Church and State A
The debate over the proper or legal relationship between Church and State usually takes place in a very narrow context, e.g., religious pluralism in 21st century America or the "theocracy" of the Estates of the Church. This debate is usually acrimonious because it involves, in the first case, a struggle between atheists and theists and in the second between groups of Christians, each convinced that it holds a monopoly on truth and that other Christians are not only wrong but damnably and devilishly wrong.
Our pagan friends tell us that the fault lies with Christianity itself or, more broadly speaking, with monotheism. Ancient polytheists tolerated all religions except for Christianity, because it made an exclusive claim on truth and on the loyalty of its adherents. Actually, this is not true, and it is useful to pause a moment to correct this error.
Now, generally speaking it seems a reasonable proposition that the more varied the polytheism the less likely it is to persecute heretics, but exceptions abound. The Romans of the late republic and empire gratefully (in most cases) accepted strange gods. In the case of the Greek gods, the Romans made an equation, sometimes valid, between, for example, Zeus and Jupiter. Other equations were misleading. Aphrodite and Ares are not Venus and Mars, Minerva is not Athena. In the case of Egypt and the Middle East, the Romans accepted many of their gods—but, it should always be remembered—in an already Hellenized and thus sanitized form.
The Romans of the republic did not like the cult of Bacchus and we know of an incident where citizens who participated in these rites were condemned to death. Romans also persecuted the Druids both because the Druids fomented rebellion against Rome and because they practiced human sacrifice, but Roman law also restricted the practice of even licit and state-sponsored religions, like the cult of the Magna Mater, whose priests were permitted to roam the streets only on a designated holiday. Since the priests were eunuchs, Roman citizens were forbidden to be priests. On the positive side, the cult of the emperors was more or less mandatory.
The Greeks, because of their political fragmentation, were a good deal more open-minded, but the Athenians spent the allies' tribute on the cult of Athena and, if we believe the story, put Aeschylus on trial on the charge that he had revealed the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries in a play. The poet defended himself by proving he was not an initiate. And we have the certain story that young Athenians who parodied the Mysteries and mutilated herms (busts of Hermes found on the streets) were put on trial for their lives. Most famously, there was the trial of Socrates. Doubtless it was politically motivated, but two of the charges had to do with religion: atheism and introducing new gods. (Yes, as Socrates pointed out, these charges are self-contradictory, but understandable since Socrates' "gods" were quite unlike anything the Greeks had worshipped.) They did accept foreign gods, though they were perhaps less pervasive than the alien deities at Rome.
If we were to turn to Egypt or Babylon, we would find a similar pattern of restricted tolerance: a plurality of gods, a willingness to incorporate alien gods into the local pantheon, and, especially in times of stress, a willingness to restrict or persecute strange cults.
To understand this and to apply more general conclusions to our own circumstances, we have to know what we mean by religion (and by state). We think, often, of religion as an individual thing or private belief and speak of faith and religion as if they were the same thing. But ancient religion was less a matter of believing—though there was often strong belief—than of public practice. When the Greeks say they "believe the gods" (nomizein tous theous), what they meant was that they did what other good citizens did on the feast days of the different gods, particularly the days on which they propitiated or helped the god(s) who preserved the city. It is no accident that Athena, who as Athena Polias preserves and defends the city, is the deity to which there were probably the most temples. To refuse to take part in the Pathenaic festival was to betray the city.
But there were many other cults with social significance. Some involved honor paid to dead relatives or opening the new wine; others brought the city together in the liturgical dramas we call tragedies. It is not that Greeks did not develop personal convictions about the gods. Philosophers criticized the Homeric depictions as crude and blasphemous, while others, like Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato might rightly be called theologians, but, for most Greeks down to and after the Roman conquest, it was the gods of the city who mattered most, and even a skeptic or atheist like Epicurus told his disciples to go through the motions if only to avoid trouble.
If we had nothing but this topic to consider, we might do an anthropological survey of African and New World religions, but we should reach the same conclusion. That religion has less to do with private belief than public, collective worship that is partly aimed at public safety. Even the word religion tells us this. For the Romans, religio was a binding duty to stay right with divine powers, whose will and approval had to be sought for all important enterprises. This entailed the practice of augury and divination of various kinds and then the carrying out of the appropriate sacrifices. I forget how many hundreds of oxen Aemilius Paulus had to sacrifice before receiving divine approval to attack at Pydna. The counter-example, is the Claudius Pulcher who, when the sacred chickens would not fly before a naval battle, hurled their cage into the sea, saying, "If they won't fly then let them swim." The Carthaginians won.
We can continue this discussion with Christian examples. [To be continued]
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I thought he said "if they won't eat, let them drink" (according to my copy of Suetonius). I also like Suetonius story about Pulcher's sister, who, being stuck in her litter on the crowded streets of Rome, announced that she wished her brother were alive again to lose another naval battle and thus reduce the Roman population.
