The Queen of Heaven?

You just do not see the Bible coming up in the actual formation of the federal government, the U.S. Constitution. It just doesn’t happen. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are things today, Dan?

It’s a glorious summer or spring day.

Summer?

You are living in the future. Summer. It’s been—but it’s getting warmer and I do appreciate that.

Yes, it’s windy today, but the last couple of days it’s been nicer.

Yeah. So life is good. We have some crazy stuff to talk about this week. I’m going to enjoy talking about it. First, we’re doing a What’s That? Or maybe it should be a Who’s That? Because we’re, uh, we’re gonna hit the Queen of Heaven.

The very same.

Yeah, which, uh, which I, I was surprised by, uh, and, uh, and I think it’s—I think it’s gonna be a really fascinating topic of conversation. And then we’re gonna take issue, uh, and the issue we’re going to take is with the notion that these here United States of America were founded by and founded as a Christian nation. And boy, I think the jumping off point is the claim that was made recently by, most recently by the America Reads the Bible thing that we talked about a bit ago that the Bible is the most quoted text from any of the founding fathers. Yeah. So, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna dive into that. We’re gonna, we’re gonna get into it. So that’ll be a lot of fun.

But first, what’s that?

So, the Queen of Heaven, not the Queen of Hearts.

But the Queen of Heaven, you say it could be used multiple ways. Yes. What are the different—now, the one that you had me look up is the one that is mentioned a couple times in the Book of Jeremiah.

What’s the other way? Let’s start with the other way, and then we’ll get to Jeremiah.

Well, the other way is that Mary, the mother of Jesus, can be referred to as the Queen of Heaven. I think that’s primarily within the Catholic tradition. I don’t know if the Orthodox tradition adopts that title as well. I can’t imagine they do. But yeah, this is one of the titles that is attributed to Mary based on the notion that Jesus is the King and Mary was his mother. So she is—

So she should be by rights, the Queen Mother of Heaven.

Yes, well, and Queen Mother is a title that is like closely associated with that. Like when people talk about her as the Queen of Heaven, they will explain she’s the Queen Mother.

So yeah, I did bump into that when I was looking into this. I also bumped into people using that as a bludgeon to beat up Catholics and point out how dumb they are, because the Queen of Heaven is bad, is condemned in the Book of Jeremiah, and therefore they should be ashamed of themselves. So let’s dive over to Jeremiah.

Yeah, yeah, let’s. So we’re going to start in Jeremiah 7. There are several more references if we go into Jeremiah 44, and we’ll read some of those in a little bit. How many more references? I think 3 more references just in Jeremiah 4—no, 4 more references just in Jeremiah 44. But starting in Jeremiah 7, I’m going to start in verse 16. Okay. And the people of Judah are getting harangued here.

Yeah. Is this Jeremiah himself? Is that whose voice is doing the haranguing?

Well, the chapter begins, “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house and proclaim there this word.’” So is the Lord’s house, are we talking about the temple? Yes. Not the summer home. Not the place in the Poconos.

It can mean different things. But okay, the Lord—so Jeremiah has posted up at the door of the temple.

And he is now hollering in about how bad everybody is.

Yeah. And in verse 16, he starts, “As for you, do not pray for this people. Do not raise a cry or prayer on their behalf and do not intercede with me, for I will not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven, and they pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.” So this is obviously God speaking through Jeremiah.

“Don’t ask me for help for them. They’re making cakes, those jerks. " Yeah.

“When they know I prefer muffins. " Right. Yes.

“I am on a diet, you guys. " Rude.

And then we get— this is repeated, Jeremiah 44. We have 3 verses in a row, verses 17, 18, and 19. And here, this is talking about Egypt. This is— and these are diaspora folks in Egypt. Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food and prospered and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out libations to her, We have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine. And the women said, indeed, we will go on making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out libations to her. Do you think that we made cakes for her marked with her image and poured out libations to her without our husbands being involved?

And you know, guys are probably like, don’t bring me into this, don’t, don’t throw me under that bus, he’s already mad enough already. You had to bring me into And then down in verse 25, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, ‘You and your wives,’” because you brought the husbands into it, “have accomplished in deeds what you declared in words, saying, ‘We are determined to perform the vows that we have made, to make offerings to the Queen of Heaven and to pour out libations to her. ’ By all means, keep your vows and make your libations. " So God is kind of saying, “Yeah, keep on doing it. See what happens. " By all means.

