The United States is a Christian nation in the same sense it is an English-speaking nation. There isn’t any law mandating it—that’s just the way it is: Go out on the street, and you’ll mostly hear people speaking English, obeying (more or less!) laws written in English by English-speaking people in accordance with a Constitution written in English by people who had been, until the Revolution, Englishmen annoyed with the English king, whose court had been speaking English mainly since the time of Henry IV. That English king was the titular head of a Christian church, from which Christian dissenters had separated themselves by founding a colony in Massachusetts, which eventually joined with other colonies—many of which were explicitly Christian, with taxpayer-supported churches and clergy—and their overwhelmingly Christian populations, whose members often could be found reading English translations of the Bible named for another king of the English. (But not an “English king”—a Scottish one.) The population remains in the majority Christian, with the share of Americans who identify as Christian outweighing those who identify as Republicans or Democrats combined. But to say “This is a Christian nation” is a kind of political and social shibboleth—as is denying the obvious fact that this is a Christian nation. Of course there are people who live here who aren’t Christian or who don’t speak English, just as there are people who live in Japan who aren’t ethnically or culturally Japanese or who don’t speak Japanese—but, even though Japan has some pretty aggressive nationalists who worry the liberals, nobody really gets bent out of shape if someone says Japan is a Japanese nation: Who could deny it?
Who doubts that Hindustan—the Hindustani name for India—is Hindu? Yes, there are Hindustani Muslims and Hindustani Sikhs and Hindustani Christians and Hindustani Jains there, but if you put a replica of New Delhi on Mars and rocketed any halfway culturally literate human being to it, he’d get out of the landing module, take a look at that 108-foot-tall statue of Hanuman and say: “Oh, look: Hindu civilization.” Even though they have McDonald’s and rock ’n’ roll and polo shirts.
I have this on my mind because I recently participated in a Poynter Institute presentation for journalists on what we now call, for lack of a better term, “Christian nationalism.” I have some unhappy history with these people, but I try to do as many of these events as I can in the hope of making some marginal improvements in my struggling occupation. It was a very fine example of “diversity” as imagined by progressives: a panel of people with different demographic features who all basically agreed about the subject at hand. (We was agin’ it.) I’m a longtime merciless critic of these “Christian nationalist” fanatics and the riffraff they milk for power and profit, and I was the most sympathetic member of the panel by a mile. Journalistic groupthink is poison, and it is a real threat to the credibility (and economic viability) of the business.
One of the panelists, a very well-intentioned pastor with a new book out, objected to the host’s citing an organization critical of Christian nationalism because the group supposedly has retrograde views on other subjects and isn’t as opposed to Christian nationalism as she wishes it were. And there’s some great diversity for you: It isn’t enough that we’re all critics of the idea in question (and that nobody thought to invite anybody sympathetic to it to present an alternative point of view) but, apparently, we all have to be critical in the same way and to the same degree. That this is preposterous did not seem to occur to anybody except me.
What I tried to explain to the viewers—and I am afraid this fell on deaf ears—is that the Christian nationalists have a kernel of truth at the heart of their complaint, and it is a kernel of political truth rather than a kernel of religious truth. The heart of the matter isn’t revealed truth but democratic legitimacy.
The so-called wall of separation between church and state in the United States may be excellent policy—the more time I spend in churches and talking with politicians, the more I think it is!—but it has a problem: Nobody voted for it.
The First Amendment prohibits the “establishment” of religion, which means the creation of a national church—a state church is what an established church is. And while many of the men who negotiated, argued about, wrote, and ratified the Constitution had wall-of-separation (the phrase itself is, of course, Thomas Jefferson’s) views and many didn’t, none of them thought that they were proposing or voting for a document that might make it illegal to put up Christmas decorations at a public building in Jackson County, Indiana, a couple of centuries hence.
It is worth reminding modern Americans what the actual politico-religious landscape of the United States looked like before the Revolution, in the Founding era, and in the generation after. Most of the colonies (and, later, the states) had established churches, by which I do not mean that they had state education budgets that included money for students who might prefer to attend a school with a religious affiliation (many did; this was generally uncontroversial until Catholic immigration ticked up in the 19th century) but that they had state churches, i.e., taxpayers paid taxes that were used to finance the ministries and clergy of particular Christian denominations, such as the Congregational Church in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Henry David Thoreau complained about this, and Jefferson (along with James Madison) worked for the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Virginia. Antidisestablishmentarianism (it is rare that one has an opportunity to use the word correctly!) was stronger in New England than in the South, where the established churches were mainly Anglican and, as such, suspected of being tainted with monarchism.
