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There are widespread fears that the current George
W. Bush administration represents an unusual and ominous convergence of religion
and politics in American life. The new book by one-time Republican party
strategist Kevin Phillips, titled American Theocracy, argues that
the Christian Right includes dangerous groups that deny the separation of church
and state, embrace a foreign policy agenda resting on pre-millennialist ideas
regarding the Rapture, seeks to construct a Christian theocracy at home and
abroad, and has successfully carried these ideas into the White House.[1]
At one level, such fears are clearly exaggerated.
The war in Iraq, for example, may or may not be a good idea. However, the chief
strategists behind it clearly had objectives in mind other than a hastening of
the End Times.
At another level, though, the
contemporary infusion of Christian ideas and energy into American politics is
very real…and nothing new at all. Indeed, one cannot begin to understand the
history and character of the United States without facing the repeated and
fundamental blending of religious enthusiasm and American politics, from the
colonial origins of American nationhood to the present. The supposed grounding
of American political society on the “separation of church and state” is simply
not true. Indeed, even the phrase “cooperation of church and state” does
insufficient justice to the American experience. To appreciate the American
story, it is helpful to compare it to an almost pure case of religious
establishment: namely, The Church of Sweden.
Now I stand before you as a spiritual grandchild of
The Church of Sweden. I was baptized, raised, and confirmed into the Augustana
Evangelical Lutheran Synod, the American offspring of the Swedish national
church. So I confess to a certain fondness toward my subject here.
The Church of Sweden traces its origins to 1527,
when Swedish King Gustav Vasa embraced the Protestant rebellion. In part, this
came in reaction to Papal intrigues that favored Denmark’s efforts to unite all
Scandinavia under a single Danish crown. Also in part, Gustav Vasa saw the
church’s wealth as a fine resource for building a nation. Perhaps there was a
genuine conversion, as well. In any case, King and Parliament declared Sweden a
Lutheran land in 1544. A century and a half later, The Church of Sweden Act
[1686] provided that King and Parliament should jointly regulate this Church, to
the exclusion of all others.
At its best, The Church of
Sweden evolved into a folkkyrka, a people’s church, a pillar of Swedish
nationhood. Sweden’s bishops gained their own political base, claiming one of
the four legislative chambers in the nation’s old Parliament. At its worst, The
Church of Sweden behaved like a classic monopoly, suppressing all potential
rivals, and private conscience.
During the 18th
Century, foreign merchants residing in Sweden—including Catholics and Jews—did
gain the right to worship quietly in their own manner; and the late 19th
Century saw a degree of toleration extended to the so-called “free churches,” or
dissenting Protestant groups. All the same, as late as 1999, The Church of
Sweden was governed by the 1000 paragraph Church Law established by Parliament;
all new Swedish babies automatically became members of the church if at least
one parent was a member; parishes could levy a church tax of about 1 percent on
income; and Parish Councils were elected along political lines.[2]
Financially, these arrangements left the Church of
Sweden at the millennium’s end as perhaps the wealthiest religious body on
earth. Spiritually, The Church of Sweden was nearly dead. While 88 percent of
the population were formally members of the Church, a mere 2 percent were
regular worshippers. Moreover, politics altered the church. Prior to 1919, The
Church of Sweden reflected the nationalism and conservatism of the old Kingdom,
a politics of the ‘God, King, and Soil’ variety. Since 1931, the Swedish
political order has been dominated by the Social Democratic Labor Party, and the
Church of Sweden has largely been reshaped in its image.[3]
A personal story might help
here. Several decades ago, I conducted interviews with Alva Myrdal, a key
socialist and feminist architect of the contemporary Swedish welfare state. At
the time, she served in the radical cabinet of Olaf Palme, as Minister of
Disarmament and Church Affairs. In the latter capacity, she was the one who
would select new Bishops for the Church of Sweden from a list submitted by the
General Synod. She joked: “Here I am, a lifelong atheist, choosing the new
leaders of the Swedish Church.” For good reasons, most modern Swedes came to
view their people’s church as merely another branch of government.
