The Congressionally-constituted America250 commission licensed the series to an evangelical Christian comics publisher, pushing a deeply-distorted, evidence-challenged account of the nation’s founding and constitution.
In Talking Points Memo, Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard discusses the disturbing contents of the official, Congressionally-created America250 commission’s core historical product: a sixteen-volume comic book series produced under license to a Christian comic book publisher.
The series offers a profoundly distorted picture of the role of Christianity in the founding of the colonies and, later, the United States, ignoring the non-conforming stories of all the colonies south of New England in service of its meta-argument: that the U.S. and is a Christian nation created by Divine will, as was the 1787 Constitution.
It asserts a variety of miracles took place — divine interventions to allow Washington to win various battles in the Revolution, to prompt Jefferson to write the preamble to the Declaration, to allow the great compromise that created the Constitution — and then goes on to tell us a highly partisan account of what the Constitution should and shouldn’t mean, including defenses of Clarence Thomas’s character, Antonin Scalia’s “originalism,” and the present court overturning Roe v Wade.
We’re told only Godly revolutions like America’s result in good, while secular ones like the French Revolution end in chaos — because “when God is driven from the public square, there are no absolutes; anything goes” — which will come as a surprise to the secular veterans of the Velvet and Romanian Revolutions. The comics fail to explain how avowedly Christian regimes like Franco’s turned out so badly while secular ones in postwar Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands managed to produce three of the richest, happiest and most stable countries in the world.
“So why is an official U.S. congressional commission effectively endorsing this unbalanced and evidence-challenged version of our national story?” Woodard asks in the piece. “I reached out to the commission’s media department to ask, and to learn more about how the relationship with Kingstone came about. They didn’t respond.”
Woodard’s essay for Talking Points Memo appeared July 3. TPM, the pioneering online political news website founded by Josh Marshall in 2000, has more than 35,000 paying subscribers and a dozen staff writers based in New York and Washington, D.C.
Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center, examines regional issues in American life and has developed a revised civic national story for the 21st century United States tied to the ideals in the Declaration.