And the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ought to be understood as having at least as much to do with monarchy as it does with a liberal Anglo-Protestant sympathy for religious liberty. At the time, established churches were everywhere in the Protestant world (Catholic “establishment” is a different kettle of ichthyses) institutions of monarchy. And that is still mostly the case: If you consider the few remaining countries in the Western world with established churches—the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Norway—what you will see is not countries with a great deal of Christian passion (these comprise some of the least-religious countries in the world) but countries that are constitutional monarchies. Iceland is unusual in having an established church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland) but no monarchy, while Canada is unusual in the opposite way, having a monarch as head of state but no established church. (The Church of Canada isn’t.) Many of the Founders would have agreed with Thoreau that forcing a man to pay a tax to support a church with which he wishes to have no association is wrong, but none of them thought the First Amendment prohibited that. Which is why the disestablishmentarians were obliged to take other action—sometimes statutory, sometimes constitutional—to accomplish those ends. With Massachusetts being the last holdout, the states eventually did disestablish their churches—mostly democratically.
Americans tend to accept democratic outcomes more readily than outcomes arrived at through undemocratic or antidemocratic means. That is partly a matter of time (democracy is slow), partly a matter of voice (everyone who wants a say gets one), partly a matter of these changes often being gradual, and—in considerable part—because the democratic process itself confers legitimacy in the minds of most Americans. To take one relevant example: There were many social changes affecting the lives of American women in the 20th century that were much, much bigger than the abortion right exnihilated into existence by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. But Roe became a rallying point, while there was no successful 50-year campaign to overturn the 19th Amendment or to strip women of their gradually acquired equal economic rights or to undo the no-fault divorce laws.
The extent to which the democratic process provides political lubrication is remarkable: Ronald Reagan ran for president as the champion of American conservatives, including Christian social conservatives; in California Gov. Reagan had signed into law the nation’s first laws legalizing abortion and no-fault divorce. By contrast, the Supreme Court in Roe claimed to discover a right to abortion in the Constitution—but that was a constitution no one had voted for. The actual constitution, ratified in 1788, has nothing to say on the question, and the people who voted for it surely did not believe they were creating a national mandate for abortion or for same-sex marriage—or for unquestionably desirable things such as the abolition of racial discrimination.
When the Christian nationalists insist that our current climate of aggressively enforced secular homogeneity is an ahistorical innovation imposed on American life by progressive activists and allied judges over the course of the past several decades and that this regime lacks democratic legitimacy, they are not wrong in the particular—a fact that should be obvious even to people who do not share the Christian nationalists’ political agenda, including those of us who find it generally contemptible as politics and as religion both.
When John Adams was a grown man visiting Philadelphia for the first time, he saw something he never had seen before: a Catholic Church. In Massachusetts, the law allowed for the hanging of Catholic clergy simply for being present there. And while the revolution did provoke a good deal of welcome liberal sentiment throughout the new republic, the first public Mass was not celebrated in Massachusetts until years after the Revolution. The established church at the state level survived the founding generation into the age of Jackson. Government support of religious schools was an accepted and common fact of life until the post-Civil War era, when Irish Catholics started showing up in numbers that made the old Puritan elite nervous. But even such exercises in bigotry as the Blaine Amendments were generally enacted by democratic means.
If you want people to accept social change, then give them a voice, a vote, and, above all, a little bit of time. Or a lot of time, as needed. That isn’t what you want to hear if you are a member of an oppressed minority group or a marginalized community demanding change. But the undemocratic imposition of radical social change is a near-guarantee of radical reaction. There may be times when we judge that this is worth it, but how much better would it have been for the country—and everybody in it—if desegregation, for example, had been achieved more through democratic means and less through judicial fiat? The Union Army may have flattened the South, and the federal government could have imposed whatever it wanted under martial law, but it was critically important that Congress pass and the states ratify the 13th Amendment. Unless you are a hopeless utopian, you have to realize that there are trade-offs in all things political: Democratic processes are slow and halting, often by design, while nondemocratic methods provoke backlash and impose other long-term political and social costs.
One of those costs is giving juice to batty radical movements and providing career opportunities for irresponsible demagogues—not that we blessed Americans know anything about that!
There are a few intellectually serious Christians out there with some profoundly illiberal ideas about the relationship between church, state, and social order. Amusingly, about half of them are Catholics (team Leo XIII) and half Calvinists (team R.J. Rushdoony), meaning that each half sees the other as heretical. But, ultimately, this isn’t about theonomy—it’s about democracy.
And two cheers for that, maybe two-and-a-half.
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