A CHRISTIAN NATION? No, but Founders Hard to Pin Down
Many observers hope/fear that Barack Obama will reinterpret and reenergize the American Civil Religion.
I posted a version of this at the Daily Kos in reply to desnider’s post We were not founded as a Christian Nation. It has elicited a fair amount of comment, much of it hostile. Apparently some readers assumed it was a thinly disguised argument for Christian theocracy. Huh? Regular readers of this blog will recognize some familiar ground covered.
Although I sympathize with desnider’s point in his recent diary We were not founded as a Christian Nation, as is often the case the historical record is far more complex and nuanced. Many of the leading lights of the Revolutionary and Foundation eras were indeed Deists, including the revered George Washington himself who spoke almost exclusively of “Providence” and certainly never knelt in the Valley Forge snow to engage in maudlin, if prophetic, prayer. Of course count Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and a host of others in this group. But few employed the hair-on-fire, spit-in-the-eye anti-religious rhetoric of Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason . Only Ethan Allen in Reason: The Only Oracle of Man comes to mind in that category.
John Adams, despite the diplomatic language he employed to assuage the fears of the Bey of Tripoli, was, as President, an ardent advocate of confounding religion and government. Though a religious liberal-an Arminist adherent of the New England Standing Order (Congregationalist) who was comfortable when his local parish became Unitarian after his presidency-Adams firmly believed that infusing Christian religion in government was necessary to prevent anarchy, Jacobinism, and dreaded democracy from infecting the body politic. As the inheritor of New England Puritanism-even if he rejected Calvinism-Adams believed that humans were naturally debauched and could be restrained only a vigorous clergy holding up the consequences of damnation and public disapprobation in concert with a “natural aristocracy.” As President he promulgated two controversial national days of “Fasting and Humiliation” to elevate Christianity. And he relied on the “Black Legion”-ministers-as a principal political foil for Jeffersonian democracy.
Other members of the founding generations were actively religious. Many Anglicans were torn between country and the established religion of which the King of England was the anointed head. Many Quakers, rejecting violence, rejected the Revolution and many were active Tories. But many members of both groups joined the flinty Yankee Congregationalists and the middle colony Presbyterians to take active rolls in the revolution and in the new government. Members of non-established dissenting sects like the Baptists, Methodists, and Universalists were often among the most ardent of Patriots during the war, and the most unwavering Democrats afterward in appreciations of Jefferson’s firm stand against established churches.
Our nation was formed in a cauldron that threw the adherents of the Enlightenment and of the Great Awakening together. It was not always a comfortable match. But out of those contending forces grew a unique American innovation-a national Civic Religion that is explicitly non-sectarian or even particularly Christian-which honors both the Puritan “Shining City of the Hill” vision of America as a new Promised Land with a new covenant and the Deists’ non-personal Providence.
Several authors have plowed this ground in recent years including Robert Bellah, who coined the term Civil Religion, Gary Wills. and Jon Mechan. But none has done it better than the Unitarian Universalist scholar, Forrest Church. I commend The American Creed: A Spiritual and Patriotic Memoir and particularly So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State.
I added the following in a comment to one of those who thought I was a covert “Christianist.” His comment was titled What the hell is the point of this diary?
How about thesis, antithesis, synthesis?
Sigh! Like a lot of other commentators here, you seem to assume that my diary offers some kind of support to the notion of a Christian Nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not myself a Christian, except in the sense that I may count the teachings attributed to an itinerant First Century Jewish preacher among the sources of wisdom I find useful. And I am an ardent advocate of the separation of church and state, promulgated by Jefferson and others.
But I am not blind to the complex forces of history. As a people we have been negotiating this thorny ground since the beginning. The ascendency of the theocratic religious right in recent years has revived the discussion. Liberals and secularists have responded with increasing vigor. As has always been the case, when the theocrats over-reach, the people-or at least a big chunk of the people-reject them. This cycle has been a recurring theme in American history, as have the informal compromises we have worked out in order to live peaceably with one another.
You might not like the "Civil Religion" which has resulted, but it has been broad enough to include liberal voices like Emerson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Emma Lazarus, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Barack Obama-all drawing on the Declaration of Independence-on one hand, to political and social conservatives from Daniel Webster to William F. Buckley-drawing on the Constitution and other documents promoting social order-on the other.
George W. Bush and the Theocrats who supported him overstepped that broad agreement. And were rejected for doing so. Just as the left will be rejected if we overstep ourselves wrapped in smug and condescending self-righteousness. Americans don’t much like prigs of either sort in the long run. Obama understands this, which is why he is renegotiating the terms of the Civil Religion. And why absolutists of all stripes will despise him.