American Separationism – Glenn A. Moots (lawliberty.org)
American
Separationism, by Glenn Moots
Is “Christian Nationalism” something to be feared? Academics have been wringing their hands about it for
almost twenty years, but they have mostly defined it in terms of things
like Creationism, homeschooling, courtship, or trying to make Thomas Jefferson
a Christian. That hardly adds up to a dangerous public theology. Russell Moore, Andrew Whitehead, and
Samuel Perry have raised the stakes, charging Christian Nationalism with
“nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine
sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.” Moore goes so far as
to compare it to violent Islamic jihad or Orthodox patriarch Kirill’s bizarre
beatification of Russians dying in Ukraine. David French has likewise compared Christian Nationalists in
America to Putin. Perry, Whitehead, and others have tried to blame them for
January 6, an association ably discounted by Daniel Strand.
[People who think CN
is more urgent than reforming Education Departments, Strand might offer some
relief.]
Such hysterics are hardly warranted insofar as Christian Nationalism as a
coherent political theory is a nascent movement, but one finds in remarks by SBC president Bart
Barber a historical divide in Protestantism. While no Christian
Nationalist wants, as Barber put it, “churchly dominion over the
operations of government,” his concern reveals a
longstanding Baptist concern about religious establishment in America. Fear
not. There will be no establishment of religion. The most important obstacle
to that kind of Christian Nationalism is American Protestants
themselves, who are—as far as politics is concerned—all Baptists now.
Protestants: Magisterial vs. Separatist
If we can indulge some anachronism, there is a kind of “Christian
nationalism” in the DNA of what is called “magisterial Protestantism.” At the
beginning of the Reformation, all Protestants excepting Anabaptists were
essentially magisterial Protestants. Fearful of Rome and absent
its authority, Protestants throughout Europe partnered with the “civil magistrate” (i.e., civil
authorities) for protection. Magisterial authority varied among the
newly-Protestant polities, but in no case did the church have authority over
the state. Barber is just flat
wrong about that. But the state did have authority enabling what is
called religious establishment.
It would be hard to find a Protestant confession written during the first
century of the Reformation that doesn’t endorse establishment. Per the original
1646 Westminster Confession,
for example, magistrates had a duty to preserve religious “unity and peace,” to
suppress “blasphemy and heresy” and “corruptions and abuses in worship.” This
duty could even include calling a synod of ecclesiastical leaders to settle
doctrinal questions. A popular Protestant trope referred to civil rulers as “nursing fathers”
(Isaiah 49:23), responsible before God and the people for their de facto
covenanted polities.
Dissent abounded from the
earliest days of the Reformation, however, especially in England. Prominent dissenters, not
content with the pace of religious reform as they saw it, were punished by
civil authorities largely on civil grounds: in theory or practice they disturbed the peace and challenged
standing authority [This
reminds me of the ineluctable Phil Beaver at UBC, both before (1993) for
falling-in-love-to-a-Louisiana-French-Catholic-woman and now for discovering he
was& is an advocate for Jesus’ principles, whatever they are, to “ourselves
and our Posterity” (U.S. preamble.], sometimes in an incorrigible manner. “Separatists”
were a particular kind of dissenter who declared some degree of ecclesiastical
independence from the established church. Prominent separatists, however pious
and orthodox, could be treated as badly as obstreperous heretics or blasphemers and sentenced to
imprisonment or worse. Congregationalist Henry Barrow, a seminal separatist, was hanged for sedition in
1593 because his defense of congregational self-government threatened to
undermine the established Church of England and its rule by bishops, which it
eventually did.
Separatist ecclesiology is an
essential part of the Baptist heritage. Baptist historians have traced their
ecclesiology to separatist theologian Henry Jacob, though he himself was not a
Baptist. As separatists, growing sects of Baptists on both sides of the
Atlantic were subjected to fines and imprisonment, including some levied by
Congregationalists who, though initially persecuted in England for their own
separatism, built religious
establishments in New England not dissimilar from Anglican
establishments in Virginia. [John
Adams egregiously fought to preserve English tradition.]
Baptists went even further than other separatists in their political
theology. In 1645, for example, Baptist John Tombes argued that baptizing the nations (Matt 28:19) means
only baptizing believers in every nation, not building or preserving
Christian magistrates or states. Baptists likewise eschewed Old Testament
Israel as a model for Christian nations (as magisterial Protestants considered
it), instead reducing it to a spiritual type (i.e., foreshadowing) for the “New
Testament Church” (the “antitype”). Christ alone is head of the church, they said, not bishops,
presbyteries, synods, or magistrates, and His authority was delegated only to
individual congregations. [There’s
that historical neglect of Jesus’ principles, whatever they may be, grounded in
the competitive, bemusing title “Christ”.]