Thanks for the correction. I have told this story in lectures so often that I have taken the liberty of improving it. Yes, what a family it was. Let's not forget Claudius the Triumvir and the rape of Verginia, or Clodia--the shewolf of the Palatine--and her brother who incited a mob to burn down Cicero's house and, earlier in his career, had incited a mutiny against his brother-in-law Lucullus. Then there are the imperial Claudii, the best of whom was Tiberius. The last place is a tie between Caligula and Nero. They might have sung, with apologies to Hank Jr., "If I get drunk and kill all night long, it's just a family tradition."
If religion is public and concerned with public safety, then the ideas of many moderns are turned on their heads. No more Deism or praying only in private. Indeed such beliefs seems to undermine society itself. On the other hand, early Christianity was profoundly communal from what I understand. Christians didn't just worhip in private, they formed communities.
Perhaps the pagan Roman and Greek ideas of religion influenced later Christian Roman and Byzantine views on the subject. The emperor in Constantinople was the protector of all Christians, even those in the Muslim conquered Middle East, and all Christians supposedly owed loyalty to him, even in the West, though the Pope had other, but very similar, ideas. Since there is still a Pope and no Emperor, the Pope wins by default, except for the schisms that have occured.
When we decorate the graves of our deceased family and ancestors, we are behaving rather more like the ancient Greeks and Romans than like silly moderns. We are, in a sense, communing with the dead as well as the living present at the decoration, much like communion in the Catholic church involves the living, dead, and yet unborn.
I must stop now lest I begin to regret the schisms, and that Belisarius didn't reconquer all the West including Britain, and that Constans II didn't live to reconquer the Middle East and N. Africa. Instanbul never, Constantinople forever!
There are so many contemporary implications to this piece that I am flummoxed as to where to begin. Some random questions and comments:
Can a nation long survive (I mean really long) without a state religion? How about without any religion? Europe has been de-Christianizing itself for centuries, but it was only in the second half of the 20th that majorities became agnostic/secular - and now these very countries are on the brink of both external (Muslim/demographic) and self-annihilation. Quite a rapid decline (though perhaps enjoyable, in a 'dolce vita' way, for those selfishly 'heaping up their own funereal pyres').
Is the proper conservative position here to advocate a national Church? Traditionally, conservatives defended Throne and Altar. I understand that this question is difficult in the American context. But what about for the other nations of the West? I myself believe in the necessity of National (not State) religion. Shouldn't one of our twin Ultimate Goals, the Omega point so to speak of Western conservatism, be the restoration of the public primacy of Christianity (the other, of course, is the similar restoration of whites, the West in its essence consisting of the white race + Christianity)?
Of course, in many multidenominational places (eg Germany), there would be a problem of which specific form of Christianity should hold pride of place. We don't want to reignite the Wars of Religion (though, ironically, were masses of Europeans to become Christian fanatics of whatever sects, at least they would not countenance any Islamic presence in their midst - and thus the devastation of recrudescent internecine Christian conflict might actually save the West). Perhaps the modern ecumenical movement can craft some minimalist Christian public agenda that all could agree to.
What is a "Western religion"? In recent decades I've noticed a growing attempt to include Islam in that category. I believe that the new conservative Christian state can/should tolerate, in their 'private spheres', Jews, Mormons, pagans (that is, the indigenous religions of the white race), and atheists - and that is all. Persons not fitting into those rather tolerant and magnanimous exceptions do not belong on Western territory, and should be expelled.
This is all very interesting, and unfamiliar to me.
Only recently I was wondering whence the peculiarly American obsession with "the separation of Church and State" arose. Because not a single Protestant outside America - whether known to me in person or known to me exclusively through his writings - has ever demanded such a separation as a first principle. On the contrary, to the extent that the non-American Protestants whom I've met have spoken about the matter at all in my hearing, they would like to see their own churches given every possible governmental privilege, thanks very much.
I hope Thomas Fleming is able in future articles to clarify the Christian-era historiography of this subject. Some people have told me that the American preoccupation regarding the topic derives from Locke; but my impression is that even Locke happily endured legally established Protestantism in his native land after 1688. Is the dogma a Jeffersonian distortion of Lockean theory? Would it have occurred in America at all had Jefferson never existed? I'd be keen to find out.
The extreme form of the "separation of church and state" comes neither from Jefferson nor from American Protestantism. It was invented in the 20th century by people with entirely different motives.
Thanks, Professor Wilson. Very well then, who were these people, if they were neither Jefferson himself nor mainline American Protestants? Are we talking about John Dewey? Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Paul Blanshard? (And didn't Jefferson himself speak about "a wall of [church-state] separation" in 1807 or whenever?) My limited knowledge of, and research into, the matter has been insufficient to give me any clues.
Dr. Wilson could answer more comprehensively than I, but I would say that yes, such people are to blame, along with their useful idiots. When America was still overwhelmingly believing and practicing, they co-opted Protestant fears of Romanisation to block, among other things public funding for private schools (then almost entirely Catholic). As soon as they had gained political credibility, they turned on their unsuspecting "friends" and made war on every vestige of Christianity in American civic life, Catholic and Protestant.
