America was founded on principles of religious liberty, or tolerance, meaning Americans were free to worship God as they saw fit. This was a deliberate break from the European wars of religion and other forms of religious persecution. As George Mason said in his Virginia Declaration of Rights, “religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience….”
God, in other words, did not want unwilling converts; he wanted voluntary ones.
Beyond that, Americans cannot agree on much of anything when it comes to faith and public life. One camp asserts, quite confidently, that America was founded as a Christian nation. But not even they can agree on what that means, nor how a “Christian nation” should conduct itself. This camp falls into two factions: a moderate group that suggests merely that the Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by Christian values and a more Nietzschean, Christian Nationalist faction that seeks to wield power in patently unchristlike ways. This latter group is represented by figures like Andrew Wilson, who openly promotes “dominance by one group over everybody else cuz we’ve got a better view,” and Nick Fuentes, who praises Hitler and Stalin and seeks to install “Catholic Taliban rule” in America. It’s a vicious view of the world, one that bears more resemblance to the philosophies of the man who famously pronounced “God is dead” than to the religion of the meek and mild Jesus.
The second camp, on the other hand, promotes the “meek and mild” at the expense of everything else. This group seeks, to a fault, to defang the steely faith of Trump’s white evangelical devotees. It’s represented by the rising darling of the Left: James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and Texas state representative now running for the U.S. Senate, whose lenient, warmhearted faith borders on universalism. So allergic to public acts of religion, Talarico, a professing Christian, opposed Texas Senate Bill 10, an act to “display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms,” because it was, he said, “deeply unchristian.” In a vague appeal to Mason’s Declaration of Rights, he argued that “forcing our religion down their throats is not love.”
“There is nothing Christian about Christian Nationalism,” he added. “It is the worship of power in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”
In light of the increasingly belligerent faith of men like Wilson and Fuentes, Talarico may make a good point. However, his hands-off approach to moral issues — actually, his befuddled biblical “defense” of nonnegotiable left-wing values, including abortion and transgenderism — sidesteps Christianity’s traditional religious mores.
A third group meets somewhere in the middle, espousing — even if unwittingly — what sociologist Robert Bellah called the American civil religion (a term he derived from Rousseau). Bellah denied that this incredibly nuanced practice is merely the obligatory “semblance of piety” all but required of an American elected official. The 119th Congress consists of only three “religiously unaffiliated” members, all of whom are freshmen (the previous Congress contained only one). Another study shows that “Only three U.S. presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Johnson — have been unaffiliated with a specific religious tradition.” This makes name-dropping “God” — usually in the vaguest possible sense — a politically safe bet. As Bellah wrote, it’s “a word which almost all Americans can accept but which means so many different things to so many different people that it is almost an empty sign.”
But there’s more to the American civil religion than perfunctory nods to the man upstairs. This “religion” refers, instead, to the nation’s foundational customs, practices that, over time, have taken on a sacramental quality — a political liturgy, if you will. “Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share,” Bellah observed. “These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling the American civil religion.”
With so many competing views regarding faith in the public square — (1) faith should dominate politics, (2) faith and politics should never mix, and (3) faith should inform our understanding of politics — it’s ironic that bitter rivals on all sides have cited the same Founding-Era phrases — religious liberty, separation of church and state — to justify incompatible claims. In this three-part series, we will explore three ways in which faith has shaped the American Republic and what they tell us about the appropriate role of religion in a tolerant and diverse society.
The faith of the pilgrims
Their name was a nod to one of the world’s most famous texts on faith. “[T]hey [the Separatists, an offshoot of the broader “Puritan” movement] knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits,” William Bradford described. He was quoting from Hebrews 11, the “faith chapter.” Other than that, Bradford’s cohorts likely never referred to themselves by their now-famous moniker. But the pioneering qualities of an intrepid spiritual adventurer, much like Abraham, were no doubt on display in the crew of the Mayflower; setting sail for a “hideous and desolate wilderness” was an extraordinary leap of faith.
Arriving in America, 41 men — Pilgrims and non-Pilgrims — signed the Mayflower Compact. This formative document fused the Separatists and “Strangers” into a “Civil Body Politic,” dedicated to promoting “just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices….” Once again, Abraham served as an invisible role model. While historians consider the Mayflower Compact to be the first “social contract” in America, it was surprisingly ahead of its time: books like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, pioneering classics in the social contract genre, didn’t arrive for another 31, 42, and 69 years, respectively. The Pilgrims’ exercise in self-government was based on something else: Covenant.
“Having undertaken for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia,” the Puritans pledged to “Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic” [emphasis added]. It was an appropriately biblical form of deal-making for a deeply religious people. The Old Testament told the story of how God had entered into a covenant with Abraham, a man who would become the father of a great nation, God’s chosen people. “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us,” John Winthrop said in his famous 1630 sermon charging the Massachusetts Bay Colony to shine like “a city upon a hill.” From the earliest days of European settlement in the New World, there was a growing, mythical sense that America was destined to become a kind of “new Israel,” God’s “almost chosen people,” as Abraham Lincoln said. This view certainly accorded with the Puritans’ strictly Calvinist view about God’s “elect.” From Winthrop, who believed his fellow Puritans had “entered into covenant with Him for this work,” to John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, both of whom referred to the famous shining city, American political rhetoric has almost always been awash with biblical imagery and a special perception of our own presumed “chosenness.” But it all began with the crew of the Mayflower, which exemplified and paved the road for American self-government. As Professor Daniel Dreisbach has argued, the signing of the Mayflower Compact — an Abrahamic-style covenant — represented “a signal event in the development of an American constitutional tradition.”
Another way in which the Pilgrims embodied America’s manifold religious orthodoxies — and paradoxes — was through their emphasis both on religious liberty and Levitical law. The Pilgrims, of course, wanted the freedom to worship God according to their own consciences, but they also wanted to live in a virtuous society. As such, they imposed strict moral rules based on an Old Testament reading of the Bible. The Separatists believed the Church of England had been hopelessly corrupted. But more than that, they also believed that God intended for His people, like Israel, to be sanctified, “set apart.” John Robinson, the Pilgrims’ pastor before they left for America, spoke extensively about the need for separation, which he called the hallmark of “all true Churches from the begin∣ning of the world.” A refusal to distance themselves from the “profane multitude,” he said, would “reproach the Churches of God.” [edited for modern spelling].
This quest for moral purity necessitated certain puritanical laws, which, while not mandating religion per se, would have made it difficult for non-religious people to thrive in the new colony. The Separatists had sought freedom from the world’s contaminations; they weren’t about to open their doors too widely to its wicked influences. Indeed, historian Robert Bartlett has suggested that most of the “Strangers,” initial non-members of Robinson’s Separatist congregation, eventually joined the church.
It was the beginning of one of the great American debates — how to balance liberty with the need for public morality — and it would bleed over into one of the greatest religious movements in history…
To be continued.