Review: Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence by Alan Dershowitz

Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence
by Alan Dershowitz.

First off, this book is fantastic. It should be a pre-requisite reader for anyone who wants to have a conversational-interest in American politics and policy or participate in American politics. Actually, let's just make it a standard read for 5th to 8th graders when they start to learn about American history.

This book denounces the movement in contemporary American politics of right-wing religious conservatives using the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as being in support of their purely christian ideals and agendas, going so far as to saying that all the founding fathers were deeply christian and that our country's founding documents were always meant to be upholding these christian values for this CHRISTIAN NATION. Dershowitz accomplishes this by relying nearly solely on the words of the founding fathers themselves, using extensive contextual citations from their public and private works to get surprisingly specific opinions from them on these exact topics. Reading quote after quote of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin denouncing the bible and foretelling of the dangers of involving religion in politics will have you saying "Really? Those guys wrote that? That is so telling, how did I never hear of that before?" and will live absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that the modern-day religious right's christian agenda in our politics is PRECISELY what the founding fathers wrote their founding documents AGAINST.

It would lend itself well for children to read, since the writing style is minimal and clear. A christian might even be able to understand it. There are no unfounded accusations or opinions here, no literary acrobatics or selective quoting going on. We just have account after account from the pen of Thomas Jefferson himself refferring to the bible as "dung" and entirely made-up, unbelievable, and self-contradictory. We have extensive quotations from the founding father's intentions in writing the declaration of independence, and there is really no mistake that religion is meant to stay completely separate from politics. Nowhere once in the constitution or declaration of independence is any reference made to Jesus or the god of the bible, and Dershowitz explains why that is not an accident.

In short, this was yet another book I selected to fuel my growing intolerance for religious belief. While we have always known how ignorant and stupid right wingers sound when they say things like "this is a christian nation founded on christian ideals and therefore we should make gays illegal / not teach evolution / teach bible in the classroom...", but now having read these firsthand quotes of the intentions of the founding fathers, we know that statements like these are so far off of reality and really just show an embarrassing stupidity and ignorance on the topic of our founding documents and our country's history.

This is not a Christian nation, it was not founded on christian ideals, and the Declaration of Independence stands to prevent and oppose the very agendas that those of the religious-right are pushing into our politics.

-GD