The people who are out beating the bushes for the “Christian Nation” theory have already made up their minds and are not about to be dissuaded form the position that the actual hand of God the Father Almighty guided T. Jefferson’s hand as he drafter the Great Deceleration and that the Holy Spirit whispered in the ears of the men at the constitutional convention. They have an agenda. That agenda is that (1) everybody ought to think and believe just like I do and those that don’t should be expelled or held to an inferior position until they do, and (2) the central government ought to give me money.
The simple fact is that in the early 17th Century when this country was first settled and in the late 18th Century when this country was organized almost all the settlers and almost all the organizers were Western Europeans. If they were Christians (which they certainly were) it was because their roots were in a territory where either Roman Catholicism, some variety of Calvinism or some brand of Lutheranism was dominant. It was not until the mid-Nineteenth Century that the US started to see any number of immigrants who were not North European Protestants and they scared the hell out of the locals. See, for example the Know Nothing Nativeist party. Even today the bulk of Western Europeans are nominal Christians and in not a few European countries the local dominant church is to one extent or another subsidized by the central government.
The genius or the founders was that, despite their European-Christian sources, they were able to look at the then recent history of Europe and the history of the American colonies and make a deliberate and calculated decision that the impulse to unite priest and policeman was not going to prevail here. The “Christian Nation” types, either intentionally or not, seek to make the priest a policeman and the policeman a priest. Not a good idea.
I’m not much persuaded by quotes from the founders–especially quotes lacking context. I am persuaded by history. Remember that the English Civil War and its continuation in the Highland Uprisings and Cromwell’s Commonwealth were almost current events for the men who organized this country. The Battle of Colloden preceded the “shot heard round the world” by a mere 30 years.
Ask him to show you from the Bible where God ever ordained a Constitutional Republic with free elections, freedom of speech / religion / press, and the right to a trial by jury.
Can’t do it? So much for the idea of America being a Christian nation.
Still more ad hominem arguments from the master of same. Anytime you care to address the substance of my postings, as opposed to nit-picking sentence structure and inserting revisionist fiction, let me know.
This post is an appropriate springboard to point out that we are apparently having two divergent conversations in this thread deriving from the OP.
Re the more general historical question of whether the US is a “Christian Nation” in the sense of it’s origin documents and constitution, the answer is “yes” in terms of the prominent place that the value of the individual, and the rights of the individual by extension, within the polity are assigned. The notion of the intrinsic value of the political individual is directly linked to the New Testament Christian worldview of the intrinsic value of the sacred individual.
The aforesaid “Christian” content of the proto-American political landscape in this context is mainly influential, and not some determinate paraphrasing of the Bible into the constitution. The majority of the founding fathers had enough experience with, and historical knowledge of, all the various ways a direct insertion of religious beliefs into the political process could go wrong and be abusive, and were (thankfully) determined not to let it happen in creating the operational framework of the new government.
Re the specific question of whether the US is really a “crypto-Christian” nation with a fig leaf of separation of church and state laws to make it seem otherwise, the answer is obviously “no”. The American separation of Church and state may not have always been adequately or rigorously enforced, especially in areas of overwhelming religious homogenity, but it is a bedrock of US political and social principal and (even if grudgingly) has normally been upheld where legitimately challenged.
These “show me where x article or constitutional paragraph comes directly from the bible” challenges to the “Christian influence” are strawmen to the larger questions of historical influence and operational political reality.
More of the same I see. Where is this value of the individual put forth by the church? Where are all the other Christian nations that put forth this principle? Where are rights of the individual put forth in any area in the Bible? Face it these were ideas that arose outside of the Bible and the Christian heritage.
So they were aware of the damaging influence of putting Christian principles into the framework of the government? Glad we’ve finally reached an agreement.
Some examples for the end of that if you don’t mind? Obviously I agree with the first part.
I never once asked for that. I asked for where the notions of individual freedom, equality, and democracy arose from the Bible and Christian teachings. It’s a legitimate question. Just because you have no real response doesn’t make it a straw man. Make a connection already.
I’m awaiting his email reply to my rebuttal of his (very weak) arguments, which amounted to nothing more than some quotes from some founders that included references to God and the like. Weak, weak, weak.