See what happens.

Yeah. So, so there we have it. The, the, these clearly there was a practice. I mean, this is Jeremiah. I think you’ve mentioned a bunch of times was into putting the kibosh on a, on a bunch of different practices.

Were already in play that were happening.

Yes, we have a lot of this in this period. So this is stuff being written right at the time of the exile and during the exile and maybe a little before, depending on when you think Jeremiah was written, ‘cause Jeremiah begins before the exile occurs. But basically we’re coming up with explanations for how the exile could have happened. How could a foreign nation have come in and violated our autonomy and come in and destroyed the temple and forcibly migrated so many Judahites over to Mesopotamia. And the idea is, oh well, it must have been punishment. And this—.

Right, our God must have abandoned us to our captors.

Yes. And this is a classic literary motif, rhetorical motif in ancient West Asia, because you see it in Babylonian writing. You see it like the Moabite, the Mesha inscription from like 850-ish BCE. There’s a part where King Mesha is trying to account for why Moab was allowed to be a vassal to the nation of Israel, why Israel was allowed to subjugate them. And he says it was because Chemosh was angry with his land. Which is basically the same argument. Our patron deity got mad at us and was like, “Just for that, I’m making you a vassal to this other nation over here. " And so the same thing happens in ancient Israel and Judah. We’ve got, you know, every time that somebody’s cult statue was stolen, the rationalization— because you don’t want to just be like, “Well, I guess that god actually sucked. " You want to maintain the belief that this god has power and is your patron.

So you go, “Oh, well, this god fled the temple and fled the statue, not out of fear, but because they’re disgusted by us. " And that is what allowed, that’s what facilitated the destruction of the temple and the violation of the integrity, the sovereignty of our land. So, yeah, it’s a—.

I’m just going to say, You’re talking about them taking the icons or whatever out of it. It just sounded a little bit like a frat, a fraternity stealing the other team’s mascot or something. But I mean, I don’t mean to— yeah, I don’t want to diminish it, but it kind of has that vibe.

But yeah, yeah, that is kind of what’s going on. And because it’s, you know, it’s something that’s larger than the building, it’s larger than the statue itself. It’s the notion that this represents what holds us together as a people and establishes our identity and all these things.

Right.

God doesn’t— So that they can’t, this can’t happen again.

Because God did live in the statue. God was the statue or was directly associated therewith.

Yeah, yeah. And so you had ways to rationalize it, but then you also get this renegotiation going on. But anyway, one of the pre-exilic things that became very, very unpopular around the time of Josiah is, you could say, a Queen of Heaven, you could say Adonai’s consort, partner, or wife. And we’ve talked about this before with Asherah, the Israelite goddess. And there are some scholars who think that the Queen of Heaven is a reference to Asherah. But I’m going to say it’s not.

Okay. I had wondered that. I did delve into that a little bit, and it did seem like it was a controversial question. Yes. Definitely not a slam dunk by any means.

No, not a slam dunk. I think it’s probably not Asherah. We get Asherah, like we have explicit connections between Asherah and Adonai. We have inscriptions, the Kuntillet Ajrud inscription.

I’ve seen that. There is an inscription on a t-shirt that I have seen multiple times.

Yes, it’s actually printed on the t-shirt, not inscribed.

Oh, okay.

It is an image of an inscription. Yeah, but it talks about blessings by Adonai and by his Asherah. And we have a couple of different inscriptions that make reference to that and even have a drawing of the male and female divine figures. And you do have in ancient Akkadian, you do have Asherah referred to, or Ashratu, or Ashratum is how she’s referred to in Akkadian. She’s referred to as Kallat Shar Shame, which would be bride of the king of the heavens. So there’s a sense in which Asherah could be the Queen of Heaven, but I think there’s a closer connection to make. But first, one of the things that we’ve talked about how in the past, we’ve talked about how Josiah likely criminalized, vilified, demonized Asherah and Asherah worship. And there are a lot of scholars who think this was part of a broader kind of cult centralization where we’re doing away with, um, not just worship of other deities, not just worship of God’s wife, but even like ancestor worship, and even what scholars these days refer to as family religion.

