Andrew L. Seidel and Dr. Jerry Coyne discuss The Founding Myth - Hemant Mehta emcees

if my pleasure to introduce both of these gentlemen who were here tonight Jerry Coyne over there is the professor emerita s' in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago he has written more than a hundred research papers and two really excellent books why evolution is true and faith versus fact both of which I would highly recommend he's going to be asking the questions for tonight so welcome Jerry Coyne and the other person here who you may have heard of is Andrew Seidel and he's the his title is the director of strategic response at the Freedom From Religion Foundation he is one of their attorneys and I do have a bio but I figured I'm not gonna read that I will tell you a story though about Andrew I've known him for many years but about five years ago I had the opportunity to listen to Andrew give a talk to a large group of young atheist activists and the thing is what do you tell a group of young atheist activists and he told them I'm gonna give you a talk about how you get the kind of job you want cuz a lot of those students may have wanted to get a job doing the sort of thing that he does which is work in the church state separation world and he did a little bit of background and he doesn't know I'm telling you this like this is stuck with me for five years now because he basically said like let me tell you how I got my job at the Freedom From Religion Foundation and he basically said and I'm paraphrasing here he basically stalked the people who ran the Freedom From Religion Foundation until they gave him a job involving like writing articles sending them as articles meeting up with them saying let me buy you dinner so I can talk to you and sell myself to you as to why you should hire me and it was very effective and the reason I mentioned that is because he's someone who knew for a long time that arguing for church-state separation is the thing that he is the most passionate about and it's the thing he wants to devote his career to so he said he's writing a book the fact that he's writing a book called the founding myth about this myth that we're a Christian nation is pretty much like not just in the ballpark he's hitting the Grand Slam of the things he's most passionate about when it comes to he's not only an expert in this field it's the thing that he would be reading about and writing about even if he wasn't in this field so if you haven't read the book yet I would highly encourage you to read it ask him tough questions when you get a chance and I will be back at the end of this to moderate the Q&A but and recital I read the books way it's actually three times if we count its first incarnation which is very different from the version we see today and I recommend it highly and you'll like it quite a bit Andrew wants to call special attention to the footnotes which I'm going to do to show the diligence of his work his research thing there's a lot of footnotes so did you pay attention to that where I wanted to do this even let's give Andrew a chance to talk about the genesis of his book if he can excuse the word Genesis and who the audience is who was aimed at maybe talk about three of his cases in constitutional law and mainly repress briefly the contents of the book without giving you too much of a spoiler about what it says so I'll start off with when I was reading that preface which is by Dan Barker the co-president of the FFRF Day I said that that you've been running this book for years yeah ever since he met you in 2010 yes it's nine years so that's a long time and I just wanted to what compels you to write it in the first place so this actually this started out as a law review article that just got really out of hand I initially was very taken with the idea that the United States was based on the ten commandments that our law and government on the Ten Commandments in 2005 the Supreme Court decided a couple of cases and one of the cases they struck down a Ten Commandments display and in the other case they allowed Ten Commandments display to stay up and one of the reasons I'm paraphrasing and oversimplifying here was that the Ten Commandments influenced our law and our historical for that reason so that this display is acceptable and that didn't make sense to me there was a Ten Commandments display in Denver where I was going to school at the time and I wanted to write a law review article about this and the more that I went through each of the commandments and kind of compared them to America's founding principles I realized that there's just this fundamental conflict between the principles embedded in the Ten Commandments and the principles on which our nation was founded and that conflict for me made it fair to say that the Ten Commandments were unamerican and that idea started then kind of I ended up running with it and it became well I mean not just limited to the Ten Commandments I look at other principles in the Bible things like hell and vicarious Redemption through human sacrifice and I'll compare those to some of our founding principles in the Bill of Rights and then from there is like well I'm this is already way more than I thought it was gonna be so I just kind of kept going with it but really it was to push back against bad history being used in our courts to decide cases and eventually violate the separation of state and church and so part three of the book is the 10 commandments part part 2 of the book is comparing the Bible to these and so they all made it in there but it was there's just a lot of you article that got way like this yeah I mean none I've written a couple of articles since and limited myself I actually wrote a historical review recently about on the if you look at that the manuscript of the Constitution at the very end it says written are done in the year of our Lord and that actually is a big argument for Christian nationalists and I wanted to trace how that word made it onto the manuscript itself and so I did a lot of historical research and really dove into the archives for this one it was a really fun review to write and that one got published very very quickly in constitutional studies turns out it turns out that most of the founders didn't know it was even on there I'll describe a guy named Jacob shallows put it on there while they were debating some other really important things so most of them assigned it likely without even knowing that it was on there you mentioned Christian nationalism which wasn't a charmer I'm really familiar with the beginning but it's clear that the underlying famous because they fight the rising tide of Christian Nationals and maybe you could tell us a bit about what it is why Trump is considered a Christian nationalist even though I thought Trump was an atheist before well he thinks of himself as God so we can't call him innate what exactly is so Christian nationalism is the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation that we are based on judeo-christian principles and that somehow we have strayed from that foundation and that's the actually the really important part of Christian nationalism that we've gotten away from our religious roots and we need to get back and that language of return and getting back to the religious roots is what they use to justify many of the overtly religious policies that you are seeing today your Christian nationalism would include things well first let's say that it actually before the 2016 election it was an impotent sideshow okay this was on the fringes of conservative politics on the fringes of conservative religion but Donald Trump tapped into Christian nationalism in a way that we've we've never seen before and if you look at the best indicator for a Trump voter in the 2016 election it was not their race it was not their religion despite how much we here evangelicals supporting Trump it wasn't their political party even it was believing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and so that was the best indicator of a Trump voter in the 2016 election so he rode a wave of Christian nationalism into the most powerful office in the world and since then he has been legislating that Christian nationalism into a public policy the immigration ban that is Christian nationalism the move of the embassy to Jerusalem is another element of Christian nationalism and it's happening at the state level of course - I mean everything that you're seeing with the abortion laws that are being passed these draconian abortion measures Christian nationalism and it is putting the Christian religion into law the goal really is to redefine what it is to be an American so that to be an American is to be a Christian to be a Christian is to be American and then to reshape the law accordingly so that Christians are a favored class and all Mountain Christians be they religious minority or atheists are this our second-class citizens a subclass that is that is