The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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American Religion History: Mission Reflux

Without American missionaries, no Transcendentalism, says Mead (almost):

“Missionary endeavors to translate the sacred writings of other faiths into English may have been for the purposes of arming Westerners for religious controversy with the heathens, but the ideas of those texts quickly found a place in American thought.  Emerson and Thoreau read Hindu scriptures, and their thought, and the development of American intellectual life, was deeply influenced by these ideas.”

American Religion: Neutrality

Gedicks again, on the claim that the Establishment Clause requires the government to remain neutral between “religion and irreligion” and between “belief and unbelief”:

“This dictum,  present at the birth  of contemporary  Establishment Clause  doctrine inthe Everson case in  1947, is my personal candidate for the most frequently invoked incoherent constitutional  rule.  I mean,  really,  what sense  can one possibly make ofa rule that requires  the government to remain  neutral  between a  proposition and its negation?  One may agree or disagree about what it could mean to be ‘neutral’ between various  religions, but it is at least possible to have a sensible conversation  about this.  By contrast, there has always been something  decidedly weird about the requirement that the government be neutral between religion and nonreligion,  or belief and unbelief.  Indeed, the requirement seems to constitute empirical proof that even the dumbest things  can start to make  sense if they’re  repeated  often enough.”

He elaborates, at length and amusingly:

Continue reading…

American Religion History: Civil Religion

In a 2006 article in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Frederick Mark Gedicks points out the impotence of civil religion in a pluralist society:

“The irony  of civil religion  is that it is  supposed  to  provide  a  substitute  for theestablished church, a means of morally instructing and spiritually unifying the peopleso as to bind them to republican  government.  Yet, in a radically plural  society likethe United  States,  like  most of the  countries  of Western  Europe,  there is no  set  ofreligious beliefs that is both sufficiently broad to command the assent of most citizensand, at the  same time, sufficiently  deep to  contain serious theological  content.”  He is skeptical, as am I, that a pluralist society can have a civil religion with any meaningful content to it.

American Religion History: Christian America?

Is America a “Christian nation”?  A perennial puzzle, and finally impossible to answer without many “in what respects?” qualifiers.

One distinction might help: Presuppose a nation full of Christians, as America was for much of its history.  That nation might take various forms, and the distinction I want to introduce is that between a biblical nation and a Christian nation.

A nation where the rite of royal anointing includes explicit references to the king’s iconic relation to the Anointed Jesus is (in that respect) Christian.  A nation where the rite of inauguration includes an oath  with a hand on a Bible, but includes no reference to Jesus or the Trinity or even God, may be a biblical nation but isn’t (in respect to this rite) a Christian policy.

Another example: Many American Puritan writers, and many American writers long after, considered America “God’s New Israel” (for a great selection from John Winthrop to Ralph Reed, see Conrad Cherry’s God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny).  That is definitely a biblical trope.  But it hardly qualifies as a Christian one, for it is self-evident in the New Testament that the church alone is God’s new Israel.  Insofar as the American experience is read through the lends of America-as-Israel, America is a biblical but not a Christian nation.

American Religion History: Constitutional Religion

Was “religion” in the First Amendment implicitly understood to mean “Christian denominations” or “Christianity”?

Not by everyone.  During the debates over disestablishment in Virginia in 1785, Jefferson explained that the vote on one amendment proved that “they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.”  Jefferson certainly would have understood the First Amendment in the same fashion.

American Religion History: No Establishment

In his book, A Christian America, Robert Handy describes some of the debate concerning the First Amendment: “The religious question was given considerable attention during the debate over the First Amendment.  Madison apparently would have liked to have the remaining establishments in the states eliminated, but the Senate refused to allow this, for those which remained in three New England states had their defenders.  Some attempts were made in the course of the Senate debate to have the amendment worded in such a way that the establishment or at least public assistance for more than one church might be possible.  One proposal suggested that the amendment read: ‘Congress shall make no law establishing any particular denomination of religion in preference to any other,’ but the attempted failed.”  Handy recognizes that the final form was more radical, demonstrating that “the new nation was breaking with the older forms.”

