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Civil Religion
A Case Study Showing How Some Baptists Went Astray on the Separation of
Church and State
By Richard V. Pierard
Dr. Pierard presented this paper to the
60th Anniversary Conference of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public
Affairs in Washington, D.C. on October 8, 1996 and it is reproduced here
with the consent of both the author and Dr. James Dunn of the Baptist
Joint Committee. Dr. Pierard is Professor of History at Indiana State
University, Terre Haute, Indiana.
As every Baptist knows, a firm and
unshakable commitment to the idea of the separation of church and state is
a basic Baptist distinctive. It was an integral feature of their history
from the emergence of the first Baptists in the seventeenth century. Thus
the mass defection in our day from this fundamental, bedrock doctrine is
an extraordinarily dismaying development. One of the most striking
examples of how this repudiation of the Baptist heritage has transpired is
provided by two statements made by the Rev. Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of
the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. During the heat of the 1960
presidential election campaign, when nearly all evangelicals in the United
States had lined up against the candidacy of the Roman Catholic John F.
Kennedy, Criswell contributed an article to the organ of the National
Association of Evangelicals in which he declared: "It is written in
our country's constitution that church and state must be, in this nation,
forever separate and free." The Protestant contention is not for mere
toleration but absolute liberty, which is a divine right. Religion must be
voluntary and uncoerced, and "in the very nature of the case, there
can be no proper union of church and state." Jesus'
statements--"my kingdom is not of this world" and "render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are
God's"--marked forever "the divorcement of church and
state." Criswell went on to call Roman Catholicism a "political
tyranny" as well as a religion, a system that "like an octopus
covers the entire world and threatens those basic freedoms and those
constitutional rights for which our forefathers died."
If Kennedy wins, Criswell said, nothing may happen now because he is
emphasizing separation of church and state, but "the door is open for
another Roman Catholic later who gives the pope his ambassador, the church
schools state support, and finally, recognition of one church above all
others in America."1
However, twenty-four years later on August 24, 1984 during the Republican
National Convention which was being held in Dallas and had become for all
practical purposes a festival of civil religion, Criswell was asked on the
CBS Evening News about the goings on in his city. He replied: "I
believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment
of some infidel's imagination."2 How times had changed!
Interestingly, President Ronald Reagan, who in 1984 was the darling of the
evangelicals, had already fulfilled the first point of Criswell's 1960
prophecy and was then making some moves to carry out the second point.
What lay behind all this was the ironic fulfillment of point three, the
establishment of a national church. It turned out to be something much
broader and more inclusive than Roman Catholicism could ever be. It was
civil religion, the quasi-deification of America itself.
What Is Civil Religion?
The question of civil religion was brought to center stage in the United
States in the mid-1960s by the publication of Robert N. Bellah's paper at
a symposium on religion in America in the journal Daedalus.3 This
stimulated a debate that has continued in the scholarly community to this
day, although much of the fervor has waned. He argued that American civil
religion arose from seminal national events such as the Declaration of
Independence and the subsequent words and deeds of the Founders, and he
traced the manner in which these were utilized. He insisted that the
phenomena of American civil religion were those of a genuine religion, but
acknowledged that because modern Westerners usually compartmentalize
religion and differentiate it from secular activities, it was not easy for
them to see that "every group has a religious dimension." As he
put it, religious elements are integral to the social system of the United
States, and Americans can discover a "positive
institutionalization" of civil religion in their national past and
present.
His essay opened with the line: "Few have realized that there
actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the
churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in
America." Bellah insisted that this religion--or perhaps better,
religious dimension--has its own seriousness and integrity and requires
the same care in understanding that any other religion does. He went on to
analyze John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, where Americans were asked to
make God's work their own, and then traced the idea through Rousseau,
Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln
and the Civil War, memorializing the American war dead, World War II,
Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson, the prophetic poetry of Robinson Jeffers, and
the various expressions of American closeness. He maintained it was a
living faith, one in need of continual reformation but yet capable of
growth and new insight.
