the real break between the theocratic norms of the colonial era and the democratic values of religious equality that stand at the center of the struggle of the American experiment to this day. Understandably, it was a big issue at the time, since religious oaths had been standard, and perennially controversial in most of the colonies.  The abolition of "religious tests" set in motion the disestablishment of the state churches.  (I wrote about the significance of Article 6 an essay, History is Powerful:  Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters in The Public Eye magazine in 2007.)

Indeed, a great deal of opposition to ratification of the Constitution centered on religion. While it is true, as the film emphasizes, many were concerned about the absence of any mention of God or Christianity in the text, many opponents were also opposed to the banning of religious tests for public office.  

The Constitution was ratified by a majority of the states, but part of the politics of getting there, was a deal made with civil libertarians like Jefferson that they would support ratification for a document that they felt insufficiently guaranteed religious liberty, in exchange for the promise that the Constitution would be amended later. They did, and it was.  

In an online debate at Religion Dispatches (an outgrowth of a panel at Netroots Nation in 2009), I added:

"Barring religious tests for public office in Article 6 also obviously meant that there would be no religious test for citizenship. (You can't be elected to office if you are not a citizen.) Thus the framers were clearly not solely concerned with whether or not we had official federal or state churches, but first that the right of belief resided with individual citizens.

The plumb line of this principle is clear.  When Thomas Jefferson first proposed the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1777, he stated that this right of individual conscience must be extended to everyone, including: "the Jew, the Mohametan, and the Hindoo." Jefferson was not arguing the demographics of majority and minority religions, but first principles. It took time to advance them, even then. James Madison as governor of Virginia managed to push Jefferson's bill through the legislature in 1786--the year before the drafting the federal Constitution, of which Madison is credited with being the principal author--as well as the principal author of the First Amendment. Virginia had already disestablished the Anglican Church, the day after it joined the revolution in 1776. So there is no mistaking the meaning of formally extending religious liberty to all in the wake of disestablishment and as a famous forerunner to the Constitution itself.

In fairness, any story necessarily includes some facts and leaves out others in order to keep the narrative clear. But in this case, the result is a gross distortion of the history of religious liberty in the U.S.  




Display:
and the miniseries merits lots of discussion. Here is one early review.  http://www.cleveland.com/tv-blog/index.ssf/2010/10/god_in_america _is_a_compelling_series_but_omits_many_key_events_people.html

by Frederick Clarkson on Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 02:36:14 AM EST



by NancyP on Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 10:07:31 PM EST

I watched the first part. It clearly is designed to push the idea that you have to be religious to be a good American. At every point where one could discuss the right not to be religious, it merely trumpets the goodness of the newest Protestant cult and its innocent desire to compete freely with the established cults in the "marketplace". Only in the section about evangelical oppression of Catholics in NYC could one come to the realization that those who scream for their rights today will try to take them from others tomorrow - the narrator doesn't explicitly point this out. Tom Paine's rabid anti-clericism is of course omitted. The American Revolution is practically heralded as a evangelical crusade, which the show could have used as a teaching moment about wartime holy hypocrisy in which the enemy du jour is always the Antichrist.

by super390 on Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 12:07:20 PM EST

that portrayed this mini-series as "well balanced".

Yeah, right.  I've seen how 'balanced' even PBS can be.  A few years ago there was a special about Aristide and Haiti.  The only problem is, just before that came out, I'd seen a video including entire sections of interviews that were used in that so-called special, and the editing to promote the view of Aristide as a 'bad guy' was painfully obvious- you could see where they chopped out comments and sections of interviews that completely inverted the meaning of the short snippets the 'special' used to portray him as bad.  Since then, some of my research has demonstrated how the news media biases the reporting- and always to support the status quo.  The brainwashing is sometimes so obvious that I wonder why people don't seem to see it.

It saddens me to see religion twisted to serve the elites like it does (especially in the case of the dominionists), supporting the statement by Karl Marx that Religion is the opiate of the people.  I tend to agree with Weber more... that it could also serve to fight the status quo and work for equality and freedom, although that isn't nearly as common as keeping people 'in their place'.