The proliferation of separatism made it impossible to maintain
magisterial partnerships that relied on an established parish church
ecclesiology. De jure establishments obliging the licensing of dissenting
ministers or meeting houses, or tax-funded clergy, for example, faded by the
early nineteenth century [1801s].
Legally speaking, the First Amendment [1791] was unrelated to the disappearance of these
state establishments because it prohibited only federal establishment.
By doing so, it arguably protected the state establishments by not threatening
to supersede them with a federal establishment. [The last time I checked, every state had a preamble that
cites God.]
The Separatist Legacy
De jure establishments waned as separatism waxed, but the persecution of separatists left
a mark on the psyche of their victims [After 30 years’ more study, I perceive that I am “elect
by God” to advocate discovery of Jesus’ principles, whatever they are. I feel
joy rather than victimization.]: Adrian Chastain Weimer calls this the
“identity of persecution.” Those who carry this mark believe not only that Christians shouldn’t seek power,
but that persecution defines the faithful. This explains why some of our
Evangelical leaders eschew influence through any means other than winsome persuasion.
Justifying such a social theology via “proof texts” like 2 Timothy 3:12 [In fact, everyone who wants to live a
godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,] or John 15:20 [If they persecuted me, they will
persecute you also.], however, runs
hard up against those first generations of magisterial Protestants who never read such verses to
oblige political impotence.
Separatism also undermined establishment by advocating for a “gathered
church.” To be a gathered church means not only separation from an established church but discerning true
believers [The-ineluctable-evidence
is that the-laws-of-physics does not support humankind separating on beliefs.
This principle was accepted by the polytheistic Sumerians 5,500 years ago.
Their political philosophy is expressed in Hebrew vernacular of Genesis
1:26-28.], sometimes by use of a “conversion narrative,” to gather them
out of both the established churches and the spiritually corrupt wider world.
In taking John Cotton to task in 1644 for not separating sufficiently from the
Church of England, separatist par excellence Roger Williams prefigured
Jefferson’s own image of a wall
of separation (which Jefferson invented, appropriately enough, in
correspondence with a Baptist). Williams defined the church as something
“walled in” from the world so that “all that shall be saved out of the world”
can be “transplanted out of the Wilderness of the world and added unto [God’s]
Church or Garden.” [Roger
Williams missed Genesis 1:26-28’s principle: humankind is responsible to life
on earth rather than to the church.]
The divide between separatists and established churches can be
illustrated using a parable debated since the beginning of Christendom (Matt
13): should wheat and tares be separated now or later? Magisterial Protestants
were content to let both grow up together, using variations of the parish
model, infant baptism,
and some form of establishment to encompass as many people as possible.
Congregationalists and Baptists hoped to separate wheat from tares now by
discerning true believers
and welcoming them alone into full fellowship. The rest were left to the
wilderness of the world until
converted, which had the
predictable consequence of turning the wider world into a moral wilderness.
[One of my 1990s amateur-theologian
SS teachers said Catholics would not be saved, because they had not been
baptized after accepting Jesus’s salvation. I related that my 3 Catholic
children had each attended 13 years of catechism and accepted Confirmation in a
comprehending status. The SS teacher countered “Yes, but Confirmation is not a
Sacrament.” That afternoon, I checked: it is a Sacrament. I reported back to
the amateur, and he never apologized. Not long after that, I resigned both the
Baptist brotherhood and Christianity, never losing my appreciation for Jesus’
teaching. This is one of many human-alienating experiences, only coincidentally
at UBC.]
Baptists, the largest denominational legacy of the gathered/separatist
ecclesiology, and many of their non-denominational cousins still wear this
“identity of persecution.” Baptist tropes [a common or overused theme or device : CLICHÉ] persist in broader popular memory, too, thanks to their
successful deployment against establishment opponents. For example, establishments presume to
either force saving faith or extirpate all religious dissenters. Neither is
true. One can see such claims anticipated and refuted by Johannes Althusius,
for example. Nevertheless, that
narrative energizes Baptists like Moore and Barber or de facto Baptists
like French.
The Rise of New Establishments
Polly Ha has argued that one
can find incipient ideas of liberalism in separatist pioneers like Jacob. A similar argument has been made
that John Locke cribbed from separatist theology. Finding the roots of
liberalism in separatist ecclesiology is hardly seen only in hindsight. In
1645, Baptist Thomas Collier worked hard to rebut the criticism that sectarianism was de facto
individualism. But even if liberalism was seeded by separatism, neither
Jacob nor Locke as proto-liberals sought a Rawlsian neutrality or a broad “marketplace of
ideas” that French or Moore celebrate.
