America's religion - essay 1
Dec. 19th, 2009 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThe heart of the conflict between conservatives and liberals in America is religious. Although some conservatives are not Christian and many liberals retain for various reasons a claim to Christian identity, nonetheless the claim that sets them at each other's throat is simple - simple and tremendous, because it implies a claim on the whole nation, including the opponents. Conservatives say: America was founded as, and remains, a Christian country. Liberals say: America was founded as, and remains, a secular country, whose organization has no organic connection with any kind of religion, and certainly not with Christianity.
Both are wrong - not just wrong, but grossly wrong. And at this point I have to use words that will sound strong, even offensive; I am afraid that some of my friends will in fact be offended. The historical vision of modern American conservatives is distorted almost to the point of hallucination by the instinct to see a highly modern form of religion, all but unknown to the Founders, and, where known, despised, as "old-time religion". If there is one thing that is certain about the Founders, it is that they were not Evangelicals, let alone Evangelicals in the modern meaning of the word. In so far as they knew anything like modern Evangelicalism, they would have called it Revivalism - or simply Enthusiasm or Fanaticism. And in case you had any doubts, these were bad words.
The majority of the Founders were Deists. There were a couple of Catholics, both from the Carroll family of Carrolltown, MD, and a few other trinitarian Christians; but practically all the leaders, and all the more illustrious ones, were Deists of various sorts. Franklin may well have been an atheist - at the very least, he does not seem to have ever had any concern with any world but this - but then Franklin was in every way an exception; the oldest of them all, city born and bred rather than a country gentleman, and a man whose self-made background, while it seems to us prophetic of the American ideal to come, was at odds with the rural idea of the good gentleman farmer citizen that most Americans had taken across the sea from England. No other Founder, to the best of my knowledge, can be described as an atheist.
Therefore, if the conservative vision of an America founded by severe or enthusiastic Christians taking the Eucharist weekly and intensely committed to the Creed is hallucinatory, the secularist vision of a double-barred secularist state in which religion has no place is a downright fraud. None of the Founders - probably not even Franklin - would have contemplated such a nonsense for a second. It would not have occurred to them that such a thing as a state without religion could be conceived; let alone a republic. They all with Adams and Washington that a polity such as they were founding could only be upheld by a people shot through by morality taught by religion. Their Deist, that is Unitarian, beliefs, can be seen in this as in many other things: that they tended to regard any religion as improving that individual sense of responsibility on which they believed their republican creation to rest. So, if anything, they were favourable to any religious activity. That was the main reason why they allowed the hated Catholics and the despised Jews to set up in public and with no control. (I read somewhere, though I cannot find confirmation, that Pope Pius VI offered the fledgling American government a right of veto over the appointment of Catholic bishops, and that the Founders, true to their principles, turned it down.) Anti-Catholic prejudice was fundamental to the colonial experience, and, as events would show, would long outlive the Founding generation. Some might say it has never gone away. But the Founders set Catholics free, as they set Jews and Baptists and other ignored, despised or persecuted minorities, because they had a basically positive opinion of all religious bodies. Jefferson might bark at "priestcraft", Franklin regard the whole matter as something beneath a reasonable person, but virtually every one of them saw organized religion as a basically positive thing and good for a republican state; exactly the attitude that modern secularists hated in the likes of George W.Bush, and which they hysterically described as the onset of theocracy. Even Franklin would have laughed at such stupidity.
Another feature of the Founder generation - indeed, one that they handed down to their successors until well into the twentieth century - is a polite habit not to discuss religion in public; which is why the actual Deism of some of them has been sometimes doubted. Jefferson's, of course, was notorious, expressed in terms that (like Franklin's absurd dismissal of Plato) must embarrass even the admirers of that remarkable man. But as for Washington, it seems clear that his strongest and most sincere religious allegiance was to Freemasonry. He went to (Episcopalian) church with his wife, but then so would many husbands whose allegiance is less than profound; he served as a vestryman for a while before the Revolution; but after the Revolution, there is no evidence of his taking Communion, or of showing any faith in Jesus. When it fell to him to inaugurate the institutions and finally the capital of the new nation, he used Masonic ritual. Now Freemasonry is in effect a Deist cult with some bells and whistles on. Most members do not take its religion very seriously, but it is my view that Washington did, and did so the more in the last years of his life. The extraordinary notice that - after having been baptized in the Episcopal church as a baby - he apparently allowed himself to be rebaptized by a group of Baptists in the seventeen-eighties certainly does not show much internal respect for Christianity, which finds re-baptism a horror.
