According to this Huffington Post/YouGov poll, 32 percent of Americans would favor a Constitutional amendment that would make Christianity the official religion of the United States. 42 percent oppose such an amendment, with 32 percent “strongly” opposing the idea.

It may appear shocking to some that so many people are in favor of such an amendment to the Constitution, but from a historical perspective this is not shocking at all. As I argued in the first four chapters of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, Americans have always understood themselves to be living in a Christian nation. Though not everyone who believed that America was a Christian nation would have argued on behalf of a Christian amendment, there were many who did.

In 1863 ministers gathered in Xenia, Ohio and proposed the following amendment to the preamble of the U.S. Constitution:

WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, [recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, the law of God as the paramount rule, and Jesus, the Messiah, the Saviour and Lord of all] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This group of ministers eventually became known as the National Reform Association (NRA).  n 1864 its leaders brought their proposal for a Christian amendment to the White House and, according to an annual report of the NRA, Abraham Lincoln gave his approval to their mission. By 1874 the organization was holding national gatherings attended by several thousand people, mostly clergy.

The NRA leadership made several arguments on behalf of a Christian amendment. They believed that the original decision to leave references to Christianity out of the Constitution dishonored God. Some of them believed that God used the Civil War to punish the Union for its godless Constitution. Others argued that the Constitution did not reflect the religious sentiments of the majority of the American people.

The NRA also put forth a historical argument for why the Constitution should include a Christian amendment. Its members believed that the government of the United States was founded on Christian principles. The primary evidence for such a believe was the Declaration of Independence (with four references to God), the state constitutions (which were loaded with Christian language), and the colonial and state criminal codes. By invoking the Puritans and Pilgrims, the membership of the NRA was making an argument that the United States had always been a Christian nation.

It should also be noted that the NRA maintained a commitment to the separation of church and state. They rejected the idea of an established church. In this sense, they distinguished the “separation of church and state” from the “separation of religion and state.” Its members were very careful to affirm that they were not opposing religious liberty and were not interested in creating a theocracy. But they did want to give Christianity a privileged place in America. This meant the promotion of Bible reading in schools, the preservation of the Christian sabbath, and the public recognition of the teaching of Christianity as the nation’s moral guide.

Like the current attempt in North Carolina to create a state church (I should add here that the bill was just killed in the NC House of Representatives), the NRA never specified how the government would strike a balance between the separation of church and state on the one hand and the privileging of the Christian religion on the other.

The movement to add a Christian amendment to the Constitution failed, but this did not derail continued attempts get such an amendment passed. The NRA renewed its platform again in 1894 and 1910 and continued to meet through World War I. In 1947 and 1954 the National Association of Evangelicals promoted an effort to add the following words to the Constitution: “This nation divinely recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations through whom are bestowed the blessings of God Almighty.”

Attempts to make the U.S. Constitution more Christian or to make Christianity the official state religion have been around for a long time. In most cases, the advocates of such amendments have failed to make a clear distinction between their respect for the first amendment (especially the disestablishment clause) and their wish to create a religious establishment. It should thus not surprise us that the North Carolina bill was killed for its failure to articulate its wishes in a clear and coherent way.

The framers of the North Carolina Constitution of 1776 made it abundantly clear as to what kind of people they wanted to serve in their new state government. Article 32 states:

That no person who shall deny the being of God, or the truth of the Protestant religion, or the divine authority of either the Old or New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State, shall be capable of holding any office, or place of trust or profit, in the civil department, within this State.

North Carolina did not have an official state church (Article 34), but they certainly had a very specific religious test oath for state officeholders. The NC Constitution defended religious freedom for all its inhabitants (also Article 34), but only Protestants were allowed to hold office.

Nine current North Carolina GOP state legislators would like to return to the “golden age” of 1776. They recently passed a bill that would allow them to create a Christian religious establishment in the Tarheel State. Here is the bill that they proposed:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

On one level, this bill does not call for the same religious test oaths required by the 1776 Constitution. On another level, it goes beyond the 1776 Constitution by calling for a religious establishment.

