Even America's founders rejected Christian Nationalism
November 04, 2023
Several times in the past few years I have written about Christian Nationalism, a movement that imagines the U.S. is -- or at least should be -- a Christian theocracy.
It goes against the grain not only of Christianity but also of the foundations of the American system of government. And yet it has its deluded supporters, some of whom we saw among the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists.
I want to return to that subject today because of something I just read in Mark A. Noll's remarkable new book, America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization: 1794-1911. Noll is a prolific and enlightening scholar whose books are always worth reading.
Noll, an emeritus history professor at the University of Notre Dame, notes early in the book that the Bible figured "prominently in the early American commitment to democratic principles. To be sure, democracy in the modern sense was only just beginning, since the stirring phrases of the Declaration of Independence, such as 'all men are created equal,' applied at the time only to white men with property.
"Yet even that level of political empowerment made for a great change, particularly because it involved the rejection of Christendom, the formal linking of church and state."
What happened at the founding of the U.S., Noll writes, was "the patriots' visceral rejection of Britain's church-state regime, which they perceived as a prime source of tyrannical corruption."
And what does Christian Nationalism today seek? Exactly the "formal linking of church and state" that the European invaders who created the United States rejected from the start.
Noll explains all of this further this way: "The new nation's repudiation of Christendom posed even more uncertainties than a religious terrain dominated by internally divided Protestants. The only social order older Americans had ever known simply assumed the formal interweaving of religion and regime, the interweaving Europeans had long taken for granted as God's way of uniting civic order, prosperity and the reverence due his sovereignty. But now in the new nation, governments at all levels moved to guarantee the free exercise of conscience for all beliefs and practices that did not endanger public peace. With only a little hesitation, the American states were abandoning government sponsorship of religion, or at least the coercive establishment of only one Christian denomination as an official state church."
There are many good reasons to reject Christian Nationalism, of course, including the reality that although a majority of Americans today still identify as being some type or other of Christian, the nation is increasingly pluralistic when it comes to religion, especially considering that nearly one-third of adult Americans now identify as religious unaffiliated.
So a nation ruled by a Christian Nationalist government would be or soon become a case of the majority being ruled by the minority. Add to that the vast variety of Christianities practiced in this country and soon you have to decide which of them gets to rule, assuming they can't rule by coalition (not a bad assumption).
Did the Bible play an important role in shaping American life, including its politics? Absolutely, and Noll tells a lot of that story in this new book. But the founders quickly rejected what today we recognize as Christian Nationalism. It was the right choice then and the right choice now.
(Can we connect Christian Nationalism to the idea expressed by the newly elected Speaker of the U.S. House that his election was ordained by God? I think that's a stretch, frankly. Indeed, he recently specifically denied trying to make Christianity the official religion of the U.S. Rather, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., simply seemed to be misusing this passage in the New Testament book of Romans (13:1): "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God." Some scholars today make a good argument that the Apostle Paul, who wrote this, wasn't praising the brutal Roman rulers but, rather, was advising Christ-following Gentiles who were guests in Jewish worship spaces to be good guests, respectful of the temple authorities. It was those temple authorities, not the Roman civic authorities, to whom Paul was pointing, in other words.
On the other hand, as historian Heather Cox Richardson has reported in one of her recent "Letters from an American," Johnson has "asserted that we do not live in a democracy but in a 'Biblical republic.' He told a Fox News Channel interviewer that to discover his worldview, one simply had to 'go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.'" Apparently one doesn't even have to interpret the Bible when one reads it. Weird.)
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IS PAPAL DIPLOMACY DOING ANY GOOD?
The world has become accustomed to hearing from whoever is pope whenever a war or some similar crisis breaks out somewhere. Pope Francis has stayed in that lane, as this RNS story reports. "Pope Francis and the Vatican," it says, "have opened a new front in diplomacy efforts to address the violence in the Holy Land, with papal diplomats working to promote peace through official and unofficial channels."
I'm always glad to find thoughtful voices advocating and working for peace. My question is whether anyone who is leading the wars in Ukraine or in Gaza/Israel pays much attention to a pope. Does Vatican diplomacy ever make a difference? I don't have a quick and ready answer to that question, but would be interested to hear your ideas about it (I'm at [email protected]). Has anyone read the 2021 book God's Diplomats? Or the 1959 book Vatican Diplomacy?
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P.S.: Recently I wrote this blog entry about several ways in which various religious communities are paying more attention to the mental health needs of people. So it seems appropriate to tell you about a new effort to help young people in metro Kansas City, specifically in the Lee's Summit area, develop in healthy and stable ways.
This link will take you to a video and a news release about what's to be called The Wesley Place, which will be part of the Pro Deo Youth Center. The video, which features a couple who donated a large amount of money for The Wesley Place, will tell you about Wesley, their late son.
And here is a July 2023 story by The Kansas City Star that describes the expansion that's coming to Pro Deo, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
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