Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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WHEN white Christian nationalists — ranging from US Vice President JD Vance to English criminal Tommy Robinson — make wild claims that America and Britain are Christian countries that require theocratic governance we say “meh“, shrug our shoulders and move on to fill our tortillas or groom our pet gorillas.

But I was pulled up short when I belatedly discovered that a Democratic senator in New York, Chuck Schumer, above, posted this bilge on the Fourth of July:

This drew a sharp rebuke from American Atheists. Its President Nick Fish lost no time to write a letter to Schumer, which contained these paragraphs:

A comprehensive review of this phrase, “God’s noble experiment,” by my staff, by multiple journalists, and by Joanne Freeman, a Yale University historian who is an expert in early American politics and history, finds no example of any founder using this phrase.

What we did find, however, were multiple examples of you claiming the founders had used this term to describe our nation. In fact, the only example of this term being employed by anyone — other than you — is in a 1939 review of Ray Billington’s book ‘The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860‘ by a Hillsdale College historian, a book unrelated to the founding era. 

At a time when our nation’s history is increasingly being subjected to revisionist, falsified narratives by the White Christian Nationalist movement to justify their exclusionary treatment of anyone who doesn’t fit within their narrow vision of who counts as an American, it is incumbent upon us to demand better. The truth matters. 

And the truth is that repeating this myth, this fabrication, is doing the work of the White Christian Nationalist movement. The truth is that the United States was founded as a bold experiment in self government. A nation built on religious pluralism. A nation where it ‘does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god.‘ 

American Atheists also immediately launched a petition demanding that Schumer correct the record, retract his fabricated statements, and apologise.

Journalist Jonathan Larsen quoted Joanne Freeman as saying:

In the well-over 100,000 documents written by founders included in the Founders Online database from the National Archives, no one uses the phrase ‘God’s noble experiment.’ No one.

Larsen also pointed out that Schumer also cited “one nation under God,” without noting that “this phrase was only injected into the Pledge of Allegiance, and other previously secular places, in the 1950s, to weaponise Christianity in the effort to stir up anti-Communist sentiment.”

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