One
Nation Under God?
By
MOLLY WORTHEN
Published:
December 22, 2012
THIS
week millions of “Chreasters” — Americans who attend church only on Christmas
and Easter — will crowd into pews to sing carols and renew their vague
relationship with the Christian God. This year, there may be fewer Chreasters
than ever. A growing number of “nones” live in our midst: those who say they
have no religious affiliation at all. An October Pew Research Center poll revealed
that they now account for 20 percent of the population, up from 16 percent in
2008.
Valero
Doval
Avoiding
church does not excuse Americans from marking the birth of Jesus, however. Most
of us have no choice but to stay home from work or school — and if you complain
about this glaring exception to the separation between church and state, you
must be a scrooge with no heart for tradition. Christmas has been a federal
holiday for 142 years.
Yet
Christianity’s preferential place in our culture and civil law came under fire
this year, and not simply because more Americans reject institutional religion.
The Obama administration subtly worked to expand the scope of protected civil
rights to include access to legal marriage and birth control. Catholic bishops
and evangelical activists declared that Washington was running roughshod over
religious liberty and abandoning the country’s founding values, while their
opponents accused them of imposing one set of religious prejudices on an
increasingly pluralistic population. The Christian consensus that long governed
our public square is disintegrating. American secularism is at a crossroads.
The
narrative on the right is this: Once upon a time, Americans honored the Lord,
and he commissioned their nation to welcome all faiths while commanding them to
uphold Christian values. But in recent decades, the Supreme Court ruled against
prayer in public schools, and legalized abortion, while politicians declared “war
on Christmas” and kowtowed to the “homosexual lobby.” Conservative activists
insist that they protest these developments not to defend special privileges
for Christianity, but to respect the founders’ desire for universal religious
liberty — rooted, they say, in the Christian tradition.
The
controversial activist David Barton has devoted his career to popularizing this
“forgotten history” through lectures, books and home-school curriculums. Mr.
Barton insists that “biblical Christianity in America produced many of the
cherished traditions still enjoyed today,” including “protection for religious
toleration and the rights of conscience.”
Bryan
Fischer, spokesman for the American Family Association, told me that he saw the
“nones” as proof that “the foundations of our culture are crumbling.” The Pew
poll, he said, “is one of the signs.” A couple of weeks after we spoke, he told
a radio audience that God did not protect the children killed in the Newtown,
Conn., massacre because of the Supreme Court decisions banning prayer and Bible
reading in public schools. “God is not going to go where he is not wanted,” Mr.
Fischer said.
How
accurate is this story of decline into godlessness? Is America, supposedly
God’s last bastion in the Western world, rejecting faith and endangering
religious liberty?
The
truth is that “nones” are nothing new. Religion has been a feature of human
society since Neanderthal times, but so has religious indifference. Our
illusions of the past as a golden age of faith tend to cloud our assessment of
today’s religious landscape. We think of atheism and religious apathy as
uniquely modern spiritual options, ideas that Voltaire and Hume devised in a
coffee house one rainy afternoon sometime in the 18th century. Before the
Enlightenment, legend has it, peasants hurried to church every week and princes
bowed and scraped before priests.
Historians
have yet to unearth Pew studies from the 13th century, but it is safe to say
that we frequently overestimate medieval piety. Ordinary people often skipped
church and had a feeble grasp of basic Christian dogma. Many priests barely
understood the Latin they chanted — and many parishes lacked any priest at all.
Bishops complained about towns that used their cathedrals mainly as indoor
markets or granaries. Lest Protestants blame this irreverence on Catholic
corruption, the evidence suggests that it continued after Martin Luther nailed
his theses to the Wittenberg church door. In 1584, census takers in Antwerp
discovered that the city had a larger proportion of “nones” than 21st-century
America: a full third of residents claimed no religious affiliation.
When
conservative activists claim that America stands apart from godless Europe,
they are not entirely wrong. The colonies were relatively unchurched, but
European visitors to the early republic marveled at Americans’ fervent piety.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840 that the absence of an established state
church nurtured a society in which “Christian sects are infinitely diversified
and perpetually modified; but Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly
established that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.”
De
Tocqueville visited during a wave of religious revival, but he underestimated
the degree to which some Americans held Christianity at arm’s length: the
“infidel” Abraham Lincoln declined to join a church, and his wife invited
spiritualists to hold séances in the White House.
Nevertheless,
America’s rates of church affiliation have long been higher than those of
Europe — perhaps because of the First Amendment, which permitted a religious
“free market” that encouraged innovation and competition between spiritual
entrepreneurs. Yet membership, as every exasperated parson knows, is not the
same as showing up on Sunday morning. Rates of church attendance have never
been as sterling as the Christian Right’s fable of national decline suggests.
Before the Civil War, regular attendance probably never exceeded 30 percent,
rising to a high of 40 percent around 1965 and declining to under 30 percent in
recent years — even as 77 percent still identify as Christians and 69 percent
say they are “very” or “moderately” religious, according to a 2012 Gallup
survey.
