Dear CNN,
Many questioned your decision to hire Rick Santorum as a senior political commentator back in January 2017. Not because he’s a conservative—diversity of opinion can be valuable—but because he’s a bigot. His bigotry toward LGBTQ people was already well-known and documented, as even a cursory Google search shows. That his bigotry was rooted in religion perhaps gave him a pass, and your network chose to pay this man, presumably quite well, to pontificate to audiences of millions.
Last Friday, however, Santorum delivered a speech in which the racism was obvious, but the harmful disinformation rooted in Christian Nationalism was less so. I write this open letter in hopes that it will connect the dots for your network between his Christian Nationalist claims about America’s founding and his more overt and alarming racism.
By now, you’ve seen the video that’s been burning a hole through social media. At a Young America’s Foundation event, your commentator said:
CNN's Rick Santorum: "We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture" pic.twitter.com/EMxOEYDbg7
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 26, 2021
If you think about this country, I don’t know of any other country in the world that was settled predominately by people who were coming to practice their faith. They came here because they were not allowed to practice their particular faith in their own country. And so they came here, mostly from Europe, and they set up a country that was based on Judeo-Christian principles — when I say Judeo-Christian, the Mosaic laws, 10 Commandments, and the teachings of Jesus Christ, the morals and teachings of Jesus Christ. That’s what our founding documents are based upon. It’s in our DNA. …
We came here and created a blank slate [sic]. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture. It was born of the people who came here pursuing religious liberty to practice their faith, to live as they ought to live, and have the freedom to do so. Religious liberty. Those are the two bulwarks of America. Faith and freedom. I mean, you hear it all the time about faith and freedom, faith and freedom. But it is what makes America unique in the world.
Transitioning from the claim that America was founded on “Judeo-Christian principles” to bigotry and racism is, quite literally, a textbook example of Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism is and has always been bigoted.
The idea that America is founded as a Christian nation is not up for historical debate. Historians settled that issue long ago. America was not founded as a Christian nation. Fallacious claims about a Christian founding are meant to rewrite our history to justify hateful, exclusionary, and bigoted policies and power grabs now.
Let’s pull the thread on one of Santorum’s seemingly innocuous claims and see where it leads: The claim, shared by many Americans, is that settlers came to America “pursuing religious liberty.” Fleeing persecution is not the same as seeking religious freedom. The distinction is crucial. Santorum means that the Puritans and Pilgrims and their example is instructive. The Pilgrims, for instance, fled persecution in England, but they didn’t come to America. They went to Leidan, in Holland, where the government tolerated their minority religion and gave them more religious freedom than was available in Europe at the time.
But freedom meant that others, including members of the flock, were free too, including to leave the sect. Some did. The Pilgrims didn’t want religious freedom, they wanted a government that would enforce their particularly stringent brand of Christianity. So they fled Leiden and came to North America. They fled religious freedom so they could establish theocratic enclaves in the wilderness. The same can be said of the Puritans, who regularly banished and even executed people over theological disagreements. This is not freedom, but religious tyranny.
This historical myth-making about the Puritans is partly because, for much of American history “the inspired historians … were nearly all New Englanders,” as Nancy Isenberg observed in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. But other colonies are more representative of the principles on which America was founded, especially New Amsterdam, which would become New York City. And when our founders looked back at the Pilgrims and Puritans, they saw theocracies and persecution.
The popular myth regurgitated by Santorum, your senior political commentator, claims those theocracies as forerunners of the American Experiment when really, the founders viewed them as examples of what to avoid. The myth also hides the settlers’ brutality, which the Puritans also practiced against the Pequots—one of the genocides of indigenous peoples that Santorum brushes aside.
The Puritans waged a holy war on the Pequots, setting fire to a village on the Mystic River, killing 700 indigenous men, women, and children, and selling the survivors into slavery. As I’ve written elsewhere, the genocide was like something out of the Book of Joshua. The Puritans certainly saw it that way. John Mason, the Puritan militia commander and an early version of one of those New Englander historians, wrote an unashamed account of the slaughter and that his god laughed while his men slaughtered: “GOD was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven,” a haunting allusion today. Mason concludes, “Thus did the LORD judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies!”
For the Puritans, this was divine, biblically-sanctioned genocide. And if this seems remote or impossible today, despite the fiery oven language, think back to the Christian Nationalist mob that swarmed the Capitol on January 6th. One of the primary promoters of the Big Lie and organizers of the rallies and marches leading up to the event was a group founded by Trump supporters who believed their god instructed them to form a group to march on our halls of power. They called the group the Jericho March, after the biblical battle of Jericho in which the biblical God commands the sack and slaughter of every living being in an entire city. They named themselves after a genocide. (I cover the ties between January 6th and Christian Nationalism, including the Jericho March, in a new epilogue for the paperback of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, due out in August and available for preorder now.) There is a direct line from Santorum’s fallacious history to his bigotry against Native Americans, and it’s all related to the same justifications that led to Jan. 6.
So far, CNN, I’ve only focused on one of your commentator’s claims. There are others. When your employee talked about our founding documents embodying “Mosaic law” and the Ten Commandments, he was spouting more Christian nationalist disinformation. Never mind that our Constitution doesn’t mention a god, draws its power from the people (not a god), and separates religion and government by, for instance, banning religious tests for public office.
Sure, some of the Ten Commandments overlap with criminal laws that prohibit murder, theft and perjury. But these rules are not exclusive or original to Judeo-Christianity. They are universal principles that all humans understand. To claim them in the name of one religious tradition is the same kind of bigotry that Santorum spouted in the rest of this clip.
People are justly appalled and angry at Santorum’s callous and untrue take on Native Americans and him minimizing their genocide at the hands of the people he chose to lionize. Fewer will understand that he showcased a Christian Nationism that is, at heart, bigoted and racist. CNN, you must understand. As a large and influential media entity you must grasp this threat. Santorum is spouting the same Christian Nationalism that motivated the insurrection on January 6th. Some of us have been warning for years that Christian Nationalism is an existential threat to our republic. Each day clarifies the reality of that threat. Understanding that diversity of viewpoint is important, we’re still compelled to ask: CNN why are you platforming a Christian nationalist?
