downdb.net

With Glenn Beck’s Festival of White Resentment going on this past weekend,”black robed regiment” was all over my Twitter feed and Google Reader list like a rash. This meme was new to me, but it had the sound of one of those code-phrases that make the rounds of right-wing blogs and talk-radio.

Sure enough, according to the googles, it’s another attempt by Christianists to revise American history in their favor, this time casting colonial preachers as primary actors in the establishment of the United States as a Christian nation. The first link that came up was to some religious nutball’s site, and his write-up on the topic contains this gem:

These men of God would get in their pulpits and they would basically tell people what or who they should and should not vote for, because they understood that in order to have a great government, then you must have great citizens.

So, by “great citizens,” what you actually mean is “People who do what their preacher tells them,” which would be about as far as you can get from the notion of a well-informed citizenry able to think through policy issues and make decisions for themselves. For this crowd, the legitimacy of the government doesn’t come from the will of the governed, it comes from god—their god. But hey, best not to let Locke, Rousseau, and the entire Enlightment get in the way of your project to set up a Christian theocracy.