In the minds of many, it was, surely, not an anti-religious Amendment, but one for the protection of religion against the defilements of establishment, and in the minds of others it was an effort to protect politics from the energies of religious passion.  It was also, importantly, a restriction on Congress, not on the States.

Yet, it was not merely a prohibition of establishing a single denomination.   The First Amendment’s prohibition was more complete – prohibiting not only the establishment of one Christian group but the establishment of “religion.”  The First Amendment is more secular and secularizing than some conservative Christians are willing to acknowledge.

American Religion History: Introspective America

In a 1998 essay, “Is America an Experiment?” Wilfred McClay notes that, for all our supposed materialism and pragmaticism, Americans are “a remarkably introspective people,” with an “incorrigible” habit of trying to divine the meaning of our country.

McClay lists a selection of options: “First, there is the Puritan idea of America as a probationary ‘errand into the wilderness’ and Americans as a people called to a mission of redemption and a life of the most rigorous self-examination. There are the universalistic accents of theEnlightenment, thought to have resonated especially widely anddeeply in the American context. There is the tendency, whether republican, Enlightened, or romantic, to see American life as aliberation from the corrupt and arbitrary constraints of customand tradition, and as a recovery of the innocence and authenticity of Nature. . . .

Continue reading…

American Religion History: Solicitous nation

Some musings of mine on the dynamics and tensions of America’s role in the world was published this morning at http://www.firstthings.com/.

American Religion History: Savior of Europe

Wilson was the first sitting American President ever to venture out of the Western Hemisphere.  He left the U.S. on December 4, 1918 to conclude the treaty that ended World War 1 in person.  He got a hero’s welcome.

Beinart writes: “When Wilson disembarked, Europe’s battered masses gave him a greeting that one journalist called ‘inhuman – or superhuman.’  At 3 A.M. that night, on the train carrying the American delegation to Paris, Wilson’s doctor looked outside and saw men, women, and children lining the tracks as far as the eye could see.  When the Americans reached the French capital, two million admirers jammed the streets, the largest crowd in French history.  In Rome, the mayor likened Wilson’s visit to the Second Coming.  In Milan, banners compared him to Moses.  Italian soldiers knelt before his picture; families placed his photograph on their windowsills, surrounded by sacred candles.  ’For a brief interval,’ wrote H.G. Wells, ‘Wilson stood alone for mankind. . . . He was transfigured in the eyes of men.  He ceased to be a common statesman; he became a Messiah.’”

American Religion Theology - Ecclesiology: The Catholic Advantage

Between Time Toward Home and his last book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, Neuhaus converted to Catholicism.  Whether as cause or result or some of each, the latter book gives ecclesiology a much higher and more satisfying profile.  Neuhaus’s final work is marked by a recurring concern over the American tendency to substitute America for the church.

And along the way, he notes the advantage that Catholics have in resisting this temptation: “the fundamental complaint of anti-Catholics in American history is that Catholicism requires a ‘dual loyalty’ – an allegiance to America and a prior allegiance to the Church.  That was and is exactly right.”  Neuhaus, following John Courtney Murray’s lead, insists that these are not “necessarily” conflicting allegiances, and says that “Catholic allegiance complemented and reinforced the allegiance to the American experiment.”  Be that as it may, Catholics are heavily inoculated against American ecclesio-nationalism.

Protestants will know we’ve made some progress when we start getting charged with having a “dual allegiance,” when we are suspected of being agents of a foreign power.

American Religion History: Immigration and Patriotism

Neuhaus makes the cogent observation that American patriotism has been regularly refreshed by the influx of immigrants who find that the American dream is still realizable: “Perhaps taken-for-granted Americanism needs to be regularly refreshed by the Americanism of those who discover America all over again.”  With the end of mass immigration in the 1920s, “the believability of American patriotism began to decline.”

