Popularizing the Sacred Religious History and the Public Imagination

“Popularizing the Sacred: Religious History and the Public Imagination” For many Americans religion, and more specifically Christianity, offers an accessible and meaningful narrative that clarifies messier historical developments. Indeed, some argue that American history is inexplicable apart from a Christian sense of providence or divine purpose. Although not limited to the United States, the American practice of claiming a “usable” religious history has, over time, become conspicuously connected with broader public understandings of history in general. “Secular” historical interpretation is subject to constant correction by those possessing “sacred” insight into the meaning of history. History is not a discipline with rules and boundaries, rather it is the purview of anybody who can connect past and contemporary events to divine purpose. Historical interpretation is not so much a profession as an intuition, a hunch, a knowing nod amongst the initiated. Television and radio programs such as The Glenn Beck Show, Focus on the Family, and the 700 Club, popularize the sacralization of American history. Countless blogs make experts out of armchair historians. Christian apologists promote Christian interpretations of history by appealing to a biblical worldview. Arguments supporting the “correct” understanding of America’s Christian heritage litter Newspaper opinion columns. Leaders of both political parties have, for a variety of reasons, indulged in public expressions of faith, and, at least rhetorically speaking, there is little difference between a Republican president who declares “our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be the model to the world of justice and inclusion and diversity without division,” and democratic president who admonishes “God can change us and make us strong at the broken places.” Of course, presidents and presidential candidates are not the only leaders who talk openly about their beliefs. Elected and non-elected officials at the local, state, and national levels frequently express their religious convictions to the public as well. From seemingly innocuous and ill-defined references to “faith” and the “divine,” to more serious attempts at providing religious rationales for the country’s legal system, many contemporary American political figures embraced the notion that faith commitments somehow belong in the public square and should appeal to the popular imagination. Although not limited to the United States, the practice of popularizing the sacred has over time become conspicuously connected with American public and political life eliciting both inspiration and frustration from a citizenry who are by and large divided over the degree to which public expressions of faith should be tolerated. Cynics contend that public figures, especially politicians, who advertise their religious beliefs are engaging in nothing less than Machiavellian propaganda, but others counter that this practice is a welcome indication of a leader’s moral compass. One of the difficulties surrounding popularizing the sacred by political figures is that there are no legal prohibitions against a politician conveying his or her personal religious convictions. Still, despite the lack of a positive prohibition, some Americans are uncomfortable with the practice and they view it, in principle, as a repudiation of the separation of church and state. The debate over the “public face” of American religion is indeed a pressing contemporary concern, but antecedents of the current discussion can be found in the religious and political heritage of America’s colonial beginnings and traced through the course of the country’s history. Puritan theology held that Israel, not Athens or Rome, represented the political ideal of antiquity that believers should seek to emulate. In this regard the Puritans shared some measure of continuity with the medieval political theology of the Catholic Church. 1 But the Puritan experiment was unique in the history of church-state relations in that theirs was indeed an “errand in the wilderness,” a society largely set free from the burden of European history, and yet at the same time sincerely committed to reinventing a new kind of Christian culture with a positive sense of mission. Aspects of this Puritan sense of mission slowly permeated the collective identity of the both the colonies and the young republic, and in particular it affected public appropriation of the sacred for later generations of Americans in two important ways. First, the language of scripture, especially the Old Testament, easily translated into an American colonial and eventually national context that conceived of itself, even if metaphorically, as a covenanted “New Israel” set apart for a special purpose in human history. Second, the Puritan conviction that God was at work in history and that they were providentially chosen to be an example to the world of what a Christian society should look like imbued the American experience with a sense of higher purpose and significance readily adopted for political purposes as the United States grew into first its national and then its international identity. Tellingly, however, the theological presuppositions that informed the ways in which the Puritans expressed their faith would slowly be transformed and eventually discarded to meet the demands of an increasingly pluralistic society struggling to understand the practical implications of democracy. Even in the early years of the New England experiment the Puritan way never achieved complete unanimity. Dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Thomas Hooker emerged within a few years of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to challenge both the theology and politics of the young Puritan community. Over time Puritan solidarity fragmented, and the sense of destiny that accompanied second and