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.
You seem very angry lately. You're going to burst a blood vessel.
Jefferson absolutely denied Christ's divinity, the virgin birth, Jesus' miracles, and everthing else he himself considered illogical and supernatural in the New Testament.
He considered himself a Christian in that he thought Christ preached on a number of perfect ways that people should live their life and so he attempted (in his mind) to follow those teachings. In that sense, he considered himself a Christian.
Jefferson's writings on this very subject are numerous and clear. But I have a feeling it certainly doesn't qualify him as a "Christian" in about 99% of people's minds.
BTW, you never answered the question, what was your screen name before you changed it?
Kierkegaard is making a comeback. Some of his stuff is still capable of twisting ones brainlobes into pretzels, so there are limits to the heights we can reach in depression.
I just enjoy being on the "new" FR, where it's OK to advocate abortion, spread anti christian propaganda and a host of other liberal DU troll issues as long as someone changes their screen name and has an old sign up date.
As I said this country was ordered by the world view of the founders who were in that contemporary arena. They knew that to link the 13 colonies as theocracy would fail. Mostly due to the failing of men. They knew that democracy would rapidly deteriorate to rule of the majority and result in the tyrany of the minority and to mobocracy. They are very unstable. So the founders settled on a constitutional Republic. Now that is a country ordered by laws. Those laws were largely borrowed from Old English Law which was a derivitive of the Levitical Law. But it did not adopt the Levitical law. They knew that the levitical law convicted all and that Jesus came not to do away with the law, but to fulfill it, every jot and tittle. The founders were also versed the the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Tacitus, Plato, Thucydides and others. They drew from the writings of the failed democracies of Greece and Rome, incorporating those components which they felt would promote liberty to posterity. But they knew that apart from the perfect law of liberty, freedom was not achievable, not because Jesus was insufficient in his fulfillment of the law, but because you and I have offended infinite justice (sin) and are incapable to rule ourselves corporately apart from an inner understanding of right and wrong. That is where the French Revolution went wrong shortly after we achieved our independence. It became a mobocracy of 50% plus 1. Thus the cascading bloodletting of the French in the early 1800's. There was no teaching or world view in them to tell them "right from wrong". Most people on this thread do know right from wrong. They are not lawyers, but they are not in fear of violating "Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not lie, and so on.." because in their boosom is the forknowledge of right and wrong. Not genetically transmitted, but culturally transmitted. Mr. AlZarhari did not get those lessons culturally. He kills with impunity and without remorse. There is no moral compass. And so it is with all Muslim countries. Go to India and you will see little children dying in the streets of Calcutta with bustling hurried lives passing by within a few steps of a dying 3 year old. Why? Because hinduism teaches that child has got to work out his bad Karma and to interfer may damn him to have to repeat this witnessed mysery and death. That is their world view as dictated by hinduism. They are not a hindu theocracy, but their law are mitigated by their religion. Christianity does not leave the child in the street to die. Christianity says pick that child up and help alleviate his pain and teach him of the love of Jesus who lovehimand died for him and will never forsake him. This is the world view of America. It is not a theocracy, but it at one time was dominated by the Christian World View. I am a Christian, but I would not want America to be a Christian Theocracy. That will happen in the future. (Zac 14, Rev.22.) In the past somewhere about 1960 nonchritians became dominent forces in education, law, medicine,politics, and buisness and as a result of their political activism have moved people to think they needed to receed only into their churches for worship. Historically we lifted up the cause of Christ and gave Him preeminence in all aspect of our lives. This was abandoned about that time (50) years ago and we now only have to look around and see the expression of the PostChristian America. We have, to a large degree failed to be good. As deTocqueville said, "America is great because she is good. If she ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." That is the charge we all have to deal with and collectively. Will America cease to be good? If it does, we may have to endure the future as France redux. We will be blown about by every wind of doctrine, rather than standing on a foundation of Rock.
He kept (almost) all of his letters; his journals and diaries and papers add up to 33 large voumes. In NONE of his writing are there devotional messages of the type characterized in the "Prayer Journal" that you would have us believe he wrote (as in your first post on this matter).
The best evidence is that he was a Christian of the Deist variety who believed that Church attendance was a good thing. He was much more a Son of the Enlightenment (his Freemasonry is evidence for that) than a Born Again Christian. I can't remember him EVER mentioning Jesus or Christ in any of his writings.
I stand by that. What I said is that he was more "devout" when it came to Freemasonry which is certainly not incompatible with Christianity. And again, show me ONE quote of the general where he uses Jesus Christ in a sentence. He was a Christian, just not a devout one by today's standards.