Although Bellah popularized the notion of civil religion in his essay and
in some ways even functioned as an advocate (he said it would supply
Americans with a basis for self-criticism and an understanding of their
mission in the world),4 it had been around for some time. As far as we
know, the term was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract
(1762). He saw it as a sort of moral glue for the body politic created by
the social contract. It was the general will of the people expressed
religiously in the life of the state, with a benign, deistic god presiding
over the public faith and seeing that it was properly kept. Over a century
later Émile Durkheim argued that a common religion was part of the unity
and character of every society. It was a sort of faith with which the vast
majority of its people could identify and reaffirm at regular intervals.
Various twentieth-century sociologists and theologians in the United
States referred to this concept through such expressions as public
religion, public piety, civic faith, the common faith, the religion of the
republic, the American Way, American Shinto, and the American Democratic
Faith.
The essay touched off a vigorous debate, and over the passage of time it
became increasing clear that civil religion was essentially a scholar's
term, one that referred to the widely held set of fundamental political
and social principles concerning the history and destiny of a state or
nation that helped to bind that state or nation together. It could be seen
as a collection of beliefs, values, ceremonies, and symbols that gave
sacred meaning to the political life of the community, provided the nation
with an overarching sense of unity that transcended all internal conflicts
and differences, and related the society to the realm of ultimate meaning.
It allowed a people to look at their political community in a special
light and through this means achieve purposeful social integration and
cohesion. It was a general faith independent of the power of both the
state and the institutional church, and it existed in a harmonious
relationship with the churches.
The best concise definition of civil religion that I have seen is the one
the Lutheran World Federation Department of Studies developed in 1981 for
its study program, "The Church and Civil Religion":
Civil religion consists of a pattern of
symbols, ideas, and practices that legitimate the authority of civil
institutions in a society. It provides a fundamental value orientation
that binds a people together in common action within the public realm. It
is religious in so far as it evokes commitment and within an overall
worldview, expresses a people's ultimate sense of worth, identity, and
destiny. It is civil in so far as it deals with the basic public
institutions exercising power in a society, nation, or other political
unit. A civil religion can be known though its observance of rituals, its
holidays, sacred places, documents, stories, heroes, and other behavior in
or analogous to recognized historical religions. Civil religion may also
contain a theory that may emerge as an ideology. Individual members of a
society may have varying degrees of awareness of their civil religion. It
may have an extensive or limited acceptance by the population as long as
it serves its central function of legitimating the civil institutions.5
If these two closely related definitions
are applied to the American context, one will see that the elements of
civil religion include belief in such secular concepts as democracy,
freedom, justice, equality, tolerance, opportunity, concern for others,
the possibility of a new beginning, and the open future. Moreover, this
faith is rooted in the nation's history, from which it draws ideas and
sustenance. The Puritan tradition provided the conception of the chosen,
covenanted, and millennial nation, the "city upon a hill." From
the Enlightenment came the universalistic ideas of human equality,
freedom, progress, and peaceful persuasion and the emphasis on the
benevolent, deistic "god of nature." The evangelical and
revivalistic current contributed the notions of democracy, the free
individual, personal piety, and moral rectitude. Although one might
concede that the public faith is totally infused with secular values,
still it must be understood as a genuine religion; otherwise it would only
be secular nationalism.
Throughout American history the President has provided leadership in the
civic faith. At various times he has functioned as the nation's pastor,
priest, and even prophet. In prophetic civil religion the President sought
to conform the nation's actions to the will of the Almighty and
transcendent values, and he called upon the people to make sacrifices in
times of crisis and to repent of their corporate political sins when their
behavior fell short of the national ideals. As the national pastor he
provided spiritual inspiration to the people by affirming American core
values and urging them to appropriate these values. In the priestly role
the President made America itself (or national goals or security) the
ultimate reference point. He led the citizenry in affirming and
celebrating the nation, while at the same time he glorified the national
culture and stroked his political flock.6
Civil
Religion and Religious Liberty
All would agree that the American founders
gave religious liberty an exalted place in the Federal Constitution.
