What a time it is to be a believer!
With one minor exception, the GOP's declared candidates for President are out on the hustings, actively promoting the socio-religious agenda of the Far Right. At least two are full-throated protestant evangelicals. No less an authority on what the public thinks than The Washington Post (on August 19, 2011) solemnly advises:
"In the last several election cycles, church attendance has been a leading indicator of voting preference. The more often a person goes to church, the more likely they are to vote Republican. The less often they attend, the more likely they are to vote Democratic." (The statement is debatable, sourced to a Pew survey in 2008 which is not at all that sweeping. Nevertheless, the beltway has been so advised by a board-certified member of the mainstream media!)
In fact, more than two-thirds of Americans do profess to be Christians. A great deal is being made of this by believers who are certain their religion is the true religion of the whole nation. The media bestows coverage on such confident fervor and seems to regard the candidates' preachments with bemused and tolerant grace and gentle questions, if any. Needless to say, the MSM in not engaging in much in-depth analysis of this point of view.
How to think about this?
Who's Who? In its Religious Landscape Survey of 35,000 Americans in February 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 78.4% of all adults professed to be Christians. The breakdown of this number, however, belies the conclusion the Far Right would derive from it:
Of that 78.4%, 51.3% are Protestant, of whom 26.3% belong to "evangelical churches," 18.1% to "mainline churches" and 6.9% to "historically black churches." Roman Catholics are the next biggest bloc of believers in the US, at 23.9%. All other religions together total less than 5% of those surveyed. The 16.1% balance is counted as "unaffiliated": atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular."
So Christian protestant evangelicals comprise less than 27% of the Pew sample of Americans. Still, though, that is a visible number, being both concentrated and widespread. The nine states with the highest proportion of evangelicals are all - no surprise, here - in the "Bible Belt" South. Evangelicals also have substantial presences throughout the West and Midwest, including Michigan and Ohio, and in states like Pennsylvania, where they are dominant in selected areas. It's the New England states and many urban centers around the country where evangelicals are not particularly prevalent.
To be sure, among evangelicals, there is a considerable array of religious beliefs. Not all evangelicals are conservatives, not all are Republicans, not all parade with Tea Party signs and not all would meld religion and politics as tightly as most GOP candidates for President. Nonetheless, according to The Almanac of American Politics 2012, the elections of 2010 reversed the House majority with the largest shift in partisan preference since the elections of 1946 and 1948! And now, in 2011, we can see the facility with which monied interests are able to gin up Tea Party rallies on command across the United States, staff primary campaigns and charter self-serving legislative agendas, proving how deeply the Far Right can - if properly channeled - get represented in bases of office-holders, candidates and potential voters in districts across America. This activity attracts media attention. After all, it does look like a groundswell to which attention must be paid, doesn't it.
To summarize, more than three-quarters of us tell pollsters we are Christians. Activists read these signals and design strategies to exploit them. Since there are reliable votes there, office-seekers unabashedly pander to them. How can we claim the media is wrong to pay attention to such demonstrated religious fervor?
Is there anything to be done about this apocalyptic firestorm, other than to hope its excesses will be apparent to those who are willing to think about the consequences of being governed by religion?
If we are "a Christian nation," what exactly does that mean?
Evangelicals - or more precisely, fundamentalists - want us to believe that we should be the same kind of "Christian nation" in 2011 that we were back in 1787, a time when all 39 signers of the US Constitution called themselves Christians. Go back to that time, it is argued. What they meant then, we should mean today. Original intent writ as large as possible.
However, those revered Founding Fathers of our government were a mixed assemblage, as would be expected of men from thirteen states that were colonized and cultivated differently - Catholic, Deist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian (with strong Calvinist roots), Quaker and Unitarian. Many Founders were devout. Many, including George Washington, were occasionally observant. And many - despite the hagiographies that followed and continue to be plumped for this day - who professed faith demonstrably used religion when it served their political ends and ignored it or abandoned it when it served them not.
The very label "Christian" suggests that these religions shared the same religious beliefs on two tenets central to Christianity - the divinity of Jesus and the significance of the trinity. That is absolutely wrong. In fact, some fundamentally disagreed on those points. Moreover, for examples particularly relevant to the beliefs of evangelicals today, the Founders disagreed whether the Bible should be read literally, what constituted proper worship and what role it should play in public life. In truth, in the earliest days of the Republic, adherents of these faiths typically were at each other's throats, politically speaking. (See Brooke Allens' Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (2006))
In one of his many letters to Abigail while he was serving in the Continental Congress in 1774, John Adams wrote of a proposal to begin deliberations with a prayer:
"When Congress first met, Mr. Cushing [Thomas Cushing, delegate from Massachusetts] made a motion that it should be opened with prayer. It was opposed by Mr. Jay of New York [John Jay, leader of the Federalist Party] and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina [Edward Rutledge, youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence], because we were so divided in religious sentiments, some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians, and some Congregationalists, that we could not join in the same act of worship." In the event, for purposes of comity, the proposal to pray was adopted. Tellingly, however, when a following Congress convened fourteen years later to write a constitution for these United States, it did not begin with a prayer.