Because notice something interesting about the passages that refer— the first passage in Jeremiah 7: “The children gather wood. The fathers kindle fire and women knead dough.” This is something that involves the entire family. This is a domestic practice.

Right.

And this is not something that’s going on downtown at the, you know, at the super temple. This is something that’s going on in people’s individual homes. And we have all kinds of evidence for this family religion going on in pre-exilic Israel where people are doing their own thing. And this seems to be one of the things that falls under the knife with Josiah’s cult reforms.

Right.

And so it’s, it’s not just the feminine divine that is cut out. It’s also other deities. It’s also probably ancestor worship, because a lot of the domestic family religion is probably— you know, you have— you go to your mortuary temple and you share a meal with your deceased ancestor. That’s worship.

And in Deuteronomy, again, the project of Deuteronomy, in the opinion of a lot of scholars, myself included, began under Josiah as his vehicle for accomplishing, to some degree, this cult centralization. But to— so I say to some degree because a lot of what’s in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic literature is later rhetoric. Rhetoric is not an accurate reflection of what was going on on the ground. But, um, there’s even a part in Deuteronomy which says if you’re bringing a food offering to Adonai, it cannot have been shared with the dead. So like, they’re making pretty explicit, um, they’re pretty explicitly, they’re coming after a lot of domestic religious practices and worship, right? Ancestor worship and the Queen of Heaven. And I’m going to argue— and there’s a, there’s a phenomenal book on this by a wonderful scholar named Susan Ackerman, and it’s called Under Every Green Tree, which is all about the worship of gods on the part of female clergy, priests, and things like that, as well as goddesses.

I was going to say that. I am smart enough that I did think of that, that those sound familiar enough.

They sound familiar, yes.

And sound linked enough that they sound like they could be the same thing or a version of each other.

Yeah, so we have Ishtar is Astarte in the West Semitic world. And so in the Bible we have Ashtaroth as one of the ways—it is kind of a demonizing, pejorative way to refer to Astarte by making it feminine plural as a way to kind of abstract what is going on here.

Your various Astartes.

That is one of the ways to understand it. But she is the Lady of Heaven, she is Queen of Heaven. In some places, she is associated with the heavens, with the stars. She is associated with a bunch of other deities in the Greek world that are associated with heaven and the stars. We also have her associated with war. So you will notice that one of the things that the people who are worshipers of the Queen of Heaven say is, once we stopped worshiping her, the famine happened. The land’s fertility failed us, but also we have been subjected to violence and we are no longer at peace and we are not prospering. And so it could be that we have lost our patroness who ensures that we are protected. So Astarte is Mistress of Horses, Lady of the Chariots.

This is one of the ways she is represented as battle-worn, battle-tested. But also, we have some inscriptions that talk about bakers who baked baskets of cakes for Astarte, the queen. So, one of the things that the women do according to the passage is make cakes for the Queen of Heaven.

And these might be—they are probably like raisin cakes is what a lot of scholars suggest is going on here. And they probably would have been—they probably had some kind of form, some kind of mold that the dough would have been in that would have made it so when they baked, they took a shape that included either it was shaped like a goddess or there was some kind of symbol that was baked into it that would have represented Astarte. And so, the interesting thing about that is what are the men of the household doing? They are gathering wood, they are building a fire. The women are the ones actually engaged in the material production of the actual offering, the means of worship. So this would be a cult that was focused on the labor of women and was something that was primarily mediated by women.

So I think Ackerman makes a wonderful case for understanding Astarte as the Queen of Heaven. And this would also be one of the things that fell under the axe as a result of not just of Josiah’s reforms, but probably if Jeremiah is being written during the exilic period, it is being written in a time when the Judahites who are away in exile are more directly exposed to the worship of Ishtar, which is probably going to be a lot more prominent in Mesopotamia. So they are in the lion’s den and getting exposed to that kind of stuff. And so it is probably going to be a lot more attractive, the worship of Ishtar.

Give me the—sorry, Josiah—give me the timeframe of Josiah and sort of overlay it on the Jeremiah timeframe that we are used to.

