Posts Tagged ‘religious freedom’
“Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people”*…
It’s Sunday, and war is raging (again) in the Middle East. This time around, the strains of fundamentalist Christian thought are hard to miss in the justifications of the role of the U.S. in the conflict. The widely-circulated reports of troops being briefed that the war in Iran is meant to hasten the Biblical End Times may or may not be true. But it seems clear that the millennial contingent in Trump’s movement is all in on an apocalypse. (And here.) As the right-wing site Media Matters reports, “Christian media figures have claimed that the Iran war could signal ‘the second coming’ or the ‘End Times’ and said ‘we are watching incredible prophecy in this time come to pass’.”
Tal Lavin has reached back to the work he did for his book Wild Faith to help us understand…
As chaos and violence break out across the Middle East in a war led by the US with Israel as junior partner, I wanted to revisit my research on Christian apocalyptic prophecy… about the evangelical Christians eagerly looking forward to the end of the world—and influencing foreign policy to bring it closer. It’s difficult to conceive of willful courting of disaster for religious reasons, but decades of modern Christian prophecy eagerly foresee mass bloodshed in the Middle East as a prelude to Christ’s triumphant return. Evangelicals of this stripe form a crucial part of Trump’s base and governing coalition…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Yearning for the Apocalypse,” from @swordsjew.bsky.social.
And lest we think that this inveighling is in any way unprecedented, Matthew Avery Sutton, reminds us that there’s a long history of politics using religion (and vice versa). In an excerpt from his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, he tells the story of Reconstuction, during which churches were mobilized on both sides of the divide-that-never-went-away…
… In the aftermath of the Civil War, federal leaders sought help from Christian groups… as they sought to reassert their power across the entire United States. The US Army had won on the battlefields, and now governing authorities and their protestant collaborators sought to secure the peace. They aimed to reconstruct the nation, to rebuild Americans’ shattered sense of their nation’s exceptional history and manifest destiny, and to reinvigorate their commitment to the United States’ Christian mission. But to succeed, policymakers knew they needed to limit dissent—including religious dissent.
Christian activists played key roles in every part of postwar reconstruction. In the South, Black ministers and White missionaries welcomed the formerly enslaved into the faith and worked with them to establish independent social and political lives. Defeated Southern Whites launched a multi-generation effort to defend their treason by reimagining the causes of the Civil War and God’s role in it. In the West, a series of Indian wars led to the US government’s creation of a comprehensive reservation system, where government-sponsored missionaries sought to Christianize tribes and “civilize” their children. In Utah Territory the US government cracked down on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its impressive theocracy, seeking to quell religious dissent.
Across the nation, Reconstruction policies provided new opportunities for church leaders in collaboration with the government to impose their ideas and values on the land and its peoples. Protestant activists believed that they alone had the tools and expertise to integrate Black and Native peoples, former Confederates, and religious dissenters into the body politic, while bringing healing and reconciliation to all Americans on their terms. Rocked by the split over slavery and then the war, they worked to build unity by identifying common threats and enemies and organizing Christians against them. Their actions demonstrated that after the conflict, just as before, the free exercise clause did not apply to all equally. But minority groups constantly challenged the power of mainstream Christian leaders…
… Only about one-third of enslaved Americans considered themselves Christian at the start of the Civil War. But in the Reconstruction era Black church going skyrocketed. And just about all of those who converted chose to attend Black-led churches. The days of Southern Black Christians submitting to second-class treatment in the house of the Lord had ended. In urban areas, African Americans could usually join churches that Black activists had founded before the war. In rural areas, they had fewer options. They sometimes had to settle for makeshift meetings in vacant buildings or arrange outdoor services until they could build rudimentary houses of worship.