For several reasons, Neuhaus was skeptical that mass immigration would be renewed.  The introduction of “some kind of income floor or guaranteed minimum for all its people” is one factor.  While Neuhaus approves the polity, the effect is to set “the outsider beside rather than behind millions of Americans and thus creates a fear of competition.”  More darkly, Neuhaus thinks that “most Americans would be appalled by the prospect of ten or forty million Mexicans, Nigerians, or Malaysians coming through the ‘golden door.’  Economics aside, they are so very foreign.  They are not more our people coming from our old countries.  They are so decidedly them.  They are as frighteningly foreign to us as were the huddled Irish, Jewish and Italian masses frighteningly foreign to the scions of the country’s founders a hundred years ago.”  Today, he suggested, “America has neither the necessity nor the will to take the risk of welcoming the stranger.”

If accurate, his analysis yields an ironic outcome: In the name of patriotism, Americans squelch what has been one of the chief sources of patriotism.

American Religion History: Imperial America

Back in 1975, Richard Neuhaus wrote in Time Toward Home that “America is an imperial power,” elaborating that “Suppose we could drop from our history all our self-images, ideals, notions of destiny and everything else that makes up what we have called America’s public piety.  America would still be an imperial power.  In any conceivable scenario short of nuclear annihilation, the United States will for the foreseeable future be among the strongest, maybe the strongest, power on earth.  The ways in which American influences are, for better and for worse, inextricably intertwined with the policies, aspirations and fears of other peoples defy enumeration.”  America’s imperial status is a fact like “the fact that Saudi Arabia has more oil than Japan.”  One might wish things were different, but “it is a factor to be taken into account.”

This power itself forces Americans to ask questions about the meaning of America.  Power is never self-legitimating, and the scramble for self-definition is an effort prove that we have “some right” to the power we have.  That lends an earnestness to the American character that other, less powerful nations can happily avoid: “A citizen of Denmark need not be troubled by the questions that trouble us.  He probably has no illusions that Denmark is in the vanguard of history, and, if he does, they are harmless illusions that do not impinge upon the rest of the world.  He does not have to fret about the ways in which Danish military, political, economic and cultural influences change the lives of other, for better and for worse.”

For his own part, Neuhaus insists that America, even as an imperial power, must define its role in the world in terms of the lines from Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired. . . .”).  America cannot define its national interest without taking “into account the interests of the rest of the world, especially of the world’s poor and oppressed.”  The then-popular “Kissinger version of realpolitik, with its casual indifference to the majority of the world that is poor, violates fundamental tenets of the American public piety.”

American Religion History: Paranoid style

For all of Hofstadter’s partisan distortions, he was right to note that paranoia, anxious defensiveness, characterizes American politics.  But this paranoia is more deeply rooted in American character and institutions that Hofstadter imagined.

America has regularly seen itself as the guarantor of human freedom.  Not just American freedom, but the freedom of humanity.  We were the first to enter the novus ordo saeclorum, and we are eager for others to follow.  Our founding vision say that America is freedom, and if that is so, unfreedom is always a threat to our very existence.

Since unfreedom will, like the poor, be with us always, America is forever under siege.  Even if American territory and interests are not, yet American ideals are.  And we are our ideals, or we are nothing.  Until we can guarantee freedom for everyone (which is never), we won’t be able to feel at home in the world.

Translate this into domestic political life, and we have some of the characteristic styles that Hofstadter noticed.  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; and so we are always on the defensive against the latest domestic threat to freedom.  This is utterly bi-partisan: For every tea partier today who thinks Obama a socialist, there was a liberal Democrat who five years ago thought Bush was a Nazi.

American Religion: Catholic plot

“It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism. . . . The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States. . . . These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.”

Thus far a Texas newspaper in 1855, quoted in Richard Hofstadter’s essay on the “Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

We can all breathe easy.  Dodged that bullet, we did.