For their part, Catholics saw mainline Protestant culture as "other" and were constantly tempted to support candidates who would ruin this culture; this continues to some extent to this day, the faithful too flighty to realise that the degradation of Protestantism over the last century has been to the benefit of the pholosophes and that these latter are using their newfound ammo to chase Catholicism out.
Dr. Fleming's "Establishing Christian America" provides some useful background on that "wall of separation," http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2009/12/29/establishing-christian-america/
R.J. Stove in part answers his own question with his reference to "Protestants ... [who] would like to see their own churches given every possible governmental privilege, thanks very much." The only thing many of the American Protestant sects found more desirable than obtaining privileges for themselves was denying privileges to other sects. The lowest common denominator was disestablishment. Dr. Wilson is of course correct that there were no professed atheists or comprehensive secularists among the Founders, though Madison's correspondence makes clear that he wanted as great a separation of church and state as could be effected -- his zeal in this matter extended to the belief that taxpayer-supported congressional and military chaplainships were improper (see http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions64.html). Jefferson and Madison made a point of refraining from issuing religious proclamations during their administrations, though Madison acceded to the will of Congress to issue Thanksgiving proclamations in 1814 and 1815. Madison laid stress in his first proclamation that thanks should be offered "voluntarily." Jefferson, for his part, thought that the progress of enlightened religious sensibility would lead Americans to become Unitarians, and he was bitterly disappointed to see toward the end of his life that fundamentalism was taking hold instead.
Neither Jefferson nor Protestantism wanted to de-Christianize America. Those using the 20th century judicial edicts to remove Christianity from the public sphere (now largely successful) do want to de-Christianize America. And, of course, they create a false account of American tradition and principles, and they rely always on arbitrary judicial power exercised against the will of the people.
Dr. Wilson is correct that Protestantism did not 'want' to de-Christianize America. But that is irrelevant, in the same sense that it is irrelevant that Robery Mugabe did not mean to turn Rhodesia, a rich nation, into one of the worst hellholes on the continent of endless hellholes. What matters are two things: what happened and the telos, the inherent end, of any idea or culture. In ways that usually bepeak of stumbling toward the awful truth, many people are beginning to sense that rather than being the provider of freedom and liberty, the culture of Protestant England and its offshoots is a culture born rotting. We are nearing the telos of that culture.
So, if we could could turn back the clock to the 18th century English country squire and his VA and SC counterparts, we could not avoid for our descendants 250 years on the horrors we see mushrooming arounds us, because those horrors are the decay of the natural lifespan of the ideas and the culture. What we see and fear is merely us reaching the telos of the very culture that Dr. Wilson lauds, which is but a part of the larger culure that features the New England Puritans Dr. Wilson rightly despises.
It is important to distinguish between "disestablishement" and "dechristianization." The latter logically results in the former, but the former can be followed up or even accompanied by a surge in a different denomination. All the same, it is hard to deny that the first Unitarians at least were biological descendants of Protestants, and in many respects spiritual descendants of those same Protestants. They deeply perverted the tradition they inherited, but I doubt Dr. Wilson will contest me if I submit the sort of hardline Calvinism pushed by the Puritans was already deeply perverse in its own right. At least in the North, the trend in the original 18th-century-derived stock has been straight-line dechristianisation since well before the War of Independence. Revivals have been the result of immigration from other regions or from other parts of the world or else large-scale conversion to the immigrant churches.
There is no need to cite examples of the deformed planet on which the aforementioned WASPs dwell; a cursory glance will do just fine. And yes, ever since the "opening" of "dialogue" with "other denominations" after the Second Vatican Council, there has been no shortage of examples on the "Catholic" side.
The religious history of England and North America has to be seen in the context of the "Low Church" versus "High Church" tension in the established Church of England--a bizarre spectrum from Calvinism to Catholicism. (In the opinion of this bachelor sociologist, it also cannot be understood without accepting that Calvinism, if taken to its logical end, will lead to an amoral antinomianism and ultimately nihilism. For those who protest that the first rabid atheists came from Catholic France, look up "Baianism," "Jansenism" and "Gallicanism" and cf. especially the Catholic Encyclopedia and if possible Joseph de Maistre's De l'Église Gallicane dans son rapport avec le Saint-Siège.)
Now, was there a Christian American tradition at some more recent point, say, in the South, even? The chief Christian virtue of Southern Protestants was that they were biologically and spiritually descendants of a strain of English and Scottish Protestants less thoroughly imbibed in their mentality (if not in their catechism) with Calvinism than their Northern Puritan counterparts. Regrettably--and we have discussed this before on these pages--the trend in the South the last five or so decades has been toward a more hard-line fundamentalism. A couple of nominal Neoconservatives observed the religious landscape of the United States a few years back and remarked that "the more Evangelical the South becomes, the less Southern it becomes."
