Establishing Christian America
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians. In a comparison of America’s rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortion with those of E.U. countries, America’s reputation for Puritanism takes a beating. Some of our rates are skewed by the somewhat different sexual mores of African- and Mexican-Americans, but they are, after all, Americans, and even discounting those minorities will not produce a statistical profile of the model citizens of the City on a Hill. We do attend church services more frequently than Europeans do, but here, too, the numbers are skewed by the high number of churchgoing Christians who are elderly, Southern, and female.
Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation. Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox. George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion. His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked. The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”
Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail. Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason. He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress. Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.” Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.
As Tocqueville told us 150 years ago, we are a conventional people, afraid of controversy. Going to church, in most periods of our history, has entailed fewer social complications than a reputation for atheism. No known atheist has ever been elected president: Lincoln learned to keep his skepticism to himself. America’s tradition of toleration—a peculiar blend of public hypocrisy and personal indifference to religion—is often explained by the First Amendment. Anti-American Catholics and ACLU liberals agree that the development of a Christian social order (much less a religious establishment) was prevented by the so-called wall of separation between Church and state. The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802. The Baptists were afraid that the Congregationalists who dominated their state might not grant them full religious liberty. In the view of the Connecticut constitution and state government, freedom of religion was not a natural right but a concession from the legislature, as “favors granted.” At this time, Connecticut did have a Church establishment: One had to be a Protestant to hold office, and taxes were raised for the support of the Congregational Church. To calm their fears, Jefferson assured the Baptists that he favored religious freedom:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not 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.
Jefferson was President at the time, but this letter is not an official state paper, much less a part of the Constitution or even a court decision. Nonetheless, this sentence is usually taken as a radical interpretation of the First Amendment. Some color is given this interpretation by the following sentence, which he bracketed for deletion, to avoid giving offense:
Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.
What President Jefferson is saying is that he found a public display of religion to be incompatible with his role as a chief executive whose powers to act were limited by Congress. He did not, however, say that it would be unconstitutional for him to preside over a national religious ceremony—only that it might be inappropriate, since there was no national church.
There is a serious problem with Jefferson’s statement—at least it would be a serious problem for most Christians throughout history and is still a problem for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, of course, but also for serious Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. The problem is the dangerous notion that religion is a matter solely between an individual and the god in whom he chooses to believe. In fact, from the beginning, the Christian Church acted as a community, not a random association of individuals, and, from the beginning, the Church spoke with the authority of the Holy Ghost, not only on matters of faith, but on morals and politics. Calvinists and Catholics might have wished to burn each other at the stake, but neither thought it was a matter of indifference whether a Christian followed the pope or John Calvin. Jefferson’s opinion derives from his own indifference to religion, a habit he picked up from French Enlightenment thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire. It is a dangerous idea, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution.
To be fair to that good man, Jefferson was in something of a bind. His indifference (at best) to religion was well known, and he knew that anything he wrote could and would be used against him by political rivals who had always tried to represent him as the enemy of Christianity. Cleverly, Jefferson did not even answer the Baptists’ main point: He wrote nothing about the rights of Baptists in Connecticut or the power of the legislature but spoke only of the national legislature—that is, the U.S. Congress—which is forbidden to establish a church or interfere in the exercise of religion.
J
efferson’s wall of separation cannot honestly be used to justify the government’s campaign to eliminate Christianity from public places. The President thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was merely restating and applying the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It is not easy today to get the point of this clause, since so few of us have lived in a country with an established religion. At its most severe, an established church is not only the official church of the country, it is the only legal church. In Elizabethan England, the Church of England was established, and members of other churches, whether Catholics or Anabaptists, could be punished in a variety of unpleasant ways. By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican establishment, though milder, was still strict. The Church was supported by compulsory tithes; the parish churches were the basis of poor relief; no Catholics, much less Jews, could attend a university or one of the great public schools, and none could hold office. On the eve of the American Revolution, all 13 colonies accorded privileges to the Christian religion, and nine of them had established churches. In 1788—the year the Bill of Rights was adopted—six states had religious establishments supported by taxpayers, and eleven required officeholders to be Christians.
The First Amendment, then, forbids Congress either to establish a national church or to interfere in the exercise of religion. Why Congress, specifically? Because Congress, elected from the people, is the supreme lawmaking body. As Jefferson understood, it was up to Congress to pass laws, which the president executed. The president could not have his own policies on religious freedom any more than he was entitled to have his own policies on war (much less the special “war powers” that Lincoln invented and subsequent presidents have abused): For a president to impose his own ideas on the nation would be tyrannical. Nor did anyone (except possibly Jefferson) ever think the federal courts would get involved in such an issue, since their role was to interpret the Constitution and federal laws, and they had virtually no authority to intrude themselves into the affairs of the separate sovereign states.
The fears of the Danbury Baptists were legitimate: Under the First Amendment, the states could, theoretically, interfere in the exercise of religion or establish a church, whether Anglican or Congregationalist. The fear of a national establishment came natural to Americans. What sort of national church could America have that would unite the Anglicans of Virginia and South Carolina with the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania? Even the Southern states were religiously diverse. The Carolina backcountry was dominated by Presbyterians and, eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Campbellites, while Charleston had a significant Catholic population even in the early 19th century, and eventually the number of Irish Catholics in the lower South and, after the Louisiana Purchase, French and Spanish Catholics in Louisiana was too great to be ignored. So, although Christianity held a privileged position, it was, for practical reasons, virtually impossible for states to maintain a church establishment.