Article VI declared: "No religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,"
while the opening statement of the First Amendment affirmed categorically
that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." There had never
been anything like this in the previous history of humankind. Religious
liberty was made the cornerstone of public policy. It was, as sociologist
José Casanova put it, the first of the three
"disestablishments" which American Protestants were to
experience.7
To be sure, the establishment of any specific denominational body at the
national level was precluded by the sheer variety and strength of the
colonial churches, but still either the acceptance of multiple religious
establishments or a generalized Protestant religion was a real possibility
if it had not been for Jefferson, Madison, and the Baptists and
Presbyterians in Virginia. In a brief window of opportunity, which
historian Henry May calls "the Jeffersonian moment," a
combination of rationalistic deists and pietist-sectarian Protestants
(such as the Baptist John Leland) secured the adoption of the Virginia
Statute for Religious Liberty in 1786, the foremost affirmation of freedom
at the time, and acceptance of the Bill of Rights a few years later.8 Thus
was erected the "wall of separation" between the Christian
churches and American government, a phrase utilized by President Thomas
Jefferson in his oft-cited 1802 letter to a group of Baptists in Danbury,
Connecticut. It was an idea which flowed naturally from his understanding
of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The role which Baptists played in
the achievement of religious freedom of religion in America's formative
years was particularly significant, but this is so well-known that it does
not require retelling here.
The separation principle was a charter of religious liberty for all
Americans because it prohibited the U.S. government from recognizing any
specific religion, protected all religions from government interference,
and prevented the government from aiding any or all religions. Any of
these actions would inevitably have lead to some sort of control over
their activities and beliefs. Nevertheless, the disestablishment of
Protestant churches at the national level, and soon after at the state
level as well, did not have a harmful effect on religious expression. The
democratization of the republic in the early nineteenth century and the
impact of the religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening
insured a de facto establishment of Protestantism. As the eminent
historian of revivalism William G. McLoughlin put it:
The story of American evangelicalism is the
story of America itself in the years 1800 to 1900, for it was evangelical
religion which made Americans the most religious people in the world,
molded them into a unified, pietistic-perfectionist nation, and spurred
them on to those heights of social reform, missionary endeavor, and
imperialistic expansionism which constitute the moving forces of our
history in that century.9
Evangelical Christianity now provided the
religious glue for the nation. It set the ethical norms that stood above
parties, denominations, and creeds, and it achieved cultural hegemony
through its domination of education (colleges, the common or public
schools, and Sunday schools), the mass media, and the voluntary societies
and movements for moral and social reform. Protestant Americans saw
themselves as part and parcel of a chosen nation, an exceptional people,
whose mission was to create a new humanity based on evangelical religion
and democratic institutions and to model this before the watching world.
Excluded from this "consensus" were Roman Catholics, Jews,
native Americans (Indians), and of course the enslaved African- Americans.
In fact, Catholics, who were dissatisfied with the Protestant-dominated
public schools, founded their own parochial (parish-based) schools to
protect their children from its influences.
Then, a "second disestablishment" occurred in the decades
between the Civil War and World War I that destroyed the evangelical
Protestant hegemony. The Protestant cultural consensus broke down under
the impact of the increasing secularization of American higher education
and new ideas and academic disciplines like Darwinism, biblical criticism,
and the empirical social sciences. The rapid growth of urban industrial
centers and influx of non-Protestant immigrants resulted in declining
evangelical influence in the northern cities. The growth of modernism
(liberal theology)led many evangelicals to withdraw from worldly concerns
and social issues and concentrate just on "saving souls."