Mr. Moses make many good points, especially the last one.I don't think it is quite correct to equate the 18th century deism of Jefferson (and other founders, Northern and Southern), with the Unitarianism that was a direct spawn of New England Calvinism. The latter was very much mixed in with German philosophy and aggressive social "reform." The former was a product of loose Episcopalianism. Samuel Gilman came to Charleston from New England as a Unitarian minister. He was politely received by the Charleston clergy of all denominations and within a few years he was Trinitarian and a staunchly loyal Southerner, as was his wife Caroline, a talented author. You cannot understand Southern religion, I think, without understanding the horror of the losses in and loss of The War. And also without taking account of Low Church Anglicanism and Methodism, which, as Mr. Moses suggests, were only lightly tainted by Calvinism. It is quite true that the Old Time Southern religion is about dead--- because of an ignorant clergy that has adopted Yankee evangelism. The Southern Protestant clergy of the 19th century would mourn to see what has become of their denominations.
The origional debate over separation of church and state centered on denominational schisms in the protestant churches (north and south) which included issues over church government. Church and state government do have parallel structures. In agreement with Dr. Wilson's point- Jefferson supported a pluralistic Christion polity. He just did not support a state sanctioned Christian church. This was expressed by his worry that the Presbyterians might gain too much power.
The concern that Christian denominations may exert some theocratic influence over our public policy is irrational. If anything the tension between all of the groups is positive in our political system. I suppose this should even include the dechristianisers.
The fact of the Catholic polmicists of the antibellum south seems little appreciated. It wasn't exclusively a protestant culture although they did dominate society.
Many thanks to all - I've already thanked Daniel McCarthy in a private message - for making available information on American religious history that was largely, when not wholly, unknown to me.
Here's a curious cultural phenomenon, which I've mentioned to Mr. McCarthy separately, and which American readers might perhaps find of interest. When I started school in the boondocks of New South Wales during 1967 (we called it an "infants' school" in Australia, though I guess in America it would've been referred to as an "elementary school": anyway, I was a mere five years old), the teachers - it was a government school of course - inquired of my parents what religious instruction class at school they wanted me to attend.
My parents were fairly fire-breathing atheists (my father was widely known for being such) and they made no attempt to pretend to a religious belief they didn't have. So they were told, "OK, we'll put your son in the Church of England class". Anglicanism was the default mode, in Australia, for kids whose families had no religious affiliations.
Now this was fully four years after the Abington versus Schempp ruling against communal school prayer and Bible reading. It just goes to show (a) how fantastically little Australian culture was influenced by American culture in those days, compared with now; (b) how socially powerful Australian Anglicanism was, even with none of the establishmentarian legal privileges that its mother-church in England enjoyed. Of course, even in Australia, this situation couldn't possibly happen in the 21st century. Atheists would scream blue murder about their "rights" being infringed.
@12: Jefferson's deism might well have been more pronounced had he lived in a society a bit more feudal and clerical (c.f. Westphaelian France; one of the hallmarks of the French Enlightenment is, if I remember correctly--my reading on this point is a bit weak--its Anglophilia). There are varying degrees of intellectual spasm and they can be expressed socially or spiritually depending on the contemporary context. Still, the historical and social evidence strongly suggests that the South will meet the same religious fate as the North unless Southerners extrapolate and innoculate themselves against Calvinism.
@14: Amazing story. Another reason it could not happen today is that technology helps the thought police to pound down on the rough edges all the more quickly. All the whim and frankly all the FUN has gone right out of the world.
@10: I think we are missing one important element: the neo-Pagan nostalgia of the Revolutionaries and how this mixes with a perverse Calvinism or overcooked Jansenism (assuming you think there is any difference) to give us atheism. Dr. Fleming??
In this conversation it has been several times alleged that American Protestants have sought special favours from government. I see no evidence for this, and it is a rather unseemly charge to be made by Catholics. What the American Protestant churches have been guilty of is pressuring government for a secular agenda of socialism, "civil rights," immigration, etc. Of course the Catholic hierarchy is equally or even more guilty of this presumptuous sin.
Any Catholic politician can slough off on abortion, but let him dare oppose "civil rights"!! A majority of American Catholics, especially the clergy, are more interested in being good Yankees than in being good Catholics, in my humble observation. In general, American Catholics are abysmally ignorant and misguided about the history of the Church in this country. Historically viewed, before the later 19th century the American Church was manned and ruled by brave English and Louisiana French colonial settlers and the better sort of Irish, all of whom were Southern-oriented and resistant to the bitter hatred they received from Northern Protestants. Not till the later 19th century did the Church become an immigrant Church with a hierarchy, unfortunately, drawn from the shanty Irish.
Of course, I speak as a historian, not a theologian. Another strong element in the earlier American Catholic Church was French refugees from the Africanisation of Haiti.
I am in complete agreement with Dr. Wilson, esp @ 19, despite my being a Catholic. As a general observation, I think religious conservatives are invariably excessively sectarian, at least in the US, and especially in light of the nation-destroying issues we collectively face today, none of which are directly religious. It is always useful to learn historical truth for its own sake, but what does it really matter when the Catholic or Protestant Churches became appendages of modern leftism? Indeed, what do any of the Religious Right's concerns really matter? Most people only care about the desiderata of their own lives - personal safety (crime, immigration, schools, terrorism, national security) and personal finances (the economy, taxes, deficits) being the largest ones. I sense that most Americans, including most conservatives, are tired of the religious agenda, and are hungry for something more forcefully nationalist. I think (and hope) that the days of the Christian Right's excessive influence are waning.