Although the Bill of Rights is interpreted today as a guarantee of individual and minority rights to exercise freedoms of expression and religion, this was not the original reading. In this respect, Jefferson’s letter points in the wrong direction. The primary object of the Bill of Rights was to restrain the national government, particularly the Congress.
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are primarily collective political rights exercised by the citizens within the states. (On this point, the first part of Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights is conclusive.) The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly are intended to protect the people from a strong national government that might increase its power by abridging these rights, while the Establishment Clause, which says nothing about an individual’s religious freedom, prevents Congress from interfering in a state’s right to establish or not establish a church.
In each of the clauses of the First Amendment, the Framers (James Madison, primarily) were responding to past abuses of the British government. Britain had censored political speech both in and out of the press, restricted political assemblies, and (so some Americans believed) shown signs of wishing to establish the Anglican Church in Puritan New England.
Many of the specific incidents to which Americans objected took place in the decades before the American Revolution, which they helped to ignite, and, of the actions taken by the British government, none were so seriously resented as the Coercive Acts, a series of edicts, issued by the British government in 1774, whose primary objectives were to punish New England’s rebellious commercial and political leaders and to impose tighter restraints on all the North American colonies. Thrown in for good measure was the Quebec Act, which, although it was unrelated to the problems in Boston, also aroused suspicions, partly because it transferred jurisdiction over the Ohio country to Canada but, even more, because it offered protections to Catholics and allowed their clergy to collect tithes from professing Catholics. Strangely, this was taken as evidence that Parliament was preparing to establish the Church of England in New England. The Quebec Act, in other words, is partly the inspiration for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and what the Yankees objected to was any guarantee of religious freedom for the Catholics they hated so much. The last thing a New Englander wanted was freedom of conscience for those of a different faith.
Because of the differences among Christian sects even in fairly uniform areas such as New England, state religious establishments proved to be unworkable, and, one by one, they were abandoned with little controversy. Nonetheless, the American people were probably more Christian in 1850 than they had been in 1780, when the influence of Deism and rationalism were stronger. The federal government had no authority to interfere in the religious affairs of the states, though the passage of the 14th Amendment would eventually turn the Constitution—and American society with it—upside-down.
To explain the decline of American Christianity, conservatives continue to cling to the myth of a nation settled by pious believers seeking to found “a shining City on a Hill.” But this republican Eden, on which God has uniquely bestowed His blessings, was corrupted by the Tempter. The American people are still, for the most part, good and faithful Christians, but they are under assault from immoral Hollywood movies, wicked journalists, and pointy-headed intellectuals, etc. Setting aside the obvious problem of equating New England (particularly the worst aspects of it) with all of America, we should ask ourselves this: Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see? Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine? If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.
Conservative Christians are right to complain that they are being persecuted by the government, and I do not have a solution to this grave problem except to suggest that they are wasting their time in trying to change the laws. Instead, they might consider the example of early Christians living under the pagan Roman Empire. Most Christians paid their taxes to Caesar, served in Caesar’s army, and were good neighbors and loyal citizens of Caesar’s empire. They did not engage in futile protests about infanticide, nor did they abuse and insult their pagan neighbors. They minded their own business, went to church, and prayed for the empire’s conversion. If today’s American Christians had the faith of a mustard seed, they would spurn the false prophets who have enslaved them to a party or political ideology and go about their Master’s business.
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not act like Christians.
In a comparison of America’s rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy, and abortion with those of E.U. countries, America’s reputation for Puritanism takes a beating. Some of our rates are skewed by the somewhat different sexual mores of African- and Mexican-Americans, but they are, after all, Americans, and even discounting those minorities will not produce a statistical profile of the model citizens of the City on a Hill. We do attend church services more frequently than Europeans do, but here, too, the numbers are skewed by the high number of churchgoing Christians who are elderly, Southern, and female.
Despite the number of religious fanatics who landed on our shores early on, America has never been a Christian nation. Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but few of the men who led the Revolution or drafted the Constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox. George Washington was an ordinary Episcopalian who showed no conspicuous attachment to religion. His biographer Parson Weems has preserved touching stories about Washington’s faith, but Weems was a notorious liar, and his morale-building stories have repeatedly been debunked. The chaplain to the First Continental Congress knew Washington well and respected him, but, when asked in 1832 about the first president’s religion, he replied, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which will prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”
Revelation, miracles, and mystery were a stumbling block to John Adams, who was an undoubted Unitarian, like his wife, Abigail. Ben Franklin turned deist at the age of 15, before turning into a freethinker and Freemason. He was also a notorious philanderer who fathered bastards and wrote a famous essay on how to get and keep a mistress. Small wonder that Newt Gingrich says Franklin was “great in the way he lived his life.” Thomas Jefferson was also a mildly anti-Christian deist.