But I wonder what such an establishment of religion might look like? Do these legislators want the state to collect tax money to support Christian ministers and organizations at the expense of non-Christian ministers and non-Christian religious organizations? If this bill were to pass, would the leaders of the new established church try to re-install test oaths? Would schoolchildren who are not Christians be forced to sit through Bible reading and prayer in public schools?

The sponsors of the bill are aware of the fact that they can’t establish a state religion in North Carolina without violating the United States Constitution. (The passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, and its 20th century application to religion in the states, makes a Christian establishment, or any other establishment of religion, unconstitutional). So rather than try to reinterpret the Constitution to allow such an establishment (a tactic used by many “Christian nation” advocates), these legislators have decided to ignore the Constitution altogether.  Sounds to me like a modern-day form of nullification.

For those of you who know your American history, this all sounds very familiar. But before we start worrying about another nullification crisis, the bill needs to pass the North Carolina legislature. And that is highly unlikely. (Thanks to my former student Jeff Erbig for calling this article to my attention).

By the way, all this is happening only days after it was decided that the Confederate flag would be removed from the North Carolina State Capitol.

Some of you may remember Kevin Roose. In 2007, as a student at Brown University, he went undercover for a semester at Liberty University and reflected on his experience in The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University. Here is a review of that book from Booklist:

Brown University student Roose didn’t think of himself as being particularly religious, yet he conceived the novel idea of enrolling at Liberty University, the school Jerry Falwell built, thereby transferring from a school “a notch or two above Sodom and Gomorrah” to the evangelical equivalent of Notre Dame or Brigham Young. His reasons were logical, though curious.

To him, a semester at Liberty was like studying abroad. “Here, right in my time zone, was a culture more foreign to me than any European capital.” He tells his story entertainingly, as a matter of trying to blend in and not draw too much attention to himself. One hardened habit he had to break was cursing; he even bought a Christian self-help book to tame his tongue. Throughout his time at Liberty, he stayed level-headed, nuanced, keenly observant. He meant to find some gray in the black-and-white world of evangelicalism, and he learned a few things. His stint at Liberty hardly changed the world but did alter his way at looking at it. That’s a start.

I did a post on Roose and his book on March 24, 2009.

Last week, Roose wrote another piece on Liberty University. In his New York Magazine post, Roose remarks on just how quiet Liberty has been on gay marriage during the Supreme Court’s consideration of the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. He concludes that Liberty students, like other young evangelicals, have been more accepting of gay marriage than their elders. Here is a taste:

Another Liberty student wrote me: “The general consensus from Liberty University students regarding the Defense of Marriage Act hearings has been surprisingly progressive. Obviously Liberty catches a lot of heat for being publically opposed to progressive views on gay marriage and abortion … but students at Liberty are free to form their own opinions.”

Liberty’s twin shifts on gay marriage — from vocal activism to quiet tut-tutting, and from unified opposition to a diverse mix of support, apathy, and skepticism — are likely in part a product of the school’s increased focus on growth over ideological unity. (As detailed in a recent Washington Post article, the school’s enrollment has quadrupled, to more than 75,000 students, since the elder Falwell’s death.) . . .

But what’s happening at Liberty also mirrors national trends. Pew’s poll of attitudes toward gay marriage has shown consistent growth in the number of evangelical Christians who are supportive, with gains especially concentrated among young evangelicals. The growth of evangelical acceptance has been driven in part by secular culture, but also by leaders within the movement. Last week, Rob Bell, a Christian writer and speaker who is immensely popular with the college-age crowd, shocked older evangelicals by coming out in support of gay marriage.

Check out Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s great piece on Amish romance novels at LA Review of Books. Weaver-Zercher is the author of Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels (John Hopkins UP).

I must confess that I knew nothing about Amish romance novels before I looked at Valerie’s essay, but I am now eager to read her book. I must also confess that I still have no real desire to read an Amish romance novel. Sorry, Valerie!

(OK—as I am typing this my fifteen-year-old daughter is telling me all about Amish romance novels, although she claims she has never read one.)

