It's nearing the end of July, and fake quotes and false claims are buzzing on the pages of Minnesota newspapers like cicadas in the tall ash trees.
Last week, we looked at how an Anti-immigrant letter writer uses debunked deportation email to condemn Obama record; the letter writer was wrong not only on Obama's record, but that of three earlier American presidents.
Bluestem's editor can understand the desire to appeal to the presumed authority of dead Presidents, but after spending some years toiling in Franklin's Library Company, we also prize Ronald Reagan's maxim about verifying information.
Fake quotes have a whiff about them, an odor of present-ist convenience, and thus when we read America’s future depends upon being ‘one nation under God," a column by Nate Bjorge, pastor of Little Falls' Faith Luthern Church (LCMC), in the Morrison County Record, we paused on the first paragraph:
James Madison (our fourth President), the primary author of the Constitution, said, “We have staked the whole future of our new nation not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.
Well, no. Madison never said or wrote that. Those who comb through the tiny man's writings find little trace of religion. As snopes' source notes about this specific quote:
The inaccurate Madison Ten Commandments quote was circulated among the Religious Right chiefly by David Barton, a Texas man who peddles a revisionist history arguing that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." In 1996, Barton admitted that the quote is bogus and recommended that people stop using it.
In 1993, the curators of the Madison Papers at the University of Virginia were asked if they could verify the quote. They replied that they could not. Wrote Curators John Stagg and David Mattern, "We did not find anything in our files remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent us. In addition, the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison's views on religion and government, views which he expressed time and time again in public and in private."
It's 2013, and yet this fake quote still walks among us.
Bjorge's second paragraph is a cut-and-paste of an oft-cited-on-the-internet passage on sites attempting to establish the "Christian" origins of the Constitution (usually in proximity to the bogus 10 Commandments fake Madison quote) that claims Madison took the notion of separation of powers from a passage in Isaiah (which actually suggests quite the opposite--that the three powers are all in one divine person). Until there's an more authoritative source about Madison's supposed inspiration at the Constitutional Convention, Bluestem will take his word for it in the Federalist Papers that the idea came from Montesquieu.
But even the passage from Isaish doesn't quite say when Bjorge's online source takes it to say. Bjorge cuts and pastes:
He Madison] discovered this model of government from the “Perfect Governor,” as he read Isaiah 33:22; “For the Lord is our judge, [judicial] the Lord is our lawgiver, [legislative] the Lord is our king; [executive] he will save us.”
Odd, but that concentration of power doesn't seem like checks and balances, but that sort of thing for which both Obama and Dubya have been criticized, what with their signing statements and executive orders.
In the Morrison County Record column, Bjorge sees the branches of government slipping away from "the Biblical principles upon which they were established" or that Borge imagines they were established:
If you have been following the news, it appears with each passing day our branches of government are moving further away from the Biblical principles upon which they were established. It is hard to keep up with all the scandals such as the Benghazi scandal, the A.P. scandal and the IRS scandals. Are we “one nation under God” or have we, as St. Paul claims, “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” (Romans 1:25)
Heaven alone can answer that question.
Whatever the answer, Bjorge seems quite content to exchange rigorous scholarship and attribution for bogus quotes that confirm a truth he imagines he knows. If one knows Scripture, it seems a sly dog whistle to blame those scandals on the behavior described in the next verse Romans 1:26. Who knew cute boys and strong women could take the blame for every keruffle of the Obama administration?
As for "one nation under God," that's not a phrase slipped into the national discourse by the founding fathers, but into the originally secular 1892 "Pledge of Allegiance" by Congress in 1954.
Bjorge's faith is protected by the Bill of Rights, of course--as is Bluestem's freedom to post a review of sourcing. We do have to wonder, though, why one man's Truth contains such a run of historical bogosity.
Image: A miniature of the young Madison.
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Another of the "one nation Under God" memes can be found in claims that those words appear in our national anthem. But wait, I don't recall ever singing those words.
Well, they do appear, towards the end of the fourth stanza of Keys work. But we only sing the first stanza.
For the record, The Star Spangled Banner did not become our nation's official anthem by congressional action until 1931.
Posted by: Mike Worcester | Jul 22, 2013 at 03:33 PM