the goal and if you read some of their their internal materials they're pretty darn clear about what they're trying to do so I mean currently never struck me as religious before he ran for president I was under the assumption of his a theist is a go to church does he have you ever seen him in church yeah only when it's politically convenient anyway so I mean we saw him at church just a few days ago after he went golfing and so why does he have this immense appeal for Christian nationalists if he's not really much of a Christian and he speaks their rhetoric is is a big part of it and he gives them he puts their policies into practice he's giving them things that they want you know it's one of them one of the more interesting things at least from our side is that we secular Americans I think do a pretty bad job of talking about state church separation in one respect and that is that we don't talk about the benefit to religion enough because 70 at least percent of the country depending on what study you're looking at our are believers so we need to explain to them why State Church benefit is use state church separation benefits them as well and James Madison put it really nicely he said that religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they're mixed together and what do you meant by it it's one of the reasons we're keeping religion out of government is also to keep government out of religion in a way and what you're seeing with Trump and I think some religious groups in the country are getting fed up with this is him using religion as a political weapon as a tool to ensnare voters I think you're right that he's completely disingenuous about it but it gets in votes if he speaks the language he doesn't have to walk the walk for sure we know that but if he speaks that language they're gonna go out and vote for it yeah so I mean in terms of his personal behavior he's hardly where you go getting outbreak Christian he's basically a moral he's a liar serial philanderer etcetera they don't care about that as long as he gives them what they want yeah I mean I think that I think that's a fair fair receipt and this is sort of dictatorial mean play into I absolutely think that's true this Trump as the strong man as this bully up there in the pulpit I mean if you are a Christian of deep faith and you've been brought up in this religion from your youngest days you Trump is the biblical God right he is a bully on that on that level and if you are taught to obey and revere a bully like the biblical God it makes sense that you would also revere Trump in that same way it's transference and I talked about this pretty extensively in the book because I think there's a really good argument to be made that the authoritarian totalitarian leanings of Trump really remind Christian nationalists of their biblical God and that's one of the reasons they're so attracted to it well I don't want to give away too much of what's in the book but now let's give it all the way well you bought the books the basic center of it I mean there's four parts to it the the the nature of the beliefs of the founders of the country whoever the founders might be and that's something Andrew talks about Mooney consider and founder of America the United States versus the Bible how much is the country founded on Biblical principles and then the Ten Commandments versus the Constitution where Andrew actually compares each of the commandments against the constitutional principles thing believe me the commandments don't come off looking very good in front of this part I write I like quite a bit because it's historically interesting American verbiage how how come we still have In God We Trust on our mine in a secular state how come the president says so help me God and God bless america why the Pledge of Allegiance says you know as the Word of God mention it so but surrender lying all this are these two myths that you weren't dispelling I had a bit of a I'm not a problem but I wanted you to distinguish the Kim so there are two myths that you mentioned recently that underlie the whole book could you talk about them until why they're different yes absolutely so I mean one of the central claims that you hear and how we define Christian nationalists is the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation how many people have heard that claim how many people have had a debate either in person online somewhere about that guy okay when you get into that debate I think probably many people many Americans certainly understand that we are not a Christian nation but there's a fallback position that your opponent adopts pretty quickly and it goes along lines of something like this well I didn't mean we're founded as a Christian nation what I actually meant was our nation was based on judeo-christian principles right and it's a much bigger claim another separate claims right yeah that's - yeah exactly myth 1 and then myth 2 is that back up claim that we're founded on judeo-christian principles and that it's it's a vague or claim because what is a judeo-christian principle if you people it doesn't get challenged because people don't even know what that is it's just assumed to be true but if you could disprove that second one you would necessarily blow the the water so what what I decided to do in my book which is different I think from a lot of the other really good Christian nation books out there was I I decided to ask the question did you Day on Christian principles whatever they might be positively influenced the founding of the United States of America and the answer to that is no they didn't and in fact it's a good thing they didn't because those principles are so opposed to the values and the principles on which our nation is built that it is as I said earlier fair to say the today of Christianity is unamerican and so that's what I really tried to do in the book is show that those those central principles in the two different schools of thought or the theology and the school of thought are fundamentally opposed and cannot be reconciled that that Christian nationalism truly is on America so if myth number one was false and the founders I'm sorry I've been through one was was true that the founders were indeed Christians that would that what myth number two was was true as well that the nation was founded judeo-christian principles if those principles were adumbrated by which atheists that wouldn't matter to the Christian nationalists so the character of the founders is not really that relevant to the argument nevertheless you spend a lot of time talking about yeah the nature of that I do I think it's really hard to have a conversation about the founding of our nation without talking at least a little bit about the religious beliefs of the founders but I do try to make the point in the book that look the this conversation about what the founders believed is it really is fascinating and it's so much fun to have but it's beside the point right it actually doesn't matter to the argument because even if they were all what we would consider today to be evangelical Christians you would still have to show that they then took the principles that were central to their religion and injected them into the government and you can't do that I mean just the fact that they are Christian doesn't necessarily mean that they hold on Christian principles to found the nation so I said let's forget about their religion for the most part and let's focus on the actual principles that they used to build our government and I mean I do it is a fun conversation to have and it's really fun to think about you know who believed what at one point Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Bible and cut out all the supernatural stuff the resurrection angels he likened pulling out the good stuff from the Bible to pulling diamonds out of a dome he'll it doesn't really sound like a Christian to me and it's fun to talk about that kind of stuff but it kind of gets to it's a little beside the point when you're having this this argument the more important issue is did they actually look to those religious principles when they were trying to build our nation if we know that they didn't we've got the records and the record also shows it's an athlete's document at the beginning it at the very best they were deists I don't I mean I guess nobody used to be a theist back then but do you think for example is Madison and Jefferson even Washington where would they be atheist if they were alive today I think a lot of them probably would and you might be able to speak to this too I mean I've heard it said that it was really hard to be to call yourself an atheist before Darwin and I don't know do you think that might be true or not yeah the word wasn't even used Huxley I think was agnostic that actually count yeah they weren't they were Diaz but yeah I mean yeah I think I think it was I think was probably hard to really conceive of that before you