DIALOGUE WITH ATHEISM
“Founding Fathers: Atheists, Deists, or Believers?”
Part IV
Thomas Paine, himself a Deist and influential pamphleteer for the Revolution wrote” “We have it in our power to begin the world all over again.” George Washington believed we were beginning a new race of people welcoming the “oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions.” (Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America. P. 67) Ours was to be a “melting pot”, a crucible for making the new America.
But today, says New York University historian, Arthur Schlesinger, we have neglected to teach in our universities the high values and traditions of our history. Commonly critical of the sins of the West, and laudatory of some of the Marxist or other regimes, many intellectuals fail to note the West has produced its own antidotes. Says, Schlesinger, the West “provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression, to advance personal liberty and human rights.” (Ibid. p. 76)
These movements were in many cases fueled and energized by religious convictions and Western European and American ideals. They were not promulgated in Asia, the Soviet Union, the Mid-East or Africa.
“Today,” says Dr. Schlesinger, “it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors.” (Ibid. p.78) And when in 1989 the Chinese students demonstrated for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought no representations of Buddha or Confucius. O no, they held aloft instead the Statue of Liberty.
Here is an area where I respectfully disagree with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. In his now famous (or infamous) sermon he talked about Colonial oppression of blacks, (which alas is regrettably true) but he neglected to mention black oppression of blacks.
The conflicts and massacres in the Sudan are black against black. The mutual slaughter of 600,00 Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda was black against black. The massacres of the Idi Amin and Boukassas were black on black. Some black societies still sustain slavery, keep women in subjection, and mutilate their genitals. “Some carry out racial persecution not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes…who in their tyrannies and massacres…have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights.” So speaks historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. of New York University. (op. cit. p. 76) But America has been the most successful nation in history in uniting people of diverse backgrounds.
Schlesinger writes. “No one does black Americans more disservice than those Afrocentric ideologues who would define them (fellow blacks) out of the West.” ( op. cit. p. 81)
And yet, Rev. Wright called Africa the cradle of civilization and prayed not, God bless America but God damn America. He further praised racist Black Muslim leader, Louis Farrakhan, as one of the greatest leaders of our time. Yet, says Christopher Hitchens, he once heard Farrakhan draw a hideous roar from a mob in Madison Square Garden when he yelled at the Jews, “And don’t you forget when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s Forever!” (God Is Not Great, p. 219)
So in this patriotic season, we again invoke our Founding Fathers to free us from that kind of racial and religious bigotry, fanaticism and despotism. And we would invoke the best of our religious leaders – be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or other – to advocate freedom of inquiry, speech, and religion, and to save us from ignorance, tyranny and despotism.
And most of all, let us embrace again the great ideals of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution and Bill of Rights and Pledge of Allegiance to be “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.” The way forward is not to be hyphenated Americans, but Americans united for freedom, individualism, diversity of opinion and above all, a fierce loyalty to our democratic ideals which made us great.