Well, that’s certainly been asserted. Of course it would be absurd to claim that Christian thought has had no influence on the development of modern European and American civilization, and I’m sure the Enlightenment adopted Christian ideas, as well as rebelled against them. However, the New Testament has been around for going on 2,000 years now, and for at least three-quarters of that time societies with Christian majorities have also been societies with Christian legal and political systems. This is not to blame theocracy on Christianity; indeed, by historical accident if nothing else, Christianity is probably responsible for the notion of dividing the world up into sacred and secular spheres in a way that would be quite alien to classical pagan (or for that matter Biblical Jewish) thought, and therefore paved the way for the possibility of the separation of church and state, of religion as a matter of individual conscience, and of religious liberty. However, during the period of its legal establishment Christianity seems to have co-existed quite happily with slavery, serfdom, and other forms of political and economic coercion; of widespread assertions of fundamental political and social inequality–estates of nobility and “commoners”; and of course of the deprivation of individual religious liberty. In part because Christianity was originally a supressed dissident movement in opposition to the state, it came to possess the notion of a “church” separate from the “state”, in a way which didn’t exist in Old Testament Israel or democratic Athens. Despite this incipient possibility of separate secular and sacred spheres, Christians have mostly expected church and state to function hand in glove for most of the history of Christendom, including a belief that the state should act to enforce religious orthodoxy. The Protestant Reformation initially never intended to divide Christianity into competing sects, but only to reform the single church. The Reformers (notably the Calvinists) showed precious little respect for the idea that the “sacred individual” should be allowed to decide for himself what religion he would profess. (I use the masculine pronoun advisedly, since the Christian Church has not historically been a champion of feminism.) Only by inadvertently fracturing the institutions of religion did the Reformation make religious toleration (and later true religious liberty) not only possible but necessary if religiously pluralistic societies like that of England and its colonies weren’t going to tear themselves apart.
It has only been in the last few hundred years, with Christianity legally disestablished and (no longer protected by Inquisitions and civil magistrates enforcing laws against “heresy”) subject to serious intellectual challenge, that such ideas as “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (and later that women are also equal) have become universal. As far as I know no pre-Enlightenment civilization in history–including the various Christian civilizations–had ever flatly rejected the ideas of slavery or other forms of coerced labor and institutionalized inequality such as serfdom or caste systems. None of the pre-Enlightenment Christian legal systems seems to have ever operated on the notion of universal equal civil and political rights which Americans now take for granted.
Based on the OP of this thread, I’m not sure your previous topic of argument isn’t the strawman here. The Religious Right’s pronouncements about the United States being a “Christian Nation” go well beyond philosophical and political science discussions of the origins of American constitutionalism.
This ignores the fact that there are considerably different views on issues such as separation of church and state espoused by various judges. And, the ones who have a strong interpretation of it tend to be classified as “liberal” or “moderate” and those who want to interpret such a separation very weakly tend to be “conservative”. And, Bush has been particularly apt to appoint people with strong fundamentalist religious views to various places in the government…e.g., science panels. And, then there’s the whole stem cell issue.
You may wish to believe that this issue of a Christian Nation were divorced from politics but it ain’t. (Here in the U.S that is…My impression from my years living in Canada is that the religious Right is way more marginalized there.)
Your point is well taken, that historically Christianity is not especially noted for having originated political systems that enshrine individual rights, but the more narrow point at issue in my example is whether, at the specific confluence of events that spawned the founding of the proto-American nation, the inclination to enshrine individual liberties as one of the main scaffolds of the new political framework was influenced by the specific flavors of Christianity embraced by the polity at that time. The larger question of whether historically, “Christian nations” were a good or bad actors is not what I am addressing. It’s what the influence was at that time and nexus of circumstances the American Nation was founded.
Well, you no longer seem to be making the argument that Glenn Tinder is making in the article you cited. He seems to be arguing that Christianity is inherently friendly to the concept of individual rights, and even necessary to the development of that concept; and beyond that that the loss of Christian ideology as the foundation of society will put the continued survival of liberal ideas in jeopardy. One could easily concede that in a particular time and place and set of circumstances a particular sub-type of Christian thought was instrumental in developing the ideals of the Enlightenment and liberal thought, and yet maintain that Christianity has served its purpose and may now be safely discarded in favor of society-wide secular humanism. (Note that because a religion or philosophical movement helps to give rise to some particular political or philosophical concept we accept doesn’t necessarily mean that the religion or philosophical movement in question is generally true.)