Many American Christians now celebrate that marketplace, too . . . and
are de facto separatists. They cannot defend separatism as a theological
concept like the Baptist apologists could but have instead stumbled into it under the pervasive influence of
liberalism [This is
not the classical liberalism that assumes personal reasonability, but is the
practice of killing fellow citizens and trashing property because the Democrat
Party condones it.] and/or because they think that America was settled for religious freedom
[Egregiously, only
Congress enjoys freedom of religion. The current, Democrat-controlled Congress
pushes liberal-democracy to defeat both the U.S. republic and Christianity. I
am concerned about the legalistic-intentions of the Congress to be seated in 2023,
understandable as they are.]. But liberalism as we know it in
America was just getting started in the nineteenth century, and religious
freedom was enabled before that not by platitudes about
pluralism or diversity but by prudence and circumstance [I think prudence will rise again.]. Four hanged
Quakers in Massachusetts Bay, for example, turned out to be four too many and
elicited a sharp legal rebuke from Whitehall. Theological dissent in various
forms was becoming more popular, and establishment was causing the “seditions
and tumults” that Althusius cautioned against.
The greatest loss in our default to liberalism over careful debates about
ecclesiology, however, is not theological sophistication. It is the loss of the
best argument for toleration [Better is civic-integrity, where
“civic” refers to reliable human being (verb). No human has the higher opinion
to self-assess toleration.], one that reflected a centuries-long conversation in
Christendom: the conscience
makes you directly responsible to God, and no person can stand before God in
another person’s stead. [A mimic:
The-laws-of-physics make you directly responsible to civic-integrity, and no
citizen can pursue Jesus’ principles for another person.]
That point about religious liberty acknowledging the Final Judgment was
understood even by Progressive American historians who rehabilitated
separatists like Roger Williams and turned them into superheroes. For example,
Perry Belmont’s Political Equality: Religious Toleration From Roger
Williams to Jefferson (1927) quotes William Paley’s definition of religious toleration as “the
recognition of private judgment in matters of faith and worship”
and also cites in its defense the words of Matt 22 and Mark 12: “Render
therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things
that are God’s.” [First,
Moots misses the Gensis-1 assignment to humankind sole responsibility to life.
And, it’s possible that Jesus is the author of that political principle, 13.7
billion years ago. Second, at the same moment, I appreciate the accuracy in
“words of Matt”, yet I oppose scholars lessening the influence of
the-metaphysical-Jesus’-message, which advocates like me struggle to comprehend
and apply.]
Nowhere did Belmont or other
Progressive historians say “Render unto the self the things that are the
self’s.” [This effectual
thought is the gem in Moots’ essay. It has so many great applications. What
says a man can decide wither a woman will remain pregnant or not? What says a
person can change their gender? What says a civic-old-white-man has no say?
What says the-laws-of-physics answer to religion?] Nor would the great
champions of religious freedom—in the seventeenth or the early
twentieth century—countenance our contemporary argle-bargle wherein one answers
only to oneself about all matters both divine and human. That
kind of nonsense is now so respectable that it enables our president to cite as
evidence of rising authoritarianism a widespread belief about traditional marriage once
held even by the Obamas, Bidens, and the Clintons. [The defense of traditional marriage is expressed
in Genesis 1:26-28. It is 5,500 year-old Sumerian political philosophy
expressed by Hebrew scholars 3,000 years ago.]
What Kind of Establishment?
But even in our
supposedly liberal tolerant order accountability does not go away.
Rather than being obliged to serve God, which would prioritize piety, we are
obliged to serve what most of humanity,
pagan or Christian, defined as
the grossest impieties. And it isn’t as though we have no religious
establishment. We instead have a new eschatology, moral law, and sin that
is a Christian heresy. [Imposing Christianity onto
Jesus’ principles, whatever they are, seem the fundamental heresy.]
American Christians need to recover
their noble patrimony about the conscience and stop playing the neutrality game
as if any such neutral space exists. [Not to weaken Moots’ point, it brings to mind Rob Bell’s
failure in debate with Andrew Wilson: (1) Rob Bell and
Andrew Wilson // Homosexuality & The Bible // Unbelievable? - YouTube] However difficult it is to cast off the identity of
persecution, we need to realize that in our willingness to suffer before any
new postmodern establishments, we make our neighbors suffer as well. American
Protestants must stop being the dupes of a bait-and-switch. Disestablishment
was supposed to clear our vision of God but has now left us to look only into
ourselves.