So there is probably—if, and my late 7th century BC history I need to bone up a little bit on, but there is probably an overlap between Josiah and Jeremiah. So he reigned from 640, and I want to say it was in a battle with the Egyptians—Necho, maybe? Not the wafer, but the pharaoh. I think like 609 BCE was when Josiah died, was killed in battle. And then Jeremiah, I am pretty sure, starts in like 25 years before that, like the last quarter of the 7th century, and then is writing into, or at least is represented as writing into the exile.

But Jeremiah, it feels like, it feels like what is happening as I read those passages in Jeremiah, it feels like these are just accepted practices that he is decrying. Like, everybody’s kind of doing it. Everybody’s into, you know, making these cakes for the Queen of Heaven. And he is saying, hey, we shouldn’t be doing this. And then by the time we get to Josiah, he’s like, no one is going to do it. And he commands it. And it is no longer just being decried. It is like, we are going to kill everyone who goes against us on this.

And you’ve got in the—and again, parsing apart the Deuteronomistic literature that is later rhetoric versus what might have been Josiah’s actual cultic reforms, you’ve probably got vilification of precisely this kind of stuff. One of the things that you’ve got in the Books of Kings is you’ve got a description of Josiah taking an Asherah pole out of the temple, which indicates there was an Asherah pole—the worship of Asherah alongside Adonai, the God of Israel, was taking place in the Jerusalem Temple. And, you know, the way the story is told, Josiah, 2 Kings 22, Josiah’s just bopping along doing his thing, and then suddenly somebody shows up and goes, “Hey, we found this book of the law,” and it turns out we’ve been getting it all wrong. And then he’s like, “Oh, shoot, the Asherah pole’s got to come down.” That was my favorite thing.

Meanwhile, Josiah is like, “And the book’s in my handwriting, that’s weird.”

How did that happen? And, you know, they take all that stuff out and they grind it to dust and they burn it in the Valley of Kidron. And then the illegitimate priests are also put to death. And there’s a lot of violence that goes on, at least the way the story is told in 2 Kings. The degree to which that’s historical, we don’t know for sure. I’m sure there was some pressure put on folks. But I think it is interesting how the Queen of Heaven is kind of one of the representatives of an earlier time when there was more and broader worship going on, where piety could be directed at a variety of different deities, even on an individual household basis. And that was all taken from people. And then after that, you could only worship adequately and properly if you took sacrifices or offerings down to Jerusalem. And if you didn’t live anywhere near there and you couldn’t afford to make that pilgrimage, I mean, you were kind of cut off to some degree.

So I’m one of those people—and you know, I get called a heretic for this kind of thing all the time—but I’m one of those people who is sad for the loss of that old-timey religion that probably made the relationship with the God of Israel and the family of the God of Israel a lot more meaningful to individuals and households back in the pre-exilic period before this king decided to get rid of all of that and make it so you weren’t allowed to worship that way. So I think the point I want to make is that, as you said, this was just something that was going on. This was not something that was considered problematic for probably centuries, right? Until somebody was like, time to tighten up the belt, God-wise anyway. And you’re not allowed to do that anymore. And oh, by the way, we’re going to vilify and demonize you for ever having done that.

Well, and it’s not just about centralizing the god worship, right? This is about centralizing power and structuring power so that it becomes—so that you have to get your salvation—salvation’s such a New Testament phrase.

Yeah, yeah. But you have your deliverance of some kind.

Yeah, yeah. You have to get your holy intercession through us, through me. Like, you can’t just bake a cake in your house, get the whole family involved, and feel like you’ve done something holy and feel like you’ve done something to benefit yourself. Yeah, you don’t get to benefit you. I benefit you.

Yeah. And all of my representatives who are all, by the way, men, right? So the role of women, the direct role of women in worship, is—it’s just disintegrated. It’s gone entirely. The mother in a household no longer gets to play that direct role, no longer gets to participate directly, and is now an NPC for all intents and purposes when it comes to the worship of the God of Israel. The only way you get to do it is through a man.

So yeah, there are some folks out there. There’s a book—I think it was called When God Was a Woman, and it was Merlin. I know the guy’s first name or the person. Now, shoot, now I forget who wrote it.

You keep talking and I’ll look it up.

Okay. But I’m pretty sure it’s called When God Was a Woman.

Merlin Stone.