We shall have to agree to disagree.
Let's see: Personally, I'm a person who: has a family background which is Mennonite/Brethren; has (until recently) worked within a Jewish assisted living community; sends her son to a Catholic school; and intermingles Buddhist philosophy into her prayer practice. I'm an American, and not atypical. We were founded on Christian principles, but there is such a thing as separation of church and state. And, I take exception with the person who denounced the person who posted this article as an "open liberal" who's out to cause trouble. How does she know that? I think this article was interesting, and the dialogue which has taken place is interesting too.
That was me, and I'm a he. And if you want to know about the poster, check her posting history for a few weeks or months.
She has murdered her own child, admits it proudly, and hates Christians. She has an agenda straight from DU. Check it out for yourself, then you can come back and apologise to a real Freeper.
Oh, and welcome to FreeRepublic. It used to be a conservative website.
Maybe you can explain to me the difference between the Mnemonites and the Hamish? I know they are similar but also different...
Thank you...
As a Christian I may not consider a secular conservative to be my friend, but in these times I do consider him to be my ally against an evil that hates us both.
Muleteam1
What is too bizarre? Because in my views snake-handling and speaking in tongues IS bizarre but is still condoned...
Protagoras,
Thank you for your suggestion that I study this poster's posting history for further illumination---I likely will. And, thank you for welcoming me to Free Republic, though I've been posting here for awhile already. I actually think that the article sparked some interesting dialogue. As for your suggestion that FR USED to be conservative, well it still looks that way to me. The term "conservative" embraces a core set of values, but not every conservative may agree with another 100%. There are some of us who are Classical Conservatives, some of us are Ideologically Conservative, and others are NeoConservatives. Myself, I like to identify as a "Compassionate Conservative," a term coined by our current President George W. Bush., which is defined as something of a blend of social conservatism and fiscal liberalism (although, in some respects, I'm more fiscally conservative). There is no one-size-fits-all definition of Conservative, and I say this with all the compassion in the world.
I think it would be very difficult to portray America as a "Christian Country" when slavery was being supported.
I'll answer to the best of my knowledge: The Amish and Mennonite church were originally one. Both the Mennonites and the Amish spring from the same source: Menno Simons, who was a Catholic priest who converted to the Anabaptist faith during the 1500s. He left Catholicism around the same time Martin Luther and John Calvin did, and they all set up their own sects. All this religious evaluation was taking place as a result of the printing press: For the first time, the Bible was mass-produced and, therefore, up for interpretation by learned folk. Here came the Reformation!
At any rate, the Mennonites believed a) that the church should be removed from government, and b) that membership in the church should be voluntary based on a life of accepting Jesus and living as his words commanded. Both these beliefs got them into a lot of hot water in 15th century Europe, to the point of a Mennonite holocaust---lots of Mennonites were killed and imprisoned for their religious beliefs. State churches were very unhappy with them. That's how my mother's family wound up here. They fled to enjoy religious freedom in the United States, hundreds of years ago.
The split between the Amish and the Mennonites came later, over doctrinal differences (the Amish are much more strict), but they still share certain beliefs in common. The Amish are much more insular, attempting to live only within their communities, avoiding contact with the outside world as much as possible. The Mennonites are much more involved in the world, partcularly in disaster relief efforts.
One thing that both churches have in common is commitment to peace. It doesn't mean that a Mennonite would never go to war, but acheieving peace and non-violence is a priority.
I hope this clarifies for you.
It does... Thank you...
I am a Christian, and I seriously doubt it. If the U.S. were truly a Christian nation, abortion and homosexual marriage wouldn't even be issues. Video games, music, TV and movies wouldn't be full of sex and violence because such 'entertainment' wouldn't sell.
Most black families in this country at the turn of the 1900 were Christian,...just 40 years after the war of northern aggression. They were the victims of imperfect men. In the 1750's Great Britain was in the social upheaval of throwing off the shackles of slavery. By the late 1760s there was a great controvery in this country as to the disposition of slavery. John Adams and Abigail Adams wrote of the evils of it. Jefferson wrote of its evil yet still owned slaves. Washington gave his slaves his name and their freedom at his death. He is said to have treated them like family. This was the mileu in which these people lived. Many Christian leaders spoke out vociferously against slavery, and eventually Dred Scott was struck down in 1857. Segregation persisted until the mid 1960s and still persists in the hearts of some all over this land, but it does not negate the propiciousness of Christianity and its essential doctrines. There are many injusticed people foster over on one another, but the tenents of Christianity remain stable. It is the human heart which is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?
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