In Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the author begins his tour of the past with what many politicians proudly profess to be the source of their faith and American law: the Bible. We know that the Bible’s time period was neither as holy nor as peaceful as Sunday school made it seem, but we don’t actively acknowledge it—an oversight that Pinker maintains mars our view of the past with inaccuracy and fosters a false sense of nostalgia. Identifying the true context of the Bible doesn’t render you anti-Christian, Pinker continues. It just makes you historically accurate.
Similarly, the American Constitution is often subject to this tendency to whitewash origins. The same unwarranted nostalgia that leaves us ignorant of the Bible’s violent verses also leaves us pining for the era of the Founding Fathers. If American politicians don’t openly tout the Bible as the source from which all social policies should flow, then the Constitution is treated as a holy text: it is incapable of being criticized without accusations of unpatriotic heresy. Political candidates as high-up as Michele Bachmann refer to the Constitution as “that sacred text” and argue that it ought to be interpreted as the Founding Fathers did, rendering the Constitution an unchanging document insusceptible to changing social norms. Popular reverence for the Founding Fathers, as with any topic, perpetuates not just an ostensibly harmless nostalgia, but also fallacies. They did not, for instance, tirelessly crusade to end slavery because many of them were slave owners themselves—and patriarchal ones at that.
So how can such historical ignorance come to pass for patriotic truth? As The Better Angels of Our Nature shows, governments have displayed the decline in cruelty traced by Pinker throughout his tome, despite monopolizing the threat of violence as a deterrent to crime. Beginning as far back as the Babylonians, states have historically been the perpetrators of the greatest degree of hostility, often against their own people. But the Founding Fathers were sons of the European Enlightenment, and the American Constitution embodies the conceptual revolution that questioned dogmas like the divine right of kings. Instead, they favored a government whose existence is predicated on serving the people—the quintessential American mission statement of securing citizens’ life, liberty, and happiness. The Founding Fathers strove to design a democracy that would protect humanity from itself, from those dark recesses of human nature that persuade leaders away from genuine government and toward abusive tyranny.
But the American experimentation with democracy, for all its novelty and nonviolent advancements, was nonetheless riddled with major flaws that manifested themselves in the Constitution. Likewise, American history has been marred by these now thoroughly “un-American” values, racism and sexism most severe among them. In his discussion about the evolution of governmental violence, Pinker wryly cites rapper and actor Ice-T’s impression of Thomas Jefferson reviewing the Constitution: “Let’s see: freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom of the press; you can own niggers… Looks good to me!” Defendants of slavery originally cited, among other things, the Bible’s approval of the practice; it was only after the Civil War that the Thirteenth Amendment righted the Founding Fathers’ wrong. And it required first wave of feminism—beginning with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and culminating in Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920—to correct the Founding Fathers’ sexism.
One wouldn’t know all this, though, given the hyper-patriotic rhetoric populating political discourse. The punishment meted out for tolerating historical inaccuracies and allowing the past to be permeated by an unwarranted nostalgia, whether it is for the times of the Old Testament or the Founding Father’s ideal America, is that history is reduced to a lie. Whitewashing the past to hoist America back on the tallest pedestal of equality and freedom isn’t a practice contained to either side of the political aisle. With rosy patriotism, Michele Bachmann once said as people arrived in America, “it didn’t matter the color of their skin … their language … their economic status … once you got here, we were all the same.” But anyone moderately versed in American history knows that ethnicity and economic status were crippling forces of inequality—from slavery to Japanese internment camps to employment discrimination.
It is important to do away with the notion that acknowledging the Bible’s violence and the Constitution’s original flaws makes you any less religious or patriotic. Pointing out the violence inherent in the Bible doesn’t mean you hate Christians; pointing out our Founding Fathers’ flaws doesn’t mean you hate America. And you can agree with a text like The Better Angels of Our Nature without blaspheming God or country. Whitewashing the past with myopic, feel-good lies is surely the more unpatriotic sin than simply questioning the Constitution could ever be.