Merlin Stone. Yes. And there are an awful lot of people who take that book and treat it as accurate. And the book is basically making the claim that religion was basically thoroughly matriarchal.

Right.

But there was a role for women in that, a central role, and particularly when it comes to folks like Astarte and Asherah and Anat. And there were other deities as well, goddesses that were involved in this. But yeah, I think Jeremiah represents— we get a little peek at a little bit of family religion going on that unfortunately, at least from my perspective, it’s going to be fortunate for, I think, the overwhelming majority of the people who are reading the Book of Jeremiah. But unfortunately, in my opinion, uh, we lost some of that old-timey family religion that probably— I think probably went a lot further towards, um, kind of generating a sense of community and belonging, uh, for all the members of the household than— yeah, than what we were left with. I—.

Yeah, I think that that’s a—.

The— I—.

The fact that Jeremiah literally describes, you know, the kids gathering the wood, dad building the fire, mom making the cake, literally describes a really heartwarming scenario, a scene, sets a scene, and then it’s like, and it’s bad.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s crazy to me. I think, yeah, I, I’m, but I’m really grateful that the author actually did write that whole scene out, because I think that it gives us a little slice of life, a little peek in the window of just sort of a standard household where they might be doing this sort of thing.

Yeah, and I highly recommend Susan Ackerman’s work for anybody who’s interested in learning more about this, and particularly her book, Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them. Um, the— it’s a, um, it’s a great book. It is a little technical, um, but, uh, if you’d like to learn more about what’s going on there, that’s wonderful. Also, uh, there’s a book by, um, uh, Bill Dever, William Dever, called Did God Have a Wife? Now that’s not about Astarte, that’s not about the Queen of Heaven as, as I’m representing it, that’s about Asherah, but that goes into what what Dever calls folk religion as opposed to official state religion. And that’s kind of a false dichotomy, but I think that’s a helpful book as well. Love it. Yeah.

Well, that’s it for the Queen of Heaven. She has been dethroned. Sad days for her. And for us, because that she— how much more interesting would everything be if there was still a Queen of Heaven? But let’s move on and take issue. Was the Bible the most quoted document by, by the luminaries of the early moments of our country?

Yes. No, it was not.

I mean, it was very highly quoted.

Yes, I think highly quotable.

Well, I mean, it was such a big part of culture of, you know, European and therefore American culture. Yeah. For so long. I, I don’t see how it could avoid being quoted. I don’t, you know, it was, it was a cultural touchpoint. For everybody.

Yeah. And it was not trying to avoid being quoted, but, but yes, the, the claim here though, and, and David Barton, the founder of Wallbuilders— oh yeah, which just sounds like a love your neighbor kind of organization, um, right off the start. But they, um, and here’s, here’s the— I, I guess this is their mission statement: American liberty is being eroded of late, and our biblical foundation is under constant attack. Here at Wallbuilders, we provide education, training, and resources to equip people to know and defend the truth to protect our freedom. And obviously by our freedom, it does not mean the freedom to walk the streets without being attacked by ICE agents or the freedom to do all kinds of things that traditionally have been associated with freedom. No, it obviously means the freedom to amass hordes of wealth and to oppress people.

To exert Christian control over non-Christians in this country. I feel like he doesn’t have the Satanic Temple in mind when he says our freedom.

No, no, obviously, because he will have defended the dude who went and vandalized the display of the Satanic Temple, because freedom for me, not for thee, is the real idea here. And as part of the America Reads the Bible puppet show, I guess we can call it. He said the Bible was the most cited source of our founders. And this goes back to a claim I’ve responded to many times on social media. I mean, Charlie Kirk has said it. We have heard this said by a number of others. Glenn Beck has said it. The House Speaker Mike Johnson has said it. Kirk Cameron. For some reason is, is in the public and is saying it. Um, Dinesh D’Souza has said it, Dan Patrick has said it, Newt Gingrich has said it. We’ve got a lot of people who are sharing this idea that the Bible was the most, uh, cited text by the founders, and it’s all coming from one paper, and it’s a paper that they obviously never read.

Yeah, and it’s a paper written by a scholar named Donald S. Lutz. And if you are unable to understand through the slight lisp because of my dental trays, that’s L-U-T-Z, Lutz. And the paper is called The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late 18th Century American Political Thought, and this was published in 1984 in the journal, the American Political Science Review. And there’s a table that appears on like the fourth page of the paper. And what Lutz did for this paper was he tried to gather all of the texts he could that were labeled political from the year 1760 to 1805.