This has been a fruitful discussion, to which I should like to add a few points. While Mr, Jefferson is an important American thinker and statesman, he is a bit of a red herring. Constitutionally or ethnically, it does not matter much what he thought. Someone--was it Mr. Moses?--correctly distinguished between opposition to an Establishment and the theory of separation that is hostile to Christianity per se. To locate Jefferson on this grid, one need only compare him with the nasty atheist Tom Paine, whose attack on the irrationality of Christianity in The Age of Reason gave Jefferson and his friends a good deal of trouble. Paine denied that he had blasphemed, but he was a a liar and hypocrite as well as an atheist and tax-collector. As Prof. Wilson has pointed out in the past, Church establishments could not survive in a state like SC, where there was such diversity of sects. Thus what evolved in most states was a nice Christian veneer over a secular government. Solemn acts of government were conducted with prayers, days of thanksgiving proclaimed, Christian holidays became state holidays. More serious perhaps were the restrictions on office-holders who either had to profess belief in God or even claim to be a Christian.
The opposition to Christianity did not come from the prudent "deists" of Virginia but from people like Franklin and his zanier followers who believed that America had to be liberated from the Old World's adherence to tradition and superstition. Kings and aristocrats, churches and the teaching of the classics would all preserve the Old Adam. The New Adam would be democratic, skeptical, and rational. Dewey did not invest this twaddle: He took it for Gospel truth.
Like many, most affluent and educated men of his day, Jefferson was not a Christian. Even a label like "deist", in speaking of such men, is a distraction. Deism is a thin ideology, hardly any more useful than "agnostic" today. As Frost observed, an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions. In the English-speaking world of the late 18th century, Trinitarian Christian intellectuals are a rare breed. There is Dr. Johnson, and then again, Dr. Johnson. Of Johnson's great contemporaries--Gibbon, Hume, Smith--which was a serious Christian? Even Burke is a questionable case.
Johnson excepted, most men of this time and background believed in a rational universe that could be understood by rational men. Thus morality was a question of living in accordance with rationally derived principles. We find this not only in Locke and Voltaire but almost everywhere. Locke lived in a time when opposition to religion per se would not have been permitted. He probably took it for granted as an historical necessity. The tenor of his thought, however, must lead to individual skepticism, though not necessarily to the destruction of religion.
If Hume is the great exception, he is also the exception that proves the rule, since as much as he valued custom and sentiment, his justification is almost entirely rational. I won't dignify Smith's moral "philosophy" by even taking it up. Jefferson's religion was a gentlemanly mix of religious Christian traditions and Enlightenment. Rather like Muslims, he thought the Scriptures were sublime and inspired but that Jesus' teachings of pure benevolence had been corrupted by superstition. Hence his decision to expurgate the Bible.
For most "deists," religion might be a good thing for most people, as Voltaire believed, but a rational good man need not trouble his head about it. In his sphere, as the magicians believed, man was equal to or superior to "god." In such a world with such a mind, an established church or a system of religious constraints could serve as an impediment to the good man's pursuit of reason, though it might be a good thing for lesser beings. Washington, no original thinker, thought religion a necessary prop to civic virtue and refused to support the opponents of a Virginia plan to pay clergymen with tax money.
A rational person should have seen where this would lead. If ordinary people do in fact need religion, a number of things follow. 1) There is no evidence that in their conduct philosophers generally rise above the general run of humanity, thus if religion is good, like bread and meat, for the farmer it is good for the statesmen; 2) Ordinary people do not accept the notion that their betters are exempt from the rules that bind others, and if religion is not important to Jefferson, it is not important to his overseer or his tailor. 3) If moral conduct is reducible to a set of rational rules, as, for example, Kant argued, then each man has to decide the rules for himself. So along with religion, out goes moral consensus.
Christianity, while it includes ideas, was never a philosophical system or ideology. In the time of the Apostles, a Christian was someone who accepted the proposition that Jesus was both the Messiah and the Son of God and determined to live according to the pattern of brotherhood He had laid down to his disciples. The greatest mistake made by the best Reformers was to lay too much emphasis on correct thinking--orthodoxy. I do not say this led inevitably to the Enlightenment, because there is also a Catholic path to the same Hell--but the dual emphasis on rational theology and on the primacy of the individual's intellectual commitment to a creed goes a long way in the wrong direction.
In a day or two, I am going to put up a little Part B to ask the question: Can a people that turns against its god(s) survive?
Dr. Wilson @ 18 writes:
"A majority of American Catholics, especially the clergy, are more interested in being good Yankees than in being good Catholics, in my humble observation. In general, American Catholics are abysmally ignorant and misguided about the history of the Church in this country."
Yes, these two observations cannot be contested. Witness the Catholic commentators such as George Weigel, William Bennett, Chris Mathews, and others who are just happy to to get paid to say whatever Yankess want said to a national audience such as illegal immigration as an occassion for greater charity, pre-emptive war as a new and developed version of the just war, Church and State relations as a modern, rational developement to superstition, virtue as something that will sell, and the list goes on.