In the year 2000, the Church of Sweden was formally
disestablished. Church leaders hope for a spiritual renewal. For now, though,
the parishes of The Church of Sweden stand mostly as sentimental relics, museums
of past faith.[4]
The American story is less unitary, moving more by
fits and starts. During the early colonial years, two broad themes emerged. On
the one hand, the Puritan settlement in Massachusetts sought to be as “a city on
a hill,” an ideal Christian commonwealth freed from the corruptions of the Old
World. All the same, most colonial American governments opted for some version
of an established church. Ten of the thirteen colonies at some point gave
privileged status and financial support to a single church: in New York, New
Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, the favored
body was The Church of England; in Massachusetts (including Maine), New
Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut, the Congregationalist church prevailed.
At the same time, though, the tiny colony of Rhode
Island experimented with a radical form of separatism. The colony’s founder,
Roger Williams, had been expelled from Massachusetts for his religious
troublemaking; above all, his disruptive quest for the truly pure church. As
Garry Wills has commented:
Williams
always had trouble finding people pure enough to pray with—his enemies could
never make out whether that meant he prayed only with his wife or not even with
her. They were certain it precluded him from grace before meals except when he
dined alone.[5]
His colony attracted a
rag-tag body of religion eccentrics, including the mystic Anne Hutchinson and
the then rowdy Quakers. Orthodox Puritans labelled Rhode Island the “sewer of
New England.” All the same, Williams’ fastidious regard for religious purity
led him to conclude that mere fallen men could never rule over the divine
church. Emerging as a radical Augustinian, Williams demanded a complete
separation of state and church, in order to protect the true church.[6]
Not coincidentally, the earliest synagogues in America appeared in Rhode
Island.
In the mid-Eighteenth
century, these rival American visions of religion and society rolled into an
event called The Great Awakening. As historian William McLoughlin explains, the
American “Revolution can be described as the political revitalization of
a people whose religious regeneration began in the Great Awakening.”[7]
Starting about 1735, a new wave of evangelists—exemplified by Jonathan
Edwards—spread through the colonies. Edward’s most famous sermon, “Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God,” condemned the colonists for having fallen away from
the faith of their fathers, into greed and quarreling. Tens of thousands of the
American colonials did fall on their knees, confess their sins, and beg for
forgiveness.
These “New Light
enthusiasts,” as they came to be called, were condemned by orthodox religious
authorities as extremists driven by unbridled emotions. And in truth, they
did pose dangers to the prevailing order. Their pietism translated into
rebellion: hundreds of congregations split after bitter quarrels over the ‘New
Lights’; many “enthusiasts” were jailed or saw their property seized by colonies
with established churches. ‘New Light’ preaching crossed denominational
bonds and encouraged voluntary—rather than inherited—loyalties. ‘New
Light’ post-millennial optimism also led to the conclusion that God meant to
convert all the people of America and to engage them in preparation for Christ’s
return. The New Jerusalem could come through the work of man, a great task
that would begin in America. Disobedience to worldly tyrants was obedience
to God. With only slight twists, all of these religious themes could be—and
were—transformed into political imperatives. A poem by Philip Freneau, written
in 1771, ably captures this bond of religious enthusiasm to political action.
Entitled “The Rising Glory of America,” it reads:
Here
independent power shall hold her sway,
And
public virtue warm the patriot breast:
No
traces shall remain of tyranny,
And
laws, a pattern to the world beside,
Be here
enacted first….