had an answer that that the answer that Darwin gave us yeah but I'd be willing to bet yeah it's like Dawkins said that dr. Darwin and finally made a theism intellectually respectable yeah but dispelling the buzz Capo an argument for design which was I mean for God which was the design as an agile world yeah so if you got up Jefferson here now instead of me sitting next to you and you could ask him one question where was it you really believe that's it man that's that's a that's a hard one oh I mean I probably have to ask him why he continued to own slaves given all the things he wrote unfortunately but he would mean he's really just that such this contradictory character because we could write about freedom and these ideas in ways that still speak to us today but then was such I mean a coward when you come down to it when he was implementing them in his own life he utterly failed to do so but I just I mean I'd still have to sit down to dare with any of those guys and pick their brain there's actually there's actually a couple really interesting anecdotes from the Constitutional Convention and some historian and I unfortunately forget I think it's hurting I forget her name tracked down the tavern records from the Constitutional Convention and these guys were booze hounds like you would not believe I mean the stuff that they used to drink afterwards was just they were all most of them were staying at this one flophouse I guess we might call it today and I mean barrels of wine it was it's just it was ridiculous I'll see if I can dig him up and I'll put him on my social media you mentioned they chased the ladies yeah well so one of my favorite founders is a guy named governor or güven or Morris we're not actually even sure how to pronounce his first name he spoke more than any other founder at the Constitutional Convention and most people don't know about him today he actually wrote the words We the People he gave us those in mortal words he so he was on the committee of style for the Constitutional Convention so when they they they after they had all most of their debating done they knew what was gonna go in the document they had it all written out and you know on little slips of paper here and there they gave it to five guys the committee of style and said okay make this look nice and committee of style gave it to Governor Morris who was this he was a peg leg bomb we thought that's that that's the best description of him he lost his leg in a carriage accident John Jay the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court said he wished he had lost something else because of the trouble that organ caused he had his fascinating character he was our minister to France during the French Revolution had sex with a married woman who was also talleyrand's if you remember tally ran from history talleyrand's mistress had sex with her in a convent in the carriage all over the place and the way he put it in his diary was they did the the first commandment that God gave to Adam meaning they went and were fruitful but they didn't multiply was essentially how he phrased it so they went through the motions but didn't bear the fruit something along those lines it's in the book he's this really fascinating guy and not what you would think of as a Bible believing Christian who's gonna incorporate Christian principles into a founding document let's talk about those doctrines for men so the Constitution doesn't mention God at all is that correct is there any allusion to God and the constant no there's not I mean I mentioned that year of our Lord which is actually not technically in the Constitution it's in the attestation Clause which is not part of the Constitution and that's something I get into in that article I've mentioned earlier and a lot of the states didn't even see that language when they were debating whether or not to ratify the Constitution the original Constitution only mentions religion once in article 6 clause 3 to actually bar religious tests for public office and then the amended constitution mentions it again in the First Amendment we often forget that the amendments actually did amend the Constitution which says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and so you have essentially three mentions of religion in the code in the document and all of them keep religion out of government and government out of religion all of them draw this big dividing line which we've interpreted to be this wall of separation Jefferson's words the Declaration of Independence which preceded that though has more mentions of God how are those used by Christian that oh yeah those are some of the favorites I can look to a few of those so there are essentially four quasi supernatural lines in the Declaration of Independence that Christian nationalists love to trot out the laws of nature and of nature's God endowed by their creator divine providence and the supreme judge of the world and it's really important to understand that first of all only six people signs both the Declaration and the Constitution they were more than a decade apart I mean a lot happened in that decade and the declaration wasn't really it's a founding document in one sense in that it laid out some of our founding philosophy but really what it did was sever our political connection with Great Britain it's a document of destruction primarily not of building as the Constitution is and I actually in the book I walk you through each one of those mentions I what the rough Jefferson's rough drafted the declaration said and show you where in the editing process that language was added and what what they meant by it but there's two real big takeaways from the Declaration and the first is that it is primarily concerned with this world it is it is a human document it begins when in the course of human events it is not at all concerned with the supernatural or with supernatural rights despite what you hear about god-given rights all the time so I mean that that to me is is one real important part of the declaration the second is that I think it's fair to say that the declaration is anti-biblical if you look and what the Bible says about obeying government and know that governments are ordained by God it's really hard to read that and then think you know what we need to do overthrow a government that's tyrannical which is what the Declaration of Independence says we have a duty to do that and the Bible says you have a duty to obey it no matter what the government has the sword obey the government so I think it's fair to say that the Declaration is fundamentally opposed to the bottom all so yeah I mean one thing that struck me when you're knocking down these allusions to God in the declaration as well is there any allusion to God that could have been made that wouldn't stymie you and me yeah well maybe the really were founded as a Christian nation I just wonder what they could have said that will fix your mind I mean and it's it's obvious right they could have said our rights come from Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior they could have been very explicit about this at any point along the way they chose their words very carefully all of these documents went through tons and tons of edits and debate but they never did that they never decided to do that none of those references are close to explicitly Christian at best they're theists but and and when you pair that with the humanistic nature of the Declaration and the anti-biblical nature of the declaration it's out to me it's impossible to call that a Christian document so yeah I'm trying to cover at least all the three of the all four of the areas involved you go on a lot about the Ten Commandments and I just wondered because I haven't paid much attention to Christian nationalism do they really rely heavily on these Commandments and say I mean they're popping up in front of courthouses throughout the country you guys are always fighting their installations sometimes winning sometimes losing is it that important to knock down the Ten Commandments as a foundational basis for American law said knock on Christian nationalism I think I think it really is and I the more important thing is that most people have not read the Ten Commandments and if you ever you ever ask a Christian nationalist you know what do you mean the Ten Commandments includes first of all the name when I take a commandment the one that you always get back is well don't kill that's the one they always go to if you're lucky you'll hear don't steal to they completely ignore for instance the first moment I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods before me I mean it would be difficult to write a law or a prescription that is more unamerican than that sentence right I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods before me I mean that is fundamentally opposed to the First Amendment in about 42 different ways it's we have the absolute freedom of religion in this