Christian Nation
From time to time, the claim will be made or debated that America is a Christian nation. I thought of this again when I read elsewhere that we Americans need to pray that Russia returns to the Gospel. Of course much of Russia’s history has been defined by the Gospel. Russians have had the Gospel for at least 1000 years. Communism in Russia lasted fewer than 100 years and even then the Orthodox Church was still present in Russia, albeit persecuted. Of course the Polish Church was similarly persecuted during communism, but we don’t hear people claim the Gospel needs to be brought to Poland.
This wouldn’t be all that interesting except for the lack of reflection of the people who make these claims. People like to speak of the Christian founding of this nation, but the god more often was created in these men’s own images. One could have quite a long debate over the founders and to what extent they were religious or irreligious. If we take a step back and look at the religion of the nation, we have no central religion adhering the people together. We certainly aren’t talking about something so strong as to have the State submit to it. And as we move further a long in history, we find the religions at the founding have a real lack of persistence. Two of the major groups at the founding, the Quakers and Universalists, are nearly extinct. America has also been home to the founding of various religious groups: Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Pentecostals, and Fundamentals (a distinct Baptist movement) to give some examples. These religious groups now make up major sects in this country. Additionally, many American religious groups have broken organizationally with their Reformation era European founders. Much of it happened near the Civil War, but we have more recent witness in TEC being all but disassociated with the wider Anglican communion. Folks will argue that these are mostly or all Christian groups, but that is like arguing that Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are all Easterners. The unity is only true at the most superficial level.
In the end, I think the argument that America is a Christian nation is very weak. In fairness, America as a people has its own difficulties. For example, Texas and the Great Lakes region have separate identities and the differences aren’t trivial. People’s conception of America is its government though. Whereas a place like France has had over a half dozen governments over the past 200 years, our country has had 1 government during that period, at least us in the North. It would simply be odd to hear a Frenchman claim his identity was tied with the Fifth Republic. He has a culture that includes religious practice that precedes the Fifth Republic. We on the other hand will often call the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution creedal documents. The very essence of being an American is tied up in those documents. The Russians baptized their culture in the Orthodox Church, and even communism couldn’t change that, despite its attempts at replacing it.
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My favourite American on the subject of America as a “Christian nation” is Mark Twain. He always saw right through that joke:
The idea that America is a Christian nation? Andrew Carnegie brought that up to him once. “Why, Carnegie,” Twain answered, “so is Hell.”
Here’s Twain on America’s project of “liberating” the Filipinos from Spain (and from “pagan Catholicism”):
“Salutation-Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth.”
“I bring you the stately matron named Christendom,” he wrote, “returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.”
And the very best is Twain on the subject of the Christians’ lust for “respectability”:
There’s the long essay Twain produced in 1901, “The United States of Lyncherdom.” This is not a single-minded polemic. It registers the horror of lynchings but also undertakes to empathize with people who attended them. Their motivation, Twain argued, is not inhuman viciousness but “man’s commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000 …”
As a remedy, Twain proposed, tongue in cheek, that sheriffs might be dispatched to communities where a lynching was about to take place. If they could rally enough citizens to oppose the hideous deed, that would make the anti-lynching position the new conventional wisdom that everyone would flock to conform to. But a problem–where to find enough sheriffs? Why not draft them from among the Christian missionaries spreading the malady of Western civilization in China? (Missionaries were a favorite target for Twain.) In China, he told his readers, “almost every convert runs a risk of catching our civilization … We ought to think twice before we encourage a risk like that; for, once civilized, China can never be uncivilized again … O compassionate missionary, leave China! come home and convert these Christians!”
There is something upsetting, off-balancing, about “The United States of Lyncherdom” that has kept it alive all these years. It’s against lynching, all right, but it seems to take more of an interest in being against righteousness. It makes you wonder whether you yourself, possibly, or let’s say your grandmother, might have appeared, smiling, in a photograph of a lynch mob. And just as you’re about to block out that queasiness, Twain slams in a snippet of what a particularly despicable lynching (in Texas, as it happened) was like. Oh, God. (The man was slow-roasted to death over a coal-oil fire.) And then, when he starts taking off on the missionaries? I don’t know that I want to express this opinion. But there’s no getting around it: it’s funny.
Not only was “The United States of Lyncherdom” politically incorrect, it still is. It blames one of the most shameful aspects of American history on moral correctness, the herd mentality that prevailed among Americans who regarded themselves as right thinking.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166-1,00.html
Mark Twain would have had a good time with most of the commentators at Vox Nova.
And American Christianity seems only to be able to produce, as the country’s “leaders,” hypocrites like the semi-racist Woodrow Wilson, while a truly Christian nation like Austria can produce a saint like the last Habsburg:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2009/09/17/03005-20090917ARTFIG00397-la-tragedie-du-dernier-habsbourg-.php
(For those who can read French…)
And, yes, I’m aware of HITLER, but, remember, I said “only able to produce…”; I honestly don’t believe that American religious culture could EVER produce a saint like More or Louis IX or Karl to be the nation’s leader.
Christian Nation?
Our shopping malls are more full than most churches on Sunday, so it seems our nation is a consumer one rather than a Christian one.
dpt, I’m willing to bet that the breakdowns of people in those shopping malls approach national averages. If that’s the case a majority of them believe in a God who has some sort of relationship to Scripture and draw some sort of moral implications from this fact. That they don’t go to Church on Sunday doesn’t necessarily mean that they are Godless heathens.
For those who believe in the message of Fatima, the cause of the conversion of Russia is a special case that probably doesn’t fit in with the rest of this analysis.
Of course, praying for Russia to return to the Gospels does imply that Russia at once followed the Gospels, so pointing out Russia’s previous Christian history doesn’t undermine that. Such prayers were pretty obviously a response to the atheistic Soviet regime, and if people still say that, it may be driven by ignorance or by the fact that most Russians aren’t practicing Christians.
To some extent, I think both sides in the debates over whether America is a Christian nation are silly and argue past each other – few, if any, of us are worthy to be called followers of Christ; so it has been in every generation. At the same time, certain aspects of Christianity do inform the American character, in so far as there is one, while other aspects are sadly lacking. So it is with most nations.
It seems to me that the argument that we are a Christian nation is mostly made so that those aspects of American culture that are influenced by Christianity are preserved in the face of a secularism that would destroy those aspects of our culture and politics where Christianity has had an influence.
Also, at certain points one could argue that America has had a dominant religion that most Americans (excluding Jews, Catholics, and Unitarians ans some smaller sects) could broadly assent to – that seems to be Mark Noll’s argument in America’s God, which traces religious thought in America in the 18th and 19th centuries (maybe later too, it’s been a while since I looked at it, and the parts I read were mostly 19th century).
“That they don’t go to Church on Sunday doesn’t necessarily mean that they are Godless heathens.”
The point is that there are many of us who call ourselves Christian, yet our material wealth and wants far too often take priority.