As for Catholic ignorance of history, they are only marginally more aware of the historical field than the rest who make it up as they go along. Nostradamus is almost as popular on the history channel as the Body Guards of Hitler.It is good to have a bias as either a cantankerous Protestant or Catholic, but it is never right to tell lies.
on the question of a state religion, one has to be very careful to make several crucial distinctions, e.g., between state and nation, religion and faith, Christian and non-Christian. There are many nations without a real state and perhaps even more states--e.g. the USA--which are not nations. Beyond that, terms like "conservative" are so relativistic that it hardly makes sense to use them except as shorthand for "what I believe."
State.national churches, like Scotland under Knox, Calvin's Geneva, or the Papal States, are not self-evidently a good idea or conducive to anything much except for a corrupt and abusive clergy. I do not rule out the possibility of a good and wholesome state church, but I do not think they are self-evidently a good thing, either for the nation or the church. It should be obvious to any student of history, that in a state church, it is the state that dominates the church and not the other way around.
I deliberately framed this discussion in broad historical terms so that we could approach narrower questions, e.g. state churches, only once we had decided upon general terms. Neither the Athenians nor the Jews before Saul and David had anything we could recognize as corresponding to the modern state, and yet both put limits, at least hypothetically, on religious practices. The Jews were stricter than the Athenians, but even under the kings, enforcement was slack at best--hence the complaints of the prophets.
It is difficult for us to imagine schools where prayers everyone knew by heart or memory were once recited before the days endeavors, divine themes with which the culture was familiar were often referred to in public symbols,( the cross marking graves in a government cemetary or star of David) and certain symbols with divine references were often displayed publicly without having "state sanctioned" religion. Yet, this has always been and remains today the very texture of most cultures known to man, except of course the last fifty or sixty years of our very own.
I loook forward to Dr. Flemings remarks on this subject because I personally think it is impossible to discuss today, but he has been known to .... where angels fear to .....
"In the English-speaking world of the late 18th century, Trinitarian Christian intellectuals are a rare breed."
In America, I think that there was a revival of orthodoxy, particularly in the South, in the period of say 1800 to 1850 plus it was a time when we were probably less troubled by intellectuals. While there have always been skeptics it seems like there was a period when there was a broad Christian consensus and skeptics were less apt to challenge it. So they kept their skepticism to themselves in the interest of peace and order. Active attempts to maintain orthodoxy often follow in reaction to a public drift away from it. So within New England Puritanism earlier and within Mainline Protestantism during the Fundamentalist Modernist controversy. Whatever the faults of the "religious right" might be, I think they were analogously primarily reactive. Reacting against what they saw as a new secular and anti-Christian encroachment. So while we could do without some of their policies (excessive deference to Israel for example), contrary to peter I do not think our body politic would be better off without this force of reaction.
Please note I said :intellectuals, already an endangered species in the clergy 200 years ago and virtually extinct today. Whatever else might be said about the first half of the 19th century in the US, "orthodoxy"would be the last word to come to mind to describe the Second Great Awakening. If hooting and hollering and agitating for abolition and women's rights is orthodox, then I am happy to be a heretic. Aggravating their heterodoxy and their confusion of religion with social reform is their gross stupidity, which they communicated to subsequent generations of Evangelicals. In my entire life I have only met one truly learned Evangelical, but even he suffered from the kind of fundamentalism that suspends the activities of the mind. I once asked one of his students to prepare a statement on his church's approach to abortion. A week later I got a list of proof-texts, many of them entirely irrelevant to the question.
Southern Calvinists are a great exception to this generalization, and Southern Catholics. Traditionalist Catholics like to speak disdainfully--as they should--of the Americanization of the Church, but everyone but the Orthodox got Americanized, and even with the Orthodox it is only a matter of time before their ex-Protestant converts turn the them into just one more wayward sect. (I warn my friends who are Orthodox priests and bishops not to permit the converts to acquire any authority or influence, but their kindness is so great I don't think they even hear me.)
Red is right about one very important thing, though, and that is that atheism sparks religious enthusiasm and vice versa, but enthusiasm is almost always a bad thing. The Menckens and the Gantrys need each others, and feed each others' lunacy like the Israelis and Palestinians.
"Red is right about one very important thing and that is atheism sparks religious enthusiasm and vice versa, but enthusiasm is almost always a bad thing."
I really believe this is in fact why Americans tolerate such a steady diet of atheists like Christopher Hitchens in public political discussion. His calumniating commentary during the funeral Mass of the late Mother Theresa of India for instance, gives the 700 Club and EWTN something to be indignant about. It is like the staged hysterical shouting matches between Alan Keyes and Alan Dershowitz posing as a "public debate" about freedom?