American Religion History: Unnatural Man

Some early modern thinkers saw the American Indians as exemplars of natural man, but JQ Adams believed the opposite: “Shall [Indians] doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the wolf, silence forever the voice of human gladness?  Shall the fields and the vallies which a beneficent God has framed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting barrenness?  Shall the mighty rivers poured out by the hands of nature, as channels of communication between numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence, and eternal solitude to teh deep?  Have hundreds of commodious harbors, a thousand leagues of coast, and a boundless ocean been spread in front of this land, and shall every purpose of utility to which they could apply, be prohibited by the tenant of the woods?  No, generous philanthropists!  Heaven has not been thus inconsistent in the works of its hands!”

Americans who spread commerce, settled towns, planted fields, and put the land to proper use – these are the true natural men.

American Religion History: Hebrew Republic?

John Quincy Adams was stung by British sneers that the US was a “peddling nation” with “no God but gold.”

But we’ve shown them: The Brits are now attempt to “alarm the world at the gigantic grasp of our ambition.”

This is America’s future: “If the world do not hold us for Romans they will take us for Jews, and of the two vices I would rather be charged with that which has greatness mingled in its composition.”

American Religion Politics: Memorial of sin

In his latest book (Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church), William Cavanaugh offers an intriguing analysis of the liturgy of war memorials.  Drawing on Marvin and Ingle’s Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies), he notes that the celebrations of heroic sacrificial patriots “can never really reproduce the bodily sacrifice” that they commemorate: “Thus, D-Day celebrations were marked by guilt that the present generation is merely living off the sacrifices of those who died there.  There is a fear that the ‘greatest generation’ has passed and that the current generation has not undertaken sacrifices to equal those in the ‘Good War.’”  This guilt, he argues, can only be purged by further blood, more sacrificial patriotism.

One is put in mind of the letter to the Hebrews, which speaks of the Day of Atonement as an annual memorial of sin: Each year, there is yet another reminder that the sins of the past have not been atoned.  But that memorial of sin has been removed by the final Atonement of Jesus.  In place of a memorial of sin, we have an intercessor.  And hence no need for guilt-inducing national celebrations of sacrifice.

American Religion: Patriotic catechesis

The similarities between religious and nationalist rites are often noted.  But this is no mere analogy.

Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, intended the Pledge to function as catechesis through repetition: “It is the same way with the catechism, or the Lord’s Prayer.”

American Religion: Glenn Beck

Kevin Bywater of Summit Ministries adds this to my comments about Glenn Beck’s “9 principles”:

“Beck, being nestled within the Mormon worldview, has no problem conjoining inspiration with imperfection. That is the Mormon understanding of the Bible, is it not? And the imperfection may be found in several locations: (1) the Mormon Church teaches that the Bible has been corrupted over time, both through mistranslation and mis-transmission; (2) the Mormon Church also holds that the Bible is incomplete, a view easily morphed in the direction of imperfection. But perhaps inspiration and imperfection can be collocated within the Constitution given the amendments, not all of which Beck praises, and not all of which were even nearly original (e.g., Amendment 17, the direct election of senators).”

American Religion: First Principles

At his recent DC rally, Glenn Beck unveiled “9 principles” that Americans should be fighting for.  The first is: “America is good place, not perfect, but good.”

What might this mean?  It could mean that America is a good, if imperfect, place to live.  It’s hard to see how that can function as a principle, though, since it might in the future turn out that America is not such a good place to live.

It could mean that America has a good, if imperfect, effect on the rest of the world world.  But that’s not really a principle either, but a factual claim that could be falsified by sufficient evidence of American misdeeds.

Perhaps Beck meant that the structures and institutions established by the founding fathers are good, if imperfect.  That would be reasonable as a “principle.”  That would be a principle one could conceivably defend against forces that attempt to modify those institutions.  It may be what Beck meant, but since he believes that the Constitution was divinely inspired, I’m not sure if he’d concede the “imperfect” part.

It’s all enough to make you grab for the nearest Niebuhr.

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