The Attempt to Religiously Hijack The Government Is Continuing And It Isn't Only The Fundamentalists Who Do It

One of the more aggravating experiences of online life is when you read someone spouting some common received wisdom, confirmed by other commentators,  that you know to be wrong, especially when you have the evidence to clinch the case that it is wrong.  It's my experience that no level of primary evidence presented will overcome the ideological mythology of those phony citations.  Whether it be the religious character of Copernicus and Galileo (especially the early support by Cardinals and Popes for the Copernican system) or it is, about 99 out of 100 times, the citation of Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, a thoroughly Christian document, as an attack on Christianity.   I mention both because I ran across both this past week.

As I continue rescuing my garden from the effects of near 100 degree weather and lots of rain, today, I will recommend this extremely enlightening conversation Krista Tippett had with Steven Waldman about the history of public religion in America.   I didn't hear it when it was first aired*, having not discovered Krista Tippett's program until the last several years.  As is almost always the case with her show, it will teach you a lot that you never knew before and overturn things that you had always been told were true, when they aren't.  Here's one particularly interesting and provocative passage.

Mr. Waldman: It was the church fathers and the government working together that held the trial and sentenced her [Mary Dyer's hanging had just been discussed.] to death. There’s a second bout of persecution that I think is also really significant, uh, and has not had nearly enough attention, which is, there was a lot of persecution of Baptists throughout the Colonies that, I think, has — has been written about. What was really interesting was that one of the pockets where the persecution was most intense happened to be in a couple of northern Virginia counties at the time that James Madison, was a young man and living there. Uh, it actually was part of Northern Virginia that — that gave us Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Henry, and George Mason.

Ms. Tippett: That’s amazing.

Mr. Waldman: So the — yeah, very fertile ground. So for Madison, the question of religious liberty was not something he was reading about only in Locke or hearing about as a European phenomenon. He was literally seeing it in his local courthouse with Baptists who were being thrown in jail, simply for preaching their own gospel.

Ms. Tippett: It does seem like, um, we have transposed, as you kind of described at the beginning, our — our own questions and our — the divisions of our time onto our understanding of the Founding Fathers. But you found a much more diverse and complicated picture, not only of the — of the history in general, but of these individuals in particular, and it seems to me that James Madison especially captured your imagination.

Mr. Waldman: Yes. It seems like nowadays, there’s kind of two scripts and you have to choose one or the other. One script says that the founders were all religious Christians and therefore, they would oppose separation of church and state.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Waldman: And the other script says the founders all wanted separation of church and state in part because they were secular, or they were deists. This dichotomy would have seemed utterly baffling to the founders. For one thing, the founders who supported separation of church and state mostly did it because they wanted to promote religion, not discourage religion.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Waldman: It was the whole idea was that this was a strategy for encouraging the growth of religion by leaving it alone. And there were others who thought that the way to encourage religion was by having the state support it, but they both agreed that the goal was to encourage religion. And that’s — that’s just not a viewpoint that’s reflected in the modern debate. And I did find James Madison to be the most interesting one on this because he was really the one who came up with the — the most holistic, uh, vision, uh, for religious liberty that combined, first what he was hearing from evangelical Christians, um, Baptists...
Ms. Tippett: He went to Princeton, didn’t he, which at that time was an evangelical college.

Mr. Waldman: Exactly. I mean, there’s a lot about Madison and the evangelicals that is — is amazing. First of all, we think of evangelicals now as being opposed to separation of church and state because a lot of the religious, conservative leaders have taken that position in recent times. Uh, in Madison’s era, it was the other way around. And in fact, we would not have religious liberty without the 18th century evangelicals. They were Madison and Jefferson’s foot soldiers in the drive for religious liberty. And often they were the philosophers who helped them think through the case for religious liberty.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, and what was that — what was their stake in that philosophically and theologically? It seems to me it was — there was also a theological, um, argument — an evangelical argument for separation of church and state.

Mr. Waldman: Some of the evangelical support for separation of church and state was obviously practical, which was that the evangelicals were being persecuted.

Ms. Tippett: They were in the front line to be persecuted without it, right.Mr. Waldman: Yeah. And so, they — they had an obvious interest in — in breaking up the authority of the established churches, which were preventing them from praying the way they wanted.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Mr. Waldman: But there was a theology to it, as well. First of all, they always cited Jesus’ invocation that His world was the kingdom of heaven, and that it was Caesar’s role to regulate government and the civil society. That separation was part of it. But there was something even deeper than that, which is that the evangelicals believed in a personal relationship with God that didn’t have to always go through intermediary institutions, didn’t have to go through clergy or church. It was a small “d” democratic approach.

Ms. Tippett: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Mr. Waldman: So that kind of individual liberty approach to religion obviously meshed perfectly with the revolutionary spirit that Jefferson and Madison and others were arguing as it related to the crown, saying also the individual has the right to liberty.

I wonder what evangelicals today would make of that history of their movement, especially those evangelicals who live in states where they are a frequently unpopular minority, today.

