Posted on 11/29/2004 7:24:42 AM PST by Pitiricus
After George W Bush's re-election, few people doubt that the United States is a Christian nation. But who are American Christians, where do they come from, and what do they want? Discontinuity makes American Christianity a baffling quantity to outsiders; only a small minority of American Protestants can point to a direct link to spiritual ancestors a century ago.
Little remains of the membership of the traditional Protestant denominations who formed what Samuel P Huntington calls "Anglo-Protestant culture" a century ago, and virtually nothing remains of their religious doctrines. Most of the descendants of the Puritans who colonized New England had become Unitarians by the turn of the 19th century, and the remnants of Puritan "Congregationalism" now find themselves in the vanguard of permissiveness.
More than any other people in the industrial world, Americans change denominations freely. During the past generation, the 10 largest born-again denominations have doubled their membership, while the six largest mainstream Protestant denominations have lost 30%:
This suggests an enormous rate of defection from the mainstream denominations, whose history dates back to the 16th century (in the case of Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians) or the 18th century (in the case of Methodists), in favor of evangelical churches that existed in seed-crystal form at best at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Catholic historian Paul Johnson argues that "America had been founded primarily for religious purposes, and the Great Awakening [of the 1740s] had been the original dynamic of the continental movement for independence". But he struggles to explain in his History of the American People why not a single traditional Christian can be found among the leading names of the American Revolution. Neither George Washington, nor John Adams, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor Benjamin Franklin, nor Alexander Hamilton professed traditional Christian belief, although most of them expressed an idiosyncratic personal faith of some sort. The same applies to Abraham Lincoln, who attended no church, although his later speeches are hewn out of the same rock as the Scriptures.
Johnson's less-than-convincing explanation is that "by an historical accident", the US constitution "was actually drawn up at the high tide of 18th-century secularism, which was as yet unpolluted by the fanatical atheism and the bloody excesses of its culminating storm, the French Revolution". Despite the French Revolution, Harvard College became Unitarian in 1805, and all but one major church in Boston had embraced Unitarianism, a quasi-Christian doctrine that denies the Christian Trinity. John Calvin had one of its founders, the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553.
The New England elite ceased for all practical purposes to be Christian. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister, abandoned the pulpit in 1831 for a career as a "Transcendentalist" philosopher, admixing Eastern religious and German philosophy with scripture. But a grassroots revival, the so-called "Second Great Awakening", made Methodism the largest American sect by 1844. Just as the First Great Awakening a century earlier gave impetus to the American Revolution, evangelicals led the movement to abolish slavery.
Different people than the original Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were swept up in the First Great Awakening, and yet another group of Americans, largely Westerners, joined the Second Great Awakening during the 19th century. Yet another group of Americans joined what the late William G McLoughlin (in his 1978 book Revivals, Awakenings and Reforms) called a "Third Great Awakening" of 1890. If the rapid growth of born-again denominations constitutes yet another "Great Awakening", as some historians suppose, the United States is repeating a pattern of behavior that is all the more remarkable for its discontinuity.
Few of the Americans who joined the Second Great Awakening knew much about the first; even fewer of today's evangelical Christians have heard of Jonathan Edwards, the fiery sermonist of the 1740s. Without organizational continuity, doctrinal cohesion, popular memory, or any evident connection to the past, Americans are repeating the behavior of preceding generations - not of their forebears, for many of the Americans engaged in today's evangelical movement descend from immigrants who arrived well after the preceding Great Awakenings.
This sort of thing confounds the Europeans, whose clerics are conversant with centuries of doctrine. They should be, for the state has paid them to be clerics, and the continuity of their confessions is of one flesh with the uninterrupted character of their subsidies. Americans leave a church when it suits them, build a new one when the whim strikes them, and reach into their own pockets to pay for it.
Christianity, if I may be so bold, does not fare well as a doctrine for the elites. Original sin cannot be reconciled with free will, as Martin Luther famously instructed Desiderius Erasmus, which led the Protestant reformers to invent the doctrine of predestination, and their Unitarian opponents to abandon original sin. The Catholic Church refused to admit the contradiction, which explains why philosophy became a virtual Protestant monopoly for the next four centuries. The Unitarian path, which stretches from Servetus to Emerson, leads to doubt and agnosticism, for one throws out original sin, the personal God Who died on the cross for man's sins becomes nothing more than another rabbi with a knack for parables.
Intellectual elites keep turning away from faith and toward philosophy - something that Franz Rosenzweig defined as a small child sticking his fingers in his ears while shouting "I can't hear you!" in the face of the fear of death. But one cannot expect the people to become philosophers (or, for that matter, Jews).
My correspondents point out frequently that one can trace no obvious connection between the religion of America's founders and today's American evangelicals. For that matter, observes one critic, there is no direct connection between the 14th-century English reformer and Bible translator John Wycliffe and the 16th-century Lutheran Bible translator John Tyndale - none, I would add, except for the Bible.
Two combustible elements unite every century or so to re-create American Christianity from its ashes. The first is America's peculiar sociology: it has no culture of its own, that is, no set of purely terrestrial associations with places, traditions, ghosts, and whatnot, passed from generation to generation as a popular heritage. Americans leave their cultures behind on the pier when they make the decision to immigrate. The second is the quantity that unites Wycliffe with Tyndale, Tyndale with the pilgrim leader John Winthrop, and Winthrop with the leaders of the Great Awakenings - and that is the Bible itself. The startling assertion that the Creator of Heaven and Earth loves mankind and suffers with it, and hears the cry of innocent blood and the complaint of the poor and downtrodden, is a seed that falls upon prepared ground in the United States.
