America is not a Christian country

[Marcus Marulus]

America is not a Christian country

By Thomas Fleming

27 August 2005

The Spectator

President Bush’s remark the other day that the theory of ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside the theory of evolution brought howls of derision from his detractors in Europe and the United States. It was, they said, one more piece of evidence that America is populated by fundamentalist zombies who are potentially as dangerous as bin Laden’s boys. Intelligent design, it goes without saying, is a boneheaded piece of pseudo-science, almost as simplistic as the naive materialism that Darwinists teach. But neither side of the argument cares about logic, much less truth. The important thing is to declare which side you are on: religious fanaticism or cosmopolitan anti-religious fanaticism.

Both sides agree on one thing: that America really is the promised Land of true-believing Christians. In ‘Old Europe’, the United States is seen as a land of extreme piety and fanatical Puritanism. In the United States, at least among those who support the Bush administration, Europe — France, in particular — is regarded as impious, socialist and immoral, but then France has always been America’s favourite whipping boy.

‘Man,’ declared Mark Twain, ‘is a creature who stands somewhere between the angels and the French,’ and French husbands, according to American legend, are flagrantly disloyal, while American men are the very models of marital fidelity. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the French are more likely to cheat on their wives than the Americans; and in most areas of traditional morality, the French are better behaved than the Americans. According to a worldwide survey of abortion rates in the 1990s, for example, a statistically average American woman could be expected to have .69 abortions, while her French counterpart would have .39 (and a German woman only .23). In America, furthermore, the divorce rate is more than twice as high as it is in France, and the rate of teenage pregnancies more than five times as high. In so far as these things can be measured scientifically, Americans are more sexually permissive — though also more puritanical — than Europeans.

So is there anything to American piety, or is it one of those useful myths that make it easier for BBC presenters to pretend to understand complex issues?

America has always been a strange place, even to Americans. While most countries are content merely to exist, America is supposed to have a project, a destiny, a divine mission. New England Puritans suffered from the delusion that their little settlement was a ‘city on a hill’, and Cotton Mather, who played a key role in the Salem witch trials, thought New England was plagued by witches because, before the arrival of white European Calvinists, the continent had been a playground for devil-worshipping Indians and idolatrous Catholics. President Lincoln went so far as to describe the United States as ‘dedicated’ to a proposition, and secular Americans speak glibly of America as ‘an experiment’ — a grisly idea, if ever there was one. Even today patriotic conservatives believe that ‘God’ has blessed our nation as a reward for our virtue and our piety. As H.L. Mencken observed in a more candid age, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating ...the American people.’

Small wonder that so many Europeans are afraid of the United States and its messianic approach to foreign policy. The good news is that all our exceptional virtue and piety is so much buncombe, as Mencken would have said. Despite the many myths of American ‘exceptionalism’, most Americans have always been just as content to muddle through as if they had been born among the unredeemed heathens of London and Paris.

In fact, America’s lack of genuine piety has aroused the ire of some excitable Catholic intellectuals who regard the United States as a masonic conspiracy. After pointing out the masonic symbols on the dollar bill (to say nothing of the masonic design of the national capital), they will go on to cite the fact that the constitution (drafted by leading freemasons) never mentions Christianity. This omission is aggravated by the doctrine of ‘the separation of church and state’ — a notion unacceptable to some traditional Catholics. This historical interpretation (apart from the bit about the masonic conspiracy) is utter nonsense. Christianity is not mentioned in the constitution because it is a treaty of union, not an ideological declaration. In a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional union, the best way to avoid religious conflict was for the national and state governments to be neutral towards competing Christian sects.

Conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, insist that the founders of the republic were all pious Christians. In fact, few of the men who led the revolution or drafted the constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox. Washington was an ordinary Anglican, which even in the 18th century meant very little, while John Adams was a Unitarian, Jefferson a mildly anti-Christian deist, and Ben Franklin a sceptical freemason as well as a rake. America —alas, it is all too true — has been swept periodically by revivals and cult crazes. Many of the cultists went west and ended up in California, the last stop of the rootless and disaffected before falling into the Pacific.

I have lived 60 years in the United States, the first 25 of them as an atheist, the last 35 as an increasingly reactionary Christian. I have never witnessed the great piety and deep spirituality which I have heard described in 4 July addresses and in semi-scholarly tomes on American religion. We are a practical people, above all else, and, as I have heard repeatedly from business and political leaders, religion makes good sense: the man who goes to church also goes to work, takes care of his family, pays his taxes. This is religiosity, not Christianity.

For American Christians, what they say they believe does not always translate into concrete actions or even into support for Christian moral positions. They complain, occasionally, about the prohibition of prayer in school and resent media attacks on religion, but they seem unaffected by the pervasive blasphemy of television commercials and by the barbaric post-Christian morality of everyday life in these United States. This is a country, remember, where Britney Spears was a spokesbimbo for the Episcopal Church. Many evangelical and Catholic Christians actively supported the philandering, lying Bill Clinton, and many traditional Catholics, in defiance of both the Vatican and the Church’s teachings on just war, support George Bush’s war in Iraq. In March 2003 Pope John Paul II, who described his opposition to the war as ‘unequivocal’, sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to dissuade President Bush from attacking Iraq. The President told Cardinal Laghi, ‘We’ll be quick and do well in Iraq.’ As Cardinal Laghi, who calls the invasion ‘tragic and unacceptable’, points out, ‘Bush was wrong.’

But warmongering Catholics are no match for the Revd Pat Robertson. Mr Robertson has gone beyond deflecting hurricanes and denouncing Ariel Sharon for turning Jewish settlers out of land that God gave them. Now he has called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the troublesome president of Venezuela. In defiance of both logic and Christian ethics, Robertson recently said: ‘If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.’

