Hello, my name is Anthony Alaniz, and I’m a father, a journalist, and a Proud American. I am, like many of you, tired. Tired of having to justify my personal convictions.

I am tired of having to push my sincerely held beliefs aside for another’s. I wholeheartedly believed that the values of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness superseded all other beliefs in this country and were the standard, where Americans can choose to live free of religious dogma they did not agree with.

I was wrong.

But no longer shall those who truly believe in Our American values be treated as second-class citizens. That is why I am forming the Church of True Americans, because there are profound problems with the Christian Holy Bible and its incompatibility with core American values like Liberty, Reason, Equality, and Democracy.

Its ambiguity and countless interpretations have caused, and continue to cause, untold horrors to persist long past reason should allow and fuels revolutions that have liberated races, genders, sexualities, and creeds from religious oppression, regardless of its truthfulness. The book has been used by the oppressed and the oppressors, often at the same time and in direct conflict with each other, selectively citing passages that their adversaries ignore. These dueling doctrines and contradictory creeds expose the very problem with the text.

The Bible has no unifying theme. The Christian deity declares murder a sin, and, just pages away, commands his followers to execute men, women, and children. If you fail to give him unconditional love, he will happily sentence you to eternal punishment. The book's inconsistent morality is then left up to the feelings and whims of humans of a specific time and place. 

Why have the liberated never civilized the Bible with Reason and Liberty, and remove the regressive passages that have denied Freedom to so many? Why keep them? Would editing the Bible be a capitulation to the idea that the book was never the inspired word of a god, but the collected myths of men who didn't know any better?

Thomas Jefferson thought the book needed revision, saying in an 1820 letter that he found many of the Bible filled with "so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture." The Bible, unreformed, is being used to take away the very rights it initially helped liberate, and that's a threat even Jefferson tried to stop 200 years ago.

At nearly every point in American history where we have attempted to grow the scope of Our civil rights to include more of Us, to fulfill the Founders’ promise of creating a More Perfect Union, it has been the Christian god most eagerly standing in Liberty's way. Believers of a foreign book have used their mythological figure to stand against abolition, contraception, women's suffrage, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act, the US Disability Act, marriage equality, trans rights, the First Amendment, the banning of child marriage, and much more, often co-opting the US government to enact their theology as law to discriminate against Us.

Slaveowners handed out edited versions of the Bible to their slaves, reinforcing the passages about obeying masters while removing the ones discussing liberation and freedom. Were these people God's good Christians? Were they bad ones? If evil people can edit the Bible for evil things, why can't good people edit it for good?

Why not try?

Throughout Our history, religious Americans have fought to limit liberty and to expand it. The Ku Klux Klan used its deep ties to Protestantism to funnel Americans into its hateful ranks of white supremacy. This would be the fuel that would keep the fire of segregation burning in Our country until Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. took to the pulpit to show anti-Americans a dictionary and teach them the meaning of the word equal.

Our generation's greatest civil rights victory, achieving LGBTQ+ equality against an un-American definition of marriage and love, is already being threatened by religious extremists who want all Americans to bend the knee to their deity's foreign bigotry. Today in America, books are being banned, children are fleeing their homes, and pregnant women are dying, sacrifices one book’s un-American god.

Jefferson, for all his evils, had enough sense to desecrate the Bible in hopes of protecting future Americans from its horrors. He created a human version of Jesus who performs no miracles and dies at the end. It contains no resurrection, no angels, and none of the "corruptions of reason" Jefferson despised.

His version is a far better starting point for centering America’s moral compass than The Christian Holy Bible, and nothing is stopping us from creating a new American philosophy that better aligns with the enlightenment ideals of Liberty, Reason, the Right to Self-Determination, and one's Pursuit of Happiness. Jefferson did it, and it was deemed moral enough to give to every incoming Congressional member for the first half of the 20th century.

That is why Jefferson killed the Christian God and replaced it with our Creator, an American Creator that blesses the live of all True Americans and their values.

I want to continue that work through the Church of True Americans. Please join me.

E pluribus unum! Out of many, one!