The fact that, since the founding of the United States, Christianity has been much used, against the intentions of the founders, to justify governmental impositions and adventures is one cause for concern. That is what McCain's critics warn of, in the name of a better America. The last thing needed today is a Christian nation embarked on a new crusade, at home or abroad.
I have been waiting for this, a column by James Carroll in response to ohn McCain's statement that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation. Today's offering, entitled Religion and nation, will provide much food for thought, as Carroll often does. As I often do with op ed pieces, I will mix quoting, summarizing, and offering na few thoughts of my own.
I hope you will keep reading.
Carroll starts with a reminiscence of his childhood, that he knew how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism, although he did not then know what it meant, and relates that to "the political third rail onto which ohn McCain threw himself" with his remarks. Carroll notes the arguments raised in response by McCain's critics, and agrees that McCain's remarks were dangerous.
But he also offers us come cautionary words. First, a government and a nation are not identical, and thus McCain's words, which refer to the latter, are not necessarily untrue:
For one thing, what the founders intended may weigh less than how the nation developed over the next two centuries. The Constitution created "an open national space," in the scholar Mark Noll's phrase, but, Noll says, instead of it being filled with Alexander Hamilton's economic planning, Thomas Jefferson's yeomanry, or John Adams's communalism, that space was seized by unexpected 19th-century "awakenings" of evangelical fervor.
Carroll reminds us Christian religion in many forms, whether that of elite universities or prarie preachers, became the arbiter of the national culture that Robert Bellah in 1967 labeled as "civil religion." He even reminds us that Dwight Eisenhower had himself baptized 12 days after his inauguration.
Many Americans do not realize the desire for native clergy was the impetus behind the founding of some of our great early educational institutions. Both Harvard and Yale were established for such purposes, and what we now know as Princeton, whose first president was supposed to be Jonathan Edwards, was established because of questions about the Orthodoxy of the New England institutions. And one might remember that James Madison's parents sent him to the latter because they worried about the religious orthodoxy of William & Mary.
Carroll rightly points out the national pressures towards religion in the post-World War II period, in our national opposition to "atheistic communism." His does not mention something quite relevant, perhaps due to the limits of space, that during this time and under the Eisenhower administration, the government acquiesced to a movement started by the Knights of Columbus to add the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, precisely to distinguish the U. S. from the godless Soviet Union. This is also the period when the NY State Regents wrote the prayer "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and ask thy blessing upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country" that was found an unconstitutional breach of the establishment clause in Engel v. Vitale.
In other words, there has always been a tension between the desire of the Founders to keep religion and the government apart, but there has often been a strong movement to infuse as much as possible the society, the nation, with religion, with a fusing perhaps of a variety of religious traditions into Bellah's civil religion, or as we have seen more recently, a desire to impose certain interpretations of Christianity upon the nation through for4ce of law.
Let us return to Carroll, remembering that not only is he a former Catholic priest, but also an award-winning author whose work has often focused on the early church and its influences. Thus the following paragraph probably frames the issue as well as it can be framed:
The danger in mixing religion and nation lies in the way these two enterprises have exploited one another, each to advance its separate cause. This is as old as the early-4th-century emperor Constantine, who used Christian orthodoxy as a club with which to enforce political control of his vast empire. (The Nicene Creed was a loyalty oath composed at his order, by the Council of Nicea in 325.) At the same time, Christian leaders happily enlisted Constantine's legions to suppress heresy. When the word "Christian" is used today, the broad movement it defines owes as much to Constantine as it does to Jesus Christ.
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I spent 14 years of my life in the Orthodox Church, was married there, and my wife is still, now more than 30 years after our marriage, an active participant. The late John Meyendorff often wrote about the "Byzantine symphony," a fusing of church and state. Constantine, who had not been baptized (and would not be until his deathbed), presided over the Council of Nicea - he was after all the Ecumenos, the ruler of the world, or of that part of it descended from the Roman Empire. In America, as Carroll points out, even many devout people are wary of the idea of the government enforcing the equivalent of creeds, even Christian creeds (and here it is worth noting that many religions that consider themselves Christians have requirements of creed that clash with those of others, that some ely upon the so-called Apostle's Creed while others insist upon the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, and so on).
It is the end of Carroll piece that really caught my attention. I wish I could quote all three of his final paragraphs without violating fair use. He warns us that we should be concerned that - against the wishes of the Founders - Christianity has been used "to justify governmental impositions and adventures." That line reminds me of McKinley's arguments for our involvement in the Philippines was because we needed to civilize and Christianize them. Carroll is quite blunt that we should avoid any efforts for crusades, at home or abroad - and we know how often this president resorts to the unfortunate word 'crusade."