At the same time, Roman Catholics and Jews were demanding a larger role in
public life and the now defensive Protestant establishment was unable to
prevent this. As a result, Protestants suddenly discovered and began
proclaiming the Jeffersonian doctrine of the separation of church and
state as a way to combat the growing Catholic influence in political life
and demands for public support of Catholic parochial schools. As the
nation grew more pluralistic in character, the umbrella of civil religion
now opened wider to accommodate the former outsiders, and American leaders
began talking about "the three great faiths." After World War I
the Protestant consensus would be replaced with a
"Judeo-Christian" one.
Evangelicals fought back against this "second disestablishment"
in various ways. In the South they emphasized the "old-time
religion" more than ever and sought to avoid worldly entanglements.
Many in the North embraced fundamentalism, labeled the liberal-modernists
who occupied many of the leadership positions in their denominations as
heretics, and tried to oust them from power. They sought to prevent the
teaching of Darwinism in the schools, as that seemed to threaten their
whole value orientation. They challenged growing Catholic strength by
obtaining legislation which limited immigration from southern and eastern
Europe, upholding separation of church and state as a way preventing
public funds from flowing to parochial schools, intimidating Catholics
through terrorist organizations like the American Protective Association
in the 1890s and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and securing a
constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic
beverages. By promoting "temperance," evangelicals could strike
a blow at both "rum and Romanism" and hopefully regain for
Protestantism its former position of dominance.
One stronghold of resistance to the changing situation was in the South,
where traditional religion became more entrenched than ever. Although
Southern conservatives and Northern fundamentalists cooperated to some
extent in the post-World War I cultural struggles, each went their own way
after the battles in the denominations and schools were lost. Prohibition
had mobilized fundamentalist and liberal, rural and urban, Northern and
Southern Protestants in a great crusade for the "American way of
life," and it too was lost.10 The last hurrah of the traditional
alliance was its all-out effort in helping Republican Herbert Hoover
defeat the Democratic and Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith,
in the bitter 1928 presidential campaign.
Although Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal consolidated the immigrant and
labor coalition of the Democratic party, ironically it incorporated the
Protestant ethic as well. Thus, the development of a modest welfare state,
the events of World War II, and the postwar economic boom enabled the
rapid assimilation of the non-Protestant immigrants into "the
American way of life."11 In fact, civil religion took on a whole new
life of its own during the Roosevelt years. It was used to rally people
behind the war effort (for example, the President's D-Day announcement in
1944 in a radio address to the nation which was in the form of a prayer)
and to reinforce the "three faiths" that now had become the
denominational form of the civil religion.12 The practice which President
Harry S. Truman began in 1948 of having clergy from all three groups offer
prayers at the inaugural ceremony and finally the election of Roman
Catholic John F. Kennedy to the nation's highest office in 1960 revealed
how much this new approach had become accepted.
With the onset of the Cold War, public religiosity became a major weapon
in mobilizing public support for the American cause. Just as in the 1920s,
Protestant evangelicals took their places in the forefront of the
right-wing struggle. They formed "Christian" anti-communist
groups to combat the alien ideology and declaimed against it from their
pulpits and publications. They were sworn foes of liberal political and
economic theories and shamelessly embraced conservatism in almost all its
facets.13 At the same time, the government consciously bolstered the civil
religion. An annual National Day of Prayer was instituted by congressional
action in 1952, the first of the annual Presidential (now National) Prayer
Breakfasts was held in 1953, the words "under God" were inserted
in the Flag Salute (Pledge of Allegiance) in 1954, and the pious phrase
"In God We Trust" was added to the currency in 1955 (it was
already on American coins) and officially adopted as the national motto in
1956.14 Although the civil religion had now become a vague "three
faiths" entity, the evangelical Protestants viewed its deistic god in
very theistic terms and had, albeit unconsciously, accommodated their
views to the changed situation of the twentieth century
The "third disestablishment," to use Casanova's phrase, occurred
in the 1960s. This was the uncoupling of the Judeo-Christian faith from
the "American way of life" and the acceptance of a plurality of
norms and lifestyles. In other words, public morality was now secularized
and no specific religion or religious tradition could exercise moral
hegemony in the public square.15 The critical moment seemed to be the
Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963 which forbade public schools from
prescribing the saying of prayers or devotional Bible readings. The
failure of Protestant and Catholic leaders to secure passage of a
"prayer amendment" overturning these decisions of the high
court, together with a host of subsequent rulings unfavorable to
publicly-supported exercise of religion, demonstrated that the civil
religion consensus had gone the way of the Protestant consensus of the
nineteenth century.