Here is a taste of Valerie’s essay:

In 2012, a new Amish romance novel appeared on the market about every four days. Sixty more were published in 2012 than in 2009, and 83 more than in 2002. The top three Amish-fiction authors — Beverly Lewis, Wanda Brunstetter, and Cindy Woodsmall — have sold a combined total of more than 24 million books.

As a subgenre of inspirational Christian fiction, Amish romance novels’ commercial success has garnered the attention of The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, and ABC’s Nightline, most of which have pointed out their largely evangelical female readership. One blogger suggested that the readers are “non-Amish religious women who somehow wish they could be even more repressed by a traditional Western religion than they already are.” Others are more sanguine. A marketer for one of the Christian publishing houses characterized the readers of their Amish-fiction author as evangelical women in their 50s and 60s. “These are not hipsters,” he said. “They’re very Christian, very ministry-oriented. There is lots of church talk in line [at book signings]. It’s sort of that rural, Saturday Evening Post crowd.”

And unlike the audience for reality series like TLC’s Breaking Amish or the Discovery Channel’s Amish Mafia, readers of these novels don’t want to see their Amish wasted, tattooed, touring sex museums, swearing, or packing heat. They want chaste heroines, tender heroes, devotional content, and maybe the suspense of a family secret or a forbidden Amish-English love. Amish romance novels offer readers three dimensions of chastity: chaste narratives about chaste protagonists living within a subculture that is itself impeccably chaste, refusing seduction by the car, public-grid electricity, phones in the house, higher education, and modern fashion. Despite the suggestion by some that the appeal of Amish fiction must lie in the arousal of coverings coming off, or suspenders being suspended — hence the coy industry term “bonnet rippers” — most Amish novels are as different from Fifty Shades of Grey as a cape dress is from a spiked collar. A line from Cindy Woodsmall’s When the Heart Cries is about as erotic as it gets: “The longer he stood so close to her, the stronger the need to kiss her lips became. But he was afraid she might not appreciate that move.” Readers frequently express appreciation that Amish novels are “clean reads,” and that they can leave them lying around the house without worrying that one of their kids might pick them up.

Evangelical women aren’t the only ones looking for chaste fiction for themselves and their daughters, as the Gordonville store’s shelves attest. No one knows for certain how many Amish people are reading Amish fiction, but, as I discovered while researching my book about Amish fiction, more than a few stray Amish readers are doing so. So if Amish readers are encountering fictional versions of themselves in the pages of Amish fiction, will they begin donning evangelical habits of romance and language of faith.

How does a culture change when outsiders launder its most cherished values and practices — community, tradition, simplicity, and Rumspringa — and sell them back to the people themselves?

Is it possible for a genre of fiction to re-dress a people?

One final thought:

I hereby declare Valerie Weaver-Zercher and David Weaver-Zercher the first couple of academic Amish studies.

My family and I raced home from a volleyball tournament in Philadelphia last night in order to catch the latest episode of The Bible on the History Channel. (Unfortunately we did not make it in time and decided, cheeseheads that we are, to wait until it is replayed so we can catch the entire episode in one sitting.)

I have been bouncing around the web this morning looking for some commentary and I found some good stuff.

Religion Dispatches, a left-leaning religion webzine, has been hammering the History Channel’s The Bible miniseries. In this piece, Sarah Posner quotes biblical scholar Wil Gafney who attacks the mini-series for not showing the slaughtering of babies, the ethnic cleansing, and the sexual violence that is part of the Old Testament. Fair enough. The Bible is very violent and Roma Downey and Mark Burnett have chosen to focus on the less-violent, more redemptive moments of the text.

Again, I am fine with this kind of critique, but I will continue to think that the benefits of the mini-series far outweigh the problems. This entire debate is not unlike those happening between academic historians and popular historians. Academic historians pan popular histories (think David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, etc…) because they do not offer the kind of interpretive depth common in academic writing. Yet these popular histories sell tens of thousands of copies and introduce their subjects to a lot more people than the run-of-the-mill academic monograph.

I think I am safe in saying that more Americans will learn something about the Bible from this mini-series than they will from the books in the upcoming fall catalogs of Oxford, Brill, T&T Clark, Peter Lang, The Society of Biblical Literature, or Wipf and Stock. Don’t get me wrong, bad history—whether it is related to the Bible, Christian America, or something else–needs to be countered, especially when it is being used to promote public policy—but I don’t think The Bible crosses the line in this regard.