Carroll goes on to insist that which will call separation of church and state is for the benefit of religion as well. I am going to quote most of the penultimate paragraph and all of the final to show the power of his words:
Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and all religious minorities are assaulted by even implicit claims of a "Christian nation," but so are Christians. A government that blesses itself in the name of Jesus Christ, while waging war and advancing empire, must first demolish the meaning of who that man was - three centuries before Constantine.
Scholars know very little about this Galilean rabbi (nothing, for example, about his attitude toward homosexuality), but there are two things that can be said with certainty. Jesus lived and died in resistance to the Roman empire. And Jesus rejected violence. If there are two notes of identity that go to the heart of what America has become, they are violence and empire. A Christianity that makes its peace with those, as has so often happened, is an apostate religion. John McCain, and the objects of his appeal, betray the nation - and the faith.
I titled this piece as I did because McCain's words were the occasion that led to Carroll's piece, and because it is a key part of his conclusion. I wrote it for several reasons. First, as regular readings of my postings know, I am a strong supporter of the idea of separation of religion and state, not only because of my own background (raised Jewish and living through the NY State Regents prayer, a number of years in the Orthodox Church, and now Quaker) but also because of my interest as a sometimes student of history and as a teacher both of religion and of government.
Both as a nation/culture and as a government organized under a Constitution, we have struggled with the idea of religion and its role since well before the writing of the Constitution in 1787. For all of our insisting that our settlement was because of people seeking religious freedom we do a very poor job of teaching our students of the long history of religious intolerance in this country. It was not only the history of religious warfare and oppression in 16th and 17th century Europe that shaped the men who wrote our founding documents, it was also their knowledge of the experience of people like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, of the hanging of Quaker Mary Dyer on Boston Common, that played a part, as did the arguments of men like Baptist minister John Leyland, to name just a few American influences. But that did not suppress what has been an ongoing conflict ever since: if we think the influence of religion and clergy upon our politics is something new, we have totally forgotten the attacks on Thomas Jefferson by Federalist clergy in New England who used both pulpit and papers to wage war on someone they were ready to label as equivalent to the anti-Christ in his opposition to their ideas about religion and government.
but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
The two quotes above, from Article Vi and Amendment I, make clear the desire of those who founded this nation to attempt to keep religion and government separate. Bu strictures on governmental action do not apply to those of private citizens and organizations, including clergy and churches. Freedom of speech allows them to advocate that with which I might strongly disagree, the same freedom of speech that allows those of unpopular political positions to advocate for their causes as well, including for example removing the tax exemption on churches. I have no problem with that, and if an individual refuses to vote for someone because s/he is not a Christian, not white (or not black in a majority black jurisdiction), not male (or because the opponent is a female is a male), didn't serve in the military (or is too much of a war-monger, whether or not s/he has military experience), each of us retains such individual freedom of action. That we CAN do something does not mean that we should. And I think one reason we have had battles over the teaching of history and "civics" may be that there are those who fear that if the majority of our citizenry fully knew the history of this nation, the positions for which they can now gain support would become very unpopular, their ability to influence by fear and thundering from pulpit, radio, and tv show would be diminished, as I hope it will be.
I think the use of the word "betray" by Carroll may be harsh: it implies a deliberate abandonment to something alien. For myselof, even though I used it as part of my title, I would surmise that McCain, like so many, simply does not know better. I teach this history, and the various SCOTUS cases that address the relationship of government and religion, so that at least some of the rising generation will know better.
But then, maybe the term is appropriate. I think those who attempt to use religion for political gain DO betray the Constitution and the Founders. I think anyone who has spent much of his adult life in government, or who has paid any attention to the recent debates over the appropriate relationship between religions (for we do not have only one) and government has to know that s/he is playing with liquid nitroglycerin,something inherently unstable and quite explosive.
TNT was the basis of the fortune of Alfred Nobel. This past week Al Gore won a prize funded by that fortune. This weekend was the anniversary of the winning of the same award by Martin Luther King, Jr. That award is for PEACE. Misuse of religion has far too often led to the absence of peace, to tyranny, to oppression, and to war. Politicians who misuse religion as a means to gain or maintain power are dangerous. The are violating the spirit of the Constitution. And if they do so in the name of something they call Christian, I would agree with Carroll that they are also violating the teaching of the man often labelled the Prince of Peace, a person whose words about the meek inheriting the earth might serve as a salutory reminder of how arrogance and claiming the word of God as justification for destructive action cannot be justified in the name of Jesus.
I am not a Christian. I am not a lawyer. I am an American, a person who ponders both religion and Constitution. It is because I am these things, and also a human being interconnected with a world in which even all people who could be labeled as Christian under the broadest possible defintiion represent less than 1/3 of the total humanity, that I strive against conflating religion and government. If we object to it when the religion is not our own, we cannot justify it when we have the power to conjoin our religion with our government.
I hope this is of some use to someone.
Peace.