Listening to the show,  reading the transcript, the provocative idea came to me that, today, it is atheists who, in fact, want to establish their religion as the state religion.  I think they have all along and that there has been an evangelical wing of atheism that has established itself in the nominal left for which atheism is, in fact, the paramount issue.  I think those fanatics have had such a disproportionate effect on liberal academic life, legal theory and the government that it has had the effect of destroying liberalism, in the American sense of the word.  

In the 1970s, I first noticed that there was such a phobia to anything that could possibly be interpreted to be religious that any encouragement to think about the morality of behavior was tacitly banned.  It was "judgmental" it "imposed your morality on other people".   Even in schools there was a fad for presenting "open ended" scenarios and stories in which no encouragement was to be given in judging the behavior of the characters as being wrong or immoral, that, somehow, even very young school children would [magically] find the best answer for themselves.  Which anyone who ever experienced an unsupervised school yard at recess would know was a pile of foetid crap.  Bullies and nasty cliques are the main beneficiaries of "moral neutrality" in personal life, organized criminals and dictators and violent, criminal gangs in societies and countries.  The results are antithetical to the morality and ideals of real liberalism in real life.

Stuff like that made the backlash against it far stronger than it needed to be and it continues today to disadvantage the real left, the goals of which aren't those of the fanatics.

I hold that it is self-evident in real life that there is, in fact, an actual right morality that is rather remarkably approached in parts of the Declaration of Independence, even as it is contradicted by other parts, especially the racism against the native population who "the founders"** were murdering and displacing so they could steal their land.  Which could bring us back to the folly of established religion and the need for religion to take its rightful place in aiding the correction of the evils guaranteed to arise in secular governments.   Governments are easily taken over by organized criminals, chiefly interested in stealing things but sometimes for other reasons.   And those criminals are not above using the immorality of a majority or an effective margin of the population to install itself - which is how Republicans used the religious backlash against the attempt to install atheism as the de facto state religion.  It is a seriously difficult balancing act, democracy, but it fails when there isn't just that moral intention that has been turned by the past three viciously dishonest Supreme Courts against the people who fell for that pose of moral neutrality.

The equally held rights and moral obligations that comprises the morality of traditional American liberalism is the right morality, that fact can be seen in what happens when it is absent or superseded by or suppressed by other or no moral system and I'm not going to apologize for saying that if it isn't  the basis of a society it will devolve into depravity, complete with rule by organized criminals, such as we are veering towards so dangerously, today.

*  It's kind of surprising and kind of gratifying to see how many of the themes I've written about are touched on in the program, sometimes arriving at different conclusions than I did.   Here's the introduction to the second part of the program, a conversation with Philip Hamburger as more of an incentive to listen to the show.

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today, for the Fourth of July, a surprising reality check about the long road of American democracy. The esteemed constitutional lawyer Philip Hamburger was stunned by almost everything he discovered when he researched his 2004 book, Separation of Church and State.

That phrase itself was first coined in 1802 by Thomas Jefferson, in a letter he wrote right after he became president, to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. They had asked why Jefferson would not proclaim national days of fasting and thanksgiving, as Washington and Adams had done before him. He replied by making reference to the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, writing: “...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.”

But Jefferson then added this summary clause: “Thus,” he wrote, “building a wall of separation between church and state.” The Danbury Baptists ignored this language. It only entered U.S. constitutional law nearly 150 years later, through a 1947 legal opinion authored by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. And Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK, in its American heyday, was not only racist but staunchly anti-Catholic and pro-“separation of church and state.”

** This was especially gratifying to hear.

Mr. Waldman: Well, first, I want to say that when it comes to this topic, any time anyone starts a sentence with, the Founding Fathers believed...

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Waldman: ...you should immediately have a lot of skepticism. Because one of the things I’ve learned is that there is no such thing as the Founding Fathers, as a unitary block. When it comes to these issues, they actually disagreed with each other. And they were kind of close to the action. They were the ones who wrote the Constitution, and they still disagreed with each other about what it meant.

I had long suspected that all of this talk about "the founders" originated in the segregationist resistance to the moral position of the Civil Rights Movement.  That has been the clear intention of those who drop that phrase, up to and including the members of this, the most racist Supreme Court since the 1890s.   I'd asked my mother and a number of other people if they ever remembered hearing people talking about "the founders" before then and none of them could.  It was, though, used at least one book promoting Unitarianism from before that, which I've seen, claiming "the founders" as belonging to them.  Though that use of the phrase isn't the one that caught on to such bad effect.  If you read "the founders" in full, you will find that even that presumably liberal attempt to own them, man, is a rather large exaggeration.

Reading Jefferson's letters and complete documents that are frequently excerpted dishonestly for ideological purposes, I've become rather skeptical of any citation of the position of individuals for ideological purposes.   Those people who left any documentation are frequently far more complex than the less than two-dimensional views that people present of them for their own purposes present them as being.