third generations of New Englanders fluctuated with their political fortunes at home and abroad. Outside of New England, colonists experienced even more complicated relationships with religion and public life. By the 1700s religious diversity was the rule in New York as Dutch Calvinists, Anglicans, Lutherans, German Reformed, Catholics, and Jews swelled Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley. Further south in the middle colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and various sects of Pietists shared space with Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Puritans who had left New England in search of even holier commonwealths. Maryland was founded as a haven for Catholics in 1632, and in 1649 the Catholic controlled Maryland assembly adopted an Act of Toleration welcoming all Christian faiths to the colony. Religious tolerance in Maryland, however, ebbed and flowed throughout the seventeenth century according to which theological community held power. 2 In the southern colonies Anglicanism was in general the largest denomination until the English Act of Toleration was passed after the Glorious Revolution of 1689. As a result Protestant dissenters, primarily Baptists and Presbyterians, gradually began to occupy Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Both inside and outside of New England seeds of religious pluralism were being sown, but the growth of denominationalism and sectarianism did not undermine an accessible public religion in the colonies. Between 1720 and 1750 the revivals of the First Great Awakening rekindled the hopes for providential designs on America, and they provided a kind of ideological unity to the disparate religious landscape that would in time bolster the new nation. In particular revivalist preachers like Solomon Stoddard, George Whitfield, and Jonathan Edwards encouraged the expectation that the millennial Kingdom of Christ would emerge through the earnest efforts of committed Christians. 3 Frequently, the hope of Christ’s future reign on earth was associated with the idea that young America would play an important role in God’s ultimate plan for extending redemption to the world. Even Jonathan Edwards, the most skeptical of all the Great Awakening leaders with regard to America’s special place in redemptive history, confessed that since “the old continent has crucified Christ . . . ’tis probable that, in some measure to balance these things, the most glorious renovation of the world shall originate from the new continent.” 4 By the middle decades of the eighteenth century many Americans were convinced that the future success of the colonies depended upon the spiritual sincerity and moral fortitude of “converted” Protestants who had come to experience the power of God in very personal ways. This new spiritual personalism marked an important shift in American religious thought as more and more Protestants came to emphasize the emotional and subjective aspects of their faith over and against confessionalism and doctrinal assent. The turn toward experiential religion in the eighteenth century was accompanied by equally dramatic changes in the relationship between religion and politics. From the late 1600s to the early 1800s new trends science and philosophy reshaped the intellectual landscape of both Europe and America by reordering, if not completely overturning, traditional assumptions about God, the natural world, and human nature. Although there is no one result that captures the impact of the Enlightenment on religious thought, in general terms the period witnessed a shift away from supernatural theism toward more rational or natural explanations of God’s dealings with humanity. For some religion was dismissed as irrelevant, but for others it was only much more circumscribed than it had been in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern periods. Typically, supernatural events supported by the church such as miracles and divine revelation were rejected in favor of beliefs discovered by human reason and observation of the natural world, and this rational process in turn uncovered natural religious truths — truths that could be universally accepted because they were valid at all times and in all places, or because they had been imprinted into human consciousness by a god who was otherwise quite impersonal. “Natural religion,” or “natural theology” challenged the received confessional positions of both Catholics and Protestants, and it opened-up the possibility of safeguarding moral behavior without recourse to a particular sectarian interpretation of the Bible. Moreover, in the wake of the religious wars that ravaged Europe the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the rise of monarchical absolutism, Enlightenment approaches to religion led to new ways of thinking about how shared moral justifications for public life could be retained without committing the state to a particular theological position. 5 Taken together, the exigencies of religious pluralism, the millennial hopes of the Great Awakening, and new intellectual currents emerging from Enlightenment thought changed the way public leaders expressed their faith during the American Revolution and the formative years of the early republic. Certain Puritan concepts were retained, but they were largely divorced from the ideal of an organic Christian society that viewed the Bible as a comprehensive guide to all of life. The dogmatic constructions of covenant theology that had been so essential to the Puritan experiment carried sectarian baggage that was in many ways irrelevant to the political purposes of the late 1700s. Yet, the belief that government was entrusted with a “sacred purpose” remained viable to a population conditioned by religious awakening and in the main committed to a broadly conceived cultural Protestantism. No doubt religion still mattered, but for many it slowly began to matter as much for its social