Right.

And he gathered somewhere in the neighborhood of almost 1,000 documents. And then this was just a comprehensive kind of review of every citation. And there’s a table that says distribution of citations by decade and percent of total number of citations. The Bible, uh, comes in at a muscular 34% of all citations. Oh, the Enlightenment era authors come in at 22%.

Okay, so like a John Locke sort of thing, or—.

Yeah, yeah, uh, Montesquieu, Locke, Hume. Um, the Whig literature comes in at 18%.

Common law comes in at 11%. Classical literature comes at 9— comes in at 9%. Peers, so other people writing in the same time period, that comes in at 4%. And then other is 2%. So right off the bat, look at that, by 11% more than second place, the Bible is the most quoted text of this period, 1760 to 1805. Yeah. QED.

We need to shut up now then.

Yeah. But there’s an important qualification here, and this is— I’m reading directly from page 192 of this paper. Anyone familiar with the literature will know that most of these citations, specifically the Bible and Deuteronomy, by the way, is the most quoted text from these citations. Most of these citations come from sermons reprinted as pamphlets. Okay. Hundreds of sermons were reprinted during the era, amounting to at least 10% of all pamphlets published. And pamphlets—.

10%? That’s—.

Yeah, yeah, pamphlets were a huge way of— that was the social media.

Of this time period. You, if you had something to say, one, you took on a nom de plume, something clever, right? And then two, you published a pamphlet.

Um, 10% of all pamphlets published reprinted sermons. These reprinted sermons accounted for almost three-fourths of the biblical citations, making the non-sermon source of biblical citations roughly as important as the classical or common law category. In other words, the 34%, if you take out all of these sermons reprinted as pamphlets, which by the way are not coming from your Madison or your Jefferson.

Yeah, this isn’t George Washington.

Right. These are preachers who are giving sermons and then reprinting the sermons as pamphlets. You take that away, you’re left with about 10%. So you’re actually coming in somewhere between 3rd and 5th place on this list.

So, and then he goes on to say, it is relevant nonetheless to note the prominence of biblical sources for American political thought since it was highly influential in our political tradition and is not always given the attention it deserves. And then Lutz actually cites his own paper from a few years earlier called From Covenant to Constitution in American Political Thought, where he talks about the Bible and the notion of the American people as kind of like the glue that holds us together is a compact, which is, which is like closer to a covenant than it is to a contract. So it’s kind of a merging of Locke and something, um, akin to the people of God. You know, we are an American people because we come together under this compact, and this establishes our identity.

And, and state constitutions are, are hugely influential on the U.S. Constitution, and a lot of them had religious tests for office. Um, you know, that, that could just be, you know, you, you confess belief in a, in a God or something like that, or the Almighty. Or all the way up to a specific denomination of Christian. But when we actually take out the sermons reprinted as pamphlets, the wind comes significantly out of the sails of this argument, and it no longer becomes the most cited thing. The most cited thing outside the Bible, or once you take the reprinted sermons out, the top three are Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.

So, and obviously if you know about the influence of common law and Enlightenment era rational literature, that’s not a surprise. And that makes the best sense of how the Constitution came together.

Well, and when you look at America in that timeframe, in the sort of founder timeframe, you’ve got two things happening. You’ve got the Enlightenment era stuff that, you know, that started almost a century beforehand, but continues through that. And you’ve got the Great Awakening stuff that’s happening in the US, and that’s explicitly Christian. But it’s also like very, very American view of Christianity.

Very evangelical. Yeah. But, and the interesting thing is, the period of the, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, that’s right in between the First and Second Great Awakening, right? And it’s actually the period of the lowest church attendance in the history of the United States of America. So this is what— who, who’s the— oh gosh, I forgot the guy’s name, uh, but he, he’s a real fast talker. He’s kind of like Charlie Kirk, but he’s Jewish.

And, uh, Ben Shapiro.