As Tocqueville told us 150 years ago, we are a conventional people, afraid of controversy. Going to church, in most periods of our history, has entailed fewer social complications than a reputation for atheism. No known atheist has ever been elected president: Lincoln learned to keep his skepticism to himself. America’s tradition of toleration—a peculiar blend of public hypocrisy and personal indifference to religion—is often explained by the First Amendment. Anti-American Catholics and ACLU liberals agree that the development of a Christian social order (much less a religious establishment) was prevented by the so-called wall of separation between Church and state. The phrase comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802. The Baptists were afraid that the Congregationalists who dominated their state might not grant them full religious liberty. In the view of the Connecticut constitution and state government, freedom of religion was not a natural right but a concession from the legislature, as “favors granted.” At this time, Connecticut did have a Church establishment: One had to be a Protestant to hold office, and taxes were raised for the support of the Congregational Church. To calm their fears, Jefferson assured the Baptists that he favored religious freedom:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not 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.
Jefferson was President at the time, but this letter is not an official state paper, much less a part of the Constitution or even a court decision. Nonetheless, this sentence is usually taken as a radical interpretation of the First Amendment. Some color is given this interpretation by the following sentence, which he bracketed for deletion, to avoid giving offense:
Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from presenting even occasional performances of devotion presented indeed legally where an Executive is the legal head of a national church, but subject here, as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.
What President Jefferson is saying is that he found a public display of religion to be incompatible with his role as a chief executive whose powers to act were limited by Congress. He did not, however, say that it would be unconstitutional for him to preside over a national religious ceremony—only that it might be inappropriate, since there was no national church.
There is a serious problem with Jefferson’s statement—at least it would be a serious problem for most Christians throughout history and is still a problem for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, of course, but also for serious Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. The problem is the dangerous notion that religion is a matter solely between an individual and the god in whom he chooses to believe. In fact, from the beginning, the Christian Church acted as a community, not a random association of individuals, and, from the beginning, the Church spoke with the authority of the Holy Ghost, not only on matters of faith, but on morals and politics. Calvinists and Catholics might have wished to burn each other at the stake, but neither thought it was a matter of indifference whether a Christian followed the pope or John Calvin. Jefferson’s opinion derives from his own indifference to religion, a habit he picked up from French Enlightenment thinkers from Montaigne to Voltaire. It is a dangerous idea, but it has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution.
To be fair to that good man, Jefferson was in something of a bind. His indifference (at best) to religion was well known, and he knew that anything he wrote could and would be used against him by political rivals who had always tried to represent him as the enemy of Christianity. Cleverly, Jefferson did not even answer the Baptists’ main point: He wrote nothing about the rights of Baptists in Connecticut or the power of the legislature but spoke only of the national legislature—that is, the U.S. Congress—which is forbidden to establish a church or interfere in the exercise of religion.
Jefferson’s wall of separation cannot honestly be used to justify the government’s campaign to eliminate Christianity from public places. The President thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was merely restating and applying the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, which says: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It is not easy today to get the point of this clause, since so few of us have lived in a country with an established religion. At its most severe, an established church is not only the official church of the country, it is the only legal church. In Elizabethan England, the Church of England was established, and members of other churches, whether Catholics or Anabaptists, could be punished in a variety of unpleasant ways. By the time of the American Revolution, the Anglican establishment, though milder, was still strict. The Church was supported by compulsory tithes; the parish churches were the basis of poor relief; no Catholics, much less Jews, could attend a university or one of the great public schools, and none could hold office. On the eve of the American Revolution, all 13 colonies accorded privileges to the Christian religion, and nine of them had established churches. In 1788—the year the Bill of Rights was adopted—six states had religious establishments supported by taxpayers, and eleven required officeholders to be Christians.
The First Amendment, then, forbids Congress either to establish a national church or to interfere in the exercise of religion. Why Congress, specifically? Because Congress, elected from the people, is the supreme lawmaking body. As Jefferson understood, it was up to Congress to pass laws, which the president executed. The president could not have his own policies on religious freedom any more than he was entitled to have his own policies on war (much less the special “war powers” that Lincoln invented and subsequent presidents have abused): For a president to impose his own ideas on the nation would be tyrannical. Nor did anyone (except possibly Jefferson) ever think the federal courts would get involved in such an issue, since their role was to interpret the Constitution and federal laws, and they had virtually no authority to intrude themselves into the affairs of the separate sovereign states.
The fears of the Danbury Baptists were legitimate: Under the First Amendment, the states could, theoretically, interfere in the exercise of religion or establish a church, whether Anglican or Congregationalist. The fear of a national establishment came natural to Americans. What sort of national church could America have that would unite the Anglicans of Virginia and South Carolina with the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania? Even the Southern states were religiously diverse. The Carolina backcountry was dominated by Presbyterians and, eventually, Methodists, Baptists, and Campbellites, while Charleston had a significant Catholic population even in the early 19th century, and eventually the number of Irish Catholics in the lower South and, after the Louisiana Purchase, French and Spanish Catholics in Louisiana was too great to be ignored. So, although Christianity held a privileged position, it was, for practical reasons, virtually impossible for states to maintain a church establishment.
Although the Bill of Rights is interpreted today as a guarantee of individual and minority rights to exercise freedoms of expression and religion, this was not the original reading. In this respect, Jefferson’s letter points in the wrong direction. The primary object of the Bill of Rights was to restrain the national government, particularly the Congress.
The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are primarily collective political rights exercised by the citizens within the states. (On this point, the first part of Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights is conclusive.) The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly are intended to protect the people from a strong national government that might increase its power by abridging these rights, while the Establishment Clause, which says nothing about an individual’s religious freedom, prevents Congress from interfering in a state’s right to establish or not establish a church.
