Only the good parts: why some people think separation of church and state means you have two religions

In one of his many blog posts about the troubling dichotomy between Ron Paul the public figure and Ron Paul the guy who let the craziest shit ever be printed under his name, The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates (himself a historian) wrote the following:

It is often said that Americans aren’t interested in history, but I think it’s more accurate to say that people–in general–aren’t interested in history that makes them feel bad. We surely are interested in those points of history from which we are able to extract an easy national glory–our achievement of independence from the British, the battle of Gettysburg, our fight against Hitler, and even the campaign of nonviolence waged by Martin Luther King. For different reasons, each of these episodes can be fitted for digestibility. More importantly that can be easily deployed in service our various national uses. Thus it is not so much that we are against history, as we are in favor of a selective history. The fact is that Martin Luther King is useful to us, in a way that Bayard Rustin is not (yet.)

The Founding Fathers, moments before they all simultaneously ascended to Heaven.

It got me to thinking about how infuriating it is for me to hear people go on and on about actual events as if they were holy miracles handed down from on high and how they will not only actively ignore the negatives and the failures in our country’s history, but actually try to write it out of our history as some are trying to do in Tennessee (and already has been done elsewhere in the country).

I’d say we’re children when we come to our history, except a child is much more willing to take things like facts and details into account rather than deifying figures until they become indistinguishable to the type of mythological figures that make it hard to distinguish Greek history from its fables and epics. I can’t wait, for instance, to read Bill O’Reilly’s next historical trope about the time Thomas Jefferson washed ashore in the land of the Phaeacians and John Quincy Adams, against the advice of his father, rode his horse too close to the Sun and crashed in a fireball of flame and hubris.

If I had my druthers, I’d go so far as to strike the term “Founding Fathers” from any text that wants to be taken seriously as an account of our history. It lends a patronizing and jingoistic tone that I feel is unfair to history and the development of our own nation. This country has evolved from radical ideas; some of them worked, some of them didn’t. The Constitution itself is a compromise that arose from the failure of the Articles of Confederacy (our version of the Old Testament), not a hallowed document written on a stone tablet vis a vis lightning on a mountaintop.