After reading the following transcript, I said to an old friend over the phone that we needed an Inquisition in the Archdiocese of Boston:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/29/transcript_of_ted_kennedy_funeral_service_98097.html
Dr. Wilson, there is not a devout and semi-literate Roman Catholic in the world who likes what is happening in the Church nowadays. The question is, what are the intellectual and spiritual origins of the theological dimension of our present-day cultural crisis? If supposed Roman Catholics (Leonardo Dona, Michel de Bay, Cornelius Jansenius, François-Marie "Voltaire" Arouet) have contributed there share politically and intellectually, the Catholic Church can easily point to its magisterial and hierarchical repertoire and disavow them. But most of the men I just cited and many of their peers were either in a large measure influenced by Protestantism or else hopeful to "moderate" the Catholic Counter-Reformation in one way or another.
However, major kudos to you for pointing out the problem with the Irish-structured Catholic Church in America. Many otherwise sensible American Catholics tend to romanticise the story of Irish immigration to the U.S., though there seems to have been a serious Jansenist element in the mentality of those people. Hence my snide remark about needing "an Inquisition in the Archdiocese of Boston."
I deliberately framed this discussion in broad historical terms so that we could approach narrower questions, e.g. state churches, only once we had decided upon general terms.
Dr. Fleming, you hinted on this with your discussion of the Israelites and the Athenians, but could you just clarify one more point: is a "state establishment Church" necessary for a realm to have an "official religion"? Say, along Medieval or Byzantine lines? Before the French Revolution, the state was Catholic, but the Church was independent within the kingdom and the clergy enjoyed immunity from secular tribunals (which is scandalous to moderns, but which one would expect in a state supposedly 100 percent Catholic). As well, the Church was responsible for public education, assistance, medical care, et cetera.
It's complicated but "agitating for abolition and women’s rights" was a mixed product of the unorthodox lapsed Puritans who were peddling the Social Gospel in place of The Gospel along with elements of the Second Great Awakening who didn't consciously see themselves as heterodox. The Social Gospel arose after the orthodox had largely lost their battle with the modernists for Puritanism. There is a difference between a disciple of Finney who thinks he has a better grasp on what the Bible teaches, for example, than a person who actively rejects the Trinity.
But I wasn't referring to the Second Great Awakening (which was a mixed bag theologically speaking) specifically, but more that there was a decrease in the open espousal of heterodoxy and a settling in of creedal orthodoxy as we moved away from the heady times of "revolution." There were fewer Paines or Jeffersons to deal with. I read this point made before, I think in one of Weaver's essays.
Red, I fear your amor patriae and basic kindness have led you to making a distinction without much of a difference. Christians who like to move with the times and find their own gospels, whether it is the social gospel, the Mormon gospel, the Campbellite gospel, or--most ludicrously--the pre-millennialist gospel, are all finding a new religion for their own time. The innocent sheep who got sheared by these heresiarchs, I do not blame, but it is too bad there was not some authority to lock up these people who thought themselves something, as Paul likes to say, before they could do do as much harm as they did. They all claimed to be dishing up that old time religion, when in fact it was anything but. If this is what Weaver argued, then it is only one of his many errors e.g., his admiration of Lincoln's rhetoric, his declaration that property is a metaphysical right).
Once the intellectual and spiritual revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment were accomplished, the 19th century could settle into comfortable bourgeois indifference. Like the Christians today who preach the gospel of greed (Mr. Woods) or justify the murder of Arab Christians by the Jewish state (the TV Evangelicals and their flocks), many 19th century Christians found ways of putting the secular cart before the Christian horse. Has anyone over counted the sects, ranging from fairly benign (Campbellite, Finneyite, Moodite) to pernicious (Mormon, Adventist, Jehovie) to out of their blanking mind extraterrestial loonie (Oneida Perfectionists, Graham-cracker faddits, rapping spiritualists, and the thousands of communes in California alone) that America has excreted in the past 200 years. What a country! Here's a simple formula: If it is a social, political, religious, or cultural innovation developed in America, stay strictly away, whether the innovator is Joe Smith, John Dewey, Walt Whitman, or Charles Ives. Ours is a nation of nutballs, each one with the g-d-given right to invent his own religion or verse-form, to sing his own music, to have his own blog.
Yes, Mr. Moses, this is a topic we shall be taking up: the necessity of separate spheres of authority and the importance of religious institutions as cross-cutting relationships that bind together opposing kindreds and communities.
Jefferson--a close reading of his letters indicates that he (and the like-minded) stressed the "wall of separation" largely because they feared the destructive interference of the New England Puritan clergy into politics. (Something that continued in full swing even after the transformation of Puritanism into Unitarianism, when Emerson discovered that the sacraments no longer had any meaning.)
Peter at #21. We can blame the errors of the Religious Right on our old friend the Republican Party. The Religious Right began as a well-meaning reaction against the banishing of Christianity from the public sphere and the officially-approved breakdown of morals. Then it was taken over by Republican operatives and turned into the travesty it now is (with some help from the old New England tradition of fanaticism).
". Like the Christians today who preach the gospel of greed (Mr. Woods)"
You could make that argument about Joel Osteen - a sort of 'Greed' Calvinism - but I believe you are misrepresenting Thomas Woods' position. His position, briefly summarized, is that Catholic Social Teaching is not immune to laws of economics. Do you doubt this? Or do you believe Papal Infallibility extends to economic pronouncements?