If we did have something that could be called “Christian nationalism”
under the de facto Protestant
establishment undermined by incorporation of the First Amendment, it was
something that Catholics like Tocqueville praised in the 1830s and Jacques
Maritain acclaimed in the 1940s. Education was directed to character formation
and preparation for vocation. Political institutions maintained public decency
and a sphere of domestic life enabling all the blessings of marriage not only
for the sake of husband and wife over a long life, but also their children.
Work was not merely a means to
idleness or extravagance, but duty and vocation enabled purpose and
meaning. These were the principles of the de facto establishment’s catechism,
however imperfect, enabling meaning
from the beginning to the end of life. [“Incorporation” suggests an informed collaboration.
However, the religious-practice clause of the First Amendment is an imposition
perpetrated by English loyalists who did not choose or could not afford to
return to England. It and other features of the 1791 Bill of Rights partially dis-effected
the American war for independence. I suggest amendment of the practice clause
to “promoting” instead of “preventing”.]
All of this was done before God and one’s neighbor, with political
leaders invoking scripture to emphasize virtues public and private. This became the new de
facto Protestant establishment, even if it was not the Protestant establishment
of old. If this was Christian Nationalism, it stood in sharp contrast with the
current regime of OnlyFans [cyber
prostitution], anxiety, and addiction, and blood and treasure depleted by
internationalism. [This
essay expresses the urgency I perceive about reforming civic-morality in the
U.S. I think it is important for Christians, who I think are the salt of the
earth when they practice civic-integrity, to consider Jesus and reform
distractions like Christ, God, Satan, Holy Ghost and other trappings of the
Church-competitive past and present.]
This essay is adapted from a presentation at NatCon 2022
titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christian Nationalism”
Glenn A. Moots is
Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Northwood University and also
serves as a Research Fellow at the McNair Center for the Advancement of Free
Enterprise and Entrepreneurship there. He is the author of Politics
Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (University
of Missouri Press, 2010, 2022 paperback) and coedited, with Phillip
Hamilton, Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the
American Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018).
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/protestant-evangelicals-as-the-christian-other/
[Note:
I advocate reform from Christianity to acceptance of mystery, in-order-to
cumulatively collaborate& benefit-from the secular* suggestions each
generation can accept from the-metaphysical-Jesus**. That is, practice the-good
that successive generations discover by developing the secular suggestions it
seems Jesus spoke. For example, in Matthew 19:3-8, Jesus’s message expresses 4
reforms. First, the man unites to the woman, and their unit can& may become
authentic spouses. Second, Moses’ law is obsoleted by this correction on
divorce. Third, Jesus cited political philosophy that is ancient to
Judeo-Christian literature. Fourth, the-metaphysical-Jesus may be the-God that
spiritualists seek.
“Christ”
neglects “Jesus”, which is a risk I neither take nor support. “Jesus Christ”
attempts to impose on the-authentic-Jesus opinion I will not risk.
“Christianity” is a risk I neither take nor recommend.
*Secular means worldly rather
than spiritual, and Genesis 1:28 is a worldly commission.
** “Meta” means “after” and the
authentic Jesus can only be pursued, not known.]
Protestant Evangelicals [emphasize the gospel] as
the Christian Other
David Hollinger opens his Christianity’s American Fate with
an anecdote about arguing—from his liberal Protestant standpoint—about religion
with fundamentalist
classmates in Southern California. Hollinger eventually left the faith [Maybe he left his indoctrination and discovered his
unique person. “When I
became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”
1 Corinthians 13:11.], but we are left
with the impression he didn’t do so rancorously. He did so because Christianity
in the United States became
[Not became: was& is]
a hardened conservative [self-preserving]
religion deeply influenced by fundamentalists,
who “constantly invoked Billy Graham” but had never heard of “the missionary
doctor Albert Schweitzer,
the great hero of my parents and their circle of churchgoers.” [Schweitzer
challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current
at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His
contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern
the role of Paul's mysticism of
"being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by
faith as secondary. I copied excerpts from Reverence
for Life.] At Hollinger’s class graduation,
“one Arkansas-born classmate, climaxing four years of more or less genial argumentation,”
bid Hollinger farewell by “confidently informing me that people like me ‘will
be destroyed at the battle of Armageddon.’”