country to worship one God no God or as many gods as you want I mean if you go on to read the rest of the Ten Commandments it's worse slavery is sanctioned at least implicitly twice twice in God's most moral law do you think that he would get that one right don't own another human being could have been in there it wasn't but even it's even worse things than that you know the my my favorite worst part of the Ten Commandments is God says don't worship idols or graven images everybody knows that one right you know what the punishment is for that don't do it because for I the Lord your God am a jealous God punishing children for the iniquity of the parents to the third and fourth generation the Ten Commandments promised to punish innocent children for the crimes of the parents for four generations I mean that is fundamentally immoral and very clearly on America despite what's happening at our southern border right now and you laugh about that a little bit but like that the child separation policy at our southern border was justified by Jeff Sessions citing Romans 13 I mean citing citing the Bible I wrote a piece about this for Think Progress oh it's the citation well essentially they're saying that if you break the law you should expect whatever consequences may come however harsh they be and we tied this directly to the White House Bible study that we knew Jeff Sessions was attending which was being it was that that was being preached at the White House Bible study and they used it to justify this this barbaric policy I think Christopher Hitchens if you watch YouTube is some analysis of Ten Commandments since replaces them with new Yemen estate Commandments and that's a that was an article for Vanity Fair and if you look carefully at the footnotes you'll see that that was partly what inspired me to write that mall review article that got out of hand I have a big thank you to Christopher Hitchens for this book and so I just learned I mean the ten commands are so palpably thin as a fan base for American logging thou shalt not kill isn't present in every culture and every law or whether it's a sling or Hindu or whatever so have you ever debated a Christian on the Commandments in not a not a formal debate on all the commandments person is wondering how they managed to justify the foundation US government on the sanctions that are most of them having a beautiful are the foundation of America and the formulation in the Ten Commandments is actually worse because if only if you if you really understand what they're trying to say in the Bible it's not thou shalt not kill thou shalt not kill one of your neighbors which means another believer and if you I lay this out in the text it's very clear that it's perfectly acceptable to go out and kill other people who are not believers I mean the next book of the Bible if you go go to Joshua for instance if there's seventy genocides in Joshua thank God okay's or helps commit so it's very clearly okay to kill it's just not okay to kill your fellow believers and but you're right you know I have a chapter on the golden rule which is this and it's hard to I even think even make the argument that the golden rule is the foundation of the United States of America but let's just assume that's the case for a second that is a universal human principle that every successful society we know of has come up with on their own to call that a Christian principle or a judeo-christian principle is arrogant I mean it's it's rampant arrogance of the kind that typically atheist some scientists are accused of by believers well I don't like to move under the last part which is particularly interested in me because it's a circle thing that's call american Burbage how religion is persisted now or despite detectives I'm supposed to have a list here yeah so here's the remnants of religion or a law I have a list so it's only money and God We Trust Pledge of Allegiance there's a chaplain in Congress which I guess is paid for by the taxpayers yeah we spend about eight hundred thousand dollars a year on chaplains for the US Congress their only duty is to say a prayer before the opening of the session they give that Duty away about 40 percent of the time to guest chaplains but we have it so we have a chaplain in the house a chaplain in the Senate and when I last looked they had five assistants between the two of them and this formal where's that $800,000 go down salaries that's just a lot of line for saying this yeah check the chaplains make their their governmental level is incredibly high for instance they're the same as the chief information officer for NASA they're making one of them was making 125 when I makers was making 150 a year to say prayers that's eight hundred thousand dollars a year that our our Congress is spending on prayers the other things I've written down a Sunday closing was these are all just in the clock their history and their legal defense the National Day of Prayer the National Prayer Breakfast prayer room in the capper oh god Bless America and the fact that presidents now say godless Frank apparently didn't do that back in the old days yeah no that that's one of my favorite stories from the book and I'll give it away but so god bless america I mean everybody's heard a president end of speech or a talk with that right yeah so the first time that was done to close a presidential address was by Nixon in his address from The Oval Office on Watergate yeah and then act but it's actually really interesting why I mean why would you start invoking or religion and and Nixon was VP for Ike and I mean he was there during the rise of the Christian nationalism in the 1950s when you saw things like the National Day of Prayer the National Prayer Breakfast under God added to the pledge In God We Trust on money and on a stamp I was all in the 1950s when Nixon was VP and then when he was struggling with his own and it was very clearly gonna be impeachment he started kind of turning to religion again I think to distract the country and also say look I'm religious I'm obviously a moral guy and there's this this instance where he he starts to go on a southern tour because he's worried about shoring up some support to prevent impeachment and so he's gonna do this swinging through the south to rally the people so that they can push their Congress people Congress men at that time to not impeach him and he starts at the Grand Ole Opry and you can see this on YouTube and he sits at the piano and plays god Bless America and sings that it is excruciating to watch but then he really starts turning to religion more and more the closer he gets to losing the office and I think it's to try to use it as a proxy for morality with the voters yeah it seems like a lot of the times God crept into the government was times of national trouble under Eisenhower for example the Red Scare and stuff what struck me most was the money you know what was Ben Franklin had some lager and the earliest coins that was completely different what was that there's there one of them was like mind your business yeah - hi - flies where the the - sort of model it was a science statement too right no wasn't there and some of the money about yeah I mean well this so the striking over the overall striking thing about these phrases in god we trust' one nation under God God bless america is what you've just said that they entered our vernacular at times of national fear and strife and it's not just that they enter our discourse then it's that they were deliberately pushed upon the country at that time by Christian nationalists who were knowingly for the most part taking advantage of that time of national fear in crisis to impose their religion on everybody else and you very clearly can see it when in god we trust' was added to our coins in 1863 1864 which I tell that story in the book and you can also see it very clearly in the 1950s when it was not just the Red Scare but also big business was trying to repeal a lot of New Deal era regulations and they were actually literally trying to sell religion to the American people with the ad council and madmen and so we I tell that story in the book and then I already already mentioned the Nixon story so it's it's these times of national fear and strike where religion is deliberately imposed on us and one of the things that I tried to do in the book is not arm you with just better facts more accurate facts but also better stories and better arguments to push back against Christian Christian nationalism because really facts are not enough unfortunately otherwise moving that President Trump right we live in an era of alternative facts so we have to have better arguments for our side so point you it's one thing to point out well hey look and God We Trust is clearly not a statement of our founding ethos because it doesn't come from the founding era then Franklin wanted this other thing on the coins but it's much better if you can also turn around and say look it