In other words, the Masonic ritual with which many of the United States' institutions were founded was by no stretch of the imagination religiously neutral. It had a definite religious identity, which the Catholic Church had already identified and condemned: Deist, Unitarian, Universalist in the sense that it believed itself able to incorporate and sum up "the best" of all religious ideas, and highly ritualized. The foundational presence of Freemasonry at the origin of the Federation makes once more nonsense of the modern liberal claim that America was created as a secular state with no religious identity. It was created - I mean the United States, the Union, the federal government, what the Constitution speaks of - as a Unitarian Freemason structure.
And that was emphatically not a chance or the results of George Washington's own personal tastes and beliefs. To the contrary, anyone who had visited America in 1790 or so would have concluded that Unitarianism was the inevitable fate of all the Calvinist-originated Protestant Churches of North America at the time, that is, of all the Churches which had been the state churches of most of the New England colonies. By 1816, only one Protestant chapel in Boston was not preaching Unitarianism. Even the Episcopals were within an inch of Unitarianism; Newman reports with astonishment that at the founding meetings of the church, after the Revolution, a Unitarian-influenced motion to reject the Nicene Creed as "divisive" was only rejected with difficulty. These were the dominant churches of the new America, all the dominant churches of the new America. No wonder that the Unitarian, universalist doctrine expressed in Masonic ritual was so central in their founding.
Even the First Amendment - a problematic text in some ways, as we will see - does not contradict this. The Amendment was carefully written to limit the activities of Congress, and Congress alone: "Congress shall make no laws..." In a document that so carefully sets out the prerogatives and limits on the power of each constitutional body, these are highly significant words; and they mean that the Founders did not want to intrude on the practical fact that most federal states had an established church, and that these churches were different and sometimes hostile to each other. In other words, and in spite of Washington's famous letter to the Jews of Newport, America was not born as a paradise of religious freedom. The practice of having separate state churches for separate states within the same realm was not new - Britain had reached a similar compromise at the time of the Union of 1707. More generally, all the surviving republican polities in Europe had found practical toleration to be an inevitable feature of republican rule. The Dutch pretence of excluding Catholics had worn so thin that even in the Calvinist capital, Amsterdam, Catholic churches barely disguised as private houses were easily to be found, and in the southern half of the country, Catholic bishops led their flocks from their own cathedrals. Switzerland had learned to live, however uneasily, with a distinction between Protestant and Catholic cantons, as with German, French and Italian cantons. The Italian republics of Venice and Lucca, though majority Catholic, allowed free exercise to Protestants, and, in the case of Venice, to historical colonies of Armenians, Orthodox Greeks, and Jews. It may have been simply a part of the perceived practicalities of republican government - like the militia called for by the Second Amendment - that the First Amendment rejected the notion of a national established Church.
But there can be no doubt whatever that the Founders, and especially George Mason, the father of the Bill of Rights, meant ultimately much more than this - the mere and inglorious management of religious differences. Mason wanted the Constitution to include a statement of universal rights, of the principles that were from henceforth to underlie all American legislation; and Washington, in spite of his and his followers' doubts about the practicality of any such act of laying down first principles (whose difficulties we see at present in the complex and often damaging results of Britain's recent Human Rights Act), nonetheless ended up giving Mason his way, under the curious compromise of calling it a set of amendments. In spite of its careful language, the First Amendment is therefore part of a set of universal principles, and its underlying meaning cannot be mistaken. The free exercise of all forms of religion is from henceforth a basic principle of national (federal) American legislation, and as such it is bound in the long run - whatever limitations may be placed in its way for the convenience of existing state orders - to override local habits and traditions. Carefully read as I insist it must be, the First Amendment amounts to this: that no citizen who is otherwise a decent and useful member of society shall be disbarred by his (later her) religious beliefs from exercising any office, doing any duty, or achieving any position, he might otherwise achieve. In other words, it is another statement of that universal Deist benevolence towards any kind of religion, which I have already described as a basic feature of the Founding generation. (And of that one in particular; as we will see, later generations will not be nearly as sympathetic to certain specific religions. but by then their actions were restricted by the laws inherited from the Founders.) It certainly does not amount, as the name of a notorious group has it, to a claim of "freedom from religion," even if such a thing were possible (which it is not).