This mini-series seems to be solidly of the "opiate of the people' persuasion.  Keep 'em comfortable and blind to what is going on around them.  Don't let them see the real complexity of historic situations, and especially don't let them see how their own religion or denomination has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

by ArchaeoBob on Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 12:55:52 PM EST

Your post made me think what David Barton's reaction to this series would be, but there is nothing on wallbuilders.com that I could find. I suspect he would congratulate PBS for airing a program on religion in America, but would go on to say that it did not give the full story, or that it was not patriotic enough.
=============

Disclaimer: off topic - (ran across it and wanted to share it)
There was a story on Talk2Action about Johnny Cash's nephew (I think) being an evangelical chaplain. Johnny Cash himself was very against the war, as seen in this exchange with his daughter Roseanne:

...Cash says that just before the invasion, doctors put Johnny under in a medically induced coma and the first thing that popped into his mind after he came to was whether or not Iraq had been invaded. "He went to sleep not knowing if we had invaded Iraq," Rosanne said. "It was the last thought on his mind. When he woke up, I was sitting by his side. He looked at me and reached over to pull the television over to him. He was looking at me like, 'Did it happen?' I said, 'Dad, it happened.' He went, 'No! No!' Can you imagine? This is the first thing he thought of when he woke up from a week-long coma."

http://www.spinner.com/2010/09/23/johnny-cash-iraq-war-rosanne/

by COinMS on Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 06:03:20 PM EST
Parent



It's significant to note that the Article VI "no religious Test shall ever be required" phrase is the only time the word "ever" appears in the Constitution. That's about as unambiguous as you can get.

by kgb on Tue Oct 12, 2010 at 06:08:51 PM EST

What stood out to me when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were discussed is that James Madison was not mentioned even once. He had more to do with both than Jefferson did - since Jefferson was out of the country as an ambassador at the time. He did correspond with Madison, but Madison was his own man, even though a protege and friend of Jefferson's. Also, in the second part there was no mention of Robert Ingersoll who was a very well known agnostic who gave sold out speeches all over the US. The religious bias in this series is obvious. I realize that the show is about God in American history. But, to ignore everything else is unrealistic.

by hypatiab7 on Wed Oct 13, 2010 at 09:25:04 PM EST

I watched this documentary closely because I'm looking for material to use with middle school youth about religion in America. I really didn't see the issues raised here, and I was paying attention for just such slanting.

1) In the context of the program, political offices were spoken of separately from the general population. Article VI was quite explicitly spoken of as "unique" for the time because no other country had ever NOT had a requirement for religious observance.

2) I'm pretty sure I heard as part of the program narration that one of the reasons the establishment clause wasn't in the main articles of the Constitution was that several states still had established religions at the time (particularly in New England) and that including an anti-establishment clause in the initial document would have delayed or prevented its adoption. Reading between the lines and extracting Virginia history from the recesses of my brain, Madison was concerned enough about the fragility of the Articles of Confederation that he willingly if reluctantly let go of the anti-establishment clause in order to get a more substantial union created at a time when the new and untried nation faced financial and military threats. Article VI was enough for his purposes to keep a theocracy from arising until the Bill of Rights could be added. (Let's not forget that even after that it was 40+ years before established religion was eliminated in all states.)

I'm reminded, whenever I read our early history, that our Founding Fathers were not men who allowed the perfect to impede the good. FRONTLINE isn't perfect and never has been, but this series was very good for being a 4 hour and 45 or 50 minute synopsis of our incredibly rich but sometimes ugly religious history in America.

by RevRuthUCC on Mon Oct 18, 2010 at 01:24:48 AM EST
in this diary, so you need not rely on your memory. You can also view the segment online.  I think you will find that this segment skewed the history in the way I have described.  As I wrote above, the segment was pretty good, but this is a serious matter and one worth getting right.

Contrary to the film and the related web materials, there were in fact significant guarantees of religious liberty and individual rights, although as you say, and I wrote as well, the Constitution was written and ratified in the form it was in part because of the promise for a later push for a bill of rights that would clarify the rights of citizens.

by Frederick Clarkson on Mon Oct 18, 2010 at 07:41:30 PM EST
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