Isn't the Worldnutdaily Fun?

I love this. The Worldnutdaily's idea of "news" is an article like this one, entitled "Christian Revival in U.S. - Can It Really Happen?", which is really just an ad pimping a book by John Chalfant that is available, naturally, from the Worldnutdaily at a tidy profit. Ironically, but predictably, Chalfant has ties to Reverend Moon (as does virtually everyone on the religious right these days, since he has spread huge amounts of money around those circles).

Chalfant is a member of the board of the Council for National Policy. Sounds inoccuous enough, but the CNP has been home to a Who's Who of the far right for over two decades, from televangelists like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and James Robison to Ollie North, Howard Phillips and our ol' buddy Alan Keyes. Most frighteningly, it also includes many Christian Reconstructionists like Gary North and RJ Rushdoony. Oh, I didn't mention that it also has many ties to creationism as well, as both Duane Gish and Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research have served on the CNP board. The CNP is enormously powerful as a sort of central steering committee for the religious right. Chalfant's arguments are pretty much the standard nonsense we hear all the time:

Many Christian leaders have compromised with a secular worldview that never could have created the Declaration of Independence, Constitution or Bill of Rights, claims Chalfant, a member of the influential Council for National Policy...

Christians need to realize, he says, "that they have the primary responsibility for reclaiming our nation's Christian heritage because it is Christianity upon which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were founded."

And yet, as has been shown a thousand times over, the Declaration of Independence contains deistic language, not Christian language, and was written by someone who rejected virtually everything about Christianity. And the Constitution itself has no mention of anything even vaguely resembling any principle found in the Bible or in Christian theology, as it was based almost entirely upon Enlightenment philosophy. It probably should also be mentioned that the Treaty with Tripoli, negotiated under Washington and signed by Adams in 1797, explicitly stated that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

Isn't it funny how the religious right in the late 1700s, when the Constitution was written, saw the Constitution as a godless, non-Christian document that would bring down the wrath of God upon us, yet today's religious right wants us to believe that it was a Christian document all along. Except for the honest ones, of course. Gary North, the reconstructionist who has also served on the board of the CNP, has called the Constitution not only an anti-Christian document, but a con perpetrated by deistic and Masonic founders upon the Christian population. He rightly calls the Constitution what it was, a radical break from previous Christian conceptions of government predicated upon the ideas of the Enlightenment rather than on the Bible or Christian theology. But that isn't going to stop the Worldnutdaily from blathering on about it. After all, it sells books. And isn't that what "news" is really all about?

More like this

And the big question is, do these wingnuts who keep insisting the founding fathers were Christians and were setting up the U.S. as a Christian nation *know* that they're lying?

That is the question of the hour. My guess is they actively shut out any information that contradicts them. So refuse to learn the truth and make the same assertions over and over. Exactly like the creationists. So in my opinion this is no different than a blatant lie. When the evidence is there and you activly reject it, while repeating the same bunk over and over- that's the same as lying as far as I'm concerned.

All this is made even funnier by the fact that these lunatics don't realize just how badly they're embarassing themselves.

By Chris Berez (not verified) on 28 Sep 2004 #permalink