utility as its theological implications. “Providence” was still at work, but the idea lacked the well defined biblical meaning it had carried for earlier generations of creedal Calvinists; the Bible still had something important to say about God and human nature, but not in terms of rigid dogma; theology was still significant, but primarily for its ethical imperatives rather than its claims of supernatural authority. As American Christianity, specifically American Protestantism, evolved so too did its public or political face. On the one hand, public references to religion provided a moral, if not metaphysical, rationale for the American experiment. On the other hand, most public figures carefully refrained from making dogmatic statements about their faith or referencing any particular confessional system as a guide to the “truth” of Christianity. Religion remained important, but its importance increasingly stemmed more from its usefulness to republican values rather than its spiritual veracity. The Founding Fathers, in particular, left the country a peculiar legacy with regard to the public appropriation of the sacred. Virtue and morality were important to the nation, and indeed the ethical precepts of Christianity provided a code of personal behavior that could benefit all citizens. But if Christianity, or any religion for that matter, was to be useful to the republic it had to be carefully contained. If disputes over nuanced theological positions or doctrinal convictions were to spill into public life then the social order risked fragmentation and disarray. If, however, Americans could find a common core of religious teachings shared by everyone then religion offered a powerful tool for unifying a diverse population. Public figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have to navigate this situation very carefully. For much of the nineteenth century most Protestant Americans had little trouble adjusting to the absence of an established religion as they found common cause in trans-denominational crusades designed to alleviate social-ills deemed dangerous to the country. Inspired by the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening (1800-1830s), numerous voluntary moral reform movements actively campaigned for causes such as temperance, maintenance of Sabbath laws, distribution of religious tracts and Bibles, and Protestant control of public education. 6 These activities secured vast networks of local organizations dedicated to transforming society, and they provided religious reformers a way to make their faith relevant for public life without violating the Founders’ directive that moral usages of Christianity were appropriate so long as doctrinal or sectarian disputes could be avoided. Politically speaking, the Whig Party much more than the Democratic Party capitalized on the energy of revivalism and reform, and they more than the Democrats kept the moral sentiments of Christianity firmly in the public imagination. The idea that the nation retained a certain Protestant character, even if ill-defined, provided a measure of social cohesiveness in the early decades of the nation’s history. However, this proposal remained valid only to the extent that both religious denominations and political parties could agree on broad ethical imperatives that steered far away from contentious theological or social issues that exposed fault-lines in generic public Protestantism. One issue that could not be avoided in the nineteenth century was the question of free versus slave labor, and entrenched disagreement over the matter manifested not only geographically and politically between the North and the South, but theologically as well. Political and ecclesiastical leaders on both sides of the slavery debate were quick to use religion to justify their arguments, and their heated rhetoric portended the bloody calamity of the Civil War. The Civil War, and specifically Lincoln’s use of religious rhetoric in the cause of the union, inspired a reinvigorated missiological zeal for the meaning of democracy in the modern world. After 1865, as America grew into a competitive industrial nation-state, if not the complete reality at least the ideal of “freedom” gained a consecrated significance not seen since the American Revolution, and the religious nationalism captured in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln continued in the oratory of political figures from all regions of the country. A major shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, however, was America’s growing presence as a world power that could contend with European nations for military and economic superiority. Where domestic quarrels divided Americans in the nineteenth century, increasingly international conflicts tended to unite them in the twentieth century. As the United States slowly assumed a dominant role on the world stage political leaders again invoked God to sanction the meaning of democracy in almost spiritual terms. At the same time, twentieth-century public religious rhetoric followed the pattern of earlier centuries by ignoring nuanced theological disputes in favor of language that supported a broad ethical consensus that could appeal to all Americans. Public usage of religion has been a part of the American experience since the country’s colonial beginnings and, at least in recent decades, it has become a source of controversy and division. While the practice has varied according to historical circumstance, there remain certain perennial characteristics to the way religion, specifically Christianity, has been appropriated by the public imagination in the United States. By and large past public expressions of faith in America stem from a Protestant theological disposition. In particular, they originate with the Puritan notion that divine providence secured in the American experiment a kind of sacred purpose unique among the nations. Fueled by revivalism in the eighteenth