I know the conservative myth that PBS is some kind of hotbed for liberalism isn’t true, but to see the network go out of its way to prove its conservative bona fides is disconcerting.
Two months ago, PBS gave Richard Perle a whole hour to repeat discredited neocon arguments about Iraq and the Middle East, including the notion that Saddam Hussein had a working relationship with al Qaeda, and the bizarre argument that Osama bin Laden’s “network has been destroyed.” As Media Matters noted, Perle’s PBS special “made a series of assertions about the Iraq war that have already been shown to be false.”
It appears that PBS is going down a similar road this month, with a special on religious liberty called “Wall of Separation.”
The “wall of separation” is a metaphor deeply embedded in the American consciousness. Most Americans assume that the First Amendment prevents the mixing of politics and religion. The freedom of religion clauses protect individuals from the entanglement of religion with government and secure the right to freely exercise religious faith. America is a religiously pluralistic culture guided by a secular government.
But what would surprise most Americans is the discovery that this is not what the Founding Fathers intended when they established the nation and wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In fact, they had a radically different interpretation of the role of religion in state and federal governments.
Uh oh. This reads a bit like a pamphlet from Focus on the Family. In fact, “Wall of Separation” is a production of Boulevard Pictures, which explained on its website that this PBS special will explain that the Founding Fathers had “a radically different definition” of religious liberty than what we have today, and that “the modern understanding of the role of religion in the public square is exactly the opposite of what the Founders intended.”
If this is starting to sound to you like religious right claptrap, we’re on the same page.
As my friends at Americans United for Separation of Church and State found, there’s reason to be skeptical about this new PBS special and those who put it together.
So Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others among the nation’s founders didn’t intend a “religiously pluralistic culture guided by a secular government”? That’s totally wrong and very much in keeping with the Religious Right’s spin on America’s founding.
We at Americans United did a little research on Boulevard Pictures, and here’s what we found. Although the Web site for the film company mentions no religious or political agenda, its president is Jack Hafer, an evangelical Christian who told one interviewer that Christians have an obligation to “shape the culture” and “spread the faith.” He urged Christian young people to go into the arts as “kingdom-spreaders” and as “a form of missionary service.”
That doesn’t sound too bad. Christians have a right to proselytize. But I don’t usually expect to see proselytism on PBS.
And then there’s Brian Godawa, the writer and director of “The Wall of Separation,” who is an even more interesting character. Godawa did movie reviews for a time for the Chalcedon Foundation’s Web site. Those of you who follow religion and politics will recognize Chalcedon as the nerve center of Christian Reconstructionism, the most militant wing of the Religious Right. Godawa also was a featured speaker at the American Vision’s “2006 Worldview Super Conference,” a Reconstructionist event.
Reconstructionists detest democracy and hope to usher in a fundamentalist Christian theocracy in America based on their reading of biblical law. They are best known for seeking to impose the harshest penalties of the Old Testament penal code: the death penalty, for example, for gays, adulterers, fornicators, witches, incorrigible teenagers and those who spread false religions.
I don’t know if Godawa calls himself a Reconstructionist — his reviews have been removed from Chalcedon’s Web site — but his perspective is definitely pretty far out.
When Americans United asked what was up with all of this, PBS Vice President John F. Wilson defended the decision to promote the program as serving “our mandate to present a diversity of viewpoints on issues of public importance.”
That’s hardly persuasive. PBS has a mandate to present accurate information to viewers. A “diversity of viewpoints” shouldn’t include religious right-style propaganda presented as historical fact.
When Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, a close Karl Rove ally, took over PBS, he told the Association of Public Television Stations along with officials from the CPB and PBS that they should make sure their programming “better reflected the Republican mandate.”
I think we’re still seeing the results of Tomlinson’s agenda.