The judicial actions reflected the evolution of American pluralism and
religious liberty, and they were firmly based on the First Amendment's
stricture against an establishment of religion. Protestant leaders in such
bodies as the National Council of Churches, Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, and the Baptist Joint Committee on Public
Affairs recognized this fact, and stressed how they increased the scope of
religious freedom. They pointed out that the public schools were never
intended to carry the burden of instilling devotional attitudes in the
younger generation and that in their various rulings the courts were
making a clear distinction between the compulsory corporate practice of
religion and the objective teaching of religion, with the latter being
something that was highly desirable. But many evangelicals were convinced
that "Christian America" had turned away from God, and they
wanted to restore an earlier America where a more sectarian understanding
of the deity prevailed, even if it were the bland god of civil religion
Wave after wave of problems swept over the country in these years--John
Kennedy's assassination, the civil rights movement, urban riots, student
rebellions, a seemingly purposeless war in Vietnam, breakdown of the
traditional family structure, and the U.S.-Soviet nuclear stalemate--and
these simply heightened the apprehensions of evangelical Protestants about
national decline. In 1968 the tragic murders of Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson's decision to retire, and the street
battles at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago led to a further
escalation of tensions, while the election of Richard M. Nixon, as
desirable as that was in the minds of the evangelical conservatives, did
not lead to a satisfactory solution. The war in Southeast Asia continued
unabated and the Nixon presidency came unglued as first his
Vice-president, Spiro T. Agnew, was forced to resign and finally the
President himself as a result of the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The
nation seemed to have lost its way and the civil religion had proved to be
a fragile unity.
The
Christian Right, Politics, and Civil Religion
The power of the Christian Right of the 1950s and 1960s waned in some
respects, as it seemed to have little effect on changing the direction of
the country. However, new forms of institutional growth would facilitate
its revival by the end of the 1970s--the spreading Pentecostal movement,
the emergence of megachurches, the establishment of television ministries,
and the expansion of Christian publishing and music which resulted in an
interlocking network of Christian bookstores and musical groups.
Innumerable writers have traced the development of the so-called New
Religious Right and its success in winning over many, perhaps the
majority, of American evangelicals to the Republican party, and I will not
repeat the story here. What is so remarkable is how Ronald Reagan, an
indifferent churchman at best, succeeded in using the religious question
to reach out to fundamentalists, most of whom were at lower socio-economic
levels and voted Democratic, if they voted at all. Since they would not
respond readily to the traditional Republican economic appeal, stressing
the themes of religion and nationalism achieved the desired results of
winning their votes in 1980 and 1984. This pattern was followed by George
Bush in 1988 and 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996. To be sure, although their
religious credentials were appreciably more valid than Reagan's, still
they had to adhere firmly to the social agenda of the evangelicals, even
if some points of it were not necessarily part of their own convictions or
worldviews.
A wide range of studies have demonstrated how the evangelical voters have
moved into the Republican camp,16 and this has been reinforced in the new
book by Albert J. Menendez Evangelicals at the Ballot Box (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1996). They have become the "new guard" of the
Republican party with their "traditional values emphasis" on
social issues like gender roles, sexual practices, abortion, and public
support for religion, as well as their endorsement of more customary
conservative views like the free-market economy and a strong national
defense. In fact, one could argue that 1992 was really the "Year of
the Evangelical." Conservative evangelicals had come to occupy a key
position in the GOP coalition, they predominated at the Republican
National Convention in Houston, and they became a fulcrum on which both
present and future party alignments rested. Moreover, since the highly
committed in all religious traditions had become more conservative on
social issues, this helped to bring these in and link them together in the
Religious Right bloc.