actually wiped out this unifying sentiment that was on our coins a pluribus unum you took religion the most divisive force in human history and put it where previously we had this really nice unifying force same thing with the Declaration or excuse me the Pledge of Allegiance one nation indivisible was literally divided with God you're dividing the indivisible with God one nation under God indivisible and so I mean I think pointing out and trying to make some better arguments and this is one of the reasons that I use the phrase the word unamerican and the title is because we need to do a better job of arguing our position not just stating facts and you know we are we are very good about facts and nuance on our side and I think that shackles us sometimes when we're engaging with Christian nationalism we need to take those shackles off and really start street brawling with them in my opinion let's talk a little about litigation so I mean you explain this in the book but maybe we could talk a little bit about it um these are a lot of remnants of religion in a country where that religion is not supposed to be connected with the government how is how do they legally justify and one of the challenges that were arisen says things like one nation under God or you know the Pledge of Allegiance surely there have been legal challenges to this on first America rounds there have and the Freedom From Religion Foundation has been at the forefront of a lot of those legal challenges throughout the years but and courts have done different things with justifying them but one of those central themes is look these phrases in god we trust' is a great example are not really religious anymore now that's a crazy thing for a court to say in my opinion but they've said essentially through rote repetition in god we trust' as a phrase has lost all its religious significance so it can't actually be a promise state Church problem because it's not a religious phrase you have to you have to appreciate the hypocrisy of that too I see many furrowed brows out there and yes that is the right response but it's also it's fantastically hypocritical of the Christian nationalists because if a court said that about praying the rosary or about the most ubiquitous Bible verse out there John 3:16 said that look you guys have repeated that so much it's long religious right imagine if the court said that about the favorite bible verse of the christian right they would go nuts and frankly rightfully so they're a secular court should not be declaring a very clearly religious statement to be non-religious but they are so they adopt a lot of these legal fictions to uphold some of these more frustrating this is just one Court decision it's many quarters yeah yeah it's a adhere to the same set of fictions yeah it's a common hypocritical theme yeah so yeah you've litigated yourself in some of these cases I guess maybe you could talk about one of them and the obstacles you've run up against I mean our site is outgunned financially and just in sheer by sheer numbers you know some of the reasons they're the group that brought the masterpiece cake shop case the the gay wedding cake case out of Colorado I mean they have something like I think sixty lawyers on staff and a budget of upwards of fifty million dollars a year which is more than all the secular groups that do this work the Freedom From Religion Foundation the ACLU Americans United all the other groups combined and that's just one on their side so with I mean that's a huge imbalance to begin with the good news is on the flip side of that is that we are right well right now I mean FFRF in court since 2016 we are 14 and three so we are where the courts are definitely going to get a lot more unfriendly to us with the way Trump has packed them with conservatives and I mean Christian nationalists to be honest too and there's a decision coming down that FFRF is not one of the parties in the case we did submit in a brief to the court a friend of the court brief but the case the blades of our cross case is going to come down any and that could blow a huge will pull in the wall of separation between state and church but as of right now we are still doing a pretty damn good job litigating in court and winning you just can't get in Gotham I not yet I do that I do think though that that that is something that will fall really oh I do I I mean I don't know I don't know when look what you're seeing right now and with Christian nationalism and with this wave of abortion laws it's not just trying to take advantage of a friendly Court that they have this this is all a symptom of churches looking out on Sunday mornings and seeing instead of young faces smiling back to them empty pews right they can read the demographics as well as we can and what you are seeing they are raging against the dying of their privilege that is what is happening right now they are gonna they're gonna do a lot of damage on their way out of being supreme but they know that they know that the end is near to borrow a phrase from well I mean but and I but to me that's part of the damage that they're gonna do on the way out but I do think they recognize that that they are I think they see the writing on the wall I really I really think they do it I mean there's a certain desperation to a lot of the actions that we're seeing right now they are because of the court and because of Trump there they are absolutely emboldened in a way that we've never seen before and because they see their privileges dying they're trying to take as much of it as they can wow they tend so there's this feeling of entitlement that we are seeing from the other side and you know it's not just in you know the Christian nationalist push but we're seeing it even in our litigation I mean some of the moves they are trying to pull in the court are the most ridiculous and entitled things that I've I've ever seen in there there's really annoying kind of complicated procedure to try and explain but I mean imagine litigating a case for four years winning at every single level the school board finally voting not to appeal that case to the Supreme Court and then an entire another school board coming in and say well we're gonna take that case to the Supreme Court they have nothing to do with the case at all they weren't sued not parties and they actually tried to come in and and litigate this to the Supreme Court it it's it was unlit erally unprecedented in the true legal sense of the word no they didn't allow him to do that but they felt entitled to and emboldened to do this and it was I mean I think it had Trump not been president and not packed to the Supreme Court they would never have tried something like this they feel entitled at holding now dinner you mentioned that the courts are changing their strategy now in an attempt to knock down First Amendment defenses yeah and that one of them was standing Mike maybe you could mention that briefly but also and we should wind up now because we closed 10 what should we do or what should you do as a lawyer to try to fight this seemingly impenetrable chain just wait a hundred years no I mean well those are two big open-ended questions I was so how standing is a very it's a strange legal doctrine and basically what courts have said is like look to take a case you can't just be an American citizen you have to have some specific interest in the case you have to be injured by whatever action you are trying to challenge and we have to be able to to fix that injury we the court and that's an oversimplification there are three different things the courts look at but standing is proven to be a massive hurdle for people and groups like the Freedom From Religion Foundation trying to a cold State Church separation because instead of deciding that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional which it clearly is I mean the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion and the National Day of Prayer is a law that Congress made telling people to pray I mean you don't get a more clear violation than that so instead what the courts have done is say you can't even bring this case so it becomes a jurisdictional issue rather than about answering rather than answering the question on the merits and that's what they did with the National Day of Prayer case that FFRF bought brought we successfully got it declared unconstitutional at the federal district court and then the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said you don't have standing to bring this case and in fact if that means nobody has standing to bring that case so be it which is a very strange thing to say if you have a constitutional right you have to be able to vindicate that right in court or you don't actually but my prediction is that courts are going to stop using standing to avoid deciding these issues because the courts have been flooded with conservative judges who want to decide against us they're gonna start saying