The OP’s friend sounds like a member of the “Christian Reconstructionist” movement, which aims to establish Christianity as the state religion of the U.S., and enforce the Bible’s laws as laws of the land. See http://www.weeklyplanet.com/2004-03-25/cover.html. They remain a minority movement even within the larger Christian social-conservative movement, but we had better keep an eye on them all the same. Do you want to be stoned for blasphemy?
In 1995 Marvin Olasky published a book, Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America (Crossway Books), arguing that the American Revolution was as much a Christian crusade against the moral corruption of Britain at the time as it was a political struggle. But John J. Reilly (a conservative Catholic, by the way), effectively debunks this thesis at this link: [ur]http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/fflav.htm[/ur]
In any case, the majority of Americans are no longer Christians in the sense of believing in Christianity as the one and only true faith. The following comes from The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996), pp. 278-279:
(Emphasis added.) There can be no doubt that the “moral consensus” of modern American society is based on some Christian values (e.g., the value of the individual, personal honesty, sympathy for the poor and weak, and the idea that there is a sphere of personal autonomy on which the state may not encroach) while rejecting others (self-denial, otherworldliness, traditional sexual morality, and absolute acceptance of any prevailing social order as ordained by God). And I’m pretty comfortable with that.
Our system of laws derives ultimately from those pagan Anglo-Saxons. That legal tradition, leavened by the knowledge gained from experience in the intervening years, and the principles of the Enlightenment, gave us our current system of government. I don’t see where Christianity entered into it (and I am curious as to exactly which “Christian principles” are supposedly embedded in our system).
As far as I can see (especially sitting here in old New Amsterdam), America was founded upon and guided by the principles of commerce, pure and simple. It’s always been about making money.
I suppose this could be a hijack, but I wonder if this friend of the OP has thought about other countries that have claimed to be guided by the Bible.
For example, generations of European leaders, from many different countries, claimed a holy mandate for their rule. Yet, freedom and self-determiniation were not always high on those monarchs’ lists of priorities. Those multitude of rulers certainly claimed fealty to a Christian deity, so how is that pledge reconciled with their illiberal rule? Were they pretenders to the throne in the eyes of God?
Further, since the US broke with those Old World powers, does he claim that makes our country more Christian than any other, if not the first true Christian nation?
Also, how does Britain, with a figurehead monarch in charge of a whole church, stack up on the Christian Nation list? (Seems to me that the UK would then be more Christian than us Yankees, what with the convergence of church and state at the highest levels…)
Not really a rebuttal of the excellent points that others have made, but just curious what his response would be.
Interesting. Perhaps someone should have informed Washington of his aversion to the Christian religion and its lexicon. From Washington’s prayer journal:
I personally don’t believe that America is a “Christian” nation any more than it is a “white” nation or a “European” nation or a “male” nation. The mere fact that many of our founding fathers were Christians, or seemed closely associated with Christianity, doesn’t mean that the course of our country has been dominated by Christian thought. I’d argue that secular ideals – like equality, capitalism, and freedom – are vastly more important concepts. So while Christianity has had some influence on our politics, it’s a mistake to ignore the other factors that have influenced our country, too.
Don’t be silly. Of course there is a shared heritage between Christians and Jews. The first Christians were Jews. And Christians still share the values established in what they refer to as the Old Testament.
Christians diverge significantly in their religious beliefs from Jews today, but they share a religious heritage, and many of the same fundamental values. So while you – a Jew – may disagree with many (or all) Christians on some (or all) things doesn’t mean you don’t have a shared heritage.
Forgive me if this point was raised earlier in this thread (which I did read). IIRC, the mainstream definition of a Christian is one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, born of a virgin, who performed miracles, raised the dead, was crucified, went to hell, rose from the dead, and ascended bodily into heaven. By doing this, he redeemed all mankind. And he was fully God too. (forgive me if I left out a few things, I’m going by memory of what the Apostle’s creed said.)
Therefore, to be a Christian nation, wouldn’t the US have to incorporate these beliefs into the structure of the law and government of the country?
And yes, I realize that there are many definitions of a Christian, lots of which won’t conform to the above. But still…
First of all, thank everyone for your participation. As you already know, you have provided me with pretty much bulletproof evidence of the error of his viewpoint.
Which I then provided to him. I copied and pasted the whole Tipoli article and all the quotes. And THIS is the unbelievably pathetic response he gave:
It’s times like is that I could fall to my knees and weep for joy that I found this place and you people. The SDMB RULES!!!