When foreigners speak of American piety, they usually have in mind some form of evangelical Protestantism. But that is a very broad category, which includes austere and disciplined Calvinists in the South as well as clownish TV preachers and the megachurches fitted out with rock bands and wall-sized video screens. Imagine a luxurious sports complex with Elvis, in his sequinned powder-blue Vegas jumpsuit, crooning ‘How Great Thou Art’ to a mob of hysterical middle-aged women writhing in the aisles. This is not ‘that old-time religion’, unless the ‘old time’ in question is the heyday of the Münster anabaptists. Perhaps I am biased: as a pure-minded young atheist I was arrested for mocking a travelling evangelist who healed the sick and raised the dead with wirework that anticipated Hong Kong martial arts movies.

The United States was never a ‘Christian country’ in a confessional sense, though it was once a nation of mostly Christians. Today, it is a nation with a weak-kneed Christian majority that elects, year after year, an actively anti-Christian political class that encourages divorce, protects abortion and pornography, and banishes prayer and Christian symbols from public places. Republican leaders, it is true, pander to their Christian constituents, but they have never and will never lift a finger to advance the cause of Christian morality, much less Christian faith.

Most Americans say they ‘believe in God’, and Americans do attend religious services more frequently than Europeans, or at least they tell pollsters they do, though when the numbers of an ABC poll are broken down, weekly churchgoers tend to be women, Southern, Republican, and old. In western Europe, far fewer people go to church or profess any religious faith, but, from what I have seen, observant Catholics in Italy and France are a good deal more serious than their counterparts here in the land of ‘In God We Trust’.

To compare apples with apples, the most prominent conservative Catholics in the United States are the so-called neoconservatives. They are indifferent or hostile to the traditional liturgy, defend the discovery of democratic capitalism as an event of ‘incarnational significance’ (Michael Novak), and have routinely defended US foreign policy against explicit statements of John Paul II. Catholic neoconservatives represent the triumph of ‘Americanism’ in the Church. They are more Republican than Catholic, more loyal to George Bush than to any Pope. In secular, anti-Catholic France, a Catholic has to be resolute, even courageous; in America, he just goes with the flow.

European leftists can breathe a sigh of relief. A typical American may go to church too often to be respectable, but when he walks out on the street he is either a little liberal or else a little conservative. If there really were a ‘Christian America’, Hollywood would be broke, and the ashes of both political parties would be reposing quietly in the dustbin of history.

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[source]

The myth of the allegedly very "Christian", conservative, traditionalist America still persists in the mind of many Europeans and the myth is cherished by large sections of both "left" and "right"...

[Sergius]

Well said. Every day that the (neo)cons in the States stay in power and practice their "Christian" values, is an insult to Christianity and a great day for Atheism.

[Aptrgangr]

The U.S. is not a 'Christian nation'

By Jon Meacham

Monday, October 8, 2007

Senator John McCain was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last year for very long - McCain, who once referred to Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance," was there to receive an honorary degree - but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood.
In a recent interview with Beliefnet.com, McCain repeated what is an article of faith among many American evangelicals: "The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

According to Scripture, however, believers are to be wary of all mortal powers. Their home is the kingdom of God, which transcends all earthly things, not any particular nation-state.
The Psalmist advises believers to "put not your trust in princes." The author of Job says that the Lord "shows no partiality to princes nor regards the rich above the poor, for they are all the work of his hands." Before Pilate, Jesus says, "My kingdom is not of this world."

And if, as Paul writes in Galatians, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus," then it is difficult to see how there could be a distinction in God's eyes between, say, an American and an Australian.
In fact, there is no distinction if you believe Peter's words in the Acts of the Apostles: "I most certainly believe now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him."
The kingdom Jesus preached was radical. Not only are nations irrelevant, but families are, too: He instructs those who would be his disciples to give up all they have and all those they know to follow him.

The only acknowledgment of God in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: The document is dated "in the year of our Lord 1787." Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith. The Connecticut ratifying convention debated rewriting the preamble to take note of God's authority, but the effort failed.

A pseudonymous opponent of the Connecticut proposal had some fun with the notion of a deity who would, in a sense, be checking the index for his name: "A low mind may imagine that God, like a foolish old man, will think himself slighted and dishonored if he is not complimented with a seat or a prologue of recognition in the Constitution."
Instead, the framers, the opponent wrote in The American Mercury, "come to us in the plain language of common sense and propose to our understanding a system of government as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, not a God appears in a dream to propose any part of it."
While many states maintained established churches and religious tests for office - Massachusetts was the last to disestablish, in 1833 - the federal framers, in their refusal to link civil rights to religious observance or adherence, helped create a culture of religious liberty that ultimately carried the day.

Thomas Jefferson said his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination."
When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city's clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time) - a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, saying, "happily the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a "Christian party in politics." Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed "Christian amendment" to the Constitution to declare the nation's fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.
The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God.
They grounded the founding principle of the nation - that all men are created equal - in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country's tapestry, not the whole tapestry.

In the 1790s, in the waters off Tripoli, pirates were making sport of American shipping near the Barbary Coast. Toward the end of his second term, Washington sent Joel Barlow, the diplomat-poet, to Tripoli to settle matters, and the resulting treaty, finished after Washington left office, bought a few years of peace. Article 11 of this long-ago document says that "as the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," there should be no cause for conflict over differences of "religious opinion" between countries.
The treaty passed the Senate unanimously. McCain is not the only American who would find it useful reading.

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of "American Gospel" and "Franklin and Winston."

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