First, a personal notice. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a Scandinavian festival in Stromsburg, Nebraska, so I won’t be posting anything. Be strong.

Over at The American Culture, where I cross-post now and then, Mike D’Virgilio has some thoughtful comments on the historical revisionism—distressingly popular among young evangelicals—that blames the “culture wars” in America on conservatives. I suppose if you weren’t around at the time, you can be excused for believing that kind of nonsense.

Below, a short history of religion in America as I suppose it’s taught in schools nowadays. (In case you’re new to this blog, the material below is satire. If you don’t know what satire is, look it up.)

In the beginning, an earnest group of Deists founded the United States. In order to protect the country from the fearful ravages of religion, they included in the first amendment of the Constitution a guarantee that the right to religion, and “the free exercise thereof,” might not be infringed upon by the government. Why they expressed it quite that way, when their clear purpose was to protect the people from all public expression of religion, remains a mystery.

Throughout the course of our nation’s history, religion has always been taboo in public life. No public figure ever prayed, or called for prayer, or defended his policies on the basis of the Bible. That was not done. The average citizen, in fact, never entered a church, and had no idea what the Bible has to say.

Throughout the greatest crises of our nation, the idea of calling on God was never even considered. The movement to abolish slavery, led by such stalwart secularists as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Rev. (the Rev. stood for Revisionist) Henry Ward Beecher, proudly proclaimed the equality of all people based on evolutionary science. Julia Ward Howe’s classic song, “The Battle Ballad of the Republic,” with its classic lines, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the horde,” expressed the humanitarian, humanist philosophy that united Americans (even when they were shooting at each other).

In the late 19th Century, the entirely secular Progressive Movement found a presidential candidate in that staunch secularist, William Jennings Bryan (who, probably under the influence of a brain lesion, later became the only American of his generation to question the theory of evolution). Another progressive cause was Prohibition, spearheaded by the entirely secular Women’s Skeptical Temperance Union.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that an insidious conspiracy of Christian fundamentalists wormed its way into American life, and started banning a lot of traditional freedoms that Americans had always cherished, like abortion and gay marriage. Where these religious fanatics came from is a mystery, since such people had never before been seen in this country. But it is the duty of all patriotic Americans to oppose them in their crusade to take away our precious constitutional rights to “choice, security, and the guarantee of happiness.” (This original wording from the Declaration of Independence has recently been restored by the Federal Department of Deconstruction Criticism.)

As General Custer once said, “The west would be nice, peaceful place, if those Indians hadn’t sneaked in and started causing trouble.”