Texas GOP Should be Careful What They Wish For

The Republican Party of Texas’ 2022 platform calls for special privilege for Christians and demands that Christian prayers, Bible reading and the Ten Commandments be returned to public schools. Aside from the fact that the same folks who claim to be originalists venerating the U.S. Constitution don’t seem to understand either Article VI or the First Amendment which make it quite clear that this nation is secular. There is a great reason with historical examples of why they should be happy it's secular.

Let’s start with our 13 original colonies. As the Church of England was striving to establish a single, uniform religion across the kingdom, colonial America was divided, each of the colonies being dominated by their own brand of Christianity. Anglicans, who conformed to the Church of England, populated Virginia. Massachusetts was home to the Puritans.  Pennsylvania was ruled by and filled with Quakers.  Baptists ran Rhode Island.  Roman Catholics had Maryland. From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics often referred to as “Papists” were banned from the colony, along with other non-Puritans. Four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661 for persistently returning to the city to stand up for their beliefs. Anglican Virginia was the scene of notorious acts of religious persecution against Baptists and Presbyterians.  In 1771, a local Virginia sheriff dragged a Baptist preacher from the stage at his parish and beat him to the ground outside, where he was also horsewhipped.  In 1778, a pair of Baptist ministers were conducting services at the Mill Swamp Baptist Church in Portsmouth, Virginia where a gang of men rushed the stage and grabbed them, took the ministers to the nearby Nansemond River swamp, then dunked and held their heads in the mud until they nearly drowning them.

In the 1830s and 1840s, a wave of anti-Catholic violence broke out in the Northeast and elsewhere, mostly directed at recent Irish immigrants.

The Mormons were chased out of New York, then Ohio, then Missouri. A few years after settling in area of Illinois they named Nauvoo an anti-Mormon mob attacked the settlement on June 27, 1844 and burned it to the ground. They also invaded the jail cells where Smith and his brother were being held “morals” charges, and executed them.

Between 1933 and 1939, the period of the Great Depression, anti-Semitic fervor reached new heights in areas such as New York and Boston, Jews were violently attacked. Assaults, propaganda and intimidation were mostly carried out by special societies, like the Ku Klux Klan.

Televangelist John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, which boasts of 22,000 active members, once claimed the Roman Catholic Church was the “great whore of Revelation,” a “false cult system” and the “anti-Christ.”

Temple Beth-El, in San Antonio canceled Shabbat services in-person and online last Saturday, July 9, due to security concerns presented by the local FBI office regarding threats to the safety of San Antonio synagogues. Anti-Semitic flyers appeared on residents' lawns in Alamo Heights and Helotes in February. The flyers have been tied to multiple anti-Semitic and neo-nazi groups.

The various Christian sects can’t even agree on the contents of the Ten Commandments let alone a single bible version.

Republicans who say they want a Christian nation might want to re-think that as President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are both Catholics as are six of the nine Supreme Court Justices: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. So all those apostate Protestants here in Texas might just find they’re not so happy to have the Papists in control.