Those shiftless Mennonites

I'm on the road at the moment, travelling the eastern US. On the way from Washington to Boston we passed through Pennsylvania, including Amish country. We stopped at Lancaster, a region particularly renowned for the Amish and visited a Mennonite info centre that we were told would explain something about their common Anabaptist culture. We paid for a tour of their Tabernacle which was described to us in minute detail. But as the guy was talking (with many a sharp S) I was trying to work out how ancient Jewish practices related to Anabaptists more than other Christian. Then at the end of his sermon he explained that the Bible says that when Jesus was crucified (or was it a couple of days later, when he was resurrected?) the curtain behind which God hides was torn in half. That is, Anabaptists (like other Christians) don't do any of that Jewish stuff anymore because God no longer lives behind a curtain in a tent.

I was really pissed off that we had paid money to hear a sermon and see a reconstruction of what they don't do anymore! We learnt nothing about Amish, Mennonites or any other Anabaptists.

The proof of the pudding

This is the end of the second-last week of classes. Today I handed out course evaluation sheets fo my class to assess me as a teacher. I'll get at least one bad one because I cut off one of my students' religious arguments rather abruptly.

We are just getting to the interesting part of the course - how the separation of church and state bears on the creationism debate. I put it to them that there's two ways to interpret the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment - "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion." This could mean either that the government can have nothing to do with any religion. Or it could mean only that it shall not establish an official religion ie fredom of religion, not freedom from religion. A Jewish girl who has no time for creationism pointed out that the USA is already heavily weighted towards Christianity and gave the example of swearing in presidents on the Christian Bible. I agreed and mused about whether JFK should have asked for Apocrypha in his (she very sensibly asserted that there should be no religious text associated with the ceremony).

Then a girl who's rather partial to creationism piped in saying something about "This country was founded by Christians. All these other religions came later..."

When I cut her off with, "But that's not true. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were not Christians; they were both deists. They believed in a god but were certainly not orthodox Christians." But that student is quite a nice girl (apart from the thin streak of bigotry) so I tried to soften the blow with, "I'm sorry to ruin a good argument but it's just not true."

We were then almost at the end of the class. If I had more time, or if I'd been quicker to think of it I would have taken the debate a little further. That is, even if every founding father had been an orthodox Christian, there have been non-Christians here well before 1776, before the Pilgrim Fathers, even! And apart from the Native Americans there's the African Americans who certainly didn't ask to be brought here and denied the right to practise their traditional beliefs, so it's hardly surprising that they converted to Islam in droves in the '60s. And what happens when an American born and raised here becomes an atheist? Where is he to go?

Even though I didn't get to say those things, I can't imagine she would have liked being told by an alien something that she didn't know about the founding fathers of her own nation. Oh, and not many (maybe a third, probably less) of the students present knew that the Pledge of Allegiance used to be secular but had "under God" added during the the Cold War.