Their already large numbers were continuing to grow, meaning that there
would be even a greater potential for more evangelicals and Catholics to
join with conservatives in the Protestant mainline in supporting the
Republicans. This was particularly evident two year later. The special
March 1995 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics entitled
"The Christian Right and the 1994 Elections," which focused on
the mid-term elections in five particular states, brought this out
clearly. The group's religious-based mobilization gave it influence as a
part of a broader conservative coalition, but this mobilization did set
limits on its independent impact in politics. The great weaknesses of the
Religious Right proved to be the conflict between movement
"purists" and "pragmatists" and the kinds of
"self-starter" candidates who appear out of nowhere and alienate
people because of their extremist views or political naiveté and
inexperience.
The Pat Robertson presidential bid in 1988 indicated how much Christian
Rightists had gotten involved in Republican nomination politics and
organizations. To be sure, the pragmatism in the recruitment of candidates
for office can be costly, because local activists run on enthusiasm and
this can be throttled by moderation and compromises. However, through
their grassroots organizing and distribution of "voter guides"
they generated a large voting bloc that contributed to a broader
conservative coalition. The Religious Right scored some spectacular wins
in 1994, but were these due to their efforts as such or the Republican
groundswell in general? Still, the evangelical realignment is an important
phenomenon and it forced the Democratic party to move to the center in
1996 to win back some of its old constituency.
The Christian Right's commitment to civil religion is best revealed in its
adherence to American exceptionalism, the idea that America has a unique
place in history. According to this view, America was chosen by God, its
people are heroic, self-reliant, and freedom-loving, and it stands as a
beacon to the world of the inestimable benefits of a society which is
governed by consent and where the free individual under God can live in
peace and happiness. Although the government has now gotten out of hand,
the American spirit is alive and well. To set things aright again, people
need only to renew their original compact of freedom and civic virtue.
This story line can be found in dozens of pious books about America which
have been a major industry of the Christian Right.17 Every Christian
bookstore carries a selection of them and they are standard fare in the
history courses in Christian schools. Even Ronald Reagan subscribed to
this doctrine, although he might not have gone as far as some of the
evangelical "Christian America" writers did.18 In these we read
about a godly people who covenanted with the Lord, who in turn cared for
them in the untamed wilderness. Guided by God, we are told, the Americans
threw off the yoke of British tyranny and wrote a Constitution which
protected liberties in a manner never seen before, because it created a
government of laws rather than men. Further, it is claimed, the
cornerstone of the nation was the Bible and its authority, and the
government built upon it was severely limited in its responsibilities.
Moreover, the founding fathers and subsequent leaders continually
expressed their deep faith in God, as they claimed to discover in
contemporary documents.
During the nineteenth century America grew and flourished on the ethical
principles of Protestant Christianity, this story line continues, but just
as the nation neared the pinnacle of political and economic achievement,
it began turning away from God. Vast hordes of immigrants poured into this
fair land who knew not the "God of our fathers" and brought with
them the vices of the Old World along with alien religions. This resulted
in the growth of big government, big business, and big labor, the
individual was submerged, and people came to think only of security and
material wealth. The schools rejected God-centered ideals in favor of
secular philosophies and progressive education, and the idea of fixed,
absolute standards for moral conduct was thrown out. Thus God brought
judgment upon his people--the two World Wars, the Great Depression,
communism, and the breakdown of society. The only hope of national
redemption, the line continues, would be a return to the "Author of
Liberty." Christian historians who dispute this interpretation are
immediately labeled humanists and their arguments ignored. One may not
challenge with impunity the holy history of God's chosen nation, it is
held.