We
know, then, that the good old days were not so good after all, even in God’s New
Israel. Today’s spiritual independents are not unprecedented. What is new is
their increasing visibility. “I like the fact that we’re getting more ‘nones’
because it helps Christians realize that they’re different,” Stanley Hauerwas,
a Protestant theologian at Duke Divinity School, said when I asked for his
thoughts on the Pew poll. “That’s a crucial development. America produces
people that say, ‘I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my personal
opinion.’ ”
The
temple of “my personal opinion” may be the real “established church” in modern
America. Three decades ago, one “none” named Sheila Larson told the sociologist
Robert Bellah and his collaborators that she called her faith “Sheilaism. Just
my own little voice.” Americans are drifting out of the grip of
institutionalized religion, just as they are drifting from institutional
authority in general.
THIS
trend, made famous by books like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone,” has
encouraged both the theological mushiness of those who say they are “spiritual,
not religious” as well as the unfiltered fury that has come to characterize
both ends of the political spectrum. “It seems like we live in a Manichaean
universe, with vitriolic extremes,” said Kathryn Lofton, associate professor of
American studies and religious studies at Yale. “That’s not unrelated to the
lack of tempering authority. ‘Religious authority’ is no longer clergy in the
pulpit saying ‘Vote for Eisenhower,’ but forwarded URL links or gossip
exchanges in chat rooms. There is no referee.”
For
a very long time, Protestant leaders were those referees. If individual impiety
flourished in centuries past, churches still wielded significant control over
civic culture: the symbols, standards and sexual mores that most of the
populace respected in public, if not always in private. Today, more and more
Americans openly accept extramarital sex, homosexuality and other outrages to
traditional Christian morality. They question the Protestant civil religion
that has undergirded our common life for so long.
The
idea of Protestant civil religion sounds strange in a country that prides
itself on secularism and religious tolerance. However, America’s religious free
market has never been entirely free. The founding fathers prized freedom of
conscience, but they did not intend to purge society of Protestant influence
(they had deep suspicions of Catholicism). Most believed that churches helped
to restrain the excesses of mob democracy. Since then, theology has shaped
American laws regarding marriage, public oaths and the bounds of free speech.
For most of our history, the loudest defenders of the separation of church and
state were not rogue atheists, but Protestants worried about Catholics seeking
financing for parochial schools or scheming their way into public office to
take orders only from mitered masters in Rome.
Activists
on both the left and the right tend to forget this irony of the First
Amendment: it has been as much a weapon of religious oppression as a safeguard
for liberty. In the 19th and early 20th century, when public school teachers
read from a Protestant translation of the Bible in class, many Americans saw
benign reinforcement of American values. If Catholic parents complained,
officials told them that their Roman dogma was their own private concern. The
underlying logic here was not religious neutrality.
The
Protestant bias of the American public sphere has mellowed over time, but it
still depends on “Christian secularism,” said Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a
political scientist at Northwestern University. This is a “political stance”
premised on a “chiefly Protestant notion of religion understood as private
assent to a set of propositional beliefs,” she told me. Other traditions, such
as Judaism and Islam and to some degree Catholicism, do not frame faith in such
rationalist terms, or accept the same distinction between internal conviction
and public argument. The very idea that it is possible to cordon off personal
religious beliefs from a secular town square depends on Protestant assumptions
about what counts as “religion,” even if we now mask these sectarian
foundations with labels like “Judeo-Christian.”
Conservative
Christian activists hold those sectarian foundations more dearly than they
admit, and they are challenging the Obama administration’s efforts to frame
access to contraception and same-sex marriage as civil rights immune to the
veto of “private” conscience. Alan Sears, president of the legal advocacy
organization Alliance Defending Freedom, sees an unprecedented threat to
religious liberty in the harsh fines facing employers who refuse to cover
contraception in their insurance programs. “It is a death penalty. It is a
radical change,” he told me. “It’s one thing when you’re debating about public
space, but it’s another when you say, if you don’t surrender your conscience,
you’re out of business.”
Barry
Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (an
organization that until 1972 was named, tellingly, Protestants and Other
Americans United for Separation of Church and State), sees things differently.
He worries about what might happen if an unpredictable Supreme Court agrees to
hear conservative Christians’ challenges to the contraception mandate, or their
pleas for exemptions for charities that accept federal grants but discriminate
on the basis of religion in hiring. “The court could create something vastly
more dangerous than corporate free speech: a ‘corporate conscience’ claim,” Mr.
Lynn, a lawyer and an ordained minister, told me. “These cases could become as
significant for the redefinition of religious liberty as Roe v. Wade was a
rearticulation of the right to privacy.”
These
legal efforts are less an attempt to redefine religious liberty than a campaign
to preserve Christians’ historic right to police the boundary between secular
principles and religious beliefs. Only now that conservative Christians have
less control over organs of public power, they cannot rely on the political
process. Now that the “nones” are declaring themselves, and more Americans —
including many Christians — see birth control as a medical necessity rather
than a sin, Mr. Sears sees a stark course of action for the Catholic and
evangelical business owners he represents: “Litigation is all that our clients
have.” Their problem, however, is more fundamental than legal precedent. Their
problem is that America’s Christian consensus is fragmenting. We are left
groping for something far messier: an evolving, this-worldly, compromise.
Molly
Worthen is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
