News-Record.com

Well, Reuters -- perhaps out of pure sloppiness, perhaps out of an excessive willingness to believe the foreign media's own hype about the worst intellectual excesses (or deficiencies) of Americans -- ran this story. No one who has lived his whole life here would unquestioningly accept this story as true, I hope. And yet some people did -- among them blogger Matt Drudge (whom I don't link to as a general rule). In fact, without ascertaining the facts, Drudge actually posted contact info for the school and principal, thereby no doubt subjecting them to a barrage of angry -- and uninformed -- phone calls and e-mails.

As I've said before, any reporter for a real news organization who had Drudge's record for being dead wrong on facts would have a short and unhappy journalism career. But this isn't about bloggers v. "real" journalists (a false distinction to my eyes, but I digress).

It is, instead, about the way in which a specific kind of American Christian conservative -- a group that tends to decry any notion of "victimhood" among women, minorities or other groups susceptible to prejudice or bigotry -- tends to see itself not only as victim but also as persecuted. Here. In America.

Nuts, I know; after all, with the possible exception of Sen. Joe Lieberman, who is an Orthodox Jew, is there anyone who could get elected president of the United States today without having professed some variation of the Christian faith, often and publicly? And this despite the Constitution's ban on a religious test for public office. I suppose I've always been sort of aware of this phenomenon, but when I began covering religion for the N&R in the mid-1990s I was stunned to learn how widespread, and how resistant to documented historical fact, it was.

And of course, because this group sees itself as victimized, it pursues remedies, as do the groups it criticizes, in the same way that the groups it criticizes do: It sues. And the particular group doing the suing, is the Alliance Defense Fund, whose hands, with respect to the establishment clause of the First Amendment, are just about as dirty as they come. If we really need tort reform (a separate question I'm not touching here), this would be a good place to start.

As has been noted many times in many places -- go Google it if you don't believe me; I'm not going to do your homework for you -- the framers of the Constitution included Christians (my own Presbyterians numerous among them), Deists and atheists. Most professed belief in some sort of higher power and many thought it advisable that Americans, as individuals, should seek that power's blessing for the country, facts that some American Christian conservatives, with no historical basis, have reinterpreted to mean most or all the Framers were fundamentalist Christians who intended America to be a Christian nation. Bzzzt. Sorry, wrong answer, but thanks for playing; today's fundamentalism actually is a much more recent development.

Our system of government is probably the greatest human achievement to emerge from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Yet tens of millions of Americans are fleeing the Enlightenment as fast as their belief in creationism can carry them, while God watches and shakes his head at how often and how easily we miss the point.

And years from now, some of these same people still will be huddled around the campfire, as it were, telling stories about the school that wouldn't let a teacher give copies of the Declaration of Independence to students because the document mentions a Creator....