Most significantly, God is nowhere mentioned in the American Constitution. Moreover, in Article VI, the drafters specified that "... no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Freshly experienced with the religious factions of their own time, the Founders were not about to incorporate religion into governance.
Benjamin Franklin, who established himself early as America's sage, wrote:
A man compounded of Law and Gospel, is able to cheat a whole country with his Religion, and then destroy them under Colour of Law." (italics in Franklin's original, a letter in The New England Courant in 1722)
Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense in 1776 was key to explaining the need for revolution to the American public, was an unapologetic freethinker, vigorously at odds with every established religion.
Thomas Jefferson was the proud author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom which disestablished official religion in Virginia. (Fellow Founder James Madison shepherded Jefferson's draft statute through the Virginia assembly, Jefferson being abroad.) Here is Jefferson (in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802) on the point:
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to no other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not of opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."
So, many of the Founders together with many more like them of many religious and political persuasions counseled against involving religious beliefs with politics. "Nothing is to be more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion," John Adams wrote in a letter to Benjamin Rush (1817). Adams, it must be emphasized, was a religious man throughout his life. One need only visit the Church of the Presidents in Quincy, Massachusetts, to see his influence - and, attention, Ms. Bachmann!, also that of his son, John Quincy Adams - both of whom were avowed Deists and Unitarians.
Could there be any clearer proof that these good and religious men did not favor a nation governed by Christianity?
But, you may argue ...
... I appear to have accepted that America is "Christian" while in fact, as you say, we are not. For example, professing to a pollster that one is faithful does not constitute belief. You also point out that we are not the regular church-goers many of us say we are. We want to be, and we want to be thought to be, but we just aren't. And, America is a polyglot combination, historically absorbing Jews, Mormons, Muslims, atheists, agnostics and many "Others-than-us," some of whom have been, in their lives, one or more of the above. Makes it hard to count, doesn't it! No wonder a hefty number of responses to the Pew pollsters in 2008 were "unaffiliated."
All true, I think, and that raises the next question.
How might we be ruled by religion?
Well, look for the Biblical abominations ... but be selective. Ignore all the Old Testament stuff about slavery and dietary rules, the sexy poetry of Solomon and most - but not all! - of the commandments to make war against infidels, teachings that might make American Muslims blush. Focus instead on the homophobic passages. As for the New Testament, ignore Thomas Jefferson - with his Bible that deletes the description of miracles and some of Jesus' more exotic abjurations - and the fact that Mr. Jefferson had a Quran in his library (which is now lodged in the Library of Congress) and focus on salvation and what it will take to get ready for The End Times.
And as for somebody else's Holy Book? Well, we're a Christian nation. They - the Somebody-Else-Others - may practice their personal beliefs, personally ... but we are entitled to a government that reflects us and what we believe.
Let's think about this. If we are to be governed by God's laws, what legislature will decree them? What executive will parse their ambiguities, apply them to the people, enforce their provisions? What regulatory agencies will administer the programs? What court will exert supremacy and declare God's true pronouncements? Who is it that will make known the will of God? And dare we ask, which God?
That the Far Right has an agenda, can anyone doubt? They hide it when they must, to get elected. Observe the different gloss the ultimate GOP Presidential and VP nominees will put on his and/or her beliefs than they will have put during their campaigns to be nominated. Just as the Tea Party has been so skillfully manipulated all along, economic concepts will be ballyhooed - staying at high level abstractions which do not touch the practical realities of debt reduction, spending controls, tax reform, smaller government - and social concerns will be downplayed in many districts, selectively, during the campaigns.
GOP strategists are not fools. Their candidates must attract voters in the middle - call them "independents" or "moderates" or "undecideds" or whatever. That's where the votes are that will determine many of the outcomes of 2012. So all this talk about receiving messages from God, and divining the original intent of the Founders, and the Christian base of the United States (note: the Right will use the term "Judeo-Christian" when it serves them, and never else) will be selectively employed or ignored to win this next election.
Charles Koch is right. "[T]he mother of all wars" is underway.