The thesis of this work, insofar as there is one, is that American Christianity became more
conservative at precisely the same time that broader American society became
more secular, and secular in this work is unquestionably tied to social
liberalization. [This
thesis overlooks the Genesis 1:28 suggestion that comprehensive-safety&
security to life on earth depends on human being (verb), an option each person
can& may pursue. My assertion is not distant from Schweitzer’s, I recognize
in this reading after coping “Reverence”.] Hollinger proposes that this
is a uniquely American fate,
born out of conservative white Evangelicals’ desire to escape the social
obligations of the Gospel filtered through an ecumenical mainline Protestantism
influenced by the Enlightenment. [Not so: it’s a typical erroneous effort to avoid the obligation
expressed in Genesis 1:28: RHI.] More specifically, Hollinger argues,
Evangelicals hoped to escape the imperative to extend civil equality [civic-integrity] to nonwhites. “Evangelicalism,”
Hollinger claims, “made it easy to avoid the challenges of an ethnoracially
diverse society and a scientifically informed culture.” Evangelical numbers, he
claims, “swelled during the era of Donald Trump.” And those who “adopted
evangelical identity anew had good reason to do so. What they were joining was
easily recognized.” [Ridiculous
anti-Trumpism! These issues arose in western culture in debate with 5,500 year
old Sumerian political philosophy. In other words, predating monotheism’s 4000
year-age. About 2600 years ago, Hebrews recorded the laws of Moses with which
to bargain with their-God. Then 2000 years ago, believers started to codify
Christ as the predicted messiah. Only 500 years ago, reformers attempted to
free Jesus to the believer. Meanwhile, Eastern cultures developed
independently.]
Hollinger rejects arguments from Evangelical scholars who claim that
non-religious people identified as Evangelicals and warped the public
perception of the movement. “It is a mistake to suppose that evangelicalism has
been hijacked by outsiders.” Put simply, Evangelicalism has always been the
reactionary, authoritarian, racist mirror image of enlightened, progressive,
tolerant mainline Christianity. [The chaos within Christianity, exemplified by these two “scholars”,
speaks only of intolerance among Christians.] Evangelicalism’s moment of
strength therefore occurred just as the rest of society secularized [Smith attempts to label people who I doubt would accept
his label. What is “secular”? Non-Christian? Merriam-Webster online says it
means “of or relating to the worldly
or temporal”. Genesis
1:28 is secular.], because Evangelicalism—whatever that even is (Hollinger
leaves it largely undefined)—became the natural home for white conservative
reactionaries [People just
want the security to pursue the happiness they perceive rather than submit to
the life someone would impose on them. If they lived in a culture that stated
it this way, I doubt they would claim they are Evangelists. In other words, the
Christian v. secular squabble imposes this dilemma on them.].
Unique cultural, political, and sociological circumstances, Hollinger
argues, made the American
republic Protestantism on steroids. Protestantism developed liberal and
conservative strands in the nineteenth century [in Western Europe], but American Protestants remained somewhat insular.
Public life was relatively closed to others until the end of the nineteenth
century [1899, the heart
of the Jim Crow era], when the rising influence of two groups loosened
the hold of the Protestant
socio-cultural establishment. The first group were American Protestants who interacted
benevolently with non-whites and understood the universality of human rights
and all the other artifacts of an Enlightened Christianity [There’s no such entity. There’s only humble human being.]:
American missionaries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
These missionaries traveled the globe and “bore witness to the humanity of
non-Christian and nonwhite peoples. They [traditionally] rejected the notion that nonwhites
and non-Christians were heathens in need of conversion [to civic-integrity]. Instead, nonwhites and
non-Christians were brothers and sisters [in need of conversion to Christianity].
Missionaries “expanded the scope of factual knowledge about the world and also
achieved a substantial measure of ‘sentimental education’” that enabled them to
have a “greater empathetic identification with previously exotic peoples.” [Exotic? What’s wrong with
fellow human-beings?]
The second group
that confronted Protestant hegemony in the United States were immigrant Jews. Jewish
literati, entertainers, politicians, and cultural overserves, whether they
intended to or not, all “participated in a demographic challenge to Protestant
cultural hegemony.” American Jews represented another cosmopolitanism that made the idea of
Christian America—widely shared, according to Hollinger, by both Evangelical and ecumenical and
mainline Protestants [Suddenly
Protestanism is unified to the writer!]—“harder to maintain as
non-Christians occupied more and more cultural space.”
Jews in this narrative joined with the minority of secularizing post-Protestants like
John Dewey to weaken Protestant cultural and intellectual hegemony.
American intellectual institutions, even in the late nineteenth century,
protected Protestantism from any serious epistemological [actual-reality] challenge.
Jewish thinkers, more cosmopolitan than Protestants according to Hollinger,
combined with secularists to engage works of British and Continental figures
who emerged from “cultural settings in which there was no longer a habit of
favoring religion of many kinds.”