In each of the clauses of the First Amendment, the Framers (James Madison, primarily) were responding to past abuses of the British government. Britain had censored political speech both in and out of the press, restricted political assemblies, and (so some Americans believed) shown signs of wishing to establish the Anglican Church in Puritan New England.
Many of the specific incidents to which Americans objected took place in the decades before the American Revolution, which they helped to ignite, and, of the actions taken by the British government, none were so seriously resented as the Coercive Acts, a series of edicts, issued by the British government in 1774, whose primary objectives were to punish New England’s rebellious commercial and political leaders and to impose tighter restraints on all the North American colonies. Thrown in for good measure was the Quebec Act, which, although it was unrelated to the problems in Boston, also aroused suspicions, partly because it transferred jurisdiction over the Ohio country to Canada but, even more, because it offered protections to Catholics and allowed their clergy to collect tithes from professing Catholics. Strangely, this was taken as evidence that Parliament was preparing to establish the Church of England in New England. The Quebec Act, in other words, is partly the inspiration for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and what the Yankees objected to was any guarantee of religious freedom for the Catholics they hated so much. The last thing a New Englander wanted was freedom of conscience for those of a different faith.
Because of the differences among Christian sects even in fairly uniform areas such as New England, state religious establishments proved to be unworkable, and, one by one, they were abandoned with little controversy. Nonetheless, the American people were probably more Christian in 1850 than they had been in 1780, when the influence of Deism and rationalism were stronger. The federal government had no authority to interfere in the religious affairs of the states, though the passage of the 14th Amendment would eventually turn the Constitution—and American society with it—upside-down.
To explain the decline of American Christianity, conservatives continue to cling to the myth of a nation settled by pious believers seeking to found “a shining City on a Hill.” But this republican Eden, on which God has uniquely bestowed His blessings, was corrupted by the Tempter. The American people are still, for the most part, good and faithful Christians, but they are under assault from immoral Hollywood movies, wicked journalists, and pointy-headed intellectuals, etc. Setting aside the obvious problem of equating New England (particularly the worst aspects of it) with all of America, we should ask ourselves this: Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see? Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine? If America were, in fact, a basically Christian or moral nation, Hollywood would be out of business, and so would most colleges and universities.
Conservative Christians are right to complain that they are being persecuted by the government, and I do not have a solution to this grave problem except to suggest that they are wasting their time in trying to change the laws. Instead, they might consider the example of early Christians living under the pagan Roman Empire. Most Christians paid their taxes to Caesar, served in Caesar’s army, and were good neighbors and loyal citizens of Caesar’s empire. They did not engage in futile protests about infanticide, nor did they abuse and insult their pagan neighbors. They minded their own business, went to church, and prayed for the empire’s conversion. If today’s American Christians had the faith of a mustard seed, they would spurn the false prophets who have enslaved them to a party or political ideology and go about their Master’s business.
This article first appeared in the June 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
Dr. Fleming is too kind to Mr. Jefferson, who was not just "indifferent" to religion but an actual blasphemer (cf. his "de-mythologized" version of the Gospels). Although the Anglican Establishment may have been (relatively) mild by 1775, it had been ferocious for quite a while before that until there were too few Catholics left in Britain to be any threat to its prerogatives. Religious division indeed has been the undoing of Christendom and the last American church with any nerve or influence lost it back in the 1960s. The Catholic bishops and their obedient flocks had been the dam holding back the Hollywood-led cultural revolution until they caved.
Rem tene! Jefferson was an "enlightened" intellectual who sincerely believed that Christianity, once it was sanitized of superstition, would be a force for good. He was utterly different from Tom Paine, who hated Christianity. These distinctions may not meet the needs of this or that argument, but if we do not begin with the facts insofar as we can discover them, we shall only be spinning our wheels as we go in circles.
Despite Mr Jefferson's 'unorthodox' version of Christianity (a Christian Deism - he thought Jesus' teachings were fine until they were 'corrupted' by St Paul!) his daughters and grandsons were all baptized into the Episcopal Church of Virginia. He was merely a product of the Enlightenment, and fortunately he did not appear to influence many other Virginians in religious matters.
"Could men and women of strong faith really be corrupted by Hollywood movies that no Christian has any business going to see? Can you imagine Saints Peter and Paul attending the premier of Kill Bill or Saint Monica watching Lost with little Augustine?"
This is true. The problem is that today, unlike in the Roman Empire of those days, it is difficult to protect one's children even from the worst of this so-called culture. The media, even the most demonic parts of it, pervade everything. Even if you don't allow your kids to watch TV or surf the Internet, their little playmates do.
If you try to establish an oasis of Christianity, as they did at Ave Maria (city), Florida, with leases that ban abortion and the sale of contraceptives and pornography, then the bigoted, anti-Christian ACLU comes in -- as it did there -- and makes you stop. So much for private property rights, let alone freedom of religion.
Newsweek reported in 2006 of city founder Tom Monaghan, who later backed down:
------------------------
The ACLU of Florida is worried about how he's playing the game. "It is completely naive to think this first attempt [to restrict access to contraception] will be their last," says executive director Howard Simon. Armed with a 1946 Supreme Court opinion that "ownership [of a town] does not always mean absolute dominion," Simon will be watching Ave Maria for any signs of Monaghan's request's becoming a demand. Planned Parenthood is similarly alarmed. So far, Naples Community Hospital, which plans to open a clinic in Ave Maria Town, says it will not prescribe any birth control to students. Will others be able to get the pill? "For the general public, the answer is probably yes, but not definitely yes," says hospital point man Edgardo Tenreiro. The Florida attorney general's office says the issue of limiting access will likely have to be worked out in court. Barron Collier and Monaghan say they're following Florida law.