Black clergy became some of the strongest advocates for full equality and rights in the postwar South. Seeing Jesus as a liberator, they aimed to make the egalitarianism of the gospel and the Declaration’s line that “all men are created equal” the reality in the United States. Many engaged directly in politics, understanding that while slavery might have ended, securing political equality required vigilance…
… Black ministers’ political engagement made them targets of violence. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, a [Protestant-led] terrorist organization founded by Southern Whites shortly after the war, burned down churches and threatened Black activists. A journalist testified to the US Senate about his interview with a minister. While “he had been preaching on the circuit,” Klansmen dragged the preacher from bed in the middle of the night and “beat him severely.” They “told him that if he returned to the county he would suffer for it.” This was one example of many. As racial violence escalated in the South, serving as a minister proved dangerous…
… Historian, sociologist, and Black activist W.E.B. Du Bois summarized in 1903 the role that churches played in Black life, especially in the postwar South. “The Negro church of today is the social centre of Negro life in the United States,” he wrote, “and the most characteristic expression of African character.” Postwar Black churches, as Du Bois understood, represented the heart of Black efforts to secure social, political, and religious equality. Church leaders had engineered the Christian faith into a tool of liberation, which made them a threat to the White Christians of the South and much of the rest of the United States.
In addition to working to suppress Black political and religious power, many Southern Whites launched a quasi-religious campaign to reshape the memory of the Civil War. Rather than acknowledge their deep investment in slavery, they recast the conflict as a tragic clash between two honorable forces—the North fighting to preserve the Union, and the South struggling to defend local autonomy and states’ rights. The authors of this revisionist account reduced slavery to a secondary issue, incidental to the “real” causes of the war. As a result, by war’s end, many White Southerners felt they had no reason to repent, no moral reckoning to face, and no obligation to embrace Black equality or suffrage. For them, the war had simply preserved the Union and, almost as an afterthought, ended slavery. Nothing more.
Christianity became central to this new Southern narrative. In defeat, White Southerners cast themselves in the role of Christ, imagining their suffering as redemptive. They claimed they had sacrificed for the greater good of the nation, their values—chivalric protection of White women, paternalistic care for those they enslaved, and Christian devotion—positioned them as the rightful moral leaders of the country. In their view, God had chosen them to guide the nation toward righteousness, but first he had humbled and purified them through the bloodshed of war…
Also eminently worth reading in full: How Christianity Was Used By the Powerful and the Marginalized to Shape Post-Civil War America,” from @literaryhub.bsky.social.
We are reminded why our founding fathers– so many of them, Deists— so wisely insisted on freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Apposite: “The ‘Straight White American Jesus’ podcast covers the history, philosophy, theology, and politics of Christian nationalism” (from Boing Boing)
Also, (under the general heading “things aren’t always what they seem”): “The Iran War’s Most Precious Commodity Isn’t Oil,” (gift article from Bloomberg)
And finally: only vaguely related, but fascinating: “Preached Whales“– (landlocked) Central European pulpits shaped like fish, whales, and boats.
* classic children’s fingerplay rhyme
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As we celebrate separation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan was released.
Johnny’s in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine / I’m on the pavement, thinkin’ about the government…
The opening sequence of D. A. Pennebaker‘s Dont Look Back (the apostrophe is absent in the title… and yes, that’s Allen Ginsberg in the background)
“No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side”*…
Lucas Cranach the Elder: Martin Luther, circa 1532; Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of Erasmus, 1523
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading figure of the Northern Renaissance, is widely considered the greatest of early humanists. Five hundred years ago, he faced a populist uprising led by a powerful provocateur, Martin Luther, that resulted in divisions no less explosive than those we see in America and Europe today.
Between 1500 and 1515, Erasmus produced a small library of tracts, textbooks, essays, and dialogues that together offered a blueprint for a new Europe. The old Europe had been dominated by the Roman Church. It emphasized hierarchy, authority, tradition, and the performance of rituals like confession and taking communion. But a new order was emerging, marked by spreading literacy, expanding trade, growing cities, the birth of printing, and the rise of a new middle class intent on becoming not only prosperous but learned, too.
