Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is no fan of the lawsuit Americans United and its allies have filed to block display of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana’s public schools.
That’s no surprise. Perkins and his Christian Nationalist gang have long sought to shoehorn their particular brand of faith into America’s public schools. Much of his column is the same old thing we’ve been hearing from these organizations for years – “the founders loved God,” “there’s no such thing as separation of church and state,” etc.
To buttress his argument, Perkins quotes a passage from George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, a document much loved by Christian Nationalists. During his remarks, Washington linked religion and morality, asserting that we can’t expect that “national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
There are a few things to keep in mind about this passage. First off, the address was written for Washington by Alexander Hamilton. As AU Vice President of Strategic Communications Andrew L. Seidel notes in his book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, the words “national morality” are ambiguous. They imply a collective morality for society but don’t automatically implicate a role for government to use religion to promote it.
In his draft of the speech, Hamilton included the line, “Does it [national morality] not require the aid of a generally received and divinely authoritative religion?” Washington, whose Deistic views have been well documented, removed the line.
Nowhere in the address does Washington say that this national morality must be linked to Christianity, and he rejected the idea that the country needed a “generally received” faith. As Seidel put it, “Washington’s edit suggests that he believed that any religion, not just Christianity, could replace morality. The Farewell Address conceives of religion and morality as two separate, distinct things – not as synonyms expressing the same thought, though Christian nationalists misread it that way.”
In short, this is yet another attempt by Christian Nationalists to retroactively baptize a founder as an opponent of church-state separation. Once again, it fails outright once the whole story is told.
