A post earlier today by Killer of Sacred Cows (link) raises a discussion regarding the reaction of “evangelicals” to the defeat. The post seems to argue that Evangelicals just may be more quickly able to adapt than will the mainstream GOP.
I thought I would toss in some historical background to ground the discussion. Warning: you cannot understand “evangelicals” nor the relationship between “church & state” without understanding history!
If you do understand history, you will know that “Evangelicals” have historically often adopted a “Separatist” model of the relationship between faith, society, and government. The moment they begin to despair about the possibility of effectively “reforming” society, they are likely lapse into a quietist, withdrawn model which disconnects faith from politics.
The Covenant Model
During the Reformation, the vast majority of Protestant sects allied with national or regional governments. They had to in order to survive. Martin Luther only survived Worms because he had cultivated political connections with independent German princes who loathed the interference in their affairs of Rome's bishops, cardinals, and legates. The major reform movements all aligned with government:
- Lutheran Churches aligned with German princes and the Swedish government.
- Swiss Reform & Calvinist churches aligned with Swiss Cantons and the Dutch and Scottish governments.
- The Church of England, of course, was aligned with royal and parliamentary authority by Henry VIII.
In Geneva, John Calvin developed a model of political science mixed with faith based on the Old Testament. His "Covenant Theology" called for 2 things:
1. Separation of Church & State (meaning something vastly different from what you think)
2. An alliance between ministers and town councils to impose A) "correct" (i.e. Calvinist) theology and B) a "godly lifestyle" on the society (despite the belief that only a few "elect" were destined for salvation). "Consistories" of ministers made rulings general and specific on the sins of the people and these rulings were enforced by the "secular" magistrates.
This Calvinist, covenant model of a simultaneous "separation" from and alliance with government became the model for the Presbyterian church in Scotland and the DESIRED model that "Puritans" in England kept failing to impose on the Anglican Church.
Eventually, Puritans migrated to a realm in which they could, they hoped, fulfill Calvin’s vision fully, completely, and from scratch in a “wilderness” waiting to be “tamed” by what Roger Williams called the “garden of the Church.” You guessed it: the result was New England! You may well have heard of John Winthrop’s famous “City on a Hill” sermon. The whole point of the New England and Connecticut colonies was to create a “New Jerusalem”—a society which would be blessed by God IF its people obeyed the Law of Moses.
Now here’s a really trick bit, one that confounds almost everyone today. For the Calvinist New Englanders, a Religious Covenant was precisely religious freedom! You can see that vision of freedom in the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (Bartleby link). This document was actually a remarkable improvement on the models of religious liberty in Europe. It offered a safe haven for people of faith who were the victims of persecution or discrimination by mainstream European churches. It strictly separated church from state. What did this mean?
Essentially, it was an institutional distinction. No magistrate could be a minister; no minister a magistrate. This really mattered to exiles from the deeply established churches of Europe in which secular and sacred roles often merged. Here’s a perhaps surprising example: in early New England, ministers were rigorously forbidden to be involved in wedding ceremonies. Calvinists rejected the Catholic (and Anglican) concept of marriage as sacrament, so the New England Puritans sharply divided the role of binding people in marriage from the ministry.
On the other hand, the New England model of religious liberty had nothing to do with pluralism. NOTHING AT ALL! One was NOT free to deviate very far from what the alliance of ministers and magistrates agreed to be acceptable belief and lifestyle. Deviance from “godly behavior” was punished by the magistrates. The Body of Liberties reserves the death penalty for worship of a different god, for homosexuality, and for witchcraft. These of course were sins calling for the death penalty in the Law of Moses.
So religious freedom in early New England incorporates SOME of our current ideas of the concept, including the language of separation. But the Puritans (Congregationalists) of New England sought to create a state FREE to obey God’s law, not a state in which individuals were “free” to practice their own religious convictions, no matter what they were. And this state was quick to sanction those who deviated. First Roger Williams and then Anne Hutchinson were banished for challenging Congregational/Colonial authority, even though they were pretty ardent Calvinists themselves. Quakers were rigorously persecuted throughout the British Colonies. And, of course, hundreds of people, mostly women, were prosecuted and many hung on charges of witchcraft.
Today, the so-called “Dominionist” movement is a resurrection of this Calvinist Covenant Theology. The notion, one which was all too common in the 16th through 18th Centuries, is to re-create in the contemporary nation a Covenanted society according to Calvin’s model. It is crucial for us to understand that, in this tradition, “religious liberty” calls for the covenanted Elect to institute a society governed by the Law of Moses in which religious deviance is NOT PERMITTED! That is what both Separation of Church and State and Religious Liberty mean to that movement.
