One of our listeners seems to get his talking points from Right-Wing medial like OAN or Fox News. What are American culture, values?
Are Democrats anti American culture & values
A listener typed a message in our live chat during a recent Politics Done Right program. It allowed me to make a few points that few people take the time to ponder.
The listener said that it is Democrats, Progressives, that are separatists. He implied they are anti-American culture and values. Making such a statement was very ill-advised, given our history and genesis.
The Pilgrim came to America purportedly for religious freedom. So anyone believing that is one of the aspects of American culture should be careful as reality says something else.
The idea that the United States has always been a bastion of religious freedom is reassuring—and utterly at odds with the historical record. … In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith.
The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side. And much of the recent conversation about America’s ideal of religious freedom has paid lip service to this comforting tableau.
From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”
Is that the part of the culture he wants us to continue adopting?
But that is just one part of our Genesis. The Virginia Company of London established Jamestown thirteen years before the Pilgrims landed in America. And what is their reality in America? They brought a new culture to the land. They imported the first African slaves to what was to be the United States. Is teaching that reality anti-America culture and values or explaining why a national humility is in order.
This is just our genesis. Early American culture dehumanized many people of various cultures responsible for building and creating all that made America its own culture. What Progressives will not tolerate is the implication that American culture is not one created by and represented by all.
