Bill Press "responds" to my email

So I emailed Bill Press about his article which I first talked about below. My email was pretty much what I wrote here, but I added a couple things and I was a bit more polite. What follows is the full text of Mr. Press' response to my rather lengthy email:

Your ignorance is showing. BP

That's it. No attempt to counter my points. No acknowledgement that he was wrong. Just "your ignorance is showing." Ridiculous. If you wish to also attempt to correct him on his blatant errors and falsehoods, his email address is bill@billpress.com. Don't expect much more in way of a response, though. Mr. Press is obviously a liberal elitist who thinks he is never wrong and anyone with a factual opinion contrary to his own erroneous opinion is ignorant.

For completeness' sake, here's the full text of my email to Bill:

> Mr. Press,

I am thoroughly insulted by your article and disgusted by the misconceptions, half-truths and lies you have spread about American history, the "separation of church and state," and religious conservatives. I will attempt to correct you on the many things that you got wrong.

First of all, you claim that "for many religious conservatives, re-electing President Bush wasn't enough," yet you offer no evidence other than one dated example that many of them feel this way.

Next, you claim that religious conservatives want to "tear down the wall of separation between church and state, get rid of any nonbelievers, make Christianity the official state religion and declare the United States a Christian nation." Ridiculous! This is nothing more than knee-jerk reactionary rhetoric that has about as much basis in reality as Chicken Little's cries that the sky is falling. Perhaps a handful of powerless extremists want that, but the vast majority of religious conservatives do not. Additionally, the United States is already a Christian nation, as you yourself prove below, ironically enough.

You then provide a "recent" quote from Rev. Jerry Falwell: "We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours." From what I've found online, that quote is from 1993 - 11 years ago. That's not very recent, is it? Furthermore, there is no context for the quote, so citing it really is a worthless exercise. And if this is your idea of an example of "many religious conservatives," you obviously are lacking in any knowledge about representative sampling. One person does not equal "many."

Again in your article, you make a point to declare that the U.S. is not and has never been a Christian nation and you pretty much claim that anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant of American history. Trust me - the people who claim the U.S. is a Christian nation and always has been are very likely to be far more learned on the country's history than you appear to be.

You claim that the Founding Fathers didn't want to create a Christian nation. I think what you mean is that they didn't want to create a Christian government. There's a difference. The nation is the land, its people and their society. The government is what the people use to create and enforce laws.

Now we come to the most ridiculous and baseless lie in your entire article: "the founding fathers were not Christians. Most were Deists." Whether it's your lie or someone else's that you are mindlessly repeating, I don't know and it doesn't matter. It's a lie nonetheless. Please read the following well-researched webpages and learn about the faiths of our Founding Fathers:

Were the Founding Fathers "Deists," "Freethinkers," and "Infidels?"

The Faith of Our Fathers

Evidences of Faith in the Buildings, Memorials, and Forefathers of the United States (scroll about halfway down to a list of the Founding Fathers' denominations)

Furthermore, your description of Deists not only seems to be lifted from some anti-religious source like Internet Infidels, but as we shall see, it also flies in the face of the actions and beliefs of those Founding Fathers who people claim were Deists.

Moving on to the issue of the Constitution, you are correct in that the document is "hands-off" when it comes to God, but you need to remember that the Constitution founded the government, not the nation. The Declaration of Independence, the document that founded the nation, is definitely not "hands-off" when it comes to God. As to your statement that the Constitution does not mention God, Providence, Jesus or Christianity, you are not only one-fourth incorrect (the phrase "in the year of our Lord" directly references Jesus), but also hypocritical as you treat the phrase "separation of church and state" as if it did appear in the Constitution, which it does not. You state that the Consitution establishes no national religion, which is true, but has no bearing on whether or not this is a Christian nation. And as far as public officials are concerned, where do you suppose the traditional practices of taking their oaths on a Bible and stating "so help me God" come from if we are not a Christian nation?

Next, you mention Bejamin Franklin appeal for prayer at the Constitutional Convention - an issue which you get half right. Franklin's proposed measure on prayers was rejected only because it was so late into the convention, which had already had its share of problems. Had the issue been brought up at the beginning, it very likely would have been approved. The ever-formal Founders also felt that an ordained clergy would be needed to lead the prayers. Furthermore, a sermon was presented at the convention just six days later and prayers were then read every morning after that. Of course, Franklin is one of the men who is claimed to have been a stalwart Deist "who believed in a remote Providence, or 'Watchmaker God,' who created us, wound us up and left us on our own." Why would someone who supposedly believed that promote the offering of prayers to God for his intervention?

Then you bring up Article 11 of the 1779 Treaty of Tripoli as supposedly being clear on whether this is a Christian nation or not. Unfortunately for your argument, it is not clear at all. First of all, Article 11 refers to the government, not the nation itself. Second, Article 11 did not appear anywhere in the Arabic version of the treaty. Finally, when the treaty was renegotiated 8 years or so later, the statement along with the entire article was completely dropped. To be quite frank, the "argument from Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli" is ignorant and impotent.

You do get something right in that the Founders saw what was happening with religion and government in Europe and didn't want that repeated. However, that again does not have any bearing on if this is a Christian nation or not. You follow with a baseless assertion about the supposed abuses of early settlers. I would really like to see evidence to back up both that assertion and the assertion that such abuses influenced the Founders' work.

You claim we are "at once a secular nation and a religious people." This is called talking out of both sides of your mouth. We are a religious (primarily Christian) nation and people with a secular government. The nation can exist without the government, but the government cannot exist without the nation.

Next, you claim that the U.S. has existed for over 215 years. While technically correct, that figure is about 13 years off (2004 minus 1776 equals 228).

Now we get to statistics that you yourself provide which prove that this is a Christian nation: "81 percent of Americans say that prayer is an important part of their daily life; and 87 percent say they never doubt the existence of God." The majority of those people are Christian, so that means that we are, in fact, a Christian nation.

You claim that Jerry Falwell (still your only example of "many religious conservatives") "and company" are "wrong on their facts [and] they're wrong on what's best for religion." From what I've seen, you've gotten more facts wrong than he or most other religious conservatives have, and you certainly are no judge of who is or is not capable of knowing what's best for religion.

Finally, you once again cite that ever misused phrase "separation of church and state," which appears nowhere in the Constitution, and state that only a fool would tear it down. I agree that church and state must remain separate, but that does not mean that religion and government must be hostile to each other as some (the ACLU, Barry Lynn and Americans United, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, People for the American Way, you...) want them to be. The Founders knew that religion and government could get along and their actions proved that. The things they did go well beyond anything that secularists have fought against in recent years. They didn't create a theocracy and neither will religious conservatives or President Bush.