America, then, was neither founded as a properly Christian country, nor as a secular one. In the Deist/Unitarian world of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Mason and the rest, atheism was barely an issue. Unlike contemporary France, and with the possible exception of Franklin, America had no prominent atheists. (It is not very surprising that when the French revolution came, the attitude of George Washington and many of his contemporaries was far from friendly.) And that is part of the issue. The United States began their history with two leading religious groupings. Northern states had as their official churches a complex of bodies of Calvinist origin - Congregationals, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed - that distinguished themselves from each other on the basis of their governing structure rather than of theology, and that had, by the time of Independence, clearly moved towards Unitarianism. The south was dominated by an Anglican successor body, the Episcopal Protestant Church; but it is interesting that its name, by describing it - like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists - in terms of governance rather than doctrine, whose name shows that it also understood itself as part that same Calvinist succession, ignoring the serious English Anglican issues with Calvinism. The Anglican connection may, however, have kept the Episcopals of 1783 - though not their successors - from Unitarianism; I mentioned the motion to exclude the Nicene Creed from the formularies of the new Episcopal bodies, because its trinitarian doctrines were "divisive" (o blessed shelter-word of every heretic!), and how it was narrowly beaten. Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopal, are terms that refer to who in the church has authority, not to founding figures or to doctrine or even (as with the Methodists) to practice. The implication is that, other than in governance, such churches have more in common than not.
But having said this, the issue we started from is certainly not resolved. Even assuming that both conservatives and liberals are wrong about the basics of American democracy and its connection with religion, how should these facts affect our contemporary behaviour? In 1783, the post-Calvinist bodies, more or less dominated by Unitarianism, tower over the American landscape. A few other Protestant churches are dotted about the landscape, identified with ethnic groupings (Lutherans, Moravians) or with revivalism (Methodists; it may surprise modern Americans, who identify the Methodists with the respectable "mainline" group of Protestant churches, that as late as HL Mencken they were still regarded as a revivalist body). In a few corners, barely noticed and barely tolerated, Baptist, Jewish and Catholic groups eke out a precarious existence. Zoom forward two centuries and a bit: the Catholics and the Baptists tower over the landscape, and the Jews, while remaining a small and to some extent endangered group, have acquired a cultural influence quite out of keeping with their numbers. The Unitarians - the same group that practically ran New England during and after the Revolution - are reduced to numeric, though not to cultural, insignificance, and the "mainline" Protestant churches are in precipitous decline and appear completely irrelevant and bewildered in the contemporary cultural landscape. How did this happen, and why?
I shall discuss this issue in the next essay in this series.
Both are wrong - not just wrong, but grossly wrong. And at this point I have to use words that will sound strong, even offensive; I am afraid that some of my friends will in fact be offended. The historical vision of modern American conservatives is distorted almost to the point of hallucination by the instinct to see a highly modern form of religion, all but unknown to the Founders, and, where known, despised, as "old-time religion". If there is one thing that is certain about the Founders, it is that they were not Evangelicals, let alone Evangelicals in the modern meaning of the word. In so far as they knew anything like modern Evangelicalism, they would have called it Revivalism - or simply Enthusiasm or Fanaticism. And in case you had any doubts, these were bad words.
The majority of the Founders were Deists. There were a couple of Catholics, both from the Carroll family of Carrolltown, MD, and a few other trinitarian Christians; but practically all the leaders, and all the more illustrious ones, were Deists of various sorts. Franklin may well have been an atheist - at the very least, he does not seem to have ever had any concern with any world but this - but then Franklin was in every way an exception; the oldest of them all, city born and bred rather than a country gentleman, and a man whose self-made background, while it seems to us prophetic of the American ideal to come, was at odds with the rural idea of the good gentleman farmer citizen that most Americans had taken across the sea from England. No other Founder, to the best of my knowledge, can be described as an atheist.
Therefore, if the conservative vision of an America founded by severe or enthusiastic Christians taking the Eucharist weekly and intensely committed to the Creed is hallucinatory, the secularist vision of a double-barred secularist state in which religion has no place is a downright fraud. None of the Founders - probably not even Franklin - would have contemplated such a nonsense for a second. It would not have occurred to them that such a thing as a state without religion could be conceived; let alone a republic. They all with Adams and Washington that a polity such as they were founding could only be upheld by a people shot through by morality taught by religion. Their Deist, that is Unitarian, beliefs, can be seen in this as in many other things: that they tended to regard any religion as improving that individual sense of responsibility on which they believed their republican creation to rest. So, if anything, they were favourable to any religious activity. That was the main reason why they allowed the hated Catholics and the despised Jews to set up in public and with no control. (I read somewhere, though I cannot find confirmation, that Pope Pius VI offered the fledgling American government a right of veto over the appointment of Catholic bishops, and that the Founders, true to their principles, turned it down.) Anti-Catholic prejudice was fundamental to the colonial experience, and, as events would show, would long outlive the Founding generation. Some might say it has never gone away. But the Founders set Catholics free, as they set Jews and Baptists and other ignored, despised or persecuted minorities, because they had a basically positive opinion of all religious bodies. Jefferson might bark at "priestcraft", Franklin regard the whole matter as something beneath a reasonable person, but virtually every one of them saw organized religion as a basically positive thing and good for a republican state; exactly the attitude that modern secularists hated in the likes of George W.Bush, and which they hysterically described as the onset of theocracy. Even Franklin would have laughed at such stupidity.
