“Religion and humanity had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.”
—John Rutledge of South Carolina, August 6, 1787, during debate on the slave trade, recorded in James Madison’s “Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention”
I tried to watch as much as I could of “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving,” held on the National Mall on May 17. Featuring Evangelical leaders like Dutch Sheets and Lou Engle on the same stage as Bishop Robert Barron, the event purportedly marked the 250th anniversary of a “Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer” observed by the Second Continental Congress. Its estrangement from the rigors of history and theology stretched farther than the Trump administration’s seeming determination to avoid “humiliation” and “fasting.” Despite an abundance of contrary evidence, for a long time the common refrain among Catholics and Evangelicals (generally those lining up behind Republican candidates) has been that the United States was founded explicitly as a Christian nation, just as the speakers at Rededicate 250 affirmed over and over. Our founding documents make no such claim. None of the men present at the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention said any such thing. Yet still the idea persists.
Rededicate 250, organized as a public-private partnership with the Trump administration, promised the event would “solemnly rededicat[e] our country as One Nation under God.” Robert Jeffress (who has called Catholicism a “counterfeit” religion) enthused, “It was God who guided our forefathers.” Jonathan Falwell, son of the late Jerry Falwell, sounded a theme for the day when he insisted that the United States “is one nation under God.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, addressing his remarks to God, recalled how “we, in the beginning, dedicated this land to your holy name.” But Bishop Robert Barron perhaps stands out for having offered a historical and theological case worth some greater attention.
Bishop Barron’s remarks recall the efforts of others like Michael Novak. Novak’s 2001 book On Two Wings argued that the American founding was a synthesis of both biblical wisdom and Enlightenment reason. It won favorable notice from Richard John Neuhaus in First Things and it was reviewed favorably (more or less) in Commonweal. Evangelicals like Chuck Colson and Kerby Anderson liked the book. And why not? As much as Barron’s remarks, it tells a cheerful story that helps us feel good about being religious believers in the United States. The story even has some truth in it. That’s the problem.
Like Novak, Barron looks to the “Christian formation” of the men who founded the United States. His argument, in sum, is that “God is essential to any coherent account of democracy, freedom, and equality.” To make this case, he neither cites John Courtney Murray nor points to Pacem in terris, Gaudium et spes, or Centesimus annus. His audience at Rededicate 250 was not a Catholic audience, and in any event those magisterial documents offer incomplete defenses of democracy, freedom, and equality when we read them carefully. Instead, Barron looks to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King Jr., and this is interesting. Lincoln and King were among those “men and women of good will” named by Pope Francis in his 2015 address to Congress. But Lincoln and Jefferson, at least, suggest where the trouble lies. And, in a different way, so does King.
King is the outlier in Barron’s story. He seems to be included because his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” affirms Barron’s claim that the “consistent thread” in U.S. history has been “the conviction that human dignity, equality, rights, freedom, and the rule of law are all grounded in God.” But this works silently against Barron’s argument, too. Barron is certain that our American foundation in God has made us different from “countries that denied the existence of God.” Because the American founders insisted that rights come from our Creator, our rights cannot “be rescinded,” he tells us. But that proposition might have seemed strange to King while he was writing from a jail cell. It would seem strange to Indigenous peoples and women, and to Catholics who suffered Know Nothing discrimination from the state houses of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and other places. It might surprise Catholics held in detention facilities by the Trump administration and who, until recently, were denied access to pastoral care and the sacraments. God has not given the kind of guarantee in the United States Bishop Barron thinks “all men” have gotten.
Then there are Jefferson and Lincoln. Both used religious references and imagery in all the ways Bishop Barron says they did. Yet they were far from orthodox believers. Lincoln never joined a church. Jefferson composed The Jefferson Bible, a digest of the four Gospels with every supernatural element removed (including the Resurrection) to leave only “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” Jefferson’s actual faith. Novak was prudent enough to skirt Lincoln with only brief mentions, and he acknowledged Jefferson as an atheist. Both Jefferson and Lincoln raise as many problems for arguing the United States was intended to be a nation “under God” as they could appear to solve, and it is doubtful that the way either man believed would be acceptable to many who gathered on the National Mall to hear speakers at Rededicate 250.
What Jefferson and Lincoln call to mind mostly is that many people helped had a hand in the founding of the United States, and they held widely different points of view. Fifty-six men haggled over the Declaration of Independence, fifty-five worked out the Constitution, and only six were present for both. The founding of the United States was more than one thing; it meant different things to different people, and it was filled with compromises because it had to be. One of those compromises made a human being into three-fifths of a human being. Another preserved slavery until at least 1808, and another deleted a condemnation of the Atlantic slave trade from the Declaration. Others balanced large states against small states. The Electoral College and the right of states to regulate commerce within their borders were the results of compromise. All claims that the founding of the United States had one clear meaning—whether about religion or anything else—should seem suspicious.
Bishop Barron focuses on Jefferson, Lincoln, and King. Novak widened the lens to include John Adams, John Dickinson, William Livingston, George Mason, and others. But both lists are selective. They fail to represent even all of the men who were most involved in the founding of the United States, to say nothing of wider opinion.
And that means they omit someone like John Rutledge, who made the perfectly ordinary eighteenth-century observation that “interest alone is the governing principle with nations” when he disqualified religious objections to slavery. Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would have accepted the primacy of rational self-interest even if they disagreed about slavery. Most merchants probably would have held an opinion like that too. Certainly someone like John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur did. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), he both named “SELF INTEREST” as “the basis of nature” and said that, in the United States, religion “demands but a little” from an American who is “a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas.” Christianity was not suited to the “new man.”
Since the early 2000s (if not longer), religious leaders have taken the religious language present at the founding of the United States for proof of something they want to see. They have ignored a lot of history to do it. The effort has drawn Evangelicals and Catholics together in political collaborations like the one we saw at Rededicate 250. But it is important to keep an eye on the larger historical picture. Men in the founding generation of the United States knew what the speakers at Rededicate 250 have forgotten. European wars between Christians in the seventeenth century cost millions of lives and drove dissenters from their homes across an ocean to the shores of another continent in search of safety from other Christian believers who would have oppressed, persecuted, and perhaps killed them. Even here, they did not always find safety from other believers.
Religion does not solve the problem of governing. Religion is politically useful because it speaks to what citizens believe. But the achievement of the modern world is to recognize that politics is not religion and the state must be distinct from the houses of worship if, indeed (as Jefferson wrote), “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment