THE SHORT ARTICLE, Why Christian nationalism is unchristian by Thomas Reese, SJ, a Jesuit, had a quote from a letter from John Adams I found interesting to think about, I'll give you the setting of it because it is relevant to things I posted recently.
Today, many Americans embrace Christian nationalism, arguing that the founders of our republic were Christians and they meant us to be a Christian nation. While it is historically true that most of our founding fathers were Christians, it is also true that they wanted a secular government, free of religion. They had seen how uniting politics and religion in Europe led to religious persecutions and wars. These wars and persecutions led many to flee Europe for America. The founders wanted a government that would treat people of all faiths equally.
For John Adams, that meant even allowing the Jesuits asylum.
"I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits," he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1816. "Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gypsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum."
I would like to know more about just what John Adams knew or believed he knew about the Jesuits and whether or not it had a factual basis in the activities of the Jesuits. Since the article that quotes it, positively, was written by a Jesuit, it would be interesting to know what Reese knows about that. Considering the Protestant religious establishment by that time in Massachusetts, a state which Adams was deeply involved in, included from more than a century earlier, Protestant "printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters" it was pretty rich of him to say that as if it was sinister. Considering Harvard University which Adams and his children were educated at was founded by ministers of religion, he certainly should have seen the illiberal hypocrisy of his statement. And the Calvinist-Congregationalist complex in Massachusetts was matched with other Protestant establishments, including actually tax-payer establishment of religion even after the adoption of the Constitution. We're still years seventeen years away from disestablishment in Massachusetts and more than several of the several states. It is especially rich considering if you translate that into the terms of a few centuries before, you would pretty much describe the entire means by which learning and education happened everywhere in the Western world, no doubt things which both Adams and Jefferson would have considered some of the actual best things about European culture. I would also want to know what actual knowledge of "gypsies" Adams had to include them in his accusations. And among the "founders" John Adams was among the most generously liberal in his point of view. John Jay certainly wasn't so liberally inclined toward Catholics, having been among those in the Continental Congress to more or less call for measures that would ban Catholics from having full citizenship.
I think a lot of the animus toward the Jesuits tended to come from the fact that they tend to be very well educated and well trained at argument and debate. Something you'd think a lawyer like Adams would be expected to admire. Though I'd be ready to say there have been some really awful Jesuits and still are, just like any other category of human beings.
The article goes on in a way that fits right in with what I said about the discrepancy between the Golden Rule and the U.S. government as it is, my contention that Republican-fascism with its large "Christian nationalist" contingent is an appendage of the Mammonist anti-Christ.
Christian nationalism is also wrong theologically. True, as Christians we should love our country, but Jesus tells us that we must love everyone as our brothers and sisters, even those of other creeds. This includes our fellow citizens and those of other nations.
We cannot ignore the poverty, hunger and sickness that afflict people outside our country. We cannot ignore violations of human rights and the rights of workers that provide us with cheap goods from abroad. We cannot ignore global warming because we have air conditioning. We cannot ignore exploitation of the environment because it is not in our neighborhood.
As Christians we cannot turn our backs on refugees from Haiti, Africa, Mexico and Central America. All are our brothers and sisters.
I'd start by noting that by the time Adams wrote his letter, the man he wrote it to, Thomas Jefferson had begun the long campaign against Hatian democracy which has blighted what might have been a far more successful Black republic than that oppressed country has been. Jefferson certainly thwarting that because he and his fellow slave-holders would not want that as an example to those African-Americans they held in slavery here. The legacy of that effort in all of the other places mentioned by Reese would take a library to document and comment on, as well as the treatment of People of Color and other minorities in the United States. A pattern that would be repeated over and over as Latin American and Central American countries gained their independence and American slave owners dreamed of conquering them as a means of extending U.S. slavery to its ultimate protection and which has as recently as the Reagan and Bush I administrations characterized American foreign policy toward Central America. Those policies of the 1980s driving, among other things, the violence and economic crises that drive illegal immigration into the United States, you would require another vast library to document that. The subsequent 19th and early 20th century history of, at times, violent hatred of Catholics would take a much smaller libarary but the matter was hardly settled by the time of Adams' 1816 letter. Anti-Catholicism was a serious factor in American politics in that period up to and including the election of Kennedy and, today, in a far more muted way, Joe Biden.
More generally consider the first sentence in the passage, "Today, many Americans embrace Christian nationalism, arguing that the founders of our republic were Christians and they meant us to be a Christian nation."
I have to ask why what those often racist, often bigoted, often far from honest or entirely wise and certainly entirely inexperienced in 21st century life dead white men wanted should be of any more concern to us today than what a far wider group of Americans wanted in 1964 and 1965 in the high point Congressional egalitarian democracy was reached. Why should what they wanted concern us any more than the enormous number of Americans who voted for Joe Biden and his campaign's stated intentions? Any election ratifying the Constitution, those who elected the Congress and legislatures which adopted the Bill of Rights was no more a valid expression of the popular will of the American People than the far more inclusive election that overturned Trumpian fascism by putting Joe Biden in office. If looked at objectively, the elections of the late 18th and early 19th centuries don't pass any kind of honest evaluation as an expression of the will of the American People.
A similar attitude among areligious or even anti-religious, devoted secularists among liberal or even lefties who hold themselves up as the biggest most devoted devotees of the Constitution is even more baffling. Idolatry among those who are largely members of heretical pseudo-Christian cults such as abound among Republican-fascists might be more understandable then those who believe that all that remains of those long dead founding fathers is their constituent molecules who proclaim a similar form of idolatry. I think that Luke Timothy Johnson's theory that the creation of idols is a intrinsic aspect of human thinking has some merit, something which even those who believe themselves to be materialist-atheist-scientific stalwarts inevitably and cluelessly do, something which it is a moral obligation of religious people to always review their thinking for.
Many more Americans of vastly different backgrounds and identities wanted what Joe Biden advocated, not much of what the white, exclusively male, almost exclusively Protestant, exclusively rich aristocrats who met in 1787 in Philadelpha wanted. Certainly Women and People of Color didn't want much of that. It is absolutely bizarre that so many of us hold as an unquestionable article of faith that that group of most certainly non-democratically chosen rich white guys wanted MUST govern us today when none of them have wanted anything for a long time due to having been dead two centuries. The way the Constitutional Convention was filled is everything from obviously not the choice of more than a tiny fraction of the population to even shadier than that should be more widely known. The popular conception of that today is about as dangerous a superstition as has ever been the focus of a mass delusion. As I've said before the presence of a Hollywood-TV series conception of "1776" and junk like the Gadsden flag at American fascist rallies and the January 6th insurrection is more than just a symptom of that, those trappings of current American-fascism really expose the basis of the danger in that mystico-historical superstition.
Now, that's something Adams might have taken as a serious danger to the country, it certainly worked out that way. Other than running a number of the elite prep-Ivy Equivalent institutions which join the Harvards and Yales of post-Protestant Ivy elite education, credentialing the high end and not a little of the lowest end of establishment fascists (Cruz, Hawley, Kavanaugh, Alito, Roberts, etc.) lots of other Jesuits have been quite radical egalitarian democrats, far outdoing Adam's friends Jefferson and Madison in that regard. And it is something which is the excuse for the Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court to overturn all of the progress of not only the civil rights struggles of the post-WWII period but even going back far into the 19th century.
In contradiction to Adams, I remember the fine Congressman, the late Fr. Robert Drinan SJ OF MASSACHUSETTS with enormous respect, especially his notable calls for equality and justice in American foreign policy and in the United States. I suspect his election in Adam's old stomping grounds would have made him turn over in his grave. I should mention that after Pope JPII forced him to retire from electoral politics, Fr. Drinan taught at one of those Jesuit universities I've been most critical of, Georgetown. Which doesn't much decrease my esteem for his memory though I'd never turn him into an idol.
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