yet you have standing and yet you lose that's that's my prediction on it so what we can do is I mean a number of different the courts are not going to be we talked about them as unfriendly for a generation and I think to a large extent that's true but there there are some solutions to that there are some political solutions also the court is not going to be static and it's going to it the makeup is going to change we'll see whether or not it gets worse before it gets better and then again there are political solutions I think to to a very political Supreme Court so we'll see we'll see where that goes and a lot of that's gonna depend on the upcoming election presidential election keep your fingers crossed well I think we've you know pretty much exhausted appreciate of the book I recommended how you'll see a lot of stories and anecdotes and law that you haven't we haven't talked about tonight so I suppose we should turn the floor over to the audience now into Andrews so he's open for questions I guess I'm on is he gonna moderator all right do you want to take the mic to want us to take the micro you want to take the mic around if you have a question ask us I can repeat it here if we need to get it on the microphone as you were thinking of questions I did have one that I wanted to ask you and I know it's not an FF are that case but in the next week or two the Supreme Court is going to decide on whether in a giant public cross that is a World War one veteran's memorial that the supporters say it's just in the shape of a cross it's not Christian a cross shape to the board yeah cross came before you it's gonna be bad it's just a question of how bad that's I mean that's the prediction I was in I was in the courtroom when Monica Miller from American Humanist Association argued that case and you like to think that you can get a read on the judges when you're in the world argument or when you're it's really hard when you're having a new oral argument you have a sense of whether it went well or not but the last time I thought it went well all three judges decided against me so and it's it was it was hard to read to begin with which which way you think those justices on the Supreme Court are going to go the real question in the case is whether or not they're going to overturn the central test that we use to determine what is a state Church violation or not and that's something called the Lemon test courts have been not applying it in other instances it's very much maligned but it's ended the other side's goal would be to get the court to adopt a new standard which would essentially require you to show that the government is coercing you into some sort of religious practice to show that the First Amendment is being if you can't show that you are being coerced then there's no violation yeah and so that's sort of the worst case scenario when that happened we would see what Christian crosses go up everywhere I mean yeah I don't want to offer them any idea I mean I mean a best-case scenario still going bad is the court issuing a really fractured opinion where two judges here two judges their three judges that would that would be also positive it would make it very difficult for lower courts to say anything in particular about the opinion and they would likely go back to some of the older case ball that's more clear so that would be that would be a good about to two institutions of government and their religious disposition one is Mitch McConnell who's implicated in a lot of the judge appointments and then number two is the fact that everybody on the Supreme Court head comes from a demonstrably religious background even the liberal justices does that color their their reasoning in their opinions that you've seen them issue about separation so I mean yeah we all we really ought to speak of the Supreme Court not as Trump's court and not as Trump's judiciary really it is McConnell's Supreme Court and McConnell's judiciary he is responsible for the make up far more that Trump is I mean Trump is just a rubber stamp for Federalist Society and Leonard Leo there's what as to that whether or not the religion influences the justices opinions you know I think we all like to think of the Supreme Court and our judges generally as of indicator of Rights that they are out there defending rights of history doesn't really bag up that view I mean the Warren Court v there was a 15 year stretch where Oh an Earl Warren was the Chief Justice where you saw some really great opinion a lot of the the really massive important civil rights cases came down during the war in the court but the Supreme Court by and large waits for public opinion to shift before changing its position if they are not as big a protector of civil rights as we think they are my one of my law professors like into the Supreme Court to the last person in on an all team tackle they run along and jump on top of the pile and say look what we did and you can kind of see that with a good example is that the obergefell the gate the gay marriage decision you know they they had that case was teed up for them many times before but they waited till all public opinion shifted in favor of that before making that decision the law didn't change of opinion and I I think they are far more of a political body than we want to think of them and I do think I do think religion influences the Catholic men on the Supreme Court it does not seem to affect Sonia Sotomayor justice Sotomayor who's also a Catholic she seems to be able to set her religion aside and decide cases the way the law would dictate regardless of what her religion says the Catholic met on the Supreme Court do not seem to be able to do that including Breyer Breyers Jewish your question was find I should remind everybody questions in the question mark and you can ask Jerry questions too about this stuff well he's here don't you had mentioned earlier that obviously the founders had plenty ample opportunity to Beast be explicit in in their language and say whether or not this was founded as a Christian nation did you find in your research fathers contributing to the conversation that we're trying to sure and I mean there's there's a debate the country had a debate about the godlessness of the Constitution at the time there were citizens who were were pissed when it was made public that there was no recognition of God or Jesus in the preamble that it began we the people instead of referring to God or Jesus and that was a big argument and a fight that they had it's not just that the Constitution happens to be godless it is deliberately godless so I mean and there's a really great book Issac Kramnik Kramnik and more Isaac kramnik and Larry Moore wrote a book called the godless Constitution I don't want to say it's maybe 20 years old now but it still goes up really well my publisher I think I really should be telling people to buy my book now this is gonna be up and I'm gonna get a call but it's really worth read it make sort of lay out a lot of that debate that was happening when the country was debating whether or not to by the Constitution because remember we didn't just it wasn't just we had the Constitutional Convention and then we actually think we had the Constitution and that was it there was there was two years of public debate about whether or not states we're gonna ratify the Constitution they had to get to us number nine before it would be ratified and then you would actually it would go into effect that's why we have the Federalist Papers which are these really phenomenal papers mostly written by Alexander Hamilton James Madison a couple by John Jay they do a great job of explaining the ins and outs of how our government was going to work did I get a question do you mind speeding up if you can has that changed and that changed to something like ten years do you think so it's so on how long have judges had like I've had lifetime tenure and what if they had an expiration date of ten years in their position so judges the lifetime tenure of federal judges is meant as a it's one of our checks and balances in our system so everybody remembers back to high school civics that we are a government of checks and balances it's the reason we have three different branches of government by dividing up power and sort of decentralizing it the founders thought believe they were protecting Liberty not that they were reflecting the Holy Trinity which is what so that's one of the more ridiculous arguments I think I just goes with that in just a paragraph in the book and I actually I think it does a pretty good job the goal was to make the judiciary independent and not beholden to one of the other two branches of government because you don't want them deciding cases politically and historically that has proven very very effective and one of the reasons that you're seeing the outsourcing of the judge selection process to the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo is because historically