A New
Jerusalem, sent down from heaven,
Shall
grace our happy earth—perhaps this land,
Whose
ample breast shall then receive, tho’ late,
Myriads
of saints, with their immortal king,
To live
and reign on earth a thousand years,
Thence
call’d Millennium….[8]
When the American victors
crafted a Constitution for their new Republic, the issue of church and state
formally arose. Article Six prohibited religious tests “as a qualification to
any office or public trust under the United States.” And the First Amendment in
the Bill of Rights declared that “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Animating these
“establishment” and “free exercise” clauses were beliefs that religious activity
was an inalienable but fragile right requiring special protection; that any
authority exercised over religion should be a state, rather than a federal,
matter; and that the federal Congress was a potential threat to religious
liberty and to existing established churches in the states.[9]
At the fundamental level, these clauses meant that there could be no preference
for any religious sect by the new federal government.[10]
More broadly, these clauses
reflected fresh developments in American society. The Revolutionary Army had
included a large number of clergymen, who developed a pronounced
inter-denominational unity.[11]
This grew into an informal American assumption of denominationalism, which
repudiated—at least at the legal level—claims that “we alone are the true
church,” which allowed broad use of the Christian label, and which laid the
groundwork for cross-denominational cooperation on practical and moral matters.
American churches would also rely increasingly on the voluntary support of a
committed laity. Hierarchies gave way to democratic governance; religious
allegiance grew more competitive. These changes largely explain the steady
dis-establishment of churches in the states: South Carolina in 1780;
Connecticut in 1818; Maine in 1820; and finally Massachusetts in 1833.[12]
But this did not mean
a separation of religion and state. Indeed, just as the young American Republic
settled into a new Century, another outburst of religious enthusiasm shook—and
profoundly transformed—the nation. Called The Second Great Awakening, it began
in New England. In recent years, church membership had floundered. Alcohol
abuse grew widespread. Sexual morals loosened; by 1800, over a third of
American brides arrived at the altar already pregnant.[13]
The revival began with
reported “heavenly sprinklings” of the spirit in Connecticut and New Hampshire
in 1797. The same year, students at Yale University formed a secret “Moral
Society,” soon turning that school into “a little temple; prayer and praise seem
to be the delight of the greater part of the students.” A new generation of
evangelists spread from Yale across the land: Nathaniel William Taylor, Bennet
Tyler, Asahel Nettleton, and Lyman Beecher. Church membership soared by 300
percent; particularly among the young. Missionary societies formed to convert
the Indians, to send ministers to heathen Asia and Africa, and to witness to the
frontiersmen. Out on that frontier, great camp meetings convened where
“displays of divine grace” transformed the cultural landscape. Dozens of new
Christian denominations took form. At the more innovative level, the Second
Great Awakening also gave birth to the Latter-day Saints (or Mormons) and the
Seventh-Day Adventists, movements that would grow into world religions.
This spiritual episode
sparked moral revival, as well. The Temperance movement took form; within a
century it would ban alcoholic beverages nationwide. In a stunning turn,
pre-marital pregnancy fell sharply: from 35 percent of new brides in 1800 to
only 10 percent by 1850. Most importantly, the anti-slavery movement was
nurtured in the bosom of the Second Great Awakening. Lyman Beecher, “baptized
into the revival spirit” in 1797, headed the family and the campaign that would
finally crush The Slave Power in 1865.[14]
This Nineteenth Century also
witnessed a budding cooperation between church and state. While established
churches disappeared among the states, the Second Great Awakening actually gave
the Christian churches enhanced political influence. In an important 1817 court
case, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not arbitrarily seized the
property of churches or church-related institutions. In the words of the Jesuit
analyst John A. Hardon, this decision established “the principle that most
Americans are citizens of the two societies, Church and State, and that
consequently they have rights and privileges which no political power may take
from them.”[15]
The “common school” movement of the 1830’s, which spread rapidly throughout the
country, actually rested on a generic Protestant Christianity, complete with
prayer, Bible readings, and instruction in Christian morality.
For the next 130 years, most
court decisions and Congressional actions reinforced a model of cooperation.
