What makes the US a Christian nation

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.

though I've been posting here for awhile already.

11/4/2004,,,is not "awhile".

Welcome if you are a real conservative.

And, unwelcome if you are some "big tent" conservative, which is to say, no conservative. Big tents have lots of clowns.

If you read the profile page of the vile slob who posted this thread, and find yourself there, you aren't a conservative at all. In which case, go away.

Abortion is murder. Anti Christianity is not conservative.

I don't know what you are referring to, RCC, but it's irrelevant. You are still the murderer of your own child. How did you do it? Did you suck your babies little brains out? Did you stab your child in the neck til your child died? Did you twist his little innocent body into pretzels and then dismember him? Do you think your baby will forgive you at your judgement?

Have you told your surviving child that you ALLOWED him to live? But you didn't feel like allowing his brother to live, so you killed him? Have you told him that at any moment you could change your mind and murder him too? I mean, if it's inconvenient for you to have him around anymore?
What will he say when you tell him? You will tell him won't you? I mean, it's OK to kill them if you feel like it, so you won't have any problem telling him will you?

Wow! You really know how to make a person feel welcome at FR. Maybe I haven't been posting as long as you have, but I wonder how many people are even interested in listening to your opinion about anything, if this is your usual M.O. Anyone ever teach you the powers of persuasion: I'll clue you in: You Ain't Got Them. I haven't encountered anyone here like you yet on F.R. You take cranky to new heights. You seem to be a fairly mean-spirited person, but maybe you just got a bad bowl of Cheerios this morning. I can get fairly cranky right back, which is what you seem to want, but to tell you the truth I don't wish to do.

However, I will deign to ask, what do you mean by the question posed to me in post #164: "Are you a troll?" A troll for what, trolling for what? Please define. If you mean trolling for cranky SOBs, looks like I'm a winner!

Secondly, I don't like the way you define "Compassionate Conservative." Our President coined the term, I use it, and you're welcome to take exception with it, but that won't stop those of us who choose it, including George W. Bush! Do you have a problem with W.? Tell us all about it, brother.

Get off MY back, YOUR high horse, and GOD's throne. I don't think anyone can condone the vile things you've said to the poster here. I don't know that poster's history, nor do I know that poster, but I don't think anyone deserves the hideous things you said. So, how about this? Anyone as angry as you must be made about something in his past. What's your beef? Didn't Momma want you? Did she make a mistake or were you a big accident after a boozy weekend?

How do you feel now? It's one thing to have an opinion, another to be vile. And now I guess we can be enemies instead of really listening to one another. Do you like it?

You seem to feel that you have superior knowledge regarding life and death decisions. Please tell me how you would judge the decision of a young Lieutenant who had to choose which of his critically wounded men he would put in the last spot on the only available medevac helicopter - which man would he give a chance to live and which men would he condemn to almost certain death.

I'll save you some time. Unless you have actually been in that situation, you have no business judging that Lieutenant's life and death decision.

Likewise, unless you have become pregnant in a situation where your life would be threatened by giving birth, you have no business judging that extremely difficult and personal decision. Just as in the example above, a very hard value judgment has to be made by the appropriate person and you are not that person.

Your condemnation of abortion decisions seems to be absolute with no exceptions. You seem to think you are more qualified to make decisions about other people's lives than they are. You may be correct about most abortions but you are incorrect about your authority to judge and make those decisions for other people. If you want to help people make the correct decision, you don't take away their freedom and responsibility to make that decision. You try to give them loving advice not superior condemnation.

Murder is vile. Anyone who supports is vile. Anyone who comes here from a liberal site to disrupt this one by trying to turn this into a debating society to present liberal dogma is vile. If you are any of those things, you are vile.

You don't like my posting style or ideas? I don't care.

Welcome to FreeRepublic, unless you are a liberal troll, then go to hell.

90% of your post is irrelevant nonsense.

Once you get to abortion, which is what I addressed, it is at least on topic.

The poster I addressed advocates abortion on demand. Not the extremely rare situations you present. She has had an abortion as a "convenience". It was decidedly inconvenient for the child who was murdered. My vitriolic posts are aimed directly at her and people like her.

Abortion is murder. There is no such thing as a freedom to murder.

Now, come on....First of all, you're not making complete sense. First of all, you say "Anyone who comes here from a liberal site to disrupt this one by trying to turn this into a debating society to present liberal dogma is vile. If you are any of those things, you are vile." Hmmm...I guess I'm guilty before proven innocent. Oh, okay, you're right. I'm really Ralph Nader, and I'm spending my post-election free time hanging out here!

You know, actually, anytime you gather more than one human being under a roof, even two Conservatives, there's bound to be eventual debate. You might be surprised to learn that you and I probably agree about certain things; but that doesn't mean we'll agree about everything.

Thirdly, you say: "Murder is vile. Anyone who supports is vile." Okay, we're currently at war. Are you supporting that war? If so, are you vile? Like it or not, war includes murder, no matter how necessary the war is. Any Marine will tell you that. You can call it "collateral damage," but some would call it murder. I'm not arguing against the war here, by the way, but I AM trying to make a point. As "Semper" said, these are complex issues, very complex.

Finally, you say: "Welcome to FreeRepublic, unless you are a liberal troll, then go to hell." What does that mean, exactly? I still don't get the trolling part.

I actually feel badly now about my response to you the other day, but I thought you should have a taste of your own medicine. You seemed to want a ranklefest, so I gave it to you, but that's not my usual nature. I guess if that's your style, okay, good, you don't have to care. But I can almost guarantee that no one will listen if you express yourself so. Passion is good; mean vitriole, no.

And welcome folks to FR without the rant. Did you read my post about "Compassionate Conservatism"? Is there only one kind of Conservative: YOU?

Like it or not, war includes murder, no matter how necessary the war is. Any Marine will tell you that.

Nonsense. War is war. Murder is murder. If you don't know the difference it's probably too late, but ya never know.

You might be surprised to learn that you and I probably agree about certain things; but that doesn't mean we'll agree about everything.

We don't have to agree on anything much less everything. But if you support abortion, I'll treat you just like I treat that vile slime who brags about killing her kid and advocates it for others.

I still don't get the trolling part.

You're new. You'll get it if you last long enough.

But I can almost guarantee that no one will listen if you express yourself so.

Thanks for the unsolicited advice.

Did you read my post about "Compassionate Conservatism"? Is there only one kind of Conservative: YOU?

It's nonsense. It's like saying "liberal conservative". A BS term politicians use to attempt to play both sides in order to get votes.

BTW, I'm not what you, or most people, would call a conservative.

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