century, the notion of being “set apart” or “chosen by God” lingered in the American imagination long after Puritan solidarity collapsed and fragmented the New England theological landscape. With the coming of the American Revolution and the birth of the republic, however, the Protestant ethos established a pattern that would have dramatic consequences for the future of the United States. After the Constitution of the United States was adopted by the various states two important principles bequeathed by the Founding Fathers became part of the American identity: first, the country would have no established national religion, and second people would have the right to speak freely about religion. Under this arrangement the confessional or dogmatic Protestantism of the early colonial period, that is the Protestantism born out of the doctrinal controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slowly ceased to matter in a legal sense to American political life. No doubt within the denominational contexts (Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, etc.) the theological content of the faith remained important, however in the United States one’s theological convictions would not be a prerequisite for citizenship nor would creedal assent be necessary to participate in American civic life. Rather, in terms of its public importance, Christianity would be valued for its broad ethical imperatives and its ability to proffer a moral consensus for a free, but otherwise disparate people. In other words, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, owing in large part to the influence of both revivalistic conversionism and Enlightenment political thought, matters of faith became intensely personal. The move toward the privatization of religious convictions did not, however, mean the absolute loss of Christian influence upon American culture, and as the religious climate of the nation changed so too did public expressions of faith. The moral and symbolic capital of Christianity, specifically Protestantism, remained and continued to be referenced even after nuanced doctrinal arguments became irrelevant to the legal construction of the American political project. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century as the responsibilities of democratic citizenship were increasingly viewed through the lens of Protestant social imperatives, sentimental notions of what it meant to be both an American and a Christian replaced the robust “public theologies” of earlier American life. These emotional ties were strong, and they provided a shared moral sensibility that united a number of social causes in the early decades of the republic. Still, they were not strong enough to keep at bay the profound political crises generated by the problems of slavery and immigration, and as these two issues divided the country, public expressions of faith were divided as well. After the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, religion continued to matter for public life as long as theological disputes remained on the sideline of political discourse. As with previous generations both the “idea” of God and the “social teachings” of Jesus were valuable to a democratic and free people, but arguments over doctrinal interpretation—such as the nature of the atonement or the continuity between the two testaments of Scripture—were not. As the United States grew into a world power the ideals and idealism of democracy assumed a hallowed place in the moral reasoning of many Americans and in language that echoed both the Puritans and Abraham Lincoln, twentieth-century political leaders often described both the domestic and the global challenges facing the country in religious terms. 7 With the political and social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, however, the strained moral consensus forged out of the union of facile Protestant social sensibilities and democratic idealism collapsed. Although a conservative cultural reaction continues to keep public usage of religious history at the fore of American life, the exigencies of pluralism and multiculturalism, and the legal difficulties surrounding the non-establishment clause complicate the place of religion in public life. Advocacy groups such as the ACLU and the People for the American Way insist that even though it is not legally forbidden, it is nevertheless bad precedent to interject personal beliefs into any aspect of politics, rhetorical or otherwise. Moreover, the limits of what the electorate will tolerate with regard to public expressions of faith outside the Christian tradition are yet to be fully realized. The year 2007 witnessed the first Muslim elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, sworn into office using a copy of Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, and it appears 2012 will yield the first Mormon presidential candidate, former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. Still, it is not clear how non-conventional religious expression will be received by a population that largely identifies itself as Christian if even in the abstract. Because many Americans value the cultural accord afforded by a common moral vision the idea of a shared religious heritage carries substantial political cache for those seeking public office while also providing the average citizen an unambiguous moral narrative. Even though this alleged religious heritage lacks specific doctrinal commitments, political leaders have successfully integrated it into their public rhetoric for over two centuries. Still, no matter how frequently God or religion is referenced by a politician certain questions remain. If God matters to the public square, how does he matter? If religion is relevant to liberal democracy, how is it relevant? In the early years of the twenty-first century answers to these questions still remain elusive, but the public imagining of the sacred continues undiminished.