Dr. Fleming, why do you characterize the Spectator piece as "irritating"? I quite enjoyed it.
I suggest C. Gregg Singer's book, "A Theological Interpretation of American History" to see what the state of belief was during the Founding era. In short, it was weak as Mr. Fleming points out.
Would Christians be better off acting as if the Constitution is a dead document and working to establish the successor state to the USA?
I meant only that many well-intentioned Christian friends, who are still pretending to admire the emperor's clothes, expressed their annoyance.
I am not sure that any political action is of much consequence these days, apart from voting for the interest of yourself, your family, and your community. If you have a Congress-crook who actually helps your district, you should probably work to keep him. If you know someone who is mayor or a senator, he is a valuable asset to you. And, I suppose, the principle of "anyone but Obama" is a rational if ineffective attitude at this point. I will postpone this discussion till later, but at this point let me just say that in the first three centuries of the Christian Church, apostles, apologists, bishops, and ordinary Christian men and women were content to lead Christian lives that set an example to the pagans. That is always the first Christian socio-political duty, and no political allegiance or project should get in the way. Thomas More learned that lesson too late. It always seems to me that More is treated with kid gloves by Catholic writers. Henry was a brute and a tyrant long before he wanted a divorce. More reminds me a good deal of Seneca the younger, who thought he would always be able to exert a controlling influence on his pupil Nero. At least in Seneca's case, his influence brought five years of excellent government to the Empire
@ John Seiler: I don't think it is so much more difficult to protect your children now than before. Bad companions will lead you to hell at any age and in any period of history, so it has always been vital to avoid them as much as possible. Our children don't watch TV or read modern children's books, and I admit they don't get out as much as others, but we have a small circle of like-minded friends, with whose children ours can play without excessive fear of contamination. One good thing about the state of our society, is that it is perhaps easier to tell the good from the bad companions. It is true that parents must be forever vigilant, but is that much different from the past?
Here, Kate, I feel you are overconfident. Your children are little girls. Boys are much harder to keep out of mischief, and even girls, when they are a bit older, will be exposed to many alien influences. And even if one succeeds in raising them in a hermetically sealed environment, what happens when they go off to college? Or, suppose you marry them off at 16 to someone similarly brought up but who turns out to be a louse? I don't want to alarm you but I know too many good Christian friends who did their best only to have at least one of their children turn to sex, drugs, rock and roll, and worse. If the Amish cannot protect their children--and they can't--then neither can we.
Yes, this is quite different from most periods in history except for very degenerate aristocracies. When it comes to the 1950's, I am no laudator temporis acti, but it was a better time. There were wild kids who drank and engaged in heavy petting, but if they got carried away they generally got married. Most ordinary smalltown people I knew of went to work, got married, reared their kids, and pursued their little enthusiasms--hunting, fishing, preserving fruits. I know there was a different world because I have read John O'Hara and James Gould Cozzens, and even small towns there were drunks and adulterers, but for the most part they were shunned. No teacher could hold a job if he/she was caught playing around. A woman teacher who went to a saloon with a girlfriend was dismissed. Keeping up appearances was everything. For people a little older than I am, the moral break-down happened when they were adults and exposed to the 60's virus.
The 50's was a weak and artificial culture that could not stand up to the shocks that came along, but even then--or if we go back a bit earlier--it is easy to see that even inattentive parents could count on relatives, neighbors, teachers, ministers and a generalized community sentiment to provide the formation the parents were neglecting. Now, the reverse is true. Every influence, including that of most private schools and most pastors, is reliably negative. Yes, strong families working together in strong church communities can do a great deal, and I see great successes both in my Catholic parish and among some Lutheran and Evangelical groups, but I also see lots of failures. The big mistake is to imagine that the parents can do it by themselves, a mistake I know you and your husband will not make.
Nothing, absolutely nothing good has happened in the 20th century. The best things have been decent attempts to hold the line or restore something good from the past, but insofar as there has been progress, it has been a progress to Hell. You are perfectly right that we can be clearer in our minds and see good and evil more clearly, but it is odd how few people do. In fact most people, including people in their 80's, just go with the flow, accepting feminism, promiscuity, divorce as simply the fruits of progress and individualism. If our people were not stupid, there would not be so many libertarians.
Dr. Fleming is wise to warn that parents should not be overconfident in directing their children down the path of lives of virtue. It is best never to be overconfident in most important endeavors, especially child raising. His most recent post on this thread is both pithy and correct in almost all of its assertions. Yet it would seem to me that parents still have the duty to raise their children as best as is possible in a world of elite-sanctioned squalor. Despair is not an option. Success in raising children can not be assured or quanitified but parents must try. They dishonor themselves by not trying.
Due to my own personal circumstances, I would argue that some good, almost all in advanced medical techniques, has occurred in the 20th Century. My first-born son was born with a very bad heart condition that required open-heart surgery at nine days of age back in 1996. Open-heart surgery was developed very recently, in the mid-1950s, so he would have died shortly after birth during most of the history of mankind. Although many medical advances in the 20th Century have been put to evil purposes, some have made life a bit more pleasant.
