A LOT of these nuts believe this. Seriously. It's a major tenet of American Dominionism.
In contrast, there is the Christian Nationalist view, which claims that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based primarily on the Ten Commandments and other parts of the Bible, and that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy.
Again, this goes back to the Puritan Origin Myth. But it played out in parallel with the growth of the United States.
Manifest Destiny was the belief that the US was destined to bridge the continent, and establish a new heaven on earth. Never mind that we had to slaughter the Native Americans
The South certainly cherished the myth that they - and not the North - was carrying the banner of God in the war against evil (meaning abolitionists).
While the idea never truly went away, it had a fresh beginning in the 1970s with a book by a man named Peter Marshall. Best known as the son of Catherine Marshall, who wrote the novel Christy, he was co-author of The Light and the Glory, the seminal work of “Providential History.”
I remember my mother reading this, although I never did. (Christy is a good book, though. The scene where a preacher grooms and rapes a teenage girl made it into my post on Doug Phillips.)
For homeschoolers of my age, however, Marshall may not be a household name. Another person took up the banner of historical revisionism and became the most familiar. That would be David Barton. In my previous post on Ted Cruz, I detailed just a few of his lies and fabrications. He is the foremost purveyor of the baloney that the United States is or was a “Christian” nation, established by God to be his kingdom on earth. And, as I noted in the previous post, he even helped write the Republican platform for 2012. Yikes.
Here is the basic idea of what Marshall and Barton teach: The United States has a special covenant with God. We are basically the “new Israel,” and were guided since our inception by divine providence. Later, however, we forsook our god (just like Israel) and all our problems are due to that. If we would just return to God, everything would be great again.
Does this sound familiar?
Pretty much any Evangelical should find this familiar, because it is the central myth of Christian Nationalism.
As I noted above, one HUGE problem with this is that it requires a staggering degree of historical denialism.
But there is another huge problem:
It requires the whitewashing of history.
I use that term in multiple senses.
The first is this: in order to believe that God directed and led the United States from its founding, one must believe that God apparently ordered some serious atrocities.
