To the editor:
The recent rally on the Washington Mall hosted by Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement finally revealed what he and his movement is all about.
It is not about politics, it is about religion. It is about defining a "true" American as being an evangelical who falls to his knees and prays before his children. The obvious alternative is someone who doesn't do this and thus that person is obviously not American and is surely bound for that eternal torture place down under which evangelicals smugly say everyone but them is going to.
Certainly Beck and Sarah Palin have the right to their opinions, but they are truly expressing very radical views which are contrary to two centuries of American and Western thinking on the definition of what a citizen of a nation is.
In America, since the founding of the republic, a citizen is someone who pays his allegiance to the government, obeys its laws and will defend the government. Belonging to a religious sect is not a requirement of citizenship. To define being an American citizen as being a religious person is a step backward to the Middle Ages where religious wars raged and the clergy of various sects were able to use the power of governments to kill and torture those of other religions and non-believers.
Beck would send this country back to the time of the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where only Puritans were citizens and all others were either exiled or killed. Go see the statue in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse of the Quaker woman who was hanged by the Puritans. Her crime was being a Quaker in a Puritan colony. If she had been a "citizen," she would have not been killed.
Puritanism is still with us.
Robert Sullivan
West Newbury