I don't think I'm overconfident. Out of all the children I knew growing up, homeschooled and attending the same conservative Catholic church, several have become lost in the world. Some of my childhood friends no longer practice their religion, others I knew made unfortunate marriages, or left home to live in sin with a boyfriend or girlfriend. One friend became a drug dealer -- I have no idea what ever became of him. The thought that my children could be lost is very frightening, and I have no desire whatsoever to be a St. Monica. Yet, many turned out well. I am hardly the only one to grow up, get married, have children, and bring them up in the Faith.
I suppose I have a somewhat different view, having always lived basically under siege conditions. I can easily believe that most influences in the world today are evil, but most people are not prepared to find that they've been living in a cesspool for most of their lives without perceiving it, especially while so many influences, many of them supposed to be good, are telling them otherwise. I do know some who have awoken to the reality of it later in life, but most people don't have the guts to make themselves so very uncomfortable with such thoughts.
As for my children, I only hope to shield them from the worst until they are strong enough to withstand it. Derek's family is one of the few influences I allow -- his daughter and mine are good friends. I have hopes for my sons -- I have two, so far -- that at least one of them might become a priest, since we need them so badly. Despair, unfortunately, is an option that I've seen others take, but I hope to keep far away from it.
The two most dangerous follies of our time are the temptations to unfounded hope and to debilitating despair. On this latter, Kate is absolutely right, and I have talked to too many younger people who see no point in getting married or having children. This is not only nonsense, it is pernicious nonsense that robs us of a good deal of our humanity. Each of us has to do the best we can and make the best of it. The English virtue of muddling through is something for us to all to emulate
Mr. Fleming, the way you portray the transition from the 50's to the 60's sounds correct to me, but what of the lower classes in Victorian England or the Roaring Twenties in America? Were those periods of debauchery confined to a narrower circle? Is the scale of the present evil the difference?
Miss Kate @ 12,
On 03 May 1970, in the midst of Reconstruction, William Gilmore Simms got off his death bed to deliver to the Charleston County Agricultural and Horticultural Association a lecture entitled "The Sense of the Beautiful." The message of the lecture was coded because this public gathering like most other during Reconstruction was under the watchful eyes and bayonets of "federal" soldiers.
In it, he compares a child to a tender plant, which must be tenderly guided to grow in the way that it should. This, of course, assumes that there is a gardener and that the gardener knows how the plant should grow. There is good soil, the plant is protected from early or late frost, from too much sun or too much shade, from too much and from too little water, from molds and rabbits, from being picked too early or allowed to stay on the vine too long, and from thieves who might steal into the garden. (All of the "from" stuff is mine and not that of Simms.)
Rearing children is not unlike raising tomatoes, something which I used to do as an "enterprising" boy. My grandma Peters had given me her last seed stock of old-time tomatoes, that kind that still tasted and behaved like tomatoes. I kept them going for years after she was gone; yet, there came a year, in which I came to trust in a hybrid variety peddled by the county agent. I planted them, four long rows of them. I took care of them with the same earnestness that I took care of my dogs, cats and chickens - watering and fertilizing as needed. Oh, did they grow, quickly, filling all the rows. In anticipation of a great crop, I threw the last of Grandma's seed stock into an over-grown corner of the garden near an old fence. The hybrids blossomed and bloomed. The bees came and did their appointed work. I killed scores of tomato worms (caterpillars) with my BB gun. There was, however, one major problem. Not one of these plants covering four long rows put on one tomato. They received God's sun and His rain. They received my care. Yet, they bore no fruit, pretty and tomato-like as they were. I pulled them up root and shoot, threw them into a pile, let them dry and them burned them - utterly up. (It would take be about twenty-years to realize the subtle theological message in my boyish agrarian act.) However, over in that neglected corner, among the weeds, s long spindly plant of my grandma's seed, had struggled in a vinish fashion to the old fence; and there on the fence was one beautiful red tomato. I had given it no notice. I picked it and washed it. We made tomato sandwiches of it.
Thus, we do indeed have duties, obligations and responsibilities before God as His stewards to rear children to accept their places in His creation. Sometimes, however, the wildlings surprise us; and the nurtured ones, so loved and so cared for, bear no fruit.
Keep up your good work.
Amend the "1970" to "1870"!
Tom, Someone has remarked that a decent man is one who apologizes for having been born in the twentieth century.
I keep an index card in my wallet which contains some lines from General Lee that were also written in 1870:
"My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them, or indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge; or of the present aspect of affairs; do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope."
I try to keep that in mind.
And interesting comparison of Seneca and Thomas More. I would actually like to hear more about Dr. Fleming's take on intellectuals in public life. I do not mean the likes of Arthur Schlesinger Jr in the Kennedy White House. I am thinking more along the lines of Seneca and Nero (and Dr. Fleming is correct-the first years of Nero's reign were not bad-of course the same could be said of Caligula's first 2 years), Aristotle and Alexander, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Sylvester II and Otto and so on. Few of them seemed to me to have profited the world by their service in the various courts they were in. Just a thought for a future conversation down the pike.
To Rob, thanks for an excellent question. Another intellectual public servant to consider and perhaps the best example was Cicero.
