Thinking Seven Generations Back and Forward

Some Native American nations hold dear the idea that the potential benefits or harm that would be felt by the next seven generations should be amply considered when making major decisions.* That seems to be a very significant idea—and one almost impossible to implement sufficiently.  

I asked AI to create an image that refers to taking care of
the earth for the next seven generations. This was the result.

I began thinking about seven generations while working on this blog post that originally was to be primarily about the Louisiana Purchase.

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed 220 years ago this week, on April 30, 1803. That was of tremendous importance for the United States, which had become a nation only 27 years earlier.

That purchase was a major accomplishment of President Jefferson and one of the most significant events in the history of the young nation—and even in the history of the nation up until the present. It is widely considered to be the greatest real estate deal in history.

The U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory from France at a price of $15 million, or approximately four cents an acre. It added to the United States an area larger than eight Great Britains, doubling the size of the United States and opening up the continent to its westward expansion.

Jefferson explained his action to Congress by saying that this fertile and extensive country would afford “an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide spread for the blessings of freedom and equal laws.”**

President Jefferson was perhaps thinking about the next seven generations in his efforts that led to the acquisition of that huge territory for the U.S.

Without question, that purchase had tremendous benefits for most White U.S. citizens—and considerable harm for Native Americans— for the next seven generations, and more.

Thinking Seven Generations Back

For individual persons, seven generations go back to their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents. In my case, Hartwell Seat (1749~1827) was my seventh-generation grandfather whose family name I bear. George Seat (1878~1952) was my grandfather, and Hartwell's grandson Franklin (1818~1905 was George’s grandfather). 

So, seven generations before I was born in 1938, Hartwell Seat was born in Virginia just six years after Thomas Jefferson’s birth. In 1797, Hartwell and his family migrated to Tennessee, just a year after it had become the 16^th state of the USA.

The Mississippi River was the western border of the new state, and at that time it was the westernmost edge of the United States. Just seven years later, though, the vast expanse of land on the other side of the Mississippi became U.S. territory.

When working on this article, it was a bit of a shock when I realized that the Louisiana Purchase, which had always seemed like ancient history to me, was made when my seventh-generation ancestor was 54 years old and living less than 200 miles from the eastern border of that vast new territory.

Just fifteen years later, Littleton Seat, my sixth-generation grandfather, migrated with his wife Elizabeth and two young daughters (as well as two of his brothers and their families) to Missouri Territory. That was three years before Missouri became the 24^th state in 1821.

Littleton’s great-grandson George, my beloved Grandpa Seat, was born just 75 years after the Louisiana Purchase, and his death was just one year shy of being as long after his birth as the Louisiana Purchase was before his birth.

Thinking Seven Generations Forward

Now, turning from the generations of the past (and the Louisiana Purchase), what about the generations to come? With me as the first generation, my first two great-grandchildren, who were born in 2022, are the fourth generation. Their great-grandchildren will be the seventh generation.

It is hard to imagine what all will happen and how the world will change during Nina’s and Vander’s lifetime. How can we even begin to imagine what the world will be like when their great-grandchildren are born? That will be well into the 22^nd century.

But maybe the Native Americans were right: we need to consider how the decisions we make now will affect the seventh generation in the future. Of greatest need along this line is concerted thought and action regarding the current global ecological crisis.

_____

* In the 2022 book What We Owe the Future, author William MacAskill writes about "longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time" (p. 4). Early in "The Case for Longtermism," the first chapter, he cites a Native American who wrote, "We . . . make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. . . . We consider: will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation?" (p. 11).

** Jefferson’s words are cited on page 49 of William Catton’s book Overshoot, which was the main topic of my March 23 blog post, and it was related to the author’s explanation of the significance of the Louisiana Purchase in expanding the “carrying capacity” of the United States at that time. 

What about the Jefferson Bible?

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth was written/extracted by Thomas Jefferson and completed in 1820. Long known as “the Jefferson Bible,” a book by that title was published earlier this year to mark the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson’s 84-page book. 

The Purpose of Jefferson’s Bible

In spite of what many contemporary conservative evangelical Christians emphasize about the early years of the United States, not all of the “forefathers” were pious evangelical Christians.

In particular, many of Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries thought that he was anti-Christian and perhaps even an atheist.

It seems clear that Jefferson disliked evangelicalism. But it is also clear that he liked Jesus of Nazareth, at least the teachings of Jesus, which he called “a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man” (in a 10/31/1819 letter to William Short, his lifelong mentee).

It is somewhat of a misnomer to refer to “the Jefferson Bible,” for it contains only what Jefferson extracted from the four canonical Gospels.

Jefferson’s intention was to separate “the diamond from the dung hill,” that is, to free Jesus’ lustrous words from the “dross of his biographers.” The resultant book is a short one of seventeen chapters, beginning with Jesus’ birth and ending with his death and burial.

Jefferson’s purpose was to present the teachings of Jesus unencumbered with anything “supernatural.” Thus, for example, there is no inclusion of Jesus’ “virgin birth,” his miracles, or his resurrection.

