A GRUBBY LITTLE WITCH HUNT
by Andrew Gumbel
The battle over revisionist Christian history in Cupertino bodes ill for the nation
If you haven’t spent the past couple of weeks tuned into right-wing talk radio and Fox News, you might not have heard of Stephen Williams. Out there in the land of Rush and Sean Hannity, though, he has already been enshrined as a folk hero of the triumphant new right, a saint and perhaps also a martyr.
Williams is a fifth grade teacher in Silicon Valley and practicing Christian who fell foul of his school principal because he was overeager to emphasize the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers in his history classes. So far, so banal. He wasn’t suspended or fired. The principal at Stevens Creek Elementary School in Cupertino simply became a little alarmed when Williams distributed a handout entitled “What Great Leaders Have Said About The Bible,” which quoted a handful of Republican presidents (all pro!) alongside Jesus himself. She became more alarmed still when he asked his class to read a chunk of St. Luke’s Gospel to help them understand the meaning of Easter. So, at the end of the last school year, she asked him to submit his lesson plans to her in advance to make sure his classes didn’t violate the separation of church and state.
When Williams edited down the Declaration of Independence to include only its references to a higher being, or when he reproduced chunks of George Washington’s prayer journal to the exclusion of the Father of the Nation’s more obviously political reflections, the principal drew the line and told him to take the discussion in a different direction.
There the affair might have ended had it not been for Williams’s friends in a Phoenix-based fundamentalist Christian outfit called the Alliance Defense Fund, who persuaded him that what was going on was a brazen attempt by Left Coast liberal heathens to airbrush God out of the public arena altogether. The ADF started spreading stories that he was the victim of an out-of-control principal who was as allergic to religious references as vampires are to garlic and rosewater. And they bankrolled a federal lawsuit against the school district, filed last month, in which Williams alleged that his First Amendment and other constitutional rights were violated.
“Declaration of Independence Banned From Classroom” read a hysterical headline on the ADF website on the day the suit was filed. Soon the line was being pounded like a drum all over the right-wing airwaves, and made it, unqualified, into the headline of a Reuters news wire dispatch. Principal Patricia Vidmar, listeners and viewers were told, couldn’t stomach the nation’s original founding document because of its mentions of Nature’s God, the Creator, and Divine Providence. “What has America become if these words no longer have the meaning for us that they have had for our parents and their parents before them?” huffed Sean Hannity on Fox News. “When these words of Thomas Jefferson fall on deaf ears, where are we?”
Hannity returned to the story again and again as though the very fate of the Republic depended on it. He even moved his show to Cupertino for one night last week and renamed it “Take Back America” to ram home the point. He continued to voice his indignation even after Williams, the star guest on the Cupertino broadcast, admitted to him that, er, actually, the story about the Declaration of Independence being banned wasn’t true. Hannity, of course, has never been one to let the facts get in the way of a good rant, and the following night he was back at it. “I think this is a pivotal moment for this country,” he thundered.
Clearly, thousands of evangelical Christians agree, because they have been bombarding Stevens Creek Elementary with e-mails, faxes, and letters. One man told the school: “We hope you burn in hell.” Another, purporting to be a concerned local resident, wrote to the school board urging them to give Principal Vidmar a psychiatric evaluation. Another Christian-right footsoldier called a teacher at home at 1:30 in the morning and said: “I know who you are, where you live, and that you work for that godforsaken school.”
The point here is not whether Stephen Williams or Patricia Vidmar overstepped a professional boundary. The debate hasn’t gotten anywhere near sophisticated enough to address that question. The point is that the frenzy whipped up on Williams’s behalf portends an ugly battle whose implications stretch far beyond Cupertino. Having gained unprecedented access to the corridors of national power, the Christian right is now setting its sights on tearing down two centuries of secular tradition, starting with the very foundation of American society, its public school system.
This is no idle threat. The backers of the Alliance Defense Fund include James Dobson, a Bush family confidant and head of Focus on the Family, which believes gay marriage will “destroy the Earth” and has already set about eviscerating the once highly regarded public schools in Colorado Springs, where it is based. They also include Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, who wants to put “In God We Trust” posters in every public school, and James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, who agrees with John Ashcroft that America’s only King is Jesus. “The time has come,” Kennedy has said, “and it is long overdue, when Christians and conservatives and all men and women who believe in the birthright of freedom must rise up and reclaim America for Jesus Christ.”
All that puts the debate about the religiosity of the Founding Fathers in rather chilling perspective. It’s ludicrous to argue, as the evangelicals do, that because most of the Framers of the Constitution were practicing Christians, they never had any intention to create a separation of church and state. First off, the argument is historically bogus. The Framers knew they could never knit a Republic together if they imposed a single Protestant religion on the heterodox believers of the 13 former colonies. They also knew that European settlers had crossed the Atlantic precisely to be able to practice their individual religions without state interference. The whole doctrine of the separation of powers was based, in part, on historical memories of a Europe oppressed by the established church.
Secularism is also a tradition that has deepened over time. Even if someone now wants to point to some of the Founders and question their secularist credentials, so what? Most of the Founders were also deeply skeptical, if not outright hostile, to the notion of representative democracy. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts called it “the worst of all political evils.” But nobody is – yet – suggesting that voting is un-American.
Forget any pretense at real debate. The showdown in Cupertino is a grubby little witch-hunt in which purported defenders of the Constitution are doing everything they can to rip the constitutional fabric of the country and trump secular pluralism with fundamentalist theocracy. That tendency has always been part of the American political landscape, of course, going back to the evangelical revivals of the early 19th Century. The difference now is that the religious extremists have money, power, plentiful access to the broadcast airwaves, and a president who echoes many of their beliefs. We should all be deeply unnerved.
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