Time to Stop Pretending and Walk Away

The idea of an international organization to promote peace and cooperation among governments is a good one. It is also apparently one that is very difficult to put into practice. The League of Nations failed fairly completely in the years between the world wars. The United Nations began in 1946 with the at least nominal support of all the great powers and the good wishes of much of a war weary world. Yet, it too has been a miserable failure. From an organization initially comprised largely of more or less civilized governments (except for the Soviet Union and its satellites), it has degenerated into one quite often dominated by despotisms and thug states. It does effectively nothing to promote peace, and its various agencies are superfluous at their rare best and downright pernicious at their far more frequent worst. The UN as now constituted is a forum for grafters, con men, murderous anti-Semites, America haters, petulantly self righteous beggars, and assorted fascist and socialist planners with stars in their eyes.

None of this is news. Anyone paying honest attention knows it. The puzzling thing is that people who do know it and may even be outraged by it continue to support the UN anyway. I received a mailing today from B’nai B’rith bemoaning the UN’s hypocrisy and vicious anti-Semitism but nonetheless expressing hope that the UN could “refocus” and realize its promise. This goes way beyond wishful thinking and into the area of dangerously delusional thinking. The people from B’nai B’rith are not alone. There are plenty of people who know what is going on, but recoil from the obvious conclusion. The Quixotic hopes of 1946 are not going to be realized. The UN is not going to reform or become useful. It is time to pull the plug.

In fact it is past time. When a project or organization becomes an irreparable failure, blindly keeping it going does not help reach but rather hinders achieving the goals one had for it. The United States needs to stop pretending and quit the United Nations, boot it out of New York City (one hopes to find a more appropriate headquarters location in Beirut, Pyongyang, or Khartoum), sell the building’s site to developers, and cut off all financial and other support to UN agencies. Honor and realism require nothing less. Then after a while perhaps the civilized nations can consider forming a replacement that might actually do some good in the world.

Religion and the Founding Fathers

There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether the United States is a Christian nation with much of it focusing on the questions of whether the founders of the republic were Christians and whether they founded the country as a Christian nation. In attempting to answer those questions sensibly, the first thing one has to know is what precisely one means by a Christian.

Historically, for most of Europe for most of a thousand and more years before the American Revolution being a Christian meant being a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Since this definition excludes millions of people who profess to be Christians, it is not usually employed in general discussion in present times, being seen as too narrow. A more contemporary and ecumenical definition might say a Christian is someone who believes in one god (either in a strict monotheism or in a de facto pantheon where one divinity reigns supreme) and sees virtue and wisdom in the moral teachings of the Bible. However, this definition is too broad, as it would at a minimum label Jews and Moslems as Christians, something neither Jews, Moslems, nor the doctrines of most Christian churches believe to be true. The right definition is the one that goes to the heart of what distinguishes Christianity from other religions: a Christian is a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus and in the trinity.

One also needs to know what one means by a founding father. If one means anybody who was an adult between 1776 and 1783 and supported the revolution, then clearly most were Christians. Of course so were most of the Tories who sided with the British and most of the indifferent who did not take a side. The population of the colonies was comprised in overwhelming majority of Protestant Christians. However, when referring to the founding fathers, most people are not talking about the population of colonial America as a whole but about the men who shaped and led the creation of the new nation. The debate focuses on whether they were Christians founding a Christian nation.

Starting with the four most important and influential founders - Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine - we see that many were not. In the case of Jefferson and Paine this is certain. Paine in an entire book and Jefferson in numerous writings make it quite explicit that they are deists who reject both the divinity of Jesus and the idea of the trinity. While Franklin is not as straightforward or emphatic, his writings still makes his deism clear enough. There is less direct evidence with Washington and more ambiguity. However the higher probability and the preponderance of evidence lie with the hypothesis that he too was a deist rather than a Christian. Beyond these four, John Adams was a Unitarian, and Ethan Allen, Gouverneur Morris and probably James Madison were also not Christians. Neither were many others of the founding fathers. The claims that they almost all were are simply false.

It is equally false to assert that, even if the most important founders were not Christians, Christianity was the decisive and shaping influence on the republic or its constitution. By 1776 Christianity had been the dominant religion of Europe for over a millennium. In that time Europe saw states that really were Christian through and through – imperial Spain, czarist Russia, the Papal states in Italy, and many others. Indeed for much of that time virtually every nation and principality in Europe not under Islamic rule was explicitly a Christian state. Most of them were also despotisms. This by itself, apart from any knowledge of the history of the philosophies of the Enlightenment and their truly decisive influence on the founders, should offer conclusive evidence that a Christian population is not a sufficient condition for a liberal constitutional republic and that something more was at work in the founding of the United States.

There is of course a sense in which America is and always has been a Christian nation. Most Americans are Christians, and their religious beliefs and traditions influence their actions. This would not be the same country if, say, Islam or animism were the preponderant religion. However these obvious facts are far from what the special pleaders on the religious right are claiming.