OK, so what happened? How did we get from there to here? Well, that’s a complex story. I may post about it some time. But for now, we need to see that the SAME DISSENTING TRADITION of Reform pietists produced a 2nd, competing and widely divergent model of relating faith to society. Let’s consider that one.
The Separatist Model
Most people don’t know that Ulrich Zwingli’s Swiss Reformation kicked off at about the same time as Luther’s. Zwingli was a Humanist scholar who believed deeply looking past authority figures to find one’s truth in critical reflection on ancient texts. Especially, of course, the Bible. Zwingli trained a cadre of young men to rely on sola scriptura, only the Bible as an authority. All questions of faith must be referred to the scriptures, not to the authorities of men. (Sorry, ladies.)
But Zwingli wanted to reform his society, and the only way to do that was to use political organization. He and his colleagues worked with the councils of some Swiss Cantons to break with Rome and institute Reformed churches, often against the wishes of majorities of ordinary citizens who were perfectly happy with their traditional Catholicism. Eventually, he died in a religious war fought between Catholic and Reform armies.
In 1523, the Reformed divines in Zürich were, like Protestants everywhere, busy disputing the theology of the mass. Zwingli consulted with the town council in drawing his conclusion. This appalled his zealous young men, and Conrad Grebel angrily broke with his mentor. The result was the so-called Anabaptist movement, a small gathering of pious zealots who concluded that mainstream society and its government would forever remain corrupt. Anabaptists formed small, modest, "separate" societies committed to holiness. Persecuted to a staggering level by BOTH Catholics and Protestants, they endured and splintered into several branches, including the Amish.
Now the key point here is separatism: a term we can use loosely to refer to a purity group which at least attempts to withdraw completely from the social and political main stream. This model often holds precisely the same theological and moral views as the covenanters. But it rejects what it considers to be a false hope of “purifying” society in general. It tends toward small, modest, politically unambitious gatherings that see themselves as other than the surrounding society. Of course, the Amish provide an extreme example, but what many don’t realize is that the impulse to despair and withdraw is at least as deeply engrained in the reform mentality as is the impulse to impose a purity model on society.
And the separatist model offers the other half of our New England heritage. In fact, the Separatists got there first! The Mayflower was commissioned by English Separatists who shared the entire Calvinist viewpoint of the Puritans, EXCEPT for the notion that the Church of England could ever be purified. They had left England to find refuge in Calvinist Holland, but soon came to regret that their children were becoming … Dutch! To be true to their faith while remaining English, they journeyed to northern “Virginia” and settled at Salem, just a few miles south of the Boston, the site that the Puritans would settle a few years later.
Now, New England soon consolidated around the Covenant Model that became the Congregational Church. But a strong Separatist sub-culture persisted. Its most outspoken champion was Roger Williams, a Calvinist Boston pastor who got himself into trouble for refusing to compromise his rather extreme Calvinist/separatist views. Williams was a Separatist’s Separatist, an extremist who nevertheless took Calvinist theory to its logical conclusion.
Calvin had insisted (along with Luther) that the individual conscience of the sinner stood absolutely alone before God. No human authority could intervene. (This was of course a rejection of Catholic sacramental authority and salvation.) OK, if this is true, then government should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with faith. EVER!
When Williams was kicked out of the Massachusetts colony, he founded Rhode Island as a colony fiercely committed to a more complete form of religious tolerance than the Congregational model. Note—this was NOT because Williams was a tolerant person. He thought only a tiny, tiny percentage of human beings were of the Elect, and the rest were doomed sinners. But he refused to allow any interference of government in faith.
Twice, colony business carried Williams to England. Both times, he encountered the English Civil Wars. Few Americans have any idea what they were or how crucial they were to the formation of America. They were immensely complex, but suffice it to say that sectarian conflicts between English Puritans, English Anglicans, closet Catholics, Scots Presbyterians, and Irish Catholics helped motivate and provided much of the rhetoric for decades of war that left perhaps 800,000 people dead.
Williams was appalled and wrote angry books condemning the violence. In The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, Discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace (1644), Williams wrote the phrase that eventually came to mean so much to American civil liberties, even though it was ignored in its day: any time “a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world hath ever broke down the wall itself,” Williams argues, disaster ensues.
Williams was deeply concerned to protect the church from the world. In his day, he was ignored, but later, Thomas Jefferson would revive the phrase in an effort to protect society and government from the church. He, too was ignored in his day, but over 140 years later, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would cite Jefferson (and indirectly Williams) in writing the Separation Ruling that changed everything.
20th Century Separation and Covenant
I’m skipping over a lot, but I want to address briefly this thing we today call “evangelicalism.” I grew up in evangelical churches. I have lived in those circles all my life. And it’s crucial that you understand something:
The Covenant Model orientation of today’s evangelicals is a profound departure from the Separatist mindset I grew up in (1950s-1960s).
