Transgressive books, part 3: Some Founding Fathers' religious beliefs

 If Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene get their way, the United States will be a sort of Christian Iran. There are many on the political and Christian right who are pushing for this. They have a bogus historian by the name of David Barton whose mission it is to prove that the Founding Fathers wanted a Christian nation. Aside from there being nothing about religion in the main body of the Constitution, and despite the First Amendment's proscription of a state religion, Barton labors on, misrepresenting historical documents to prove his point.

Should the people who want the United States to be a Christian nation get their wish, some books by the Founding Fathers will not be welcome. They might be banned altogether.

The Eighteenth Century was a time of advances in science, and many of the era's thinkers were having second thoughts about the Bible. I present here the views of three of them: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine.

In his autobiography, Franklin presented a recipe for successful living, which he called the Thirteen Virtues. Only one of those virtues comes anywhere close to religious advocacy.

13. Humility: Emulate Jesus and Socrates.

Nothing about worship. Franklin admired Jesus, but that was as far as it went. The Autobiography, by the way, is a good read, and he recounts some of his dealings with people more religious than he: the Quakers and the Dunkers, for two. The Dunkers are not well known these days, perhaps because they didn't leave any literature behind. In Franklin's time, the Dunkers were upset that non-Dunkers accused them of beliefs they didn't hold. Franklin asked one of them why, then, didn't they publish the things they believed. The answer was interesting and surprising. In their view, God occasionally revealed some truth to them; but later revelation sometimes revealed a new truth that superseded the old truth. They didn't write anything down because they didn't want future generations to be hobbled by old beliefs should God reveal something new. If only more religions were this flexible.

Thomas Jefferson, like Franklin, was a man of science, who also admired Jesus, but did not believe in his miracles. Jefferson looked at the four Gospels, and did his best to cobble together the story in chronological order. He left out all the miracles. So, I also recommend to you The Jefferson Bible. (As a personal aside, I found that reading the whole Jesus and his Disciples story chronologically made the group sound like a paranoid cult. Your mileage may vary.)

Finally, I recommend Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, which was never taught in any of my years in public school. Parents would have fussed. Thomas Paine was a Deist, and was no fan of the Bible, Old Testament or New.

The first chapter of The Age of Reason sets forth Paine's religious beliefs. The description is short and simple.

"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

"I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

"But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them."

The things Paine did not believe in fill the rest of the book.

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of."

I have to admit to you that Paine's last book was not well-received, even in the Age of Enlightenment. I believe that his funeral was attended by only one person. But I think The Age of Reason is a book that has a lot to recommend it.

So, three more transgressive books. Read them before they're banned.

Transgressive books, Part 2: James Baldwin's essays

 In Part 1 of this series, I said that James Baldwin's essays got me started reading Black literature. That's probably not strictly true. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye probably started the ball rolling, but Baldwin's essays had an electric quality that gave them what is my finest accolade: they are thrilling.

So, here's a list of his collections of essays with a couple of comments on each. It's been a long time since I've read most of these, so I'm getting some information from the blurbs on the covers, and some from the tables of contents.

Nobody Knows My Name. Race relations, naturally, but some literary criticism, too. I've read some Faulkner novels and loved them, but his collected letters put me off him, especially his letters urging the country to take integration slowly. Baldwin's essay on Faulkner's views is a highlight of this volume. There are also essays on Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.

Notes of a Native Son. There is a good deal of autobiography in this collection. Baldwin's upbringing in Harlem, his relationship with his father, and his expatriate life in Paris. Also, thoughts on protest novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular.

The Fire Next Time. The Atlantic called this book "So eloquent in its passion and so scorching in its candor that it is bound to unsettle any reader." Thrill him, in my case.

No Name in the Street. This one was written in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination and the ensuing race riots.

The Devil Finds Work. Baldwin criticizes films. Birth of a Nation. In the Heat of the Night. In This, Our Life. The Defiant Ones. And the unforgettable evisceration of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Lawrence of Arabia. And more.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Baldwin investigates the Atlanta child murders.

Read some of these. If you're a person who is able to be reached, you'll be reached. 

Transgressive books, Part 1

 In these days of book banning, the politicians on the right do not want people exploring history or literature that doesn't cast a rosy glow on America, or rather on white America.

When I started college, I didn't have the intellectual background I needed for many of my courses. As luck would have it, though, I worked in the college bookstore and was exposed to all of the books required for all the courses. Some political science courses dealt with Black politics, then being the age of rebellion against Jim Crow. It was the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his assassination. It was also the time of authors who were considered more "militant." The books required for political science courses on Black topics seemed angry and forbidding to me. It was too soon for me to try reading them.

Years later, I read all of James Baldwin's essay collections, and his writing was electrifying. That's a story for another post, but Baldwin got me started reading Black literature.

The book I want to talk about here is an anthology collected by David Levering Lewis, called The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. I would say that the average white reader might think that all Blacks are on the same page, that they all think in lock step. The Reader shows just how diverse opinions and writing styles among the Harlem literati were. It also demonstrates that, where American literature is concerned, much of the riches are in Black books.

One of the many debates among Black intellectuals concerned just what Black art should be. Should the Black American intellectual emulate white artists and their European style? Or should Black artists assert their Africanness in their art? Or should they do something altogether different? That's just one debate that was going on in Harlem at the time.

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, should you choose to read it, will put you into the middle of those debates and show you the great diversity of Black art.

These riches are something people like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis likely don't know about and couldn't understand. And this book is the kind of collection that your Eurocentric white supremacists will find inconvenient as they peddle the all-white history of the United States.