Leap Of Faith?: Tea Party Activists Promote Bogus Religious `History' Of Constitution

[Joanne98]

Over the past few months, I've had several people call or e-mail to ask me if I know anything about a book titled The 5,000 Year Leap.

I have to admit that I was not familiar with the tome, so I looked it up. Published in 1981 by a conservative Mormon named W. Cleon Skousen, the book is just a tad unusual. It's loaded with conspiracy theories and argues that America's Founding Fathers modeled themselves on the biblical tribes of ancient Israel.


Despite its daffy premise, The 5,000 Year Leap has become influential in some circles of the Tea Party. Recently, George Washington University law professor Jeffery Rosen, writing in The New York Times, called Skousen "the constitutional guru of the Tea Party movement."
This is not good.

Skousen died in 2006, but his ideas live on - and they are extreme ideas. As Rosen observed, "Starting more than 60 years ago with his first book, `Prophecy and Modern Times,' he wrote several volumes about the providential view of the U.S. Constitution set out in Mormon scripture, which sees the Constitution as divinely inspired and on the verge of destruction and the Mormon Church as its salvation. Skousen saw limited government as not only an ethnic idea, rooted in the Anglo-Saxons, but also as a Christian one, embodied in the idea of unalienable rights and duties that derive from God, and he insisted that the founders' `religious precepts turned out to be the heart and soul of the entire American political philosophy.'"

How did a book this odd gain such prominence? Rosen explains: "In 2009, after years of obscurity, Skousen's ideas were unexpectedly rediscovered by Glenn Beck, who was given a copy of `The 5,000-Year Leap' by a friend. As a result of Beck's endorsement, the book became a best seller and a Tea Party favorite."

Whenever I hear someone start talking about the alleged "biblical" basis for our government, I ask them to show me the evidence in the Constitution. Of course it isn't there. The Founders were a diverse lot when it came to personal religious beliefs, but they were in agreement that basing governments on a particular version of faith had messed up Europe for hundreds of years. They sought a new direction of the United States: separation of church and state.

I also think it's safe to conclude that the country isn't based on Mormon principles, since that religion didn't even exist when the Constitution was written.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/11/29/13054/551/Front_Page/Leap_Of_Faith_Tea_Party_Activists_Promote_Bogus_Religious_History_Of_Constitution

[rurallib]

1. Glenn Beck shits another turd for the faithful to venerate