Another front on which the Christian Right displays its civil religion
commitment is the assault on separation of church and state. A spate of
books rolled off the conservative presses condemning separation, such as
John W. Whitehead, The Separation Illusion (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1977)
and The Second American Revolution (Elgin, IL: David C. Cook, 1982);
Robert L. Cord, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and
Current Fiction (New York: Lambeth Press, 1982, and subsequently reprinted
by Baker Book House); and David Barton, The Myth of Separation (Aledo, TX:
WallBuilders, 1989). In the 1990s the anti-separationist books and
pamphlets metastasized so rapidly that it would require pages to list
them. Their views are epitomized by Francis Schaeffer, a favorite
theologian of the religious right:
Today the separation of church and state in
America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on
issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that
Christians, and all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is
a separation of church and state. The way the concept is used today is
totally reversed from the original intent. It is not rooted in history.
The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of
religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of this
doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil
government. . . . It is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to
subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with
religious convictions.19
The argument of these writers is that
America was founded on a "Judeo-Christian base," with theism and
biblical law as its integrating structure, and that the First Amendment
was written to guarantee that the federal government could not tamper with
the liberties of the citizenry by establishing one particular variety of
Christianity or prohibiting people from worshipping as they saw fit. The
idea of a "wall" between religion and the state was claimed to
be repugnant to the founders, and the First Amendment provided freedom for
religion, not from religion. But in recent years the "humanists"
have gained control of the state, and, especially through the courts, they
are now working to remove religion from public life and to turn America
away from God. Unless this development is halted immediately, a
totalitarian regime will be established where the people trust in
government instead of God.
One of the best examples of a political figure who sought the support of
the Christian Right by means of civil religion is George Bush. During the
1988 election campaign he assured fundamentalists that he shared their
views on abortion, school prayer, funding for private schools, and
pornography, insisted the United States was a moral as well as a political
union, and said there should be no wall between the church or synagogue
and politics. When he came to power in 1989, he for all practical purposes
functioned as a "civil religion president." During the inaugural
ceremony he included his own prayer in the presidential address, and in
his subsequent speeches he repeatedly talked about moral values and that
"God can live without man, but man cannot live without God."
When the revolutions broke out in Eastern Europe he declared repeatedly
that "the times are on the side of peace because the world
increasingly is on the side of God." He courted the evangelicals
during the Persian Gulf War by telling the National Religious Broadcasters
convention that it was a "just war" and proclaiming the during
the conflict a National Day of Prayer and after the victory National Days
of Thanksgiving. The following year he asserted publicly that Americans
won the Cold War by asking for God's help and they should thank God for
"this magnificent triumph of good over evil." Most
significantly, in an address to the NRB on January 27, 1992, he used a
phrase that possibly could be regarded as the most far-reaching civil
religion statement ever made by a twentieth-century chief executive:
"I want to thank you for helping America, as Christ ordained, to be
'a light unto the world.'"20
Conclusion
It is my contention that the lure of civil religion played a key role in
the defection of so many Baptists from the doctrine of the separation of
church and state. They made common cause with the large segment of the
evangelical community which had sold its spiritual birthright to the
Christian Right. In the hope of recovering the influence they sincerely
believed they once had in society, they abandoned the most important
contribution they had made to American Christianity, that is, their
commitment to religious freedom. Instead of being the persecuted remnant
people, the outsiders wherever official religion prevailed, these Baptists
chose to seek the life of ease in Zion. However, the Zion they thought
they had found proved to be elusive. The vision of a Christian America was
a mirage, and they wandered aimlessly in a spiritual desert seeking
something that did not exist.
Endnotes
1 W. A. Criswell, "Religious Freedom and the Presidency," United
Evangelical Action 19 (Sep. 1960), 9-10
2 For details of the 1984 Republican
extravaganza see Richard V. Pierard, "Religion and the 1984 Election
Campaign," Review of Religious Research 27 (December 1985): 104-5.