In passing, it is interesting to note that in 1902 Tolstoy, about whom I posted a blog article on Nov. 20, published The Gospel in Brief, a book similar to Jefferson’s “Bible”—and similarly deleting the “supernatural” elements surrounding Jesus.

The Value of Jefferson’s Bible

As there are many people—and, no doubt, a far higher percentage today than in Jefferson’s time—whose “scientific worldview” prevents them from considering anything that is unproven/unprovable by natural science to be true or real, Jefferson’s Bible can be commended to such people.

Upon recently reading The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth for the first time, I was impressed not by how much was deleted from the canonical Gospels but rather by how much was included from them.

(In spite of hearing about “the Jefferson Bible” for many years, I was happy to purchase a Kindle copy of it, for only 99 cents, and seeing firsthand what it included. The Introduction is by Cyrus Adler, who in 1895 purchased Jefferson’s book for the Smithsonian and published it for the first time.)

The Problem of Jefferson’s Bible

The Jefferson Bible: A Biography, the bicentennial book mentioned above, is by Peter Manseau, a current curator at the Smithsonian. This smallish book by Manseau (b. 1974) is both scholarly and quite readable.

I found “The Quest for the Jeffersonian Jesus,” the third chapter, to be of greatest interest. There the author says that Jefferson rejected “the supernatural, the miraculous, anything suggestive that Jesus might believe the divine things said about him” (p. 66).

Consequently, in Jefferson’s Bible we have “what Jefferson believed to be the words of Jesus, but no real sense of why anyone would have listened to him. With miracles hinted at but never delivered, forgiveness discussed but never offered . . . .”

Manseau then remarks that Jefferson’s book “often has the feeling of a series of jokes without their punch lines” (p 72).

As is true for so many other people and so many other issues, Jefferson was right in what he affirmed (the great significance of Jesus’ teaching) but wrong in what he denied (the “supernatural” referent to Jesus’ life and teaching).

Further, there is little evidence that Jefferson actually sought to live in any marked manner according to the teachings of Jesus included in his book. He certainly did not do that to the extent that Tolstoy did—but that is the same for most of us, even those of us who claim to believe the canonical Gospels.

Barton Up the Wrong Tree

Maybe I had heard of him before, but my real introduction to David Barton came at the annual meeting of the Missouri Baptist Convention in the fall of 2004. Barton (b. 1954), who is not a Baptist nor from Missouri, was the keynote speaker at the final session of that convention. It didn’t take me long, though, to disagree with what I heard Barton say.

It was mainly with regard to his views on the separation of Church and State that I thought that Barton was “barking up the wrong tree,” to use an old Midwest idiom. (You can find some of my criticism of his ideas in “Fed Up with Fundamentalism’s Attitude toward Religious Freedom,” the sixth chapter of my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism.)

Barton’s newest book is The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (2012). Unfortunately for Barton, his book, which had become a bestseller, contains so much questionable material (so many lies?) that the publisher decided last month to cease publishing it.

According to Barton, “Lie #1” about Thomas Jefferson is that he fathered Sally Hemings’ children. He concludes that there is “absolutely no historical, factual, or scientific evidence to tarnish the sexual morality of Jefferson” (p. 193).

However, even though Barton twice cites the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (2000), he fails to mention that according to their website the TJF and “most historians believe that, years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ six children.”

But I am not all that concerned about whether or not Jefferson fathered Sally’s children. As always, it is a politician’s public positions, not his/her private life, that is of greatest importance.

Of all the “lies” Barton discusses, I am most interested in “Lie #5: Thomas Jefferson Advocated a Secular Public Square through the Separation of Church and State.” There Barton claims, among other things, that the whole “history of the separation doctrine centered around preventing the State from taking control of the Church. . . . Throughout history, it had not been the Church that had seized the State but just the opposite” (p. 121).

But state churches and church-dominated states have persecuted minorities through the years. Catholic states in Europe persecuted Jews and “heretics” by the Inquisition, the Reformed Church influenced the Zurich city council to persecute the Anabaptists, the Anglican Church as the established church in England persecuted the Nonconformists (as well as Catholics), the Anglican-dominated colony of Virginia persecuted Baptists (among others), and so on.

Then there is the whole question of the freedom from religion, which Barton and his supporters seem to be opposed to. His desire to protect the privileged status of Christianity and to suppress the equality of non-Christians in American society seems to be the main reason for his calling the separation of church and state a myth (as he has done through the years; he authored a book first published in 1989 under the title The Myth of Separation).

Religious freedom, though, must be for all people and must also include freedom from religion. For that reason, I strongly favor the proper separation of Church and State (as I believe Jefferson did). That doesn’t necessitate the separation of faith and politics, but it certainly does mean freedom of, or freedom from, religion for all citizens.

Note #1: Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter’s Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President has recently been published to rebut Barton’s book.

Note #2: I have recently been involved in an ad-hoc group seeking to revitalize the Kansas City chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.