The combined forces of missionary and Jewish cosmopolitanism loosened
Protestantism’s epistemological hold on American intellectual and
socio-political life. Missionary influence, however, did not remain static. It
boomeranged back to the United States “carrying with it baggage.” The rest of
the world was more than a needy expanse in need of American benevolence and
supervision: it could inform
and teach Protestant America. The initial generation of missionaries,
all of whom Hollinger notes, were mostly educated at elite liberal arts
colleges. Educated missionary elites were therefore the most likely Protestants
to become “cosmopolitan critics of American narrowness.” [It’s troublesome that the
Catholic Church, a global force, is omitted from this discussion.]
The socio-political coalition that eventually enacted the epistemological
challenge to Protestantism in the public square was therefore formed out of
cosmopolitan liberal Protestants and Jews. The high water mark of liberal
Protestantism, argued Hollinger, was the middle of the twentieth century [1950 Eisenhower influenced by
the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization] when liberal
Protestant institutions and thinkers—examples included Union Seminary and
Riverside Church in New York City, Ivy League universities, the YMCA, the
Federal Council of Churches, publications like Christian Century, and
intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr [Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964], squared off against Fundamentalists who opposed the
modernism of ecumenical
cosmopolitan Christianity and who sought to eradicate modernist
influences on American
Christianity. Hollinger proposes that Fundamentalists joined with rural
and small-town mainliners—de-facto Fundamentalists, he infers—and nativist
groups to “swell” the ranks of the KKK and nativist rallies during the 1920s.
The 1940s and 1950s proved to be the apotheosis [deification] of liberal ecumenical Protestantism.
Their influence peaked in academia and in government. But Fundamentalists [Evangelicals?] quickly
coopted modern advertising and modern telemedia to soften the public perception
of their otherwise supposedly unpalatable views. Hollinger’s taxonomical [classification]
ambiguity and imprecise associations lead him to claim that Evangelicals would
not have become prominent had it not been due to big oil’s influence via
funding for Evangelical outreach and major Evangelical figures’ associations
with oil moguls. Leaders who identified as Evangelical, such as Carl Henry,
Charles Fuller, and most notably Billy Graham simply obfuscated their
Fundamentalist beliefs through attractive showmanship and marketing.
Ecumenical Protestant influence waned
in the 1960s. Hollinger saw mainline opposition to the Vietnam War and their
subsequent sponsorship of the Civil Rights movement as flying in the face of
hardened attitudes. Evangelicals
took up the mantle of the old racially exclusivist American empire. The
book then turns to litigate American
religion largely along the lines of the Democratic and Republican
parties. This allows the author to arrive at the conclusion that conservative Protestants, and by
proxy voters who do not support the ecumenical, enlightened, and liberal
policies of the American mainliners, now post-Protestants, are supporting exclusivist and
authoritarian politics. [This point can be clarified by considering Genesis 1:28, which
suggests that the human-duty to pursue order& prosperity to living species
on earth rises above the arguments over “Christ”. Instead, cite “Jesus”, in
order to collaborate to establish cooperation to the-metaphysical-Jesus.
Christians can& may join non-Christians in developing the-culture-of-good
following practically-affirmable after-Jesus-messages.]
The author has no time for the very idea of religious liberty, especially
for religious conservatives. “The democratic process was not compromised when
the ‘conscience exemption’ was developed in 1940 to enable individual members
of tiny pacificist sects to avoid military proscription,” but the democratic
process is compromised when “’religious liberty’ becomes a means for large
populations to escape the reach of federal and state laws.” Hollinger scare
quotes religious liberty and “sincerely held” when talking about the
populations he is specifically referencing, namely, conservative Christians asking to not have to
conform to modern innovations regarding sexuality in their businesses and
churches. Hollinger terms conservative desire to conform to perceived biblical
teaching discrimination against LGBTQ populations and, and denial of women’s
rights. [Genesis 1:26-28,
an ancient political philosophy clearly, accurately& deeply suggests that
male unites to female and the 2 become one. The-metaphysical-Jesus affirms
this in Matthew 19:3-8. The demand for order& prosperity suggests that
same-sex partners do not parent: LGBTQ populations can& may aid order&
prosperity rather than demand exclusion from humankind. These principles are
affirmed by the-laws-of-physics, and liberal-Christians have no grounds to
compromise them.]
This reviewer appreciates the attempts at scholarly detachment taken by
the author. [I question
the reviewer’s scholarly-judgement.] Hollinger informs us that although
he left Christianity, he nonetheless retains a feel for it that he hopes
informs Christianity’s American Fate. “Although I write now from a secular perspective [What do you mean by “secular”?