3 "Civil Religion in America,"
Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967), 1-21.
4 Bellah, "Civil Religion in
America," 18.
5 LWF Studies. The Church and Civil
Religion in the Nordic Countries of Europe. (Geneva: Lutheran World
Federation, Department of Studies, 1984), 8-9.
6 This definition is taken from the essay
by Robert D. Linder and Richard V. Pierard, "President and Civil
Religion," in Encyclopedia of the American Presidency, ed. Leonard W.
Levy and Louis Fisher (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 1:203, and
book Civil Religion and the Presidency (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
1988), 20-24.
7 In his book Public Religions in the
Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 135-57, José
Casanova develops the idea of the three "disestablishments" of
American Protestantism.
8 Henry F. May, The Divided Heart: Essays
on Protestantism and the Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 171-74.
9 William G. McLoughlin, The American
Evangelicals, 1800-1900 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 1.
10 Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade:
Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1986), makes this point forcefully.
11 Casanova, Public Religion, 145.
12 Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), is the classic description of the new
situation. FDR's use of civil religion is traced out in Pierard and
Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency, 170-83.
13 I strongly criticized this marriage of
Protestant evangelicals with the right in The Unequal Yoke: Evangelical
Christianity and Political Conservatism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970),
but my warning was almost completely ignored.
14 I explain these developments in some
detail in the essay "One Nation under God: Judgment or
Jingoism?" Christian Social Ethics, ed. Perry C. Cotham (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 81-103
15 Casanova, Public Religions, 145.
16 Lyman A. Kellstedt, John C. Green, James
L. Guth, Corwin E. Smidt, "Religious Voting Blocs in the 1992
Election: The Year of the Evangelical?" in Steve Bruce, Peter Kivisto,
and William H. Swatos, Jr., eds., The Future of Politics: The Christian
Right as the United States Approaches the Year 2000 (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1995), 85-104; ibid. "Murphy Brown Revisited:
The Social Issues in the 1992 Election," in Michael Cromartie, ed.,
Disciples and Democracy: Religious Conservatives and the Future of
American Politics (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1994),
43-64; James L. Guth and John C. Green, eds., The Bible and the Ballot
Box: Religion and Politics in the 1988 Election (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1991); and Corwin E. Smidt, "Evangelical Voting Patters:
1976-1988," in Michael Cromartie, ed., No Longer Exiles: The
Religious New Right in American Politics (Washington: Ethics and Public
Policy Center, 1993), 85-117.
17 Representative examples of these include
Benjamin Weiss, God in American History (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1966);
Verna M. Hall Christian History of the Constitution (1976) and Christian
History of the American Revolution (1979, both published by the Foundation
for American Christian Education in San Francisco); John Eidsmoe,
Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers
(Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987); Benjamin Hart, Faith and Freedom:
The Christian Roots of American Liberty (Dallas: Lewis and Stanley, 1988);
Catherine Millard, The Rewriting of America's History (Camp Hill, PA:
Horizon House, 1991); the spiritual fantasies of Peter Marshall and David
Manuel which trace God's plan for America, The Light and the Glory (1977)
and From Sea to Shining Sea (1986, both published by Fleming H. Revell,
Old Tappan, NJ.); and Gary T. Amos, How the Bible and Christianity
Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence (Brentwood, TN:
Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989).
18 For documentation see Pierard and
Linder, Civil Religion and the Presidency, 272-74.
19 Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian
Manifesto (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1981), 36.
20 I document these and many other examples
in three articles analyzing his civil religion, "Public Religion in a
Kinder, Gentler America," Liberty 85 (March-April 1990), 3-6;
"George Bush's Holy War," Mennonite Life 47 (September 1992),
12-17; and "The Politics of Prayer," Liberty 87
(November-December 1992).
Updated Monday, June 04, 2001
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