Ben Shapiro. Yeah, he was, he was saying something. He’s like, somebody was like, what do you do to heal a nation? That is, you know, broken like ours? And he goes, “Go to church.” And I say, “That was you. You know, I want you to go to the temple, but go to church. This is founded as an American nation. You gotta go to church.” And it was like, well, it was founded in the period when the fewest Americans were going to church. So if that was this grand revelation, it occurred in spite of the low going-to-churchiness in America. But, and, and then Lutz goes on though, and, and I think this is what kind of drives the nail in the coffin of this claim that, you know, our nation was founded as a Christian nation based on the fact that the Bible is most cited by the founders. Um, because if, if it means anything to say the— we’re a Christian nation, it means we are politically somehow founded upon something Christian, right?

But Lutz goes on to say we’re gonna look just at political writings between 1787 and 1788, and that is the drafting and the ratification of the Constitution. And when we look at that, you get a— you get a small percentage of quotations from the Bible, but if you break it down, the Federalists quoted the Bible 0%.

Right. Yeah, that’s not their thing.

Yes, 9% of Anti-Federalist citations are of the Bible. So when it comes to the nuts and bolts of actually creating the federal government, uh, the Federalists, the folks who wrote the Constitution, said, “Now we’re good,” yeah, and did not bring up the Bible. You have a couple— when you look at the accounts of the Constitutional Convention, you have a couple references to Providence and God and this kind of stuff. But these are offhand and unrelated things to the actual composition of the U.S. Constitution. And you just do not see the Bible coming up in the actual formation of the federal government, the U.S. Constitution. It just doesn’t happen.

Well, and it’s so interesting, you know, one of the things I, you know, I look at, uh, David Barton’s WallBuilders, you know, website. I want to, you know, in one place he has an article that’s like the Founding Fathers on Jesus, Christianity, and the Bible. And first of all, the opening paragraph, the, the introductory paragraph of that part of his website is astonishing. And I should say, David Barton is hailed as a luminary historian. This is— this man is a garbage historian. He—.

Well, yeah, like he’s got a BA in religious education from Oral Roberts. Yeah, like that’s it. It’s basically a correspondence degree, right?

No one in the world of history respects this man. But he is hailed as a major historian by those who want to use his work as cover for creating, for, you know, for creating laws that sort of go against, go directly against the church-state separation that was intended in the U.S. Constitution, etc. I love that the opening lines of this page on his website say, “For decades, accusations against the Founding Fathers have abounded. One of the common criticisms is that the Founding Fathers were a collective group of atheists, agnostics, and/or deists,” which you and I were laughing about because that’s a hell of a group.

Yeah, yeah.

Atheists, agnostics, or not atheists, or slash agnostics. It’s like, deists are— yeah, anyway, who wanted a strict separation of church and state, resulting in a secular government and a public square. He’s framing that as an accusation against the— no, that’s explicitly what they said they were doing.

Yeah, quite clear. And a lot of the discussion that is intended to muddy the waters will— like, I’ve been looking at folks trying to defend this claim, and they immediately get into state constitutions. It’s like, okay, what do you— why did they come together for the Constitutional Convention and create a government that superseded the states and their constitutions? And they explicitly said that we will have zero religious tests for office because a bunch of state constitutions have religious tests for office. And so when they come together to say, well, we are going to reject this feature of the lower-level governance, you can’t say that feature of the lower-level governance is in the federal, you know, it’s not baked in when they explicitly said, ooh, I’m leaving you out. Right. So that is a ridiculous fallacy.

But, you know, I think that’s par for the course for somebody who, um, who’s not phenomenally well educated when it comes to history and has really just been making a fairly comfortable living spreading misinformation and engaging in identity politics and trying to keep people angry.

It’s the problem that we run up against whenever we see apologists, whenever we see— like, the problem is when you have to start from a conclusion and then backfill everything.

Yeah, yeah.

Uh, all of your premises to, to hit the target of the conclusion that you cannot allow not to be true.

You’re not going to do good work. Yeah, that— it’s the opposite of, of what we say we’re trying to do, which is— yeah, they’re doing dogma over data, and, uh, and we’re trying to come at it from the other direction.

So I— and I don’t think— and it’s funny because, you know, the WallBuilders page that I was talking about then follows up with a whole bunch of quotations from different founders that declare their Christianity. And it’s like, okay, nothing to do with the point. Yeah, yeah, plenty of them believed it. I mean, you know, let’s not talk about the fact that Jefferson literally physically cut things out of his Bible, cut all of the sort of miracles out of his Bible because he liked Jesus as a philosopher and did not like the, you know, was not into the whole miracle thing. Yeah, that’s a little inconvenient for them.