Another feature of the Founder generation - indeed, one that they handed down to their successors until well into the twentieth century - is a polite habit not to discuss religion in public; which is why the actual Deism of some of them has been sometimes doubted. Jefferson's, of course, was notorious, expressed in terms that (like Franklin's absurd dismissal of Plato) must embarrass even the admirers of that remarkable man. But as for Washington, it seems clear that his strongest and most sincere religious allegiance was to Freemasonry. He went to (Episcopalian) church with his wife, but then so would many husbands whose allegiance is less than profound; he served as a vestryman for a while before the Revolution; but after the Revolution, there is no evidence of his taking Communion, or of showing any faith in Jesus. When it fell to him to inaugurate the institutions and finally the capital of the new nation, he used Masonic ritual. Now Freemasonry is in effect a Deist cult with some bells and whistles on. Most members do not take its religion very seriously, but it is my view that Washington did, and did so the more in the last years of his life. The extraordinary notice that - after having been baptized in the Episcopal church as a baby - he apparently allowed himself to be rebaptized by a group of Baptists in the seventeen-eighties certainly does not show much internal respect for Christianity, which finds re-baptism a horror.
In other words, the Masonic ritual with which many of the United States' institutions were founded was by no stretch of the imagination religiously neutral. It had a definite religious identity, which the Catholic Church had already identified and condemned: Deist, Unitarian, Universalist in the sense that it believed itself able to incorporate and sum up "the best" of all religious ideas, and highly ritualized. The foundational presence of Freemasonry at the origin of the Federation makes once more nonsense of the modern liberal claim that America was created as a secular state with no religious identity. It was created - I mean the United States, the Union, the federal government, what the Constitution speaks of - as a Unitarian Freemason structure.
And that was emphatically not a chance or the results of George Washington's own personal tastes and beliefs. To the contrary, anyone who had visited America in 1790 or so would have concluded that Unitarianism was the inevitable fate of all the Calvinist-originated Protestant Churches of North America at the time, that is, of all the Churches which had been the state churches of most of the New England colonies. By 1816, only one Protestant chapel in Boston was not preaching Unitarianism. Even the Episcopals were within an inch of Unitarianism; Newman reports with astonishment that at the founding meetings of the church, after the Revolution, a Unitarian-influenced motion to reject the Nicene Creed as "divisive" was only rejected with difficulty. These were the dominant churches of the new America, all the dominant churches of the new America. No wonder that the Unitarian, universalist doctrine expressed in Masonic ritual was so central in their founding.
Even the First Amendment - a problematic text in some ways, as we will see - does not contradict this. The Amendment was carefully written to limit the activities of Congress, and Congress alone: "Congress shall make no laws..." In a document that so carefully sets out the prerogatives and limits on the power of each constitutional body, these are highly significant words; and they mean that the Founders did not want to intrude on the practical fact that most federal states had an established church, and that these churches were different and sometimes hostile to each other. In other words, and in spite of Washington's famous letter to the Jews of Newport, America was not born as a paradise of religious freedom. The practice of having separate state churches for separate states within the same realm was not new - Britain had reached a similar compromise at the time of the Union of 1707. More generally, all the surviving republican polities in Europe had found practical toleration to be an inevitable feature of republican rule. The Dutch pretence of excluding Catholics had worn so thin that even in the Calvinist capital, Amsterdam, Catholic churches barely disguised as private houses were easily to be found, and in the southern half of the country, Catholic bishops led their flocks from their own cathedrals. Switzerland had learned to live, however uneasily, with a distinction between Protestant and Catholic cantons, as with German, French and Italian cantons. The Italian republics of Venice and Lucca, though majority Catholic, allowed free exercise to Protestants, and, in the case of Venice, to historical colonies of Armenians, Orthodox Greeks, and Jews. It may have been simply a part of the perceived practicalities of republican government - like the militia called for by the Second Amendment - that the First Amendment rejected the notion of a national established Church.