Simms had lived through almost unspeakable horrors and yet he could fix his mind on higher and more enduring things. Finally, yes, capitalism and mass democracy have brought the blessings of aristocratic degeneracy to the middle classes, which were destroyed, and to the working class. Conservatives speak glibly of the degeneracy of the Roman Empire, but what evidence we have does not suggest that the degeneracy described by, say, Petronius was at all widespread.
Very informative essay. At the risk of being a nitpicker, focusing on the least important aspect of this truly enlightening exploration of the Founders and religious establishment, I have to ask: what's so bad about "Lost"? (I assume the reference is to the tv show, about a group of airline passengers crash-landed and stranded on an island in the South Pacific.) I don't watch television, but it so happens that about a month ago I discovered that my girlfriend had been given the entire first season, and so, being caught in bad weather, I decided to watch all 24 40-odd minute episodes over a long weekend. Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit it, but I found it quite entertaining, and can't remember what about it was particularly anti-Christian, or even objectionable by Christians. There was an interracial romance between an Iraqi and a young blonde girl that serious conservatives (whether religious or not) would find objectionable, but otherwise the show seems very apolitical (except for a distasteful, Southern-seeming character stating that he'd never voted for a Democrat), and morally quite anodyne. Perhaps Dr. Fleming merely mentioned "Lost" as an example of successful popular culture?
At the risk of being a nitpicker, focusing on the least important aspect of this truly enlightening exploration of the Founders and religious establishment, I have to ask: what's so bad about "Lost"? (I assume the reference is to the tv show, about a group of airline passengers crash-landed and stranded on an island in the South Pacific.) I don't watch television, but it so happens that about a month ago I discovered that my girlfriend had been given the entire first season, and so, being caught in bad weather, I decided to watch all 24 40-odd minute episodes over a long weekend. Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit it, but I found it quite entertaining, and can't remember what about it was particularly anti-Christian, or even objectionable by Christians. There was an interracial romance between an Iraqi and a young blonde girl that serious conservatives (whether religious or not) would find objectionable, but otherwise the show seems very apolitical (except for a distasteful, Southern-seeming character stating that he'd never voted for a Democrat), and morally quite anodyne. Perhaps Dr. Fleming merely mentioned "Lost" as an example of successful popular culture?
John C. Calhoun
Regarding the degeneracy of the Roman Empire, I'm in agreement with Dr. Fleming that empires are always the hardest on the native population. While it the empire might have been beneficial for certain Celts or Asiatics, it arguably was not so for the native Italic peoples. While Petronius cannot be read to summarize the entire empire, his portrayal of Trimalchio is indicative of a trend in the empire. Trimalchio, an Asiatic ex-slave, became one of the richest men in Italy. Semi-literate and barely knowledgeable of Roman traditions, he probably would have infuriated the remaining well-bred Italic peoples, especially when he would have been in a position of power over them. Granted, Trimalchio is a fictional character, but for this stereotype to be successful it must have been grounded in some truth. I've always found it interesting that of the great literary works poduced in the empire, many of them can be generally characterized as "anti-empire." Starting with Vergil's Aeneid and his subtle criticisms of Augustus, to the more severe criticisms of Tacitus (whom, regarding TJF's article, Jefferson considered one of his favorite historians), Petronius and Juvenal, one finds an uneasiness about the "new Romans." While the degeneracy described by these writers was probably overstated and possibly limited to the ruling class, it has always left me with the feeling that I wouldn't have wanted to be an Italian during the empire. But a Celt living in Gaul? Possibly, which goes back to TJF's point (in a previous thread) that empires are always the hardest on the native population.
A brief response on New Year's Day. My reference to the nothing good of the 20th century was in the context of discussing moral and social change and had nothing whatsoever to do with technology. Of the bad innovations, one need only point to the changes in poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting and music; the practices of marriage and child-rearing, education, and manners. In a laugh-riot column in the WSJ, Jimmy Wales--the impresario of disinformation and bad manners--complained that rudeness on the internet was hurting his revolutionary breakthrough (Wikipedia) that has made the world so much better informed/ Tom Bethell points out the obvious, in a Spectator column, that Wikipedia is a safe-harbor for political cranks and ideological liars. People who rely on the Internet for their erudition are like people who think they are Olympic sprinters because they own a motorcycle.
As for technology, it is in principle neutral and thus capable of being put to uses good or evil according to the character and intention of the user. Unfortunately, most prime users of the past two centuries have been weak or evil. By prime users, I mean our masters--powerful political leaders, industrialists, publishers, etc. If we compare the good effects of medicine--my remotely distant kinsman (supposedly) Alexander's discovery of penicillin, the break-throughs in opthalmic surgery that made it possible for me to see and have something like a normal life, etc.--with the machine guns, poison gas, tanks, bombing planes, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc., we would have to say the Devil has it. And, if we through in all the manufacturing technology that panders to greed, laziness, and hedonism, the contest is not even close.
Yes, I am content to use my new IPhone and MacBook Air, which make it possible for me to travel (by air) to places I would rather be than Illinois, but the same sorts of technology--TV, Interstate highways, a global marketplace that encourages mobility--have made Rockford intolerable. It is true, as I remarked above, that technology is neither good or bad in itself, but it has contributed to the weakness and degeneracy of our age.