Well, and Jefferson was the one who wrote about the Creator and Nature’s God and Providence in the Declaration of Independence, and they’re like, “See, it mentioned God there.” Jefferson was the most deist of the founders and was— and people try to make the point, “Well, oh, he identified as a Christian.” He said, “I’m a Christian to the degree that it is Christian to do this.” And yeah, these folks, and even Madison, probably the most pious of the main founding fathers, he was one of the most ardent about maintaining a strict separation between church and state. And it was not because, you know, I’ve heard people argue now, oh, the church and state division was actually to protect Christianity and make sure that it was the foundation of everything. No, it was because they saw what happened when church got involved with the governments and they wanted to avoid that.

They have explicitly— we’ve got letters, we’ve got all kinds of stuff from founders explicitly saying, we’re trying to avoid all of the problems that arise when state power gets entangled with church power. And so yeah, it was very clearly an attempt to create a government that would not be under the thumb of any kind of religious authority. And you know, you’ve got people—

And wouldn’t impose any kind of religion on the people. Like, not only—not only did they want it not to be under the thumb of a religious authority, but they also didn’t want the government to impose religion of any sort on their constituents.

Yeah. And there are folks who appeal to, like, Adams saying that, you know, this—our nation is designed for a religious people and for no other. And this is kind of an old Enlightenment-era notion that morality is founded upon religion. And it didn’t mean Protestant Christianity, it just meant religion. Religion is where you get morals from. And that this is a domain, a sociocultural domain that is the seedbed of morality. And that’s just not true. But that is not saying that the government is Christian. It’s just saying we want the people to exercise some kind of religion because morality is necessary for this experiment to succeed. And Adams, a while later in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed a treaty that says that the US is in no sense founded as a Christian nation. So you’re gonna find quotations back and forth, but when it comes down to it, for it to mean anything to WallBuilders and these folks today to say that the US is a Christian nation, it must mean that structurally the government is Christian in orientation.

And that’s just demonstrably false. And it doesn’t matter that these folks were all heavily influenced by a Protestant worldview. Duh, obviously. That does not make the US a Christian nation. I just, I’m baffled by the juvenility the—just how jejune the arguments for this idea are. It’s just a dogma. It’s just a straight-up dogma that people are trying to defend because—.

Well, and even if we were to say it, you know, the Bible is the most heavily quoted, you know, certainly many of these guys made reference to the Bible in their writings. Okay, You know, if I were to write a thing and I was to say, you know, Dan, Dan McClellan is such a Hufflepuff, that doesn’t mean that what I’m saying has anything to do—like, the point that I’m making is that I am endorsing full-throated the, uh, you know, Harry Potter world or whatever. It’s just a cultural touchstone. It’s a cultural reference that everyone would understand, and that is sort of immediately digestible.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s just because you speak the language of it and just because you’ve grown up in the world of it does not mean that therefore all output is appropriatable, right, by the thing. So yeah, we can—yeah, it’s a silly argument, but definitely Donald Lutz’s work does not establish the claim in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. And when people say that, you know, they heard something on the internet and they liked it and they repeated it and they didn’t bother to go check out whether or not it was true or what the actual source said at all.

Right.

So yeah, there you go.

Know what you’re talking about before you go spreading stuff out there. So that’s great. If, if you would like to become a part of making our show happen, and keeping this running, please consider becoming one of our patrons. Uh, you can go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma where you can choose what level you would like to contribute to us.

It—.

There’s no ceiling, there’s no top limit, so you can just shoot for the moon if you want to. But that’s where you can help make us happen and help, uh, you know, you can gain access to an early and ad-free version of every episode, as well as the, uh, the after party, which is bonus content that we do every single week where we answer a lot of our patrons’ questions and we just have a really fun time with it. Uh, so, so consider heading over there. Uh, and thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show. Thanks to JJ for being our producer, and Thanks to all y’all for tuning in. We’ll talk to you again next time.

Bye, everybody.

The Queen of Heaven?

Segments

The Transcript

Books

Topics

Tags