The next time Hollywood tries to convince you that those Bible-loving Christians are bad for the GOP, remind them that Oklahoma's "rednecks" are in good company.
"Why can't the GOP censor those dumb Bible-loving rednecks to win Paris over?" you'll hear Republicans in name only ask. "Isn't the Bible just for rednecks in the South and the Midwest?" I hear Hollywood Democrats ask. Well, they must be in good company.
Speaking of which, the "redneck" Sir Isaac Newtown stated, "There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than any profane history."
The English "redneck" Charles Dickens affirmed, "The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world."
Said the Republican Party's "redneck" President Teddy Bear Roosevelt, "A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education."
And the British "redneck" C.S. Lewis? Said he, "Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated."
Of course, the Republican Party's "redneck" Herbert Hoover, who saved Europe from starvation, maintained that, "The study of the Bible is a post-graduate course in the richest library of human history."
"Within the covers of the Bible are all the answers for all the problems men face," affirmed Ronald Reagan, the pro-life, Cold War liberator. "Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a distinctive nation and people, none may be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible."
"It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible," proclaimed George Washington, the "redneck." (For public students in failing schools, he was your first President, 1789-1797.)
In Godless, the unapologetic Christian, Ann Coulter, the author of six New York Times bestsellers, frankly states that the Book of "Genesis posits a simple version of the human story: Adam and Eve are awakened to good and evil by their sin of pride, become aware of their nakedness, and stumble blinking into the forest. However literal or metaphorical the story is, no one has improved on it in 4,000 years. No Freudian has a clearer image of man's consciousness. We are in God's image, and we're the only ones in God's image, which is why we eat escargot rather than worship them."
And, President Abe Lincoln, the doubting Thomas, said, "I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take this entire Book upon reason that you can, and the balance of faith, and you will die a better man."
Indisputably, even liberal atheists and struggling saints with an IQ above my fan acknowledge the Bible's link to civilization.
"Education is useless without the Bible," added Daniel Webster. "If there is anything in my thoughts or style to commend, the credit is due to my parents for instilling in me an early love of Scriptures."
"The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it," reasoned Thomas Huxley.
"It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom," Horace Greeley stated.
Ulysses S. Grant put it this way: "To the influence of this Book we are indebted for the progress of civilization and to this we must look as our guide to the future."
"You are not educated if you don't read the Bible," asserted Christopher Hitchens, the atheist. "You can't read Shakespeare or Milton without it . . . And with the schools now, they don't even teach it as a document. They stay out of the whole thing to avoid controversy. So kids can't quote the Bible. That's terrible."
And most shockingly, the Democratic President Harry S. Truman concluded that, "The fundamental basis of this nation's law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teaching we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don't think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don't have the proper fundamental background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in the right for anybody except the state."
So, the next time Hollywood (or Kathleen Parker) tries to convince you that those Bible-loving Christians are bad for the GOP, remind them that Oklahoma's "rednecks" are in good company.
Questions? Comments? There are many, I'm sure, but even liberals can't dismiss the Bible, on intellectual grounds. Republicans need God more than ever. The world – even James Bond, my guess – needs God more than ever.
Robert J. Hutchinson reminds us: "According to research conducted by the political scientist Rudolph Rummel at the University of Hawaii, the officially atheist states of the Communist bloc committed more acts of genocide than any societies in history."
Acknowledgments: The quotes were compiled by Robert J. Hutchinson, the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible, 2007.
Bravo, Ben.
[...] Intellectual Conservative takes higher-brow-than-thou columnist Kathleen Parker to task for the contempt she has displayed toward "In God We Trust" Republicans, including "Enlightened Redneck Of The Year" Sarah Palin, by highlighting just how many "rednecks" in history have had good things to say about the Bible and religion. [...]
Traditionally, Conservatism has been primarily about personal liberty. "In God We Trust" republicans, to use your own words, are primarily in the business of legislating their morals upon others. That doesn't sound like freedom to me…
Excellent piece sir!
Based on the GOP leadership's current attitude towards what was previously their base, the Conservative-Religious section of the electorate and the increasingly numerous comments on Conservative blogs (by Conservative "stalwarts") such as the following, (cut & pasted here for your delight): "D@mn bible-thumpers! They cost us the election! We need to run them out of the GOP! They are soooo stupid! We need to stop worrying about everything but fiscal issues!"
I am left wondering if we bible-thumping Conservatives have a home in the GOP.
Those comments seem to me to simply be vocalizations of the actions of the leadership… a leadership that has abandoned any pretext of a moral guideline, saying whatever they think the citizenry wants to hear to get elected while never having any intent of attempting to keep those promises.