Rather than sitting in their ivory towers and panning the film (I am not saying Gafney is doing this; her Bloggingheads interview with Posner offers a more nuanced position than the quote Posner chose to include in her post), Biblical scholars should be rejoicing. This is a wonderful opportunity for them to engage the public in meaningful and intellectually fruitful ways about the importance of the Bible. To be fair, I think this is what Gafney really wants to do. I can’t imagine that she wants all of those stories of ethnic cleansing and rape to be included in the mini-series. Instead, she wants a conversation.

And now on to Paul Harvey, who also weighed in on last night’s episode at Religion Dispatches. He compares the series to The Lord of the Rings and decries the violence and racial stereotypes. I offered a slightly dissenting view to a previous Harvey post on The Bible, but it is hard to argue with what he has to say in this latest piece.

On our ride back from Philadelphia last night, my family and I had another great talk about the violence portrayed in The Bible. My daughters are old enough to deal with all the blood and gore, but I am not sure I would have let them watch this when they were younger.

Harvey’s critique of the “whitening” of the Biblical world and the “racially-stereotyped” Samson character is another strong point, although, with the exception of Jesus (and it is a big exception), I saw many people of color in the film. It was clear to me that a deliberate effort was made, although perhaps not to Harvey’s satisfaction (and I defer to him on this), to have a multicultural cast.

I am glad to see that Harvey is using the occasion of the mini-series to speak to a larger audience through the medium of Religion Dispatches, but I also fear that he, Gafney, Posner, and others are merely preaching to the choir. How many of the Evangelical Christians who really need to hear what they are saying are reading Religion Dispatches? Perhaps they are finding it through Google searches.

This mini-series certainly has some problems, and it is the job of academics to point them out, but from where I sit, the good still far outweighs the bad.

According to David Wheeler, author of a recent post at the Atlantic, more and more Evangelical homeschooling parents want their children exposed to evolution. At least one publisher—Christian Schools International out of Grand Rapids, Michigan—has responded with homeschooling and Christian school textbooks that do not “attempt to discredit the theory of evolution”:

This staunch rejection of modern science tends to characterize today’s leading homeschool textbooks. For example, Science 4 Christian Schools, a homeschool textbook published by Bob Jones University Press, doesn’t mince words when it comes to evolution and Christian faith. “People who accept the Bible believe that God made everything,” the book states. “They call God’s description of how things began the Creation Model. Those who disregard the Bible believe instead that everything got here by itself. They call this description of how things began the Evolution Model.”

The assertion that anyone who believes in evolution “disregards” the Bible offends many evangelicals who want their children to be well-versed in modern science. Jen Baird Seurkamp, an evangelical who homeschools her children, avoids textbooks that discredit evolution. “Our science curriculum is one currently used in public schools,” she says. “We want our children to be educated, not sheltered from things we are afraid of them learning.”

The rising number of homeschool families striving to reconcile belief in God with today’s scientific consensus has attracted the attention of at least one publisher – Christian Schools International in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Most science textbooks that attempt to present the content from a Christian perspective also attempt to discredit the theory of evolution,” says Ken Bergwerff, a science curriculum specialist at Christian Schools International. “Some do it discreetly; others are quite blatant. The CSI science curriculum clearly presents science from a Christian perspective, but does not attempt to discredit the theory of evolution. The content presents God as the author of all of creation, no matter how he did it or when he did it.”

Christianity Today magazine has followed-up with a story of its own in which it notes that Ken Ham, the nation’s leading young-earth creationist and founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, has been disinvited from several homeschool conferences for “unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited” comments about evangelical evolutionists.

Now it is time for the evangelical homeschool movement to offer a more balanced view of American history than the usual fare offered by David Barton and other Christian nationalists.

The rumors are true. David Barton’s story about children with guns in a nineteenth-century classroom came from Bendigo Shafter, a Louis L’Amour novel.

