The Sloppiness of the “God Bless the USA Bible”
The “God Bless the USA Bible” has been in the news a lot, most recently because of the revelation that all the books have been printed in China.
This Bible includes the King James Version of the English text, thus omitting the deuterocanonical books that appear in the Septuagint and in Roman Catholic Bibles.
On the other hand, this volume includes some texts that aren’t in any Christian canon, as its website boasts:
- Handwritten chorus to “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood
- The US Constitution
- The Bill of Rights
- The Declaration of Independence
- The Pledge of Allegiance
In fact, the volume doesn’t offer the entire U.S. Constitution. That document includes the Bill of Rights and all the other ratified amendments, which have the same constitutional weight as the text composed in Philadelphia in 1787.
This Bible leaves out every amendment after the first ten. Some people have suggested some nefarious intent in omitting the amendments on ending slavery, equality under the law, income tax, Presidential term limits, and the like. But the omission is just due to ignorance and carelessness.
We can see the same sloppiness in how this Bible presents the signatures at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, as shown in this screenshot from a review video by Tim Wildsmith.
Part of the blame for that mistake belongs to the signers themselves. Some of them sorted themselves out by state, but the New Englanders mixed together on the right, and the Delaware delegation didn’t succeed in separating from Pennsylvania in the middle. There are no state labels on the famous signed copy. Mary Katherine Goddard’s print shop added those for a 1777 broadside, and they appear (in different form) on the National Archives transcript.
Whoever was tasked with preparing this Bible, either in the U.S. of A. or in China, apparently downloaded text with the state labels but then didn’t format it properly.
Another of the news stories about this Bible is how Oklahoma’s school superintendent solicited bids for Bibles with “only the King James Version” but also “copies of The United States Pledge of Allegiance, The U.S. Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, and The U.S. Bill of Rights” (P.D.F. download). After criticism that that was an obvious ploy to send $3 million in public funds to the publisher of the “God Bless the USA Bible,” the state government amended its specifications.
Of course, the “God Bless the USA Bible” would not have met those specs if Oklahoma had strictly applied them since it includes only part of the U.S. Constitution.
Not to mention that this state government appears to be favoring one form of religion over others, in violation of one part of the Constitution the volume actually does contain.
2 comments:
"favoring one form of religion over others"...well, that was the basis of Massachusetts and the Plymouth colonies. They wanted to be free from other forms of religion so that they would have their own "safe space" (to employ a secular term). The Quakers had Pennsylvania..Catholics got a better deal in Maryland than in England, or dare I say it, in New England. Same for the Quakers. Rhode Island was set up to be separatists from the abutting colonies. Diversity of belief was what the nation was founded on.
And let's not forget: Massachusetts had a state religion until 1834. As written, the First Amendment does refer to "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" but it didn't say anything about the state legislatures doing so. Future generations saw this differently.
Yes, 400 years ago the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were founded on the basis of the government favoring one form of religion over others, just as the England did. And you don’t need to remind me that almost 200 years ago the state of Massachusetts was still favoring one form of religion over others.
To call that “Diversity of belief” seems rather backward, though. It would be like saying that if one colony forbade particular publications but a distant colony forbade other publications, the result would add up to freedom of the press.
Regardless, we both know that the Fourteenth Amendment, made part of the U.S. Constitution over a century and a half ago (even if the “God Bless the USA Bible” lost it), prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in a long series of cases that the states also had to protect our freedoms under the First Amendment.
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