Some examples:
• In 1892, the
U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal immigration law that prohibited an
Episcopalian church from hiring a minister from abroad. The Court explained
“that we are a Christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply
engrafted upon Christianity.”[16]
• In 1923, the
Supreme Court ruled that a parent had a right to educate his child in a
parochial church school, an extension of rights “to marry, establish a home and
bring up children [and] to worship God according to the dictates of his own
conscience.”[17]
Three years later, in the case Pierce v. Society of Sisters,
the same Court overturned new Oregon law that required all children to attend
state schools. It declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the
state” and that parents have the liberty “to direct the upbringing and education
of children under their control.”[18]
• Court decisions
during the early-20th Century allowed for free transportation and the
distribution of state textbooks to children in church schools.[19]
• Military
chaplains have existed since the Revolutionary War; their status was fully
regularized in 1937. War Department regulations instructed chaplains to
“promote morality, religion, and good order.” In 1942, the Congress
appropriated funds to build chapels on military posts throughout the country,
for worship by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
• Since their
origin, both houses of the U.S. Congress have had chaplains as well, who open
each daily legislative session with prayer.
• In times of
crisis, American Presidents and—on occasions—Congress, too, have formally called
for national days of prayer. As far back as 1789, George Washington instituted
a day of Thanksgiving, so that Americans might “acknowledge the providence of
Almighty God, to obey his will,…and humbly to implore His protection and
favor.” A Congressional Resolution of 1941 fixed this day as the fourth
Thursday of each November.
To this list we might add:
the tax deductibility of gifts to religious entities; the legal recognition of
religious conscientious objectors to war; the exemption of seminarians and
clergymen from the military draft; a series of generous tax benefits for the
clergy; and legal protection of priests relative to the confessional. All such
forms of cooperation are the fruit, more or less, of the pervasive religiosity
that infused American life during the 19th Century.
In similar ways, subsequent
religious outbursts have marked American life. In 1906, a small revival among
African-Americans on Azusa Street in Los Angeles exploded into the modern
Pentecostal or charismatic movement: again, dozens of new denominations formed;
revivalists filled with the spirit fanned out across the continent and globe.
Today, exactly one hundred years later, an estimated 500 million persons
worldwide are the spiritual children of that event. Between 1945 and 1965,
Roman Catholics in the United States poured out of ethnic urban ghettos into new
suburban homes, sparking the “marriage boom” and the “baby boom” of that era.
The proportion of Catholic families with four or more children more than
doubled. Meanwhile, a young evangelist, Billy Graham, organized a small revival
in Los Angeles in 1949, which sparked the modern Evangelical movement. Still
another revival in religious enthusiasm and behavior appears to have begun in
the late 1970’s; we still live in its wake. All of these religious episodes, I
need add, had important political consequences: most recently, the faith-based
initiatives in social services launched by the current Bush administration.
Now, as a spiritual
grandchild of The Church of Sweden, I am appalled by this American spectacle:
the excessive emotion; the ill disciplined worship; the promiscuous spread of
new denominations; the chaotic relationship of government to religion; the
theological laxity. However, as an historian—and as an American—I find this
pageant to be endlessly fascinating. Moreover, The Church of Sweden stands
today largely as an empty shell; while the spirit-driven churches of America
enjoy a turbulent growth.
A final question remains? If
cooperation between church and state is the main American story, why do many
talk today about a crisis in American church-state relations?
Part of the problem derives
from a 1947 Supreme Court decision in the case, Everson v.