judges have been pretty unpredictable once they get their lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court Reagan appointed a couple that went broke and joined all these liberal decisions and it happens a lot and if you look at judges as they age you know conventional wisdom says you get more conservative as you get older judges get more liberal so you actually I like the lifetime tenure I think it's a I think it is a it's a good check on power it's a good way to ensure an independent judiciary it just is really terrible with what we've seen in the last two years that doesn't mean the system is flawed I mean look at what happened in the two years that that part of the system is what tainted the judiciary in our minds and so now we're looking for a way to fix it I think there are political fixes to it that don't involve getting rid of the lifetime appointment with federal judges I mean also you have to remember to lifetime appointment factor then it was a lot different than it is now right I mean appoint appointing a Chief Justice younger than 50 you think back in the 1780s was a lot different than than it is now so they're out there are ten years a lot longer than I think the founders expected so that that's a better argument against it and you could put a minimum age getting into the office which would be an interesting way to do it too yes over here my great-great grandfather great-great-great great-grandfather was John Marshall the second Chief Justice on Supreme Court and he made a deal with President Adams Adams and his group slave owners were concerned that the general population in in favor of the interests of the interferes with your well I mean I right now I think the Supreme Court is very scary right now I mean John Marshall created judicial review and really did a phenomenal job of running that court almost all the decisions that came out under him were unanimous which I mean try to imagine that today they didn't they when they were writing those decisions they didn't write them the way they do now it was it was a much different process but I think there's a lot of reasons to be suspicious and skeptical of this Supreme Court and of the federal judiciary in general but again I think that's a bigger reflection on what what happened in Congress than on what then in what was happening in the courts I mean and you know the difference between two and a half years ago the courts were still unfriendly especially to a lot of states or separation stuff I'm not saying that I have full confidence in them and I think I just got through bashing them a little bit saying that they're not the defenders of civil rights that we think they are but but by and large I think our system has worked well I mean it's being tested right now in ways that that we certainly have never seen and I don't know I don't know that it will survive the tests I hope it does but I think we go on Pat I mean yeah oh and that right there because yeah yes I'm wondering how susceptible the Supreme Court is to public opinion I think I just saw oh it said roe v wade has more support now something like seventy percent seventy four percent in favor of giving it now because of the overreach compared to 13 percent that would still push the get rid of it yeah so and I'm wondering to my mind I think that they leap from behind which may be implied earlier I don't know that they can override something no matter what they want to do yeah I mean I think to a certain extent you're right and that's the question that I was answering for you is how you know how much of their religion affects their their jobs and I think when you run into the problem with religion in our system of government and injecting it into our system of government that we are supposed to be based on reasoned debate and compromise that's what is required out of the u.s. system and when you put religion into that you are necessarily removing compromise and reasoned debate you are making it about an article of faith an unbending article of faith and so I write about this actually a lot in the chapters where I talk about the civil war because the lead-up to the civil war if it's largely a religious war to the extent that we don't talk about it in the sense that it made slavery an issue of faith on both sides and there was we were the only nation that needed a civil war to end slavery I mean unless you want to count this some of the slave revolts in the Caribbean but the only nation that where the slave class had to war against itself to end slavery and that is because of the infiltration of evangelical religion into the political process during the 1830s 40s or 50s I think in it I try to make that argument in in the book so that's kind of kind of a roundabout saying a way of saying that I think the courts do need to list to public opinion but I think a lot of that goes out the window when you're talking about religion and I think there's a damn good chance that Roe vs. Wade is the question is it will it die the death of a thousand cuts or will it be overturned explicitly and I suspect it's gonna be some combination of both of those the next three or four years thousand cuts and then overturned probably on the 50th anniversary unless something big changes can you stand up you know my race you speak to the distortion yes so that the yeah how does the Second Amendment have to do with like the Christian nationalism angle of the second and how has it been distorted so I mean the Second Amendment I don't know if I'll get this word-for-word a well-regulated militia being necessary for the freedom of the state the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed that first Clause about the militia should theoretically make that not an individual right but a collective right and there was a concerted effort by the NRA to push heavily legal scholarship away from that traditional understanding of the Second Amendment into understanding it as an individual right and it is it's not accurate historically for sure it is a distortion but it is a model for how you push legal and judicial thought in a way that it is not meant to go what they did was really phenomenal and I would love our side to be able to replicate it not because we want to distort the interpretation of the Constitution but because we want to get our interpretation which is correct as I said out there and so it I mean it was and there there have been papers that have been written about how they did this an expose is written about it I'm sure you can find plenty of them online but but certainly the ties to Christian nationalism are are there on the drive down Bruce the guy running the camera right now was debating with his brother on Facebook and his brother was talking about our god-given right to bear arms I mean and that goes right to the heart of what I we were talking about with the Declaration of Independence and and you know the idea that you are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among them like liberty and the pursuit of happiness and God god-given rights are talked about by the Christian nationalists as these these unassailable hallowed things but really a god-given right can be taken away by anybody claiming to be for God they are they are weak and flimsy they are not be the bastion that the Christian nationalists think they are human rights which you have simply by virtue of being a human being are far more robust and incorruptible so I mean god-given rights are not and I talked about I talked a lot about this in the book and I will get off my soapbox on it because I could spend a long time on let me go yeah and I think you're right to point out that facts are are not as powerful as we think they are we need we need better arguments our sight absolutely needs better arguments and that that is what I'm trying to do in the subtitle of this book I we have to label them first of all use the term Christian nationalists when you can that phrase that label is very clear people understand it without necessarily knowing what it is they under and they are afraid of it right now there's a new poll said morning council said that 47% of the country view Christian nationalism as a threat you'd have looked at that before Trump took office that would have been probably almost non-existent most people didn't know what Christian nationalism was but I really I really think we need to hit them where it hurts the goal of Christian nationalism as I said at the beginning really is to redefine what it is to be an American and then to reshape our law accordingly we need to show them that patriotism has no religion that a secular America is far more American than a Christian America and in fact that a idea of a Christian America the idea of a Christian government the idea of a government based on today principals is an American they they have successfully stolen patriotism from the country and I think we need to we really need to push back on that I mean if I I bet some of