But there can be no doubt whatever that the Founders, and especially George Mason, the father of the Bill of Rights, meant ultimately much more than this - the mere and inglorious management of religious differences. Mason wanted the Constitution to include a statement of universal rights, of the principles that were from henceforth to underlie all American legislation; and Washington, in spite of his and his followers' doubts about the practicality of any such act of laying down first principles (whose difficulties we see at present in the complex and often damaging results of Britain's recent Human Rights Act), nonetheless ended up giving Mason his way, under the curious compromise of calling it a set of amendments. In spite of its careful language, the First Amendment is therefore part of a set of universal principles, and its underlying meaning cannot be mistaken. The free exercise of all forms of religion is from henceforth a basic principle of national (federal) American legislation, and as such it is bound in the long run - whatever limitations may be placed in its way for the convenience of existing state orders - to override local habits and traditions. Carefully read as I insist it must be, the First Amendment amounts to this: that no citizen who is otherwise a decent and useful member of society shall be disbarred by his (later her) religious beliefs from exercising any office, doing any duty, or achieving any position, he might otherwise achieve. In other words, it is another statement of that universal Deist benevolence towards any kind of religion, which I have already described as a basic feature of the Founding generation. (And of that one in particular; as we will see, later generations will not be nearly as sympathetic to certain specific religions. but by then their actions were restricted by the laws inherited from the Founders.) It certainly does not amount, as the name of a notorious group has it, to a claim of "freedom from religion," even if such a thing were possible (which it is not).
America, then, was neither founded as a properly Christian country, nor as a secular one. In the Deist/Unitarian world of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Mason and the rest, atheism was barely an issue. Unlike contemporary France, and with the possible exception of Franklin, America had no prominent atheists. (It is not very surprising that when the French revolution came, the attitude of George Washington and many of his contemporaries was far from friendly.) And that is part of the issue. The United States began their history with two leading religious groupings. Northern states had as their official churches a complex of bodies of Calvinist origin - Congregationals, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed - that distinguished themselves from each other on the basis of their governing structure rather than of theology, and that had, by the time of Independence, clearly moved towards Unitarianism. The south was dominated by an Anglican successor body, the Episcopal Protestant Church; but it is interesting that its name, by describing it - like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists - in terms of governance rather than doctrine, whose name shows that it also understood itself as part that same Calvinist succession, ignoring the serious English Anglican issues with Calvinism. The Anglican connection may, however, have kept the Episcopals of 1783 - though not their successors - from Unitarianism; I mentioned the motion to exclude the Nicene Creed from the formularies of the new Episcopal bodies, because its trinitarian doctrines were "divisive" (o blessed shelter-word of every heretic!), and how it was narrowly beaten. Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopal, are terms that refer to who in the church has authority, not to founding figures or to doctrine or even (as with the Methodists) to practice. The implication is that, other than in governance, such churches have more in common than not.
But having said this, the issue we started from is certainly not resolved. Even assuming that both conservatives and liberals are wrong about the basics of American democracy and its connection with religion, how should these facts affect our contemporary behaviour? In 1783, the post-Calvinist bodies, more or less dominated by Unitarianism, tower over the American landscape. A few other Protestant churches are dotted about the landscape, identified with ethnic groupings (Lutherans, Moravians) or with revivalism (Methodists; it may surprise modern Americans, who identify the Methodists with the respectable "mainline" group of Protestant churches, that as late as HL Mencken they were still regarded as a revivalist body). In a few corners, barely noticed and barely tolerated, Baptist, Jewish and Catholic groups eke out a precarious existence. Zoom forward two centuries and a bit: the Catholics and the Baptists tower over the landscape, and the Jews, while remaining a small and to some extent endangered group, have acquired a cultural influence quite out of keeping with their numbers. The Unitarians - the same group that practically ran New England during and after the Revolution - are reduced to numeric, though not to cultural, insignificance, and the "mainline" Protestant churches are in precipitous decline and appear completely irrelevant and bewildered in the contemporary cultural landscape. How did this happen, and why?
I shall discuss this issue in the next essay in this series.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 02:30 pm (UTC)FPB, I'm afraid I find this statement to be as much of a distortion as you are accusing political Liberals and Conservatives of. To make a blanket statement which implies that ALL Christians do (and have always) find "re-baptism a horror" simply ignores the entirety of the anabaptist movement, the theology of credobaptism, much of the history of the Reformation, and in this specific case, the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening (which unlike its parent, the Great Awakening in the UK, was a uniquely American experince). That Washington was re-baptized by a group of Baptists is completely in-line with both the revivalism of the time (in which the Baptists played a leading role) and the credobaptist principles of that particular denomination.