It would seem a prerequisite for any sane society that there be enough authority to enforce orthodoxy so as to prevent nutcase groups like those mentioned by Dr Fleming from ever arising, but at the same time not to have an oppressive religious establishment that suppresses intellectual and philosophical pursuits, art, etc., as in fundamentalist Muslim societies.
The lack of such a thing due to the necessity for tolerance which existed in the early republic left an open playing field for the Puritan and later Unitarians and others to lay waste to society and civilisation itself.
Likewise, beacuse it is a directly related concern, while we need intellectual freedom, we need to prevent Voltaires and Marxes from arising, and ideologies from undermining society.
How this should or could be done, I do not know.
Unfamiliar history: the present-day Religious Right's crazed and blasphemous equation of "America" with God is the DIRECT lineal descendant of the 19th century Finneyite abolitionist evangelism, which was opposed at the time by every orthodox Christian and sensible patriot---but came to power with the War to Prevent Southern Independence. (See "Battle Hymn of the Republic.")
As pointed out here, a religious establishment is a useful unifying
element for a society, although it also carries dangers. Since the bold settlers who created British North America were divided into many disciplines, an establishment was not long viable. The next best thing was a broadly accepted and collaborative Protestant orthodoxy. Such was created by the antebellum South and has existed vigourously in the South up until quite recent times---one of the reasons why the South has remained more orthodox in belief and more conservative in life.
CLyde Wilson writes:
"The Religious Right began as a well-meaning reaction against the banishing of Christianity from the public sphere and the officially-approved breakdown of morals. Then it was taken over by Republican operatives and turned into the travesty it now is (with some help from the old New England tradition of fanaticism)."
Yes this is quite true and I predict their next victim will be the Tea Party crowd. It has all the qualities of the Republican Party's favorite prey -- innocent citizens with a memory who still believe in something, American citizens who honestly think "something" can and should be done, and organizers who will say, "Well,this is something," and then package that "something",advertise that "something", and then sell it to the highest bidder --which usually, but not always, is a nest of Republican operatives willing to say or do anything to satisfy their lust for power divorced from the truth. Of course only time will tell but as one grows older, the truth in cliches becomes more clear such as, it really is diifiicult to teach an old dog new tricks. As somebody once mentioned on this blog, I believe it might have been Clyde Wilson, the Republican party should be ignored if not destroyed.
I knew that if I laid a trap for the libertarians, one of them would fall right in. No, Mr. Maxwell, it is not a question of the authority of the Pope or of all the Popes since Peter. It is the teachings of Jesus Christ and the apostles that Tom Woods has rejected and continues to reject. In setting up the infantile philosophy ("praxeology") of a non-believing Austrian Jew above the teachings of Christ and above all the insights to be gained from real philosophers and social theorists--as Woods has done--he puts himself entirely outside any Christian conversation. We shall have more to say about this on a future occasion. The issue is not and has never been a conflict between economics and theology. A man might accept the basic insights of free-market economics from Smith to Mises--as I do-without elevating economic theory above Christian duty. To make it simple enough for a libertarian to understand, let us dispense with economics and deal with something so simple as Newtonian physics. We know that if we jump off a cliff, we shall fall into the river below. Acknowledging this law says nothing about our decision, one way or another, to jump or not jump. If Pancho Villa is after us, we might just take our chances. Or, anticipating the jam we might find ourselves in, we might invent the parachute or helicopter or personal rocket. The laws of nature may be immutable, but so are the other laws of the God who created nature. An economist can sometimes--certainly not always--predict the economic consequences of a decision: If I give half of what I own to the poor, I shall probably have less money--only probably because my reputation for charity might pay off. But the economist cannot tell me whether or not I or a community should give to the poor. Misesians say they accept this distinction, but then they immediately begin to make what sound like moral judgments against charity or restrictions on market activities.
Much can be learned about economics from the great free-market thinkers, and if Tom Woods had got his degree in economics instead of American studies, I might be prepared to listen to his opinions, but a man who has no professional competence in either economics or theology or church history, who sounds off on the Latin mass without gaining a serious competence in Latin--what is there to listen to? If people wish to embrace an anti-Christiana philosophy, let them, but it is a bit much to ask Christians to accept them as brothers when they preach the opposite of brotherhood. Sermon over.
This has been an interesting and worthwhile discussion. I look forward to future essays on this topic.
The last turn of this discussion--the condemnation of the "infantile philosophy" of the Misean libertarians--is to be commended. The church-state controversy is never going to be resolved by what the good guys long ago thought, but by the edicts of the Supreme Court, which historical as opposed to "philosophical" discussion is powerless to affect. I think libertarianism is a greater worry than creeping secularism. The infantile philosophy includes the refication of liberty--or something called "liberty" which I do not recognize, as it looks more like mere permissiveness and, at best, self-actualization without any understanding of flourishing or well-being. Today, though, self-styled conservatives are too ignorant and unreflective to realize that libertarianism is a shell game without a pea.