By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — The founders of the American republic were at pains not to repeat the religious wars that had characterized so much of the history of modern Europe — including in England to which most of them looked for inspiration and tradition — and thus made sure not to establish any of the Christian sects to which they belonged as the official religion of the new nation. But they were far from hostile to faith.
To the contrary, the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, looks directly to faith as the wellspring of American liberty. Thomas Jefferson’s text speaks of a new nation rooted in “The Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God.” Above all, it says that the rights of citizens are not the gift of any monarch or government, but rather derive from God. Americans are, it said, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
And while the Constitution didn’t mention God or faith, the First Amendment that was added to it, ensured that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
As John Adams — who was not only a driving force behind the Declaration, but became the nation’s first vice president and second president — made it clear, the edifice the founders had created was not only not inimical to faith; it depended on it. He wrote in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Yet this strong strain of reliance on faith is resisted in some quarters by those, including many Jews, who see any acknowledgement of these obvious truths to be a cause for alarm.
Indeed, something as innocuous as the notion that President George Washington prayed, is still controversial.
On May 14 The New York Times took time out from its antisemitic campaign against Israel to claim that the ubiquity of the 1976 painting of Arnold Friberg, “Prayer at Valley Forge,” is an ominous sign of the rise of “Christian nationalism.”
The painting is based on something in the popular Washington hagiography by Parson Mason Locke Weems, who helped popularize an array of myths about the first president, including the apocryphal story about his chopping down a cherry tree as a boy. It may be that there is no documentation for a specific incident in which the commander of the Continental Army dropped to his knees in the snow at Valley Forge during the darkest days of the American Revolution as the painting depicts. But by the same token, it is utterly implausible to assert that the general never prayed while trying to keep his army of starving and shivering patriots together in the winter of 1777-78. He was, after all, a religious person and an active member of the Anglican Church, rather than an irreligious Deist as some claim.
Yet those who are determined to preserve a dubious freedom from religion rather than the freedom of religion that the founders deeply believed in, are offended by the use of the painting in the government’s America 250 celebrations.
Trump’s special attention to Jewish heritage can also trace its origins back to Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. In it he promised the small community of Jews then living in the United States that the American republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” and expressed the hope: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
That Trump should honor Shabbat in this manner is also not merely in keeping with American traditions, but an important contribution to the fight against the surge of antisemitism.
Christianity is an important element of the American political tradition. While the neo-Marxist left that encourages mobs to chant for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”), it is evangelical Christians who are the greatest defenders of Israel and Jewish rights.
It is true that there is a growing hostility to Jews, Judaism and Israel among a minority on the American right. They might well be termed “Christian nationalists” who are determined to discriminate against Jews. But what better riposte to their hateful messages could there be than Trump’s embrace of Shabbat as part of “America 250?”
Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzburg) wrote, “More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” Many Christians are now realizing that it can help them, too, and that is something that Jews of all denominations and beliefs should welcome.