Within the European frame of reference, there is no such thing as American Christendom - no centuries-old schools of theology, no tithes, no livings, no Church taxes, no establishment - there is only Christianity, which revives itself with terrible force in unknowing re-enactment of the past. It does not resemble what Europeans refer to by the word "religion". American Christianity is much closer to what the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in 1944 from his cell in Adolf Hitler's prison, called "religionless Christianity". Soren Kierkegaard, I think, would have been pleased.
The Unitarian Church... But the movement goes back at least to Michel Servet who was burned at the stake by Calvin!
From http://www.uua.org/aboutuu/uufaq.html#who
"In the sixteenth century, Christian humanists in Central Europe-in Poland and Transylvania-studied the Bible closely. They could not find the orthodox dogma of the Trinity in the texts. Therefore, they affirmed-as did Jesus, according to the Gospels-the unity, or oneness, of God. Hence they acquired the name Unitarian.
These sixteenth-century Unitarians preached and organized churches according to their own rational convictions in the face of overwhelming orthodox opposition and persecution. They also advocated religious freedom for others. In Transylvania, now part of Romania, Unitarians persuaded the Diet (legislature) to pass the Edict of Toleration. In 1568 the law declared that, since "faith is the gift of God," people would not be forced to adhere to a faith they did not choose.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, radical reformers in Europe and America also studied the Bible closely. They found only a few references to hell, which they believed orthodox Christians had grossly misinterpreted. They found, both in the Bible and in their own hearts, an unconditionally loving God. They believed that God would not deem any human being unworthy of divine love, and that salvation was for all. Because of this emphasis on universal salvation, they called themselves Universalists...."
And never let crass ignorance deter you...
LOL!
Try to read about Servetus and the universalists... If you can read a book that is!
It does not, in any way, show that Adams was a "Unitarian", especially given the current definition. I suspect you have fabricated this bit of information.
Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Or a Christian "hate fest".
Facts? Unitarianism was practiced in the U.S. far before 1833. Adams worshipped at the now United First Parish Church which was founded in the 1600s. In fact, he's buried there.
There is one God and Muhammed is his prophet....
That is a very pre 9/11 attitude. What foreigners think of us can lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Your interpretation of my statement is incorrect - I was not precise enough. It was a relative statement not an absolute statement. Compared to virtually all other nations, the U.S. is far more tolerant of differing religious thought.
And your opinion of what is "open minded", things like abortion and anti-christianity ...
Where did I mention abortion or anti-Christianity? I am as far from anti-Christianity as anyone. I believe in Jesus Christ with all my mind and soul. I just resist anyone ASSuming that their understanding of Jesus Christ is superior to mine. No one in this current human condition can know for sure the whole truth about spiritual matters.
You fall into a group as well, a liberal group.
You think I am a liberal? Do liberals guide their lives above all else by their faith in God? No, but I do. Do liberals believe that both parties have contributed to an overspending, over-regulating, intrusive and inefficient government? No, but I do. Do liberals believe that they have a superior understanding of good and evil and therefore they should control the lives of others? Yes, but I do not. I'm not sure about your understanding of today's liberalism but you might want to reexamine it.
I don't need to burn the internet up to find the quotes. They are readily available in many trustworthy archives. I understand where you are coming from, but you ignore the volumes of evidence that he was devout. He was certainly a very private man, and didn't constantly claim to be a Christian. There are many Freemasons that were/are also Christians.
You should see what she does when she advocates abortion.
Yep, if you were able to interpret what he wrote, you'd note he's saying that some of the churches are pushing dogma that was not part of Christ's teachings. Does that observation make him a non-Christian. I think not.
I didn't but it seems you don't want to face fact, only believe what suits you... A very "liberal" kind of mindset I would say...
So go follow him if you want. I'll see if I can find the Al Queda sign up sheet for you, it must be online somewhere.
Quote from scientific studies, not from RCC hallucinations... But you wouldn't know science if it kicked you in the b...
The Unitarians weren't alsways the way they are now. I could be wrong, I am willing to admit it when I am, but twenty years ago, I read the history of the Unitarian movement.
I seem to recall that they were a group of believers who were tired of the bickering among Christian religious sects. In response, they decided to unify and accept basic premises. Unfortunately, those basic premises threatened to cause dis-unity, so they agreed to have certain rules to determine what is truth.
That denegrated to be only what can be proven as true. This narrowed to be only what could scientifically be proven as true. And that is what became of the Unitarian movement twenty years ago, but it wasn't always a group that rejected Jesus as the Christ.
It seems that the Unitarians are now accepting every hair-brained idea of religion EXCEPT fundamentalist Christianity.
You are correct that Jefferson had little empathy for the teachings of the Churches, who often extracted things from the bible that were not there. Being opposed to such liberties with Christ's teachings does not make one a non-Christian. Admit it.
I would recommand you read Servetus' works... You would be surprised (there is also a very good book about him and his books, Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, quite recent...)
The Christians are the ones who stand up for the country and what it represents. In that sense, compared to Europe, I think we ARE a Christian nation
The Christians are the ones who stand up for the country and what it represents. In that sense, compared to Europe, I think we ARE a Christian nation
You mentioned "open minded", and that is what the person who started this thread uses as an excuse to murder her children and openly bash Jesus and Christians on this thread.
You think I am a liberal?
If you support the person who started this thread, an open liberal, who claims to be "moderate" while stalking the site spreading anti Christian hate and advocating abortion, you are one as well.
What say you? You support this abomination?
I sure know a liberal DU troll when I see one. And I know a child murderer when I see one too.
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