The 20th Century kicked off with the development of Fundamentalism. Reuben Torrey’s The Fundamentals was published in 1910 and the clashes in American congregations and denominations between fundamentalists and liberals erupted in schism in the 1920s and 1930s.
Now, Fundamentalists were reactionaries who resisted “modern” trends in theology and bible studies. They tended to reject Darwin and they ALSO rejected “modern society,” especially the so-called Jazz Age.
But they RARELY made any effort to ally themselves with mainstream society or with government. They tended to be separatists who treasured the separatist notion of religious liberty. Their perspective focused on individuals, families, and small faith communities. Even their notion of salvation, derived from D. L. Moody, contracted to ignore the social dimensions of faith. (This was a departure from 19th Century evangelical movements which were heavily involved in social justice projects, including not only abolition but also early feminism!)
After World War II, Billy Graham and others pioneered a model of faith called New Evangelism. This is precisely the world I grew up in. Adapting to youth-oriented, post war society, it fashioned an upbeat message focused on love presented in “modern,” winsome ways to a society which did not want to hear sermons about hellfire.
The Evangelical movement was theologically and socially conservative. It carried the seeds of a return to the Covenant model. But, the world I grew up in was deeply Separatist. Rarely did I hear the adults in my life talk about politics in church. Never did I hear a pastor preach about politics. We were “in the world but not of it,” and we had absolutely no vision of applying our vision to society: we had no interest in using politics to impose out view on others and it never occurred to us to apply Christianity to issues of social justice. (We knew nothing about Christian history.) We cared solely about our personal commitments to Christ and cultivating a Separatist mirror of culture. We didn’t smoke, drink, or dance, and instead of going to the high school prom, we had a quiet formal dinner of our own as a youth group.
So what happened? How did THAT evangelical model become what we see today?
I’d suggest 2 factors:
1. The Separation Ruling of 1947 re-interpreted the 1st amendment to INCLUDE the notion of “Separation.” Before that time, almost no one thought that it meant separation. In fat, for over a century, anti-Catholic nativists had been pleading for a Separation Amendment to provide the protection against the Church of Rome which the 1st amendment was thought to be too weak to provide.
In 1947, this movement got its wish and Black interpreted the Amendment to MEAN separation. But the initial, anti-Catholic rejoicing was short lived. Soon, Protestants found that Separation was going to apply to THEM AS WELL! You know, the whole prayer in school thing? Very quickly, Separation came to be reinterpreted not as a guarantee of religious liberty, but a threat.
2. The turmoil of the 1960s. For those who lived through it as I did, there’s no need to rehearse the long story, but consider this. American’s world view was profoundly, scarily shattered in a wide array of ideological shocks and cognitive dissonance: race relations, gender identity, economic aspirations, sexual behavior, terms of patriotism, biblical studies, and on and on. The 1960s shook America to its core.
And of course produced the reactions of the 70s and 80s. But here’s the key thing to understand. The Covenant Model arose out of a grassroots movement instinctively reaching for a reassuringly authoritarian past. It was not generated by the GOP.
The modern Religious Right arose in the late 70s from a response to Roe v Wade and ALSO to what were perceived as threats in the public schools. A small grassroots movement began to get its members elected to school boards to challenge sex education and to purge the books in the library. And THAT self-generated movement was co-opted 1ST BY Jimmy Carter and later by the GOP.
And keep this in mind as well. The “Evangelical” world had to overcome a great deal of reluctance to get involved politically. Jerry Falwell actually wrote about this. He says that he used to preach AGAINST any connection between faith and politics. Then, in large part because of Roe, he came to believe that his faith REQUIRED him to use politics to seek a godly society.
Over time, “evangelicals”—well, many of them—became wrapped up in Right Wing politics. They largely forgot their own history in doing so. Because the denominational roots of the Evangelical viewpoint were traditionally built on a SEPARATIST model of relating to society and government.
Conclusion
I would just suggest that you do 2 things:
1. Understand that the “evangelical” model of faith derives from twin models, the Covenant and the Separatist. History offers many examples of each, and the Fundamentalist roots of American evangelical faith were far more separatist than covenantal.
2. Understand that evangelicals can go either way. The key is simple: do they or do they not despair of mainstream society/government being capable of enough purity to qualify as godly?
For decades, fundamentalists and Evangelicals DID DESPAIR of the possibility of building a godly society and government.
If they begin once again to so despair, they could easily lapse back into a Separatist, withdrawn model.
Meanwhile, many modern Evangelicals adopt a 3rd, social justice model. That’s where my heart is!