Falwell, Jefferson and the Kaskaskia

Jerry Falwell has written a two-part story for WorldNetDaily called "The Impending Death of Christmas?" [Part 1] [Part 2]

It's a typical paranoid rant about the godless heathens on the left wherein stories of secular excess are cherry-picked, misreported and held up as typical examples of the growing threat to Jesus posed by Christ-hating liberals. He even slipped in an obligatory reference to that Festival of Lights parade in Colorado that conservative bloggers are always pulling out of their asses.

This time, however, Falwell plays his trump card against "the lies of the left." Apparently, whenever we're preventing American Christians from worshipping, we liberals falsely state that our founding fathers were keen on "the separation of church and state."

According to Falwell, we couldn't be further from the truth. Our founding fathers were men of god and were quite comfortable with the government taking an active role in promoting Christianity, and he has proof!

Falwell and his team of historians have poured over 200+ years of American histories and discovered this smoking gun:

On Dec. 3, 1803, the U.S. Congress, following the request of President Jefferson, ratified a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians. This treaty was significant because Congress, recognizing that most members of the tribe had become Christians, deemed to give an annual subsidy of $100 for the support of a priest during a seven-year period. That priest, as the Congress noted, was to perform "the duties of his office, and ... instruct as many ... children as possible."

The treaty, signed by President Jefferson, stated: "The United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars to assist ... in the erection of a church."

You read that right. The U.S. Congress of 1803, at the request of President Thomas Jefferson, allocated federal funds for the salary of a minister and for the construction of a church.

The Congress of 1803 was not hostile to Christianity. The members understood the value of imparting Judeo-Christian values among the Indians. They also recognized the need for advancing biblical values among the citizenry of the young nation.

Take that, fornicators!

Now that Jerry has brought this to light, I feel just terrible about pissing on the manger in my town's nativity scene.

Of course by 1803 there were less than 180 Kaskaskia indians left and by the early 1830s the United States had stolen what little remained of the Kaskaskia's land (and, presumably, the very church that Congress had built for them) and forced them into a reservation in Oklahoma along with the remnants of more than two dozen other nearly extinct tribes.

But don't let that distract you from the fact that GOD WAS THERE for all of it, and because of the selfless work of Jefferson, Congress and our Christian government, the Kaskaskia suffered far less as Christians than they would have had they still worshipped their pagan gods, smoked their pagan peace pipes and danced their pagan dances.

Hallelujah.

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