you when I said that thought some of you are kind of repulsed by the idea of patriotism a little bit I think you think maybe of a Mogga hat all right I bet I bet that some of that went through some people's minds and they should we should be that should be what we think of when we think of unamerican so that that's really one of the big things that I try to push and do in the book it's give you better arguments throughout so you don't just have to rely on these these facts because there are alternative facts out there I'll try to be better about my answers [Music] looking bored already to the next one are you have you anything else I don't know George are ours schedule is I I have an idea for another book and I may work on a proposal for that but near the end of the year I'm right now working on a couple long review articles there in the publication process so some more heavy stuff and then we have a pretty heavy litigation schedule at FFRF over the summer so I won't it won't be for a while but it might be before I mean this one took me like almost 10 years and the next one should not take that long let me jump over here in the front in there yes so as far as like there's a lot of focus on the Supreme Court but how concerned are you more or equally concerned about district and appellate courts and how many conservatives there are on those because even in the Illinois which is very a lot of conservative judges and that can affect standing in the second part of that question is how well do you think minority religions and work groups like the Satanic temple it was that will change standing and use it to subvert the Krishna Krishna National Institutes or use it for the wrong purposes or kept shut down yeah we really judges at the non Supreme Court level are the bigger problem that we're going to face because they're gonna take a ninety-nine literally 99% of the cases they are going to be deciding so they're gonna have probably overall a bigger impact than the justices on the Supreme Court probably I mean of course it's only the Supreme Court that can go and overturn Roe versus Wade though or the Lemon test for instance so that there's a counter-argument to that the the second part on whether or not groups like the Satanic temple can be effective I certainly think they can be effective in in a lot of arenas and they're that one of my favorite stories from working at FFRF is there was a park in San Diego where they had a nativity scene we wrote letters you got to take the nativity scene down this that's unconstitutional and they said no no anybody can put up any scene they want any display they want during the holiday season in this park and in fact we're gonna have I think it was 13 spots fenced off spots where you can have two and we're gonna lottery off the spots and then whoever wins the lottery gets to put up their display at that spot Santa Monica correct atheists won eleven of the thirteen so they immediately said okay well after this year we're not doing that it's that they stopped at this place so getting into the forum with your counter message like which is that I mean Satanic temple has basically adopted that formula that can be really really effective when there's already a forum okay but of course the main goal is to close that forum down and stop it altogether which is what we were asking for in the first place but that can be an effective way to do it yes one concern I have is that the federal courts are going to do what my question to you is to some extent that's happened but do you see that happening with separation of I don't necessarily see it happening we are looking to the states more because the federal courts have been so unfriendly we just want a big case in New Jersey saving New Jersey taxpayers millions of dollars because they were being taxed and then that money was then turned around and being given to historic churches so that they could continue to worship by repairing their buildings and that's explicitly prohibited under the New Jersey Constitution it's a more stringent clause than the Federal Constitution so we were able to successfully litigate that got a unanimous decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court we also took a case in California under the California Constitution and got a decision in that case we ended up settling the case on a Friday and the Supreme Court decided a case on Monday the next Monday that might have changed their mind about what how to settle the case so I mean we've been looking to state courts often as more friendly in a lot of respects and a lot of state courts have corollaries to the First Amendment so they have a state church separation that's really similar but what's called coextensive so not not precisely similar the contours can be slightly different where they'll have they'll have like New Jersey has a no aide clause specifically saying that you can't send money taxpayer money to churches or preachers for instance so they're better in some respects so there there are two basic ways to amend the Constitution one is going through the typical amendment procedure that's laid out and the second is what you mentioned which is the Constitutional Convention which is a really probably a bad idea all-around constitutional convention has never been done for an amendment all of our amendment have gone through the regular process and the reason I think the main reason for that is because in a constitutional convention all bets are off right the only precedent we have for the constitutional a Constitutional Convention is the Constitutional Convention and they were technically just supposed to rewrite some of the Articles of Confederation and instead they threw it out redid the whole thing came up with this whole new system of government that is that was way better but that precedent means that if we were to have another Constitutional Convention they could really do anything they wanted and the fight over who would get to be a delegate so that would be it would be nightmarish I don't I don't know that anybody actually wants another Constitutional Convention so if you said for instance we want to have a con con about putting women's right to choose or bodily autonomy in the US Constitution then you have the Constitutional Convention it's behind closed doors at their first Constitutional Convention nobody knew what was going on behind those closed doors it was secret they come out and say okay we've rewritten the Constitution everybody gets a machine gun and a tank and Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior and what do you do I mean the only precedent is you vote to ratify or not you can't there's no real way to challenge it so I think most people who have looked at this thing a constitutional convention is a bad idea and that it's better to get states to ratify individual amendments as we've seen in the past and that would be my thank you I did one question on Cavanaugh causation what if anything indicated Gorsuch wants to overturn the Lemon test he stated so explicitly he called it the dog's breakfast the dog's supper some some dog meal in oral argument and Cavanaugh has said agreeing with the chief justice rehnquist at the time said it's a bad wall of separation is a bad metaphor based on bad history instead it should be overturned they are two votes very firmly for completely demolishing the wall of separation the inauguration trying to get religion out of the inaugurate the presidential inauguration and yet so if you remember earlier I said that the conservative justices are gonna stop focusing on standing yeah they're gonna start deciding on the merits Cavanaugh laid out the roadmap for that in the case that heaven just mentioned he said yeah yeah you definitely have standing to challenge this your just a hundred percent wrong and you lose bad he was nice about it [Music] it's almost like they took an oath to uphold the Constitution and how it was interpreted and they're just ignoring it yeah I mean I think there's absolutely an argument that what they are doing is illegal and unconstitutional but they are doing it on purpose and they the only way to hold them responsible and the only way you if you would ever bring a challenge like that in court what the court would say is yeah the only way to hold them responsible is to vote them out of office andrew is here for a little bit if you have other questions make sure you pick up a book if you haven't already let's give it up for Gerry [Applause] yeah I've heard good things Joanne Freeman

Channel: FFRF

Views: 22,253

Rating: 4.9223742 out of 5

Keywords: Andrew Seidel, Jerry Coyne, Hemant Mehta, The Founding Myth, America Christian Nation, is america a christian nation, christian nation, is the united states a christian nation, is the US a christian nation, Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheist, Atheism

Id: rImjGolrxFI

Length: 81min 14sec (4874 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019