Erasmus became the most articulate spokesman for this class…
Around the same time that the Erasmians were celebrating the dawn of a new enlightened era, a very different movement was gathering in support of Martin Luther. An Augustinian friar then in his early thirties, Luther had developed his own, unique gospel, founded on the principle of faith. Man, he thought, can win divine grace not through doing good works, as the Latin Church taught, but through belief in Christ. No matter how sincerely one confessed, no matter how many alms one gave, without faith in the Savior, he reasoned, no one can be saved. When Luther made this “discovery,” in around 1515, he felt that he had become “altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”…
Initially, Luther admired Erasmus and his efforts to reform the Church, but over time Luther’s inflammatory language and his stress on faith instead of good works led to a painful separation. The flashpoint was the debate over whether man has free will. In dueling tracts, Erasmus suggested that he does, while Luther vehemently objected; after that, the two men considered each other mortal enemies.
Beyond that immediate matter of dispute, however, their conflict represented the clash of two contrasting world views—those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one; even some of Erasmus’s closest disciples eventually defected to Luther’s camp. Erasmus became an increasingly marginal figure, scorned by both Catholics, for being too critical of the Church, and Lutherans, for being too timid. In a turbulent and polarized age, he was the archetypal reasonable liberal…
As Mark Twain is reputed to have observed, “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”– the Renaissance vs. the Reformation: “Luther vs. Erasmus: When Populism First Eclipsed the Liberal Elite.”
* Desiderius Erasmus, The Alchymyst, in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I
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As we celebrate critical thinking, we might recall that it was on this date in 380 that the three Emperors of the Roman Empire issued the Edict of Thessalonica, ordering all subjects of the Empire to profess the faith of the bishops of Rome and of Alexandria, making Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire and effectively creating “Christendom.” It ended a period of religious tolerance that had been formalized in 313 when the emperor Constantine I, together with his eastern counterpart Licinius, had issued the Edict of Milan, which granted religious toleration and freedom for persecuted Christians.
“I must begin, not with hypothesis, but with specific instances, no matter how minute”*…
Paul Klee’s notebooks (notes for the classes he taught at the Bauhaus)– 3,900 pages of them– digitized and made available online by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
* Paul Klee
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As we get specific, we might recall that this was a bad day for inclusiveness in Massachusetts in 1635: the General Court of the then-Colony banished Roger Williams for speaking out for the separation of church and state and against the right of civil authorities to punish religious dissension and to confiscate Indian land. Williams moved out to edge of the Narragansett Bay, where with the assistance of the Narragansett tribe, he established a settlement at the junction of two rivers near Narragansett Bay, located in (what is now) Rhode Island. He declared the settlement open to all those seeking freedom of conscience and the removal of the church from civil matters– and many dissatisfied Puritans came. Taking the success of the venture as a sign from God, Williams named the community “Providence.”
Williams stayed close to the Narragansett Indians and continued to protect them from the land greed of European settlers. His respect for the Indians, his fair treatment of them, and his knowledge of their language enabled him to carry on peace negotiations between natives and Europeans, until the eventual outbreak of King Philip’s War in the 1670s. And although Williams preached to the Narragansett, he practiced his principle of religious freedom by refraining from attempts to convert them.
Roger Williams statue, Roger Williams Park, Providence, R.I.
“Religion is like a pair of shoes… Find one that fits for you, but don’t make me wear your shoes”*…
Procession of the Catholic Holy League on the Place de Grève, Paris, 1590-3 (oil on canvas). Such displays of intolerance became increasingly rare with the advent of the modern European state. [source]
Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an absolute value, something beyond question. Yet how it emerged, and why, remains widely misunderstood.
According to the conventional narrative, freedom of religion arose in the West in the wake of devastating wars fought over religion. It was catalysed by powerful arguments from thinkers such as John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire. These philosophers and political theorists responded to the brutality of the religious wars with support for radical notions of toleration and religious freedom. Their liberal ideals then became embedded in the political institutions of the West, following the American and French Revolutions.