I doubt that it represents integrity more than egocentric opinion.], I
know that I, as a post-Protestant
[further separated from
Roman Catholicism?], bring to the historian’s vocation a sensibility
that owes much to my Protestant background.” Hollinger’s detachment and
sensibility, however, are perhaps not enough to overcome significant weaknesses
that inform the book’s thesis and methodology.
The introduction’s reliance on tropes [cliché, stereotype] makes
the book seem like an intellectual grounding for partisan politics rather than
a meaningful scholarly pursuit of the history of religion in the United States. Why, for
example, we need to know that the fundamentalist Christian in the author’s high school was from
Arkansas seems immaterial, but it leads this reader to think the work is a
socio-cultural screed against the population identified by liberal secular
Americans as the societal other: conservative southern Protestants [Obviously justice: Northern Protestants split from
Southern Protestants over abolition of slavery in 1845, officially in the
Baptist and the Methodist conventions.].
The credentials and the morally earnest indignancy of the author
certainly deserve the reader’s appreciation, but this work is fundamentally
flawed by an imprecise and almost cartoonish taxonomy [categorization or classification] and journalistic and political tropes parading as
scholarship. Attributing
racism to proto-evangelicals over against enlightened non-racist ecumenical
Protestants is so intellectually unverifiable that it is nearly laughable.
[Racism is a political
rather than religious issue.] Mainline Protestants were just as racist
as their more conservative counterparts at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries. Woodrow Wilson was of course as
open-minded as Protestants came in 1900. Influenced by both Darwin and Spencer,
he rejected with prejudice conservative Protestant dogma. Nonetheless, he
remained a racist. [His
father: Joseph Wilson owned slaves, defended slavery, and
also set up a Sunday school for his slaves. Wilson and his wife identified with
the Confederacy during
the American Civil War.]
The author also fails to note the growth of eugenicist thought among the
very populations he identifies as the enlightened exemplars of ecumenical
Christianity. The book’s attribution of authoritarianism and racism
particularly to Evangelicals has very little meaningful scholarly support,
because the so-called mainline Christianity of the era proved also to be
racist, authoritarian, and exclusivist. [Not so for Northern Protestants who separated from
Southern Protestants in 1845.]
Christianity’s American Fate might have
been a meaningful work of intellectual or religious history, but unfortunately
it descends quickly into a sociological and political screed. The reviewer
admires the political fervor of the author but was left disappointed in his
hope for a scholarly look at the development of American religion in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is certainly a topic worth pursuing.
Research devoid of socio-religious partisanship, and political partisanship,
will be a necessity when a standard work on the subject is finally offered.
Christianity’s American Fate pits
ecumenical mainline Protestants against their conservative Evangelical
brethren.
REVIEWED
by David
Hollinger
Miles Smith IV is visiting assistant
professor of history at Hillsdale College.
Protestant
Nationalism and Catholic Empire? A Comment on Yoram Hazony (lawliberty.org)
Protestant Nationalism and Catholic Empire?
A Comment on Yoram Hazony
In The Virtue of Nationalism,
Yoram Hazony argues on behalf of what he terms the “Protestant construction of the West.” This
affirms “two principles, both of them having their origins in the Old
Testament.” The first
principle is “the moral minimum required for legitimate government.” Here
Hazony means “ten precepts” (more conventionally, if less accurately, known as the Ten Commandments).
Leading Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin recognized
the Ten Commandments as natural
law, revealed to and accessible to all people. The second principle is “the right of national
self-determination.” This meant, beyond the moral floor required by the
first principle, “it was not expected that all nations would become as one in
their thoughts, laws, or way of life.” He adds,
[T]he second principle – permitting each nation to determine for itself
what constitutes a legitimate ruler, a legitimate church, and appropriate laws
and liberties – brought the Christian world directly into dialogue with the
biblical vision of an order of independent nations. And it was this principle
that set the world free.
Hazony contrasts
the “Protestant construction” with the imperialist vision of the “Roman
church.” The Roman Catholic church, he writes, “adopted the Roman dream
of universal empire, and the project of Roman law, which aspired to provide a
single framework for a pax
Romana (“Roman peace”) extending to all nations.” [The period 27 BC
to 180 AD when no one challenged the Roman Empire.] He adds,
For more than a thousand years, Christianity thus aligned itself, not
with the ideal of setting the nations free as had been proposed by the Israeli
prophets, but with much the same aspiration that had given rise to imperial
Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia: the aspiration of establishing a universal
empire of peace and prosperity. [It is erroneous to ignore Sumer, the more ancient inventor of the
wheel, writing, and codes of law. They suggested that the Gods, focused on the
heavens, assign to humankind the responsibility to pursue
comprehensive-safety& security to life on earth and to the earth.]