As to "Lost, "de gustibus non disputandum est, I suppose. At the strong urging of a Christian friend, I watched several episodes of Lost, hoping to find it an exception to the general rule that TV gets worse by the decade. At first the concept seemed promising, but as it progressed it was just one more confused commercial strip tease, promising more than it ever delivered. (Perhaps I only watched several weak episodes. I think I began at the beginning of Season 2). I threw it in as the only recent TV show I have knowledge of, a year and a half ago when I was writing the piece. I have nothing against light commercial entertainment. Once, stranded and impoverished in San Francisco, I spent one of my last dollars at the Powell Street Theater, where I watched A Night at the Opera. Yes, I know, much of the Marx Brothers humor is directed against my people, but it is still good fun in an Aristophanic vein. I don't think George Kaufman, to take one of their best writers, had it in particularly for the American main stream, though I am willing to be instructed by those who know better. I can still watch, on my DVD player, old TV shows as well as old films, though it is really amazing how few good pop films and novels there are. For every "Out of the Past" or "Jamaica Inn" or "Maltese Falcon," there are hundreds of pieces of mind-numbing trash. I tried, a few nights ago, to watch a 1971 Michael Caine film, but the stupidity of the 60's was oozing from every frame. So it is back to reading Wodehouse and Grossmith, and Martin Greene's memoirs I have resumed reading forty years after my father lost the copy I gave him for Christmas, and watching what will probably turn out to be a bad western (Dakota) and a strange Kurosawa movie about a man who fears nuclear terror.
MAR's comment is valuable. Petronius was, however, a satirist, and it is not always possible to distinguish between the valid points they make and and their mere speaking for effect. We can balance their acerbic descriptions by looking at the letters of the younger Pliny--a good Italian, like his uncle--as Juvenal and Lucan can be balanced by Statius. In the case of marriage and marital affection and love of one's children, Richard Saller has done studies of wills and inscriptions that show very clearly that spouses were expected to love each other and said they did and that parents doted upon their children. I think a good parallel might be Victorian England, where there were plenty of opportunities for people like Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde and their friends, but whose morals were probably better summed up by Trollope and Gilbert and by a book written by the man who introduced Gilbert's patter songs at the D'Oyly Carte--George Grossmith. Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, is a brilliantly understated account of middle-class life in the 1880's. Some readers to this day do not find it at all amusing, but it has remained in print and for a potboiler, that is something.
Here is my general point: It was possible for Romans of the first century AD to lead decent lives and it was also possible for 19th century Europeans and 21st century Americans. There are still decent poets and novelists and essayists, though I cannot say I think much of contemporary painting and music. I tried to put this into a poem written for a friend's birthday 35 years ago. All I can remember are the concluding lines:
We’ll celebrate birthdays and pulling the cork
We’ll open up the wine and laugh
And talk about Boethius
Biding his time among suspicious Goths.
Regarding satire, I know that some scholars like W.S. Anderson have emphasized the "persona" of satire, arguing that the authors of satire necessarily do not believe their satirical creations and that these creations may not in any way correspond to reality, but I've always found this pill hard to swallow. I think that these persona-theorists don't want to believe that satirists just might have found it funny to mock foreigners, pathici, etc., and so probably did their audiences. For satire to be successful, the stereotypes must have corresponded to some reality or they wouldn't have been amusing. As Horace says at the beginning of the Art of Poetry, poets are limited by reality. If one just randomly mixes things up (like a painter joining a human head, horse and feathers), the result is ridiculous. Likewise, in my opinion, for satire to work, it must be grounded in the real world. Thus, I suspect there were Trimalchios running around Rome.
But, that said, you're right. There are other authors to balance this view.
"Conservative evangelicals are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers were all pious Christians, but..."
I'm to the point where, if a 'conservative evangelical' says something, I assume it's either a lie or at best an over-simplification. I always thought that if America were a Christian nation, the word 'Jesus' would appear in the Constitution.
Jack @ 26
You seem to assume that all that we are as Americans, whether or not we are a "Christian nation" or even a "nation," is defined by the Constitution. Americans in the unique idioms of the thirteen colonies, states or republics existed in those unique idioms of Western/British customs and traditions long before they ratified a document which we refer to as the Constitution. How can the creature - the Constitution - define the Creators - the states, meaning the people of each state with their unique sets of customs and traditions?
The Constitution founded neither a nation nor a Christian nation. It simply defined the relationship of the states that joined the compact and delegated and enumerated powers which the states allowed to the general government which was created by that instrument through the authority of the states, i.e. the respective peoples thereof.
Socially, America was an expression of Western, particularly British, customs and traditions in a new idiom. Those customs and traditions were informed by and infused with Christian virtues and Christian institution over nearly two millennia.
America, an idiom of Western/British customs and traditions, therefore reflected the customs and traditions infused into our societies even before Christianity. The Constitution to which you refer also does not mention Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero or Virgil. So, based on your argument, there are no Greek or Roman aspects to Western/British/American customs and traditions either.
No one could have said it better, Mr Peters. Perhaps what we need is more understanding of what is implicit in our culture and traditions. Then there would be no need for explicit statements about them in public documents, which perhaps are a sign of their loss.
Mr. Wilson @ 28
Yes, here in Louisiana, we have had a tradition, likely to be found in many states, of pulling to the side of the road, out of respect, when a funeral procession goes by. This past year, a law went into effect mandating that one pull to the side. When I became aware of the law, I conclude that the tradition, as a living and meaningful tradition, was dead. The corpse thereof is now animated by "law."
Mr Peters, I have been told that Florida has had to pass a similar law. I cant fathom people not pulling over for a funeral procession.