In broad outline, such is the account accepted by most political philosophers and social scientists. But the evidence does not support this emphasis on the power of ideas in shaping the rise of religious freedom, and underestimates the decisive role played by institutions…
Ideas were not enough to realise religious freedom. Crucially, it took political and institutional changes – specifically, the growth and strengthening of the ability of states to create and enforce rules – to make religious freedom in the West possible and appealing. It wasn’t the ideas of Bayle or Spinoza or Locke driving the rise of state power, it was the need to raise resources for governing and war. For the rising fiscal-military state, religious uniformity and persecution simply became too expensive and inefficient…
The first change was the transformation in the scale of European states. In the late Middle Ages, medieval rulers began to invest in building administrative capacity and to raise taxes more regularly. The most dramatic developments, however, occurred after 1500, as a result of developments in military technology that historians label the Military Revolution. This continent-wide arms race, brought on by the development of gunpowder, forced rulers to invest in greater fiscal and administrative capacity.
To pay for larger armies, new taxes had to be raised and a permanent system of government borrowing established. Moreover, there was a shift away from ad hoc, feudal and decentralised tax systems, and a move towards standardisation and centralisation. Rather than relying upon tax farmers, the church or merchant companies to raise taxes on their behalf, rulers invested in vast bureaucracies to do it directly. It was the only way they could pay for their ever-growing armies…
Economic changes complemented the rise of religious freedom, most notably the onset of modern economic growth. As in the Jewish example, greater freedom allowed religious minorities to flourish. French Protestants expelled by Louis XIV brought with them advanced skills and industrial expertise to England, the Netherlands and Prussia. In Industrial Revolution Britain, Quakers and other religious dissenters were overrepresented among businessmen, entrepreneurs and innovators.
The indirect consequences of moving from identity rules to general rules were even more important. Identity rules had limited the scope of trade and the division of labour. As these identity rules were removed – as guilds lost authority, and cities and lords lost their ability to charge internal tariffs – trade and commerce expanded.
The growth of trade, in turn, reinforced the trend towards liberalism. Trade, as Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu argued, encouraged individuals to see the world through the positive-sum lens of mutual beneficial interaction rather than through the zero-sum lens of conflict. Religious freedom began to seem less like a recipe for social disorder and civil war, and more like a win-win proposition…
The history of how religious freedom came to be is a reminder that commitment to liberal values alone is not enough for liberalism to flourish. It requires a suitable political and economic foundation. As the experience of 1930s Germany suggests, religious persecution can quickly re-emerge. We cannot rely on liberal ideas alone to be effective. If we value religious freedom, and other achievements of liberalism, we must look to the vitality of their institutional foundations.
This fascinating essay in its entirety at: “Ideas were not enough.” (Note earlier examples of of religious freedom as both a tool and a result of statecraft, e.g., Genghis Khan’s building of the Mongol Empire.)
* George Carlin
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As we celebrate tolerance, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Tommaso Campanella; he was born on this date in 1568. A Dominican friar, philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet, he was an early empiricist and a vocal critic of the Aristotelian orthodoxy (indeed, he wrote and published a defense of Galileo during the great astronomer’s ecclesiastical trial). For his heterodoxy, he was denounced to the Inquisition and imprisoned.
“All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality”*…
Thomas Pynchon’s earliest colonial ancestor, William Pynchon, was a key figure in the early settlement of New England (and, as the portrait above attests, less picture-shy than his descendant)… He was also the author of a book which became, at the hands of the Puritans against which it riled, one of the first to be banned and burned on American soil.
Read the extraordinary tale at “The Price of Suffering: William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.”
* Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
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As we celebrate free speech, we might send recently-reformed birthday wishes to Augustine of Hippo, AKA St. Augustine; he was born on this date in 354. Augustine famously came to his faith later in life, after a youth filled with worldly experience… including a long engagement (to an underaged girl– to wit the length), for which he left the concubine who was the love of his life, “The One”– and which he broke off just before the wedding.
Imagined portrait by Philippe de Champaigne (17th cen.)
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