Readers of my blog The Way of Improvement Leads Home will recall a post I did earlier this month in which I reported that Barton debunkers Chris Rodda and Warren Throckmorton traced Barton’s comments on gun control to L’Amour’s Bendigo Shafter. In case you missed it, here (scroll down) is Barton on the Glenn Beck Show talking about a story from the 1850s in which a group of elementary school students pulled their guns on an intruder. (Barton tells the story at about the six minute mark in the video).

In a Feb. 21 piece published at his Wallbuilders website, Barton admits that he got this story from L’Amour, but he argues that it is a true story. He writes:

The account comes from noted western historian, Louis L’Amour, one of the most famous writers of both historical western fiction and non-fiction. L’Amour amassed a personal library of 17,000 rare books/diaries/journals/documents particularly focusing on the American west, including numerous handwritten journals of frontier pioneers and settlers. Additionally, he personally interviewed many personalities who had lived in the waning days of the Old West, including gunfighters, cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, and many others. For his outstanding body of work across his lifetime, he received the Congressional Gold Medal and then the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan.

Later in life, L’Amour recorded a number of interviews, relating interesting practices and incidents he had found in his research. In one such interview, he related the specific real-life account that David cited – a story that he also included in one of his historical novels (he regularly included numerous true stories and anecdotes from the Old West in his stories). So not only did David not make up the anecdote, it actually came from one of America’s most celebrated western historians, who personally attested to its authenticity.

I find it rather appalling that Barton would celebrate a story in which kids in school are armed with guns. Yes, this is the kind of Christian nation we want—elementary students packing heat.

Just as disturbing is the fact that Barton is now using novels to make his historical points. Even my 102-year-old grandfather, who has read everything L’Amour has written, is fully aware of the fact that when he reads L’Amour he is reading fiction.

And why didn’t Barton mention the source of this story during his conversation with Beck? After all, he gives so-called “chapter and verse” for every other historical document he cites. Instead Barton tried to pass this story off as something that was a legitimate part of the historical record. This is what can happen when your approach to the past is motivated by contemporary political concerns.

But even if the story was true, by relying on L’Amour’s telling of it instead of a first-hand account of this incident, Barton violates one of his most basic rules of historical interpretation. Over the years he has chided many historians, myself included, for citing secondary sources instead of primary sources. He has tried to discredit authors, including Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch, for using second-hand accounts of events rather than eyewitness accounts.

For example, in this article from the Wallbuilders site he criticizes “scholars and popular historians” who “routinely utilize secondary sources or take quotations from these sources.” In the article’s first footnote he criticizes me for quoting John Calvin from Gregg Frazer’s doctoral dissertation “rather than the readily available Institutes of the Christian Religion.” What he fails to mention is that the quote from Frazer’s dissertation is not wrong—it can be found in Calvin’s Institutes. It is a quote that is easily traceable to the primary source.

By telling the 1850s story about kids pulling their guns on an intruder, Barton is giving authority to an account from a secondary source (L’Amour) that is impossible to trace to the original source. Such an approach to evidence contradicts what the Wallbuilders website has said about the way Barton goes about his research:

Scholars and popular historians routinely utilize secondary sources or take quotations from these sources, but when David returned to this subject for his 1996 book Original Intent, he decided to only rely on quotations that could be found in original primary source material. In an effort to be thoroughly transparent, he placed the handful of secondary quotations from Myth of Separation on an “Unconfirmed Quotations” list which he posted on WallBuilder’s website. At that time, he challenged writers on all sides of the debate over religion in the Founding Era to stop relying on secondary sources and quotations from later eras and instead to utilize original sources.

I wonder if the L’Amour story will find its way onto an “unconfirmed stories” list.

Historians can have honest disagreements about whether the L’Amour story, or other oral traditions passed down through the years, can be used as legitimate historical evidence. They can also debate whether citing a primary source that is quoted in a secondary source is good practice. But when David Barton attacks historians for using second-hand accounts and then goes ahead and does it himself for the purpose of using the “past” to make a political point on the Glenn Beck Show, he deserves criticism.

Yet another reason why Christians should not trust David Barton.

[Cross-posted from The Anxious Bench.]