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 02:37 pm (UTC)"Well, seven deacons and the pastor got saved,
And forty-seven thousand dollars got raised,
And fifty volunteered for missions in the Congo on the spot.
And even without an Invitation,
There were at least 500 re-dedications
And we ALL got re-baptized whether we needed it or not."
While the church in question in this song is never named, there is certain assumption that they are probably Southern Baptists.
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 03:29 pm (UTC)Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-20 11:41 pm (UTC)Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-21 05:20 pm (UTC)Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-21 05:52 pm (UTC)Mississippi Squirrel Revival
Date: 2009-12-22 01:54 pm (UTC)I'm amused that they even have what one of my Russian friends calls "a puppet show baptistry."
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 03:28 pm (UTC)Anyway that was not the point. My point was that Washington did not die a Christian. Washington was baptized into the Church of England, and the Church of England certainly and unarguably regards rebaptism as a horror. If he allowed himself to be rebaptized, then he had long lost any faith in the efficacy of CofE and mainstream Christian sacraments. It is also not inconsistent with the claim of Freemason religiosity to be able to absorb all the best sides of other religions.
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 04:29 pm (UTC)I'm not "throwing out" Luther, but as much as he was the lynchpin of the Reformation, he was not the entirety of it. There was a lot of re-baptism that went on during the early Reformation as a result of the disagreement over paedeobaptism in favour of credobaptism. If there hadn't been, there never would have been the record of the Reformers disagreements over the practice.
While I am inclinded to agree with your conclusion about the depth of George Washington's faith, I still disagree with a statement that implies that all Christian find re-baptism a "horror". After all, there is, in fact, an example of re-baptism in the New Testament (Acts 19).
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 09:34 pm (UTC)Uh, no. The Baptism of John was not a Christian baptism. In Christian terms, no rebaptism occurred.
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 11:07 pm (UTC)Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 10:04 pm (UTC)To give an example from my own faith background, the Independent Churches of Christ and Christian Churches (a loose brotherhood of freestanding congregations belonging to the tradition of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement) do not regard infant baptisms as valid baptism on the grounds that they did not involve a personal profession of faith on the part of the believer, and do not regard adult baptisms performed by means of sprinkling or pouring as valid because they are not done by the proper method described in the New Testament (and have several Bible verses ready to cite as proof that only full immersion was practiced in the first century Church). Only the baptism of a person mentally mature enough to make a personal profession of faith, and done by full immersion, is regarded as a valid baptism in that tradition.
Even in the Catholic Church, there are provisions for a conditional baptism in cases where there is genuine reason to doubt whether baptism was performed validly, particularly emergency baptisms. And there was a fairly notorious case recently in Australia where a number of baptisms were done manifestly invalidly (if I remember correctly, because they were using a politically-correct non-standard formula instead of the traditional "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit") and everybody involved was going to have to be contacted to have a proper baptism done. There was some concern about what would happen to someone who wasn't notified and went through life believing they were validly baptized and receiving in good faith the other sacraments -- and given the number of people who apparently were involved, including infants, the chance of someone slipping through the cracks was a very real possibility.
Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-19 11:04 pm (UTC)Re: Re-Baptism
Date: 2009-12-22 02:01 pm (UTC)Did you see last week's Lookout (December 13, 2009)? Specifically the article by Bob Russell, "Why Jesus' prayer for unity goes unanswered" -- in it he mentions in passing (because it's not main focus of his argument) that Thomas Campbell "merged his movement with Baron W. Stone even though the two didn't exactly agree on ... the purpose of baptism." (pg. 11)
Interesting. I didn't think I knew that previously and now I think I need to look into what Stone wrote about baptism.
"Washington did not die a Christian"
Date: 2009-12-21 06:02 pm (UTC)Re: "Washington did not die a Christian"
Date: 2009-12-22 04:07 am (UTC)Re: "Washington did not die a Christian"
Date: 2009-12-22 04:08 am (UTC)Nice Summary
Date: 2009-12-19 02:40 pm (UTC)Re: Nice Summary
Date: 2009-12-19 02:42 pm (UTC)Re: Nice Summary
Date: 2009-12-19 03:36 pm (UTC)Re: Nice Summary
Date: 2009-12-19 04:29 pm (UTC)Thanks!
