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.
If you like the article, you should go to the Asia Times site and look for all Spengler's articles... They are worth reading...
No Christian should try to use false descriptions...
You... lose!
You are 100% correct.
We are NOT a Christian nation. We are a nation founded by predominantly Christian men, and we have swayed from Christian values.
The only Christin nation is the church.
Only a crass idiot wouldn't know that Unitarians don't consider Jesus a God.
True, but the poster isn't Christian, in fact is anti-Christian, and also pro infanticide.
That first sentence of the Bill of Rights characterizes this nation as not of ANY particular religion. Our society is constantly changing as far as percentages of religious belief and practice which is what the founders had in mind - NOT making this a nation of one particular religious belief. The particular religious belief of any one of the founders is irrelevant to this point. We are a FREE nation of all religious beliefs.
Only a crass idiot wouldn't know that Jesus wasn't a god.
He is God.
There is only one God, and you are going to meet him one day. On your short journey to a hot destination.
bttt
Adams a Unitarian?
"Began this afternoon my third quarter. The great and Almighty author of nature, who at first established those rules which regulate the world, can as easily suspend those laws whenever his providence sees sufficient reason for such suspension. This can be no objection, then, to the miracles of Jesus Christ. Although some very thoughtful and contemplative men among the heathen attained a strong persuasion of the great principles of religion, yet the far greater number, having little time for speculation, gradually sunk into the grossest opinions and the grossest practices. These, therefore, could not be made to embrace the true religion till their attention was roused by some astonishing and miraculous appearances. Ile reasoning of philosophers, having nothing surprising in them, could not overcome the force of prejudice, custom, passion, and bigotry. But when wise and virtuous men commissioned from heaven, by miracles awakened men's attention to their reasonings, the force of truth made its way with ease to their minds".
John Adams, March 2, 1756
"The Christian religion is above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modem times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity, let the blackguard Paine say what he will; it is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man".
John Adams July 26, 1796
"The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite....And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all these Sects were United: . . . Now I will avow, that I then believe, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God; and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System".
John Adams, June 28, 1813 (in letter to Thomas Jefferson)
I guess the Unitarians were not the sops they are today, huh?
Only a crass idiot wouldn't know that Unitarians don't consider Jesus a God. 24 posted on 11/29/2004 9:55:42 AM CST by Pitiricus
I guess only a crass idiot wouldn't know that.
Foreigners are obsessed with America, they need to seek help to get over this.
We, Americans, don't give a rats- a$$ about what their opinions of us are. Yet they cannot let go of their obsession.
One of the signal developments on the evangelical scene is the revival of the principles of the Westminster Confession - precisely the creed which Calvin inspired and which Jonathan Edwards upheld in its doctrinal particulars.
This writer provides a good example of why a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Ther Unitarians believe that Jesus was nothing more than an inspired man.
And some Unitarians don't even believe that anymore.
Perhaps you are confusing the Unitarians with Oneness Pentecostals, who believe that Jesus is God and also disbelieve in the Trinity.
Think history. Many Presbyterian churches aren't Christian either, time changes things.
But it hasn't changed the new policy at FR. The one that coddles liberal baby killers and anti-Christians.
Well since Adams recognized that Jesus is the Son of God, he must not have been a devout Unitarian.
Tell that to the baby killer.
Quotes from John Adams:
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved--the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"--John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
"But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legaends, hae been blended with both Jewish and Chiistian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.--John Adams in a letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816, _2000_Years_of_Disbelief_, John A. Haught
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity." --John Adams
I agree...
This is what I wrote...
This is your belief... It isn't a fact...
As simple as that!
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