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}
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 11:27 pm (UTC)