Re: Nice Summary
Date: 2009-12-19 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 04:51 pm (UTC)That seems very carefully worded so as to imply that no liberals are actually Christians, even if they claim to be. Was that your intent?
Liberals say: America was founded as, and remains, a secular country, whose organization has no organic connection with any kind of religion, and certainly not with Christianity.
I don't really know too many liberals who'd go that far. Of course anyone who knows history knows that religion, and specifically Christianity, was very much a part of the nation's identity from the beginning.
However, whether or not America was founded as a "secular" country depends on your meaning. Was the population, and were the guiding principles of the founders, largely secular? No. But the government was very carefully set up so as to leave no direct connection between church and state. I don't think any of the founders envisioned an atheist nation, no. However, I do think (contrary to what many modern evangelicals believe) that they envisioned a nation in which not everyone, and perhaps not even the majority, would be Christian, or even religious, at all.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 05:00 pm (UTC)Yes and no. You have to bear in mind that I regard the whole phenomenon of Christianity from the viewpoint of Rome. A Baptist, to me, is certainly a Christian, but I would have some serious issues with serious and central features of his/her faith. By the same token, anyone who subscribes to the sort of attitudes represented by President Obama - for whom, as you may have observed, I have rather more respect than most of his opponents - may sincerely believe in the Trinity, in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, and in personal salvation and eternal life, but I would still have huge issues with many important features of their lives.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 06:36 pm (UTC)Well done on the analysis, by the way.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 08:30 pm (UTC)I'm still not entirely sure whether what you are trying to say is, "Yes, liberals can be Christians, I just think they're really, really wrong about some of their beliefs," or "No, liberals aren't really Christians even if they think they are, because their beliefs are contrary to Christianity."
(Replace "liberals" with "Obama" in the above paragraph, if you like.)
And I'm also not sure whether the ambiguity is because you're waffling, or because you just don't realize that you are not being clear.
I know you're a Catholic and you therefore believe that all non-Catholics have it wrong to some degree. I also know that the Roman Catholic Church recognizes Protestants as Christian, even if they're "wrong." So you don't need to give me a lecture on the viewpoint of Rome.
However, at least here in the U.S., there are an awful lot of people who are even more selective about who is a "real" Christian. They don't just exclude, say, non-Trinitarians, as you do, but pretty much anyone who disagrees with them about anything. In their minds, what they believe is what Jesus believes, and if you disagree with Jesus, you're not a Christian.
So, "liberals aren't Christians" is a very common sentiment, even if rarely expressed quite so bluntly.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 08:43 pm (UTC)If you can subscribe to every article in the Nicene Creed, you are a Christian. This excludes Arians such as the Latter-Day Saints, Unitarians, and Mormons (because of their belief that the Godhead is a perfected man rather than something superior and unique). That is not to say that you cannot be one of those and be a very fine human being; I have had Mormon friends, and my admiration for Washington and Lincoln is immense. But as a matter of description, a crook and murderer who believes in the Holy Trinity, in the divinity, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, and in final judgment and everlasting life, is a Christian; and a self-denying, constructive, enduring hero who does not, is not. As for how God will deal with them, I believe the hero will get a wonderful surprise - and the murderer will not be surprised at all.
Getting back to it....
Date: 2009-12-20 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 09:32 pm (UTC)Among other things I didn't realize that religious tolerance was as prominent in Europe at the time; despite knowing that it isn't the case, it's hard to shake being taught every Thanksgiving that the first colonists came here for "religious freedom". I'm pretty sure that's where a lot of the misconception that the Founders were devoutly Christian and envisioned a nation composed of devout Christians: if the colonists and their descendants were here because "their birthplaces wouldn't let them worship as they liked", religion must be, if not the central focus of their lives, certainly very important.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-20 03:50 am (UTC)The US Constitution has a "no religious test" for public officials right in Article VI, predating the First Amendment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_religious_test_clause
Jefferson called himself an Epicurean in a letter, which is congruent with his changing Locke's "pursuit of property" to "pursuit of happiness". In another letter he advised someone to make their own mind regarding the nature, or *existence*, of god. Even if he wasn't atheist himself he seems to have open to it.
People were of course happy to attack Deists as atheist, especially poor Thomas Paine, who was probably the most devoutly Deist of the lot.
And there's the Treaty of Tripoli, where the Senate unanimously affirmed that the US was not founded on Christian principles and thus not intrinsically hostile to Muslim states.
