Dear U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene,

I’ve enjoyed reading your tweets and posts as well as articles and comments in response to your views and service. And while I’m pleased to finally be checking in, I apologize for taking so long to do so. And I also apologize that various religious entities from Rome to several Baptist denominations aren’t recognizing your brilliance. I’m pleased to find, however, that your boss and mentor still acknowledges your excellent cognitive traits.

I’ve been thinking about ways to move through your Christian Nationalism goals, and I think I’ve come up with an avenue or two. As you know (at least I think the word has reached even you), the U.S.’s founding fathers and mothers were against connections between religion and the state (which reminds me of a third potential apology if this is news for you).

With the First Amendment beginning with: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….,” there isn’t much we can do about this with the wording’s present state. Unfortunately, this along with a number of other quotes by James Madison, the father of the Constitution and the author of the Bill of Rights, as well as those by Thomas Jefferson and others make their thoughts pretty clear.

So here’s where I think we should start. Since both Thomas Jefferson and probably James Madison, like a number of the other founding fathers, were deists rather than Christians (I’m sorry if you’re taking David Barton of WallBuilders seriously; even historians who are far-right think his work is suspect),[1] I don’t think their words should count. I think the best place to start with this argument is with your constituency as they’ll be the easiest to sway. Once we use them as test cases, we’ll be able to work through our argument further.

As an example of Jefferson’s non-Christianness, as well as ammunition for us kicking him out, I offer The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, known as the Jefferson Bible, which was something Jefferson completed in 1820 by cutting several passages of the New Testament and pasting together the remainder.

Jefferson’s condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine.[2] If you can connect with Barton on this, I think you could help him as he reportedly maintains that Jefferson gave a copy of this book to a missionary to aid in evangelizing Indians. Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School suggests that “had the Indians been converted with that text, their heirs would have had no place to go but to what became the humanist wing of the Unitarian-Universalist church.” And we certainly don’t want this. Dr. Marty states further that “[i]f you wanted to promote the idea of ‘a Christian America,’ one which would privilege one religion, a version of Christianity, and de-privilege all others, and if you want to get back to roots and origins, the last of the ‘founding fathers’ on whom you’d concentrate would be Jefferson.” [3] I suspect that you know all of this, but if you could forward this on to Mr. Barton, I think this would be a helpful step in simply deleting Jefferson from the record.

I realize that Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, but I think if we gradually erase his name from history, we’ll be able to fill the space in with others—a variation of the great replacement theory. I think we can agree that David Barton’s research won’t fly in the long run, so it’s probably best if we simply eradicate from the nation’s collective memory the founding fathers who were deists. There is the problem of other founding fathers holding the same opinions Jefferson held, but I think if we run this by your boss’s staff du jour, they’ll be able to show us how to bring alternative facts to light.

In the meantime, if the country was dumb enough to elect your boss to the highest office in the land once, I think we can agree that a second time is not out of the question. If this happens, people much smarter than I am suggest that he’ll be in the office for good.[4] So we’ll be in luck because by that point, the Constitution will be terminated for various reasons, not the least of which will be that it has gotten in your boss’s way more than once already.

So with the Constitution and Bill of Rights terminated, we’ll be able to start afresh. As you know, the First Amendment, in addition to being created because of the founding fathers’ keen understanding of the religious persecution in European nations resulting from official state religions and religious wars, was also written to counter the Christian Nationalism evident throughout the New England colonies (you are correct; there was plenty of Christian Nationalism in North America—but it was before the writing of the Constitution). You probably know that while there was a strong religious presence in northeastern North America, not all of the colonies were started as a means of religious expression—but all of them had deep Christian (Protestant except for Maryland) connections.

Thankfully, Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1629) in rebellion against the Church of England (which of course wasn’t much better than Catholicism), and Rhode Island was founded in rebellion (or in excommunication) against Massachusetts (1636), which was similar to the founding of Connecticut (1636). I’m not sure though how big a deal we need to make of Catholic Maryland’s founding (1632) since Catholics aren’t actually Christians—what with their bishops being satanic and set on destroying our nation.[5] But as the tenants of history seem to not have influenced you, ever, I suspect this won’t be a problem as we proceed. Fortunately, Maryland reverted to true Christianity with the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, which serves those Catholics right.

While Pennsylvania’s 1681 founding was certainly a noble endeavor to provide a place of religious freedom for Quakers and other Christian sects, Catholics again didn’t fare well with a Pennsylvania law of 1705 mandating that anyone holding office under Crown and Proprieties must: “Solemnly swear and sincerely profess and testify that in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, there is no transubstantiation of the elements into the body and blood of Christ at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever and that the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saint and the Sacrifice of the Mass as they are now used in the Church of Rome are superstitious and idolatrous.”[6] British law also proscribed public worship for Catholics. Well, serves them right. If they would have been real Christians, this wouldn’t have happened. So my thought with this information is to reenact this 1705 law and work at convincing your constituency that the Pennsylvania founders had intended this law for all of the colonies, and hence for the entire U.S. This shouldn’t be a difficult piece of persuasion.

While Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and Pennsylvania were substantially motivated by their founders’ concerns related to the practice of religion, others like New Hampshire (1623), New York (1664), New Jersey (1664), and Delaware (1638) were founded for business and economic reasons.

The other four southern colonies—Virginia (1607), Georgia (1732), North Carolina (1663/1712), and South Carolina (1663/1712)—all had their bases in business and commerce. However, all held Protestant Christianity through the Church of England as their official religion and denomination—serving as excellent examples of our soon-to-be-returned-to-Christian Nationalism stature. We certainly don’t want to subscribe to the liberal tenants of Church of England/Anglican/Episcopalian practice—what with them thinking your boss is a dipshit, racist, liar, insurrectionist, and a personification of the Antichrist, but I think his people can work around this.

There are some pieces of the history of the Southern colonies and mainly but not exclusively the Province of Carolina that we may also want to alter. You’ll recall that the slave trade, focusing on capturing people in Africa and selling them in North America, was a thriving business and added greatly to the population to the point that by 1708 individuals of African descent amounted to approximately one-half of the population of South Carolina, and by about 1720 their numbers constituted two-thirds of the population. Always the entrepreneurs, during this same period, South Carolinians were looking to take advantage of the indigenous human capital that was readily available around them. This creative enterprise resulted in a trade commodity to be sold to Southern planters as well as to the sugar-harvesting industry in the West Indies. Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715 (three years following the split between North Carolina and South Carolina), “there were between 24,000 and 51,000 Natives enslaved in the entire ‘South.’”[7]

At first glance, this story gets messy so maybe we can lie low on relaying it. We may though want to simply run it by Dinesh D’Souza for him to put his own special spin on it—further promoting the idea that First Nations people were better off having their land and dignity stripped away from them rather than living as free barbarians. Moreover, with D’Souza we’ll be able to place these people in tandem with transplanted Africans who he shows were better off living as slaves in North America than as heathens in Africa.[8] If anyone can pull this off, D’Souza is the chosen one since he did such a bang-up job showing how 2,000 people ensured the fake results of the last presidential election.[9] This leads though to the question about believability as Daily Beast senior opinion editor Anthony L. Fisher maintains that the 2,000 Mules theory “is too stupid even for Fox.”[10] The good news is that even without the support of Fox News, the film has done well and your constituency continues to not be bothered with the facts.

With D’Souza and your boss’s people working on this, I’m hoping alternate facts will show that all of the colonies were started as a means of religious (Protestant) freedom, expression, and expansion—and that they all agreed with one another and got along. This last point may be a stretch, but I suspect that the alternate fact maker-uppers will be up for the task.

Thank you for reading. I’m hoping that at least some of this will be helpful as we work toward fabricating the U.S.’s Christian Nationalism past.

Sincerely,
Dr. B. Gleason
Minneapolis, Minnesota

[1]“David Barton,” Southern Poverty Law Center (Montgomery, Alabama)  https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-barton; Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President (Grove City, Pennsylvania: Salem Grove Press, 2012), passim.

[2] Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014). https://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Bible-Thomas/dp/1503032051

[3] Martin E. Marty, “David Barton’s Jefferson,” in “Sightings,” The University of Chicago Divinity School, https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/david-bartons-jefferson-martin-e-marty

[4] John Dickerson, “Liz Cheney on Why She Believes Trump’s Reelection Would Mean the End of Our Republic,” CBS Sunday Morning (3 December 2023), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/liz-cheney-oath-and-honor-on-trump-reelection-and-the-end-of-our-republic/

[5] Michael J. O’Loughlin, “Marjorie Taylor Greene says Catholic Church is ‘Controlled by Satan’ in Remarks on Bishops and the Catholic League,” America The Jesuit Review (April 28, 2022).

[6] Blanche McGuire, “Pennsylvania’s Catholic Pioneers,” Gathered Fragments, The Publication of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 11, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1. Duquesne University Scholarship Collection: https://dsc.duq.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1200&context=gf

[7] Peter C. Mancall, in Economic History Association, EH.net, review of Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Emprie in the American South, 1670 – 1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press: 2002); https://eh.net/book_reviews/the-indian-slave-trade-the-rise-of-the-english-empire-in-the-american-south-1670-1717/

[8] Dinesh D’Souza, America: Imagine a World Without Her (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2015), passim.

[9] 2,000 Mules, directed by Dinesh D,Souza (D’Souza Media, 2022), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18924506/

[10] Anthony L. Fisher, “Dinesh D’Souza’s Vile Big Lie Documentary is Too Stupid Even for Fox,” Daily Beast (19 May 2022): https://www.thedailybeast.com/dinesh-dsouzas-vile-big-lie-documentary-is-too-stupid-even-for-fox

About Post Author

Bruce Gleason

Bruce Gleason is a professor of music history and music education at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. With undergraduate and graduate degrees in music and theology from Crown College, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Iowa, he is a longtime student of U.S. and world history with his research and publications focusing on military music history. His Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drums: Horse-Mounted Bands of the U.S. Army, 1820 – 1940 was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2016. His Berlin and the 298th Army Band, 1988 – 1991: A Memoir is scheduled for release later this year. See https://www.brucegleason.org and https://cas.stthomas.edu/departments/faculty/bruce-gleason/

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