A writer at Cable News Network Dot Com, one Kenneth C. Davis, had a piece arguing that the U.S. is not a Christian nation. It is poorly argued.
He speaks of "the ongoing debate between those who see America as a 'Christian Nation' and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July", and although it wasn't really all that hot here this weekend, I take it he thinks he is addressing a highly contested question. Given that, I wish he had defined his terms, to make clear for us the implications of the debate. If we're a secular nation, does that mean we have to take "In God we Trust" out of the pledge? If we're a Christian nation, does that mean the government needs to set up an Inquisition?
Although he does not make clear what the debate is about, the Davis gamely joins it:
While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "
Now, Jefferson was allowed to speak on behalf of the nation, after a fashion, once, as Davis emphasizes (that's why Davis published the piece on the Fourth); but this didn't give him lifetime license. Jefferson's interpretation of the First Amendment derives its authority from the First Amendment itself; although Jefferson is a famous person, he was not at the Constitutional convention. If Davis has an idea about the interpretation of the First Amendment, he should tell us what it is himself.
Davis may not be fully comfortable relying on Jefferson's name recognition to bolster his argument, because he quickly adds: "The idea was not Jefferson's. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a 'hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.'" Davis here moves away from making a claim about interpreting the Bill or Rights, ratified by the people, part of the Constitution that forms our government, to merely talking about the opinions of various people. What do these people's opinions tell us about what America is? Are we talking about French English or American Enlightenment figures, or some of each? Davis doesn't tell us any of this.
He continues: "Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the 'shining city on a hill' where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death."
If we're going back to 1644 to find the founding purpose of our country, why do only dissidents' opinions count? You could find quotations from Pilgrims and Shining City on a Hill types from that period, and the largely Christian purpose of the earliest Americans in New England becomes really not even a close call. Which colony/state has, historically, been more important in defining America- Massachussets or Rhode Island? Moreover, Williams goes quite a few steps beyond Jefferson, calling for the church to avoid the world altogether- something the church rarely does in practice, in America or anywhere else, and which in any case isn't any of the state's business.
Davis is probably throwing the Shining City on a Hill vision back in the face of its conservative adherents, showing how such visions can lead to persecution and other forms of overzealousness. His problems are, first, that he has framed his argument as whether the U.S. was, in reality, founded as a Christian nation, not whether it ought to have been so founded; and second, that, again, he hasn't really defined the competing visions for America. There's a good argument to be made about how conservatives' religiousity is connected to their continued belief in natural rights, and emphasis an American Exceptionalism, which sees our country as obligated to show the world that people can govern themselves without needing to be sedated by a European style welfare state, and alternates between the belief that we need to lead the world militarily to fulfill our destiny and the belief that we need to stay clear of the world and of the constraints of alliances and corrupt international law and opinion; and how progressives' secularism is connected to the opposite views. Davis has not done any of this, because, again, he hasn't defined the debate that is taking place.
Posted by: |