A few years ago I heard a well-known, evangelical TV pastor preach an eloquent, but erroneous, sermon on the Christian virtues of the deist, George Washington. At the end of the sermon, I almost expected the preacher to canonize Washington as a Protestant saint. But this supposedly strict biblical preacher had sanitized and sanctified a life that was full of social evil---ethnocentrism and oppression. George Washington owned around 300 slaves. George and the founding fathers were a rich, white, male elite who discriminated against the poor, against women, against Native American and Afro Americans.
A evangelical Afro American pastor friend of mine once told me that he preferred reading American history written by secular historians because they were more honest than most Christian historians he had read. Too often evangelical Euro American writers or preachers have sanitized American history to preserve certain ideological truths regarding our supposed Christian founding.
Good news, Pastor Andy! I may have found an American history book that you would like to read. According to reviewer Greg Taylor, Christian historian of American religious history, Richard Hughes "seriously considers the views of more than two centuries of deprived African Americans and Native Americans. It's a book that can help Christians rethink their role and mission in American life."
To help us begin the process of rethinking American history, let us listen to three Afro Americans reflect on American history. First, Mississippi born and raised, Lee Harper: "For injustice ran deep and cloaked itself well among those things that seemed just."
Next, the Rev. Bill McGill: "The Christian Coalition should stop preaching the lie that this country was founded on Christian principles and values, and teach their children that only a godless people would be responsible for Indian genocide and African enslavement."
John Perkins, in his book A Quiet Revolution, ponders the causes of horrible oppression and devastating poverty; Perkins writes: "the roots of poverty were in the system itself, growing out of the very culture and traditions and history of the South and America."
Greg Taylor summarizes some of the myths that Hughes debunks: "The myth that the colonists were a chosen people to possess North America fed the myth of Nature's Nation, born in the revolutionary period, that European white colonists, not Africans or Native Americans, were best fit to effect God's purposes."
Liberty without justice for all is hollow and hypocritical. Before we sing "God Bless America" one more time, American evangelicals should first repent of our part in American ethnocentrism and oppression and then engage in restitution to correct the severe damage done to millions of people created in the image of God.
Another Christian book, The Wars of America: Christian Views, is brutally honest about our many wars and why we fought the. The Revolutionary War is discussed by the highly respected Christian historian, George Marsden. Marsden bluntly states that, contrary to popular opinion, especially among evangelicals, the British tyranny was not bad enough to justify a violent revolution. Yet the war was enthusiastically supported by many evangelicals.
If you need additional help in correcting your sanitized understanding of American history, I would recommend two quality books by Afro American historians: Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett and The Great Wells of Democracy by Manning Marable. The Trail of Tears (there many such trails) by Gloria Jahoda documents the horrible story of the forced removal of American Indian tribes east of the Mississippi river. Next read A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki, a Japanese American who specializes in American ethnic history. Then read Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny, the detailed story of the myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Finally, consider reading Racist America by Joe Feagin; this book includes a lengthy discussion of the pervasive impact of slavery on areas of American life during the colonial period.
With this lengthy introduction to prepare the reader for this review of a very important book, let us begin the discussion of Myths America Lives By. The fact that the noted author of Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah, consented to write the forward highlights the importance of this book. Bellah is deeply worried about how America is using its enormous influence in the world today. The Puritan and colonial past is being lived out today:
"It is precisely at this moment [2004] that Richard Hughes's book is so appropriate. In this hour of danger and anxiety he invites us indeed to look within, to examine the myths we have lived by, and to consider which of them we need to reaffirm and which to revise or even discard."
Bellah declares that there is one myth that we must discard: "the myth of innocence."
"Neither our military nor our economic intervention in the rest of the world has been innocent. No empire with any duration has ever believed in its own innocence. Humility about who we are and what we can do is essential if we are to avoid the many disasters that await us."
In the last sentence to his Foreword, Bellah raises an enormously troubling question: "To what extent can we help America become a responsible empire and to what extent must we stand against empire altogether?" In the first sentence of his book, Richard Hughes makes a stunning statement: "There is perhaps no more compelling task for Americans to accomplish in the twenty-first century than to learn to see the world through someone else's eyes." Too often our myths have blinded us and led us to be ethnocentric and arrogant, but we see ourselves as righteous, good and innocent.
After living as an American for 88 years, most of this time as an evangelical, I would add that evangelicals as a whole have a particularly difficult time sorting out truth from error as far as American history is concerned. They seem susceptible to believing ideological myths, especially if these myths are couched in religious language, even deistic religious language.
Hughes uses "myth" in a scholarly sense---a commonly believed story or narrative. "Contrary to colloquial usage, a myth is not a story that is patently untrue." Yet, as a person reads this book, especially the Afro American and the Native American critiques of these American myths, it becomes clear that many widely believed American myths are deceptions. They are erroneous myths told for an ethnocentric and oppressive ideological purpose.
Hughes warns against absolutizing, making sacred, our myths. When we do this even our virtues can turn into vices. Hughes list five American myths and two additional subpoints.
During the colonial period the Puritan myth---being a Chosen People---took root.
During the Revolutionary era, the myth of Nature's Nation arose. Drawing heavily from deism and the Enlightenment, and marginally from Christian principles, the founding fathers created a new nation.
The Second Great Awakening spawned the myth of the Christian Nation, primarily as a 'badge of cultural superiority," not as compassion for the ethnic poor and oppressed.
About the same time the myth of the Millennial Nation arose. America would usher in a millennial age of freedom, not just for itself, but for the whole world.
Out of the above myths flowed the doctrine of Manifest Destiny---that it was God's will for America to spread from coast to coast. Never mind the millions who would be dispossessed or killed in the process. Also free enterprise capitalism flowed out of these myths; enormously productive, it spawned greed and exploitation.
The final myth---the myth of the Innocent Nation---Hughes finds especially dangerous and troublesome because it is "without redemptive value." It is "grounded in self-delusion." After 9-11, this myth resurfaced and was used to justify the war against terrorism and the war against Iraq. At times even President Obama seems to ground his ideas in some of these myths. Possibly he has studied too much constitutional law.
Though Afro Americans believe deeply in freedom and equality and would love to have these ideals freely available to all, they have been severe critics of the above myths. Seldom have Euro Americans, Anglo-Saxons, practiced what they preached. From the time of the founding fathers, the poor, women, Native Americans and Afro Americans have been discriminated against. For them, Lincoln's eloquent phrase "a government of the people, by the people and for the people," is a hollow promise.
In 1852, Frederick Douglas, a former slave, powerfully indicted America for its failures:
"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of [British] tyrants brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery; your prayers, hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to Him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy---a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
Unfortunately, the same could be said in 2015, a time of mass incarceration, racial profiling and a huge racial wealth and income gap,
In a concluding comment to his Introduction, Richard Hughes notes that " in every instance, the five myths reflect a powerful religious perspective." When religion is misused to sanitize or sanctify history, it can become a particularly dangerous form of ethnocentrism and oppression.
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