Hazony provides a lot to chew on. [Yet covers only the recent “scholarly” squabble
over literature covering the period 3,000 years ago through 1700 years ago,
with Protestant interjection 500 years ago. Meanwhile, the civic-humankind
intends to colonize the moon starting 10 years from now.]
As an initial matter, I think Hazony goes a bit too easy on
Protestantism and a bit too harshly on Catholicism—and I say that as a
true-believing Missouri Synod
Lutheran. In Hazony’s telling, the Protestant construction aligns
itself, and issues from, “the
biblical vision of an order of independent nations.”
There are two difficulties with Hazony’s claim. The first is whether the Old
Testament prophets and writers in fact taught this “the biblical vision of an
order of independent nations.” The second is whether if indeed they did, it motivated the Protestant
construction, a construction Hazony treats as essentially equivalent to the Westphalian system
of nation states. [Led
to “nothing
... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are
essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state", has faced
recent challenges from advocates of humanitarian
intervention.]
One might
just as easily invert Hazony’s hypothesis regarding the historical genesis of
Catholicism’s universal vision and the emergence of the Protestant national
construction [We
observe in 2022 that alien Catholic charities pay coyotes to escort illegal
aliens to the U.S. border and domestic Catholic charities support the illegal
entrants to the U.S.]: To wit, that the latter developed as a practical
accommodation to the religious divisions in Europe, the former issued from
universalistic religious visions in the Bible, very much including, if not
actually founded upon, universalistic religious visions in the Old Testament
prophets and writers.
To be sure, “an order of independent nations” would still
provide the advantages Hazony argues for even if it is not inspired by a
“biblical vision.” (And, indeed, I’m inclined to agree with many of the
advantages he suggests derive from the system.) Nonetheless, I think it’s
pretty easy to see that the Protestant construction, as Hazony puts it—the
Westphalian system, as I would put it—has more to do with the very practical need to end a ruinous cycle of
religious wars in Europe [George Washington want to stay out of European religious squabbles.]
than with Protestants deriving a commitment to “an order of independent
nations” from their reading of the Bible.
Indeed, if
anything, Lutheran and Reformed (i.e., “Calvinistic”) churches share the
religious universalism of Roman Catholicism.
I’ll dip into Hazony’s characterization of what the Old
Testament prophets and writers taught in subsequent posts. But two practical
items of note regarding Protestant universalism. First, the huge commitment of time, money, and
manpower of Protestant churches, particularly conservative Protestant churches,
to missions and evangelism, to Jesus’ call to “disciple the nations” at the end
of the Gospel of Matthew, testifies to a religiously universalistic
orientation. That is, to becoming
“one in their thoughts.”
The second
is an anecdote illuminating the same. A couple of decades back, on learning I
was a Missouri Synod Lutheran [LCMS], the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who was raised in the
LCMS and converted to Catholicism in 1990, related this personal story: After
he converted to Catholicism, he sat down with his elderly mother to explain why
he converted. He went through all his reasons and justifications. When he
finished his explanation, his mother reached for his hand, patted it, and said,
“Yes, John, I understand all that. But why did you leave the Church?” This was the classic
self-understanding of Old Missouri. The Synod was the Church; it shared Rome’s universalistic
aspirations. [Not
shared: competed with.]
Protestant churches, at least classically Protestant
churches, are as universalistic as Rome. The Westphalian system was a practical
necessity, whether or not it was biblically motivated as well. And, again, the
motivation for the rise of the Westphalian system need not affect the practical
value of a commitment to a system of independent nation states. Nonetheless,
Hazony’s religious argument, both historical and Biblical, are contestable. I
plan to consider Hazony’s claim that the Old Testament writers and prophets
distinctly endorse a system of independent nation states in subsequent posts.
[The
person who develops civic-integrity can& may usually choose the-good&
not repeat error. Their responsible-human-independence (RHI) aids humankind in
its pursuit of discovery& positive application of the–laws-of-physics.
Humankind is greater because of each person’s RHI. In the same way, the United
States is stronger because of 50 state-constitutions. Likewise, humankind is
made stronger when most nations develop RHI rather than unite under one
constitution.]
James R. Rogers is Associate Professor of Political
Science at Texas A&M University and Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty. He holds a J.D.
as well as a Ph.D., and teaches and publishes at the intersection of law,
politics, and game theory. He has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science,
the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization,
Public Choice, and in numerous other journals. He edited and
contributed to the book Institutional Games and the
Supreme Court, and served as editor of the Journal of Theoretical Politics from
2006 through 2013.
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