While the GOP may realize that they'll lose their Religious base, I am uncertain they realize that they lack in equal measure the Democrat's ability to lie convincingly: a skill born of constant and long, (indeed, multi-generational) practice.
I don't think that I can agree with your thesis. While I think its counterproductive for people to refer to Christians as "Oklahoma Rednecks" and the like, I tend to agree that the modern incarnation of the Republican is a bad one.
Religion is only one of many culprits, but it is a substantial one. Take the controversy over intelligent design(creationism,lets be honest with each other) and evolution. That entire argument has sparked a militant subsection of the Christian right that truly believes that the world is only around 6000 years old simply because one interpretation of a relatively fragile biblical chronology says it is so. In the process of this, they deny science from across the board, not just evolutionary biology(which isn't taught in public schools anyways).
Religion took Muslims and made them our new enemies(go ahead and say 9/11 did it, I dare you!). Now its okay to tell Muslim jokes and ridicule Islam. Google for a minute and you will find the robots of the right regurgitating profane insults against Islam in mind numbing numbers.
For me, republicans were supposed to be a conservative approach to government. The last 8 years have been anything but. We had the largest deficits in history. The patriot act was the single greatest affront to our supposed dedication to liberty in all our history. It amounted to burning land to save it from invaders.
Where are the conservatives? I'll tell you where. They are leaving their churches and going to their protests at the abortion clinics(to no avail) while the controllable fallacies in government continue to spiral out of control.Keep your God and religion at home. The government paves roads, builds missiles, and dolls out research grants. Good people come from good parents. Good Christians come from good Christian parents. End of story.
mpanetta,
St Augustine wrote:
"It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.
– The Literal Interpretation of Genesis 1:19–20, Chapt. 19 [AD 408]"
And,
"With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.
– ibid, 2:9"
So, I don't know why there is a controversy over creationism vs. evolution. There certainly shouldn't be as was found by th echurchfathers over 1600 years ago.
Muslims have been enemies to everyone since the founding of that religion, except to other muslims, and even there they disagree among eachother. Remember the crusades? Well, read the book of genesis and especially the story of Abraham.
Abotion is abhorrible and worth protesting.
I must admit to being disappointed with this article. Your use of the term "redneck" is muddled at best. Newton, Washington, Lincoln, Dickens, Roosevelt, and Lewis are not even remotely to be accurately described as "rednecks" (which is a cultural, rather than ideological term).
Furthermore, you succumb to the common error of implying that this country was founded on Christian values. Jefferson famously took a razor to several bibles and cut out the parts that he felt were in error. Hamilton, when asked why no mention of "God" was made in the Constitution, sarcastically replied, "We forgot". Adams was a unitarian (hardly descriptive of a modern American Christian). The Framers of the Constitution realized that our nation was a hodgepodge of a whole variety of religious beliefs, ranging from agnosticism to Puritan Christianity, and they (rightly, I think) realized that Enlightenment political philosophy was the best grounding for the Constitution as well as the reasons given for separation (in the Declaration). I could continue with more examples of why your oversimplification is as erroneous as it is extensive.
As to the issue you claim to address (and yet do so with little more than a litany of disjoint quotes), there is little reason to believe that Christian conservatism in America is the best direction. I consider myself an orthodox Catholic and a conservative, but I do not trust the government (or want it, for that matter) to attempt to operate on specifically Christian-based values. This is based on a) the historical background to the Constitution (above) and b) the simple fact that asking the government to legislate specifically theologically-derived morality is to put both "government authority" and "religious values" ahead of "personal liberty" which the Founders simply did not do. And before I am told that all laws are based on morals which are given to mankind via divine revelation (i.e. the Bible), I should like to remind you that no such derivation was deemed necessary at our founding, because laws were derived from the primacy of "natural rights" that were considered fundamentally observable in "natural man". Note the words "*endowed* by their Creator with certain *inalienable* rights". The rights, in accordance with Enlightenment philosophy, are part of God's creation of "natural man" and are inseparable. This is to say, our laws are based on natural rights and *not* on theological teaching.
Republicans (and Conservatives) need to return to their small-government, fiscally conservative, socially-responsible libertarian values and end their obsession with ensuring the strength of Christian values in America. Republicans have become little more than a lame "deficit and spend" answer to the "tax and spend" Liberals. I am loathe to give my children a nation characterized by reckless spending and, possibly worse, a nation more concerned with its security than its liberty and which is cowed by fear into accepting "big government". It is as disappointing as it is historically unsurprising that we are following Late Republican Rome and Revolutionary France in supplanting intellectual meritocracy with jingoism and blind patriotism and which takes our rights for granted while we let government grow uncontrollably under the premise that "security" is our only sacred value.