There's pre-Constitution tolerance, too: Jefferson or Madison's work for freedom of religion in the Virginia constitution; and the colonies of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were both founded on religious freedom. I think New Amsterdam was pretty open as well, including to Jews, being founded by the Dutch for the sake of commerce.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-20 12:20 pm (UTC)Jefferson was certainly well enough read in the Classics to know that Epicurean does not mean Atheist. The Epicureans believed in the gods of the Greek pantheon, but regarded them as being separate from the wold and from its suffering, and therefore to pray to them and offer them sacrifice was a waste of time. This is not unlike the Deist position anyway.
The Treaty of Tripoli was an inglorious and promptly failed attempt to dodge an inevitable war, under the misconception that the jihad that underlay the piracy of North Africa was aimed at Christians alone. The USA learned the hard way that jihadi pirates made no such distinctions - not that later US generations did any better.
Yeah, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were founded - in the interstices left over by systematic Calvinist settlement - to shelter dissenters from the Calvinist majority. But they are at best episodes, and their attitude of religious toleration, even where it lasted, was not shared by its larger neighbours.
Not a challange - a request for clarification
Date: 2009-12-21 01:20 am (UTC)One of the great-greats came over with Roger Williams, who fled the Puritains. I always thought they were Quakers, but now you've piqued my curiosity.
All I know about early America is through de Tocqueville, so right or wrong I never equated "The Founders" with the majority of Americans. "One third Tories, on third Patriots, and on third who didn't care one way or the other" was the way I was taught about the population in 1776. This is a new way of looking at things.
How do people over there see the outcome of the Climate Summit and the current state of the US's Health Care debate? I saw the Summit as a Big Nothing. (Lots of people got together. Nothing happened or was agreed to happen in the future. Typical UN do-nothing extravaganza.) And Health Care is likewise attacking the margin of the problem - much money pledged to the idea of covering more people, but no guarantees or fundamental changes (still no direct connection between people, health, and resources). What do people with a broader view see?
Re: Not a challange - a request for clarification
Date: 2009-12-24 09:58 am (UTC)Part of the problem was with discussing two centuries in one go. The Puritan commonwealths of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut were founded as Puritan tyrannies, and throughout the sixteen hundreds they were not only narrow and tyrannical, but aggressive too. They took over by brute force the Catholic English settlement of Maryland and the Swedish colony of New Sweden (New Jersey) and turned them into copycat Puritan tyrannies. All the while, however, Rhode Island was growing as a fairly liberal escape spot for all kinds of dissenters from Calvinism. If I remember right, the first Baptist congregations in America were established there. Again IIRC, Pennsylvania was established about 1680 by Quakers, keeping the pacifist and universalist attitude of its founders - but up to a point; the young Benjamin Franklin had a serious clash with the founding Penn family because of their exterminating attitude to Native Americans, which he opposed.
About 1700-1710, there was a great change of opinion all over the European world - or, at least, a long wave of doubt and anger finally crashed ashore. Religious persecution went out of fashion everywhere. In Massachusetts, I suspect that the scandal of the Salem convictions may have pushed the project along; before a few years were over, all the colonial leadership, except for the obstinate Mather, had realized that they had been accomplices in an atrocity. And there is this to be said about religious oppression in England (though definitely not in Scotland or Ireland) and therefore in settlements of English heritage such as New England: that though intolerant, they never quite crossed the treshold to extermination. The unlucky English Catholics were the subject of a battery of harassing, intimidatory and thieving laws whose disgraceful like was rarely seen among civilized oommunities; but the word never did go forth, "kill them all". And what happened in effect was that, like other excluded communities throughout the ages, religious dissenters in old and new England went into commerce - which not only gave them a field of enterprise where they could show their abilities, but was growing more and more important throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century, as England itself became the commercial centre of the world. After a certain time, merchants were not only rich but respected, and the result of their social and economic growth was that supposedly exiled and persecuted communities had gained not only power but respect. The Quakers were especially famous for this, and many of the leading banks and commercial institutions in Britain today were founded by Quakers.
Deist vs. Ethical Monotheist
Date: 2009-12-21 09:28 pm (UTC)"
That would be closer to the Deist position, true. But I think that highlights a terminological problem with your essay: to wit, to the extent that 'deist' is usually meant to imply a creator God who does not interfere with or concern Itself with Its creations, it would be wrong to say that the first rank of the Founders were majority Deists. They would be more Ethical Monotheists--rejecting Christ and the sacraments, but believing in a creator God who concerned himself with and guided human affairs.
Re: Deist vs. Ethical Monotheist
Date: 2009-12-21 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-21 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-22 09:06 pm (UTC)http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108634
That touches briefly on religion as well as immigration in America.