New Rule: Don't Google Your Past.
Ok, honestly I wasn't Googling when I brushed shoulders briefly with a ghost from the past... but what a ghost. My old youth minister from the early eighties (a lifetime ago) is not just still in the industry but a leading kookster. Even more the devout fundamentalist, he's now juxtaposing Orwell with justifications for a church-state?
Bless my soul.
It would be cliché to quote Orwell here were it not for the fact that fundamentalist intellectuals do so with even greater frequency than those of the left. At a rally to expose the “myth” of church/state separation I attended this spring, Orwell was quoted at me four times, most emphatically by William J. Federer, an encyclopedic compiler of quotations whose America’s God and Country—a collection of apparently theocentric bons mots distilled from the Founders and other great men “for use in speeches, papers, [and] debates”—has sold half a million copies. “Those who control the past,” Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984>, “control the future.” History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny.
Federer, a tall, lean, oaken-voiced man, loved talking about history as revelation, nodding along gently to his own lectures. He wore a gray suit, a red tie marred by a stain, and an American flag pin in his lapel. He looked like a congressman, which was what he’d wanted to be: he was a two-time G.O.P. candidate for former House minority leader Dick Gephardt’s St. Louis seat. He lost both times, but the movement considers him a winner—in 2000, he faced Gephardt in one of the nation’s most expensive congressional races, forcing him to spend down his war chest. Federer considered this a providential outcome.
Federer and I were riding together in a white school bus full of Christians from around the country to pray at the site on which the Danbury, Connecticut, First Baptist Church once stood. It was in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists that Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” three words upon which the battle over whether the United States is to be a Christian nation or a cosmopolitan one turns. Federer, leaning over the back of his seat as several pastors bent their ears toward his story, wanted me to understand that what Jefferson—notorious deist and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—had really meant to promote was a “one-way wall,” designed to protect the church from the state, not the other way around. Jefferson, Federer told me, was a believer; like all the Founders, he knew that there could be no government without God. Why hadn’t I been taught this? Because I was a victim of godless public schools.
“‘Those who control the present,’” Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’” He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,” he said.
To Bill's point, I attended both godless public schools and "godly" private schools and don't recall ever being taught that government couldn't exist without god. Even in a Baptist school with the sister of a Congressman as my American Government teacher I missed out on the how god build the three branches of government and how we should thank him by relinquishing control to the church. I would encourage Mr. Federer to examine closely the successes of all the countries that have by will or force, instituted church-states and explain to the class how it would improve the United States.