Board of Education. Appealing to Thomas Jefferson’s interpretation of
the First Amendment as erecting “a wall of separation between church and state,”
the Court ruled here that even sect-neutral support of religion was
unconstitutional. This reading of the First Amendment has since led to bans on
prayers in public schools or at school-sponsored events and to the prohibition
of tax deductions and credits for church school tuition.[20]
Critics of the Everson
decision point to four historical mistakes made by the Court. First, in judging
the intent of the drafters of the First Amendment, the Court relied almost
exclusively on the ideas of Jefferson and James Madison. True, they were key
figures in the drafting of the Constitution and their personal opinions tack
closely, at times, to a strict separtionist view. However, the Court ignored
the hundreds of other voices—and votes—at the Constitutional Convention and in
the state ratifying conventions which clearly offered a much more expansive view
of church-state relations. Second, the Court completely misunderstood why
Catholics had founded their own schools in the 19th Century. They
did not object so much to the secular nature of the state schools, but rather to
their informal Protestant nature. Lack of Bible reading was not the problem in
the state schools of 1880; use of the King James Version was. Third, the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was never meant to limit the free
exercise of religion. And fourth, the Court’s implicit fear of religious
zealotry flew in the face of real American history, which has been largely
defined by a form of religious zealotry.[21]
Also, something new appeared
on the American scene during the 1970’s: a militant secularism designed to drive
religious sensibilities out of the public domain. The logic behind the 1973
Roe v. Wade decision, which overturned the abortion
laws of all fifty states, was of this pedigree. So were a series of regulatory
initiatives launched during the Jimmy Carter Presidency designed to control
church fund raising practices, sharply narrow the definition of church, shut
down many religious schools, and curtail religious tax exemptions.[22]
These clumsy efforts directly contributed to the rise of the contemporary
Religious Right, portending the “culture war” in which Americans are still
engaged.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical
Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
(New York: Viking, 2006).
[2] See: Nicholas George, “Swedish Church and State Looking for Divorce,” Scandinavian Review 82 (Autumn 1994): 19-22.
[3] As an example of this leftist orientation, see: Kenneth Hermele, “A Letter
from Sweden: The Bishops Take the Lead,” Monthly Review: An
Independent Socialist Magazine 45 (Feb. 1944): 30-32.
[4] E. Kenneth Stegeby, “An Analysis of the Impending Disestablishment of the
Church of Sweden,” Brigham Young University Law Review (1999,
#1): 703-67.
[5]
Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1990): 345.
[6]
Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972): 154-55.
[7]
William G. McLoughlin, “‘Enthusiasm for Liberty’: The Great Awakening as the
Key to the Revolution,” in Jack P. Greene and William G. McLoughlin, Preachers and Politics: Two Essays on the Origins of the American Revolution
(Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1977): 73.
[8] Philip Freneau, Poems on Various Subjects (London: Russell
Smith, 1861): 50-51.
[9] Arlin M. Adams and Charles J. Emmerich, A Nation Dedicated to
Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Heritage of the Religion Clauses
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990): 43-47.
[10] Gerard V. Bradley, Church-State Relationships in America (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1987): 19.
[11] McLoughlin, “Enthusiasm for Liberty,” p. 67.
[12] Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 381-83.
[13] Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America,
1640-1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 5 (1975): 553.
[14] Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 415-440.
[15] Fr. John A. Hardon, SJ,
“Cooperation of Church and State in the United States,” at:http://www.therealpresence.org
(5/1/2006).
[16] Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143
U.S. 457-71 (1892).
[17] Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 397 (1923).
[18] Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 45 U.S. 571
(1924).
[19] Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education,
281 U.S. 370 (1930).
[20] Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 15
(1947).
[21] See: Bradley, Church-State Relationships in America, pp. 1-13;
121-46; William K. Lietzau, “Rediscovering the Establishment Clause:
Federalism and the Rollback of Incorporation,” DePaul Law Review
39 (1989): 1191-1234; Mary Ann Glendon and Raul F. Yanes, “Structural Free
Exercise,” Michigan Law Review 90 (Dec. 1991): 477-550;
Michael W. McConnell, “The Origins and Historical Understanding of Free
Exercise of Religion,” Harvard Law Review 103 (1989):
1410-1517; and John Witte, Jr., “The Essential Rights and Liberties of
Religion in the American Constitutional Experiment,” Notre Dame Law
Review 71 (1995): 371-450.
[22] Allan Carlson, “Regulators and Religion: Caesar’s Revenge,” Regulation: AEI Journal on Government and Society (May-June 1979).
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