Are we a Christian nation? Will we be at the end of the 21st Century?
Are we a Christian nation? Sam Huntington at Harvard thinks so. Jerry Falwell thinks so. Many traditional American high school history textbooks imply as much. The United States Air Force Academy thinks we are a Christian nation. Justice Antonin Scalia seems to share this view.
It was certainly the case that when they spoke of freedom of religion, what the Founders had in mind was the freedom to choose among Christian denominations; or to choose to reject Christianity, and believe nothing.
Spiritual diversity in 18th Century America spanned Christianity, Agnosticism, and Atheism with (almost as an afterthought) a little space for the tiny 18th Century American Jewish community. Hindus, Sikhs, and Parsees were not seriously contemplated in the original construct of religious freedom in America.
Perhaps the dynamics of immigration and demography will make this long-standing notion of Christian America moot in the 21st century.
Kevin Phillips pays only passing attention to the growth of non-Christian religion in the United States. It is almost as marginal in his picture of religious America as it was in the religious perspectives of Jefferson and Madison.
But the facts on the ground have changed between the 18th and the 21st centuries. If Tom Paine was not concerned about the inalienable rights of American Hindus it was probably because he had never met a Hindu.
My pal of forty years, Professor Diana Eck, who chairs the Department of Comparative Religion at Harvard (and direct’s the Pluralism Project in Cambridge), has devoted considerable scholarship to the changing patterns of religious pluralism in the United States.
In her landmark look at the growth of non-Christian religions in the U.S.,"A New Religious America", Diana attributes the increase in America’s spiritual diversity to the wave of mainly non-European immigration into the United States. Until 1924, the patterns of American immigration were dominated by Christian and Jewish flows.
A 1924 federal statute ended what we think of as the “Ellis Island era” of (mainly) European, Christian and Jewish immigration by severely restricting all immigration.
When the doors re-opened in 1965, the religious shape of immigrant flows changed enormously. The 1965 law favored non-Europeans, leading to the second great immigration wave-–the United States now accepts on average 1 million legal immigrants per year, nearly all of whom hail from Africa, Central and South America, India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. They have brought with them a tapestry of religious diversity previously unknown in America.
There are now, for example, considerably more Muslims than Episcopalians in America, but popular perceptions have not caught up with demographic realities. Indeed, the number of American Muslims is approximately equal to the total number of American Jews and American Episcopalians combined.
Diana Eck writes that “Most people know that immigration has changed the face of America in the last 20 years, and they're aware of Latino and Hispanic immigration and recognize how that has changed the Catholic Church and Protestantism across the country. But I think people are less cognizant of Islamic and Hindu and Buddhist and Sikh communities…….. many Americans carry a normative Christian sense of what religion in America is—with a bit of space made for the Jews. One of the things that was most interesting about the rise and contestation of the Bush administration's faith-based initiative during the winter was the presumption of so many people about what "faith-based" meant. And when they started to realize that it might mean Islam or Scientology or Hare Krishnas or Hindus, they were startled and not so sure this was OK”
We are still an overwhelmingly “Christian nation” in the sense more than 80 percent of Americans report themselves as Christians in surveys while only a bit more than 10% report themselves under all the other non-Christian spiritual categories-–Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Parsee, Sikh, etc.
Most of the Founders presumed the United States would be Christian, and George Washington even said that Christianity would be essential to the new nation’s moral character. And this is where Kevin Phillips’ accounting of the contenders for ownership of the religious space in politics becomes important. Northern, liturgical, non-evangelical, inclusive Christians generally accommodate to this rising spiritual diversity. Southern, evangelical Christians are far less likely to be so accommodating.
Phillips writes in American Theocracy that “the frequent by-products of religious fervor in the later stages of previous powers – zealotry, exaltation of faith over reason, too much church-state collaboration, or a contagion of crusader mentality – whel light on another contemporaty U.S. predicament. Controversies that run the gamut from interference with science to biblically inhibited climatology….. have accompanied the political rise of Christian conservatism. Such trends are rarely auspicious.”
Some of the early comments in this week’s book club have been skeptical about the long term dangers of religious conservatism to America’s prosperity and America’s democracy. Phillips does not share their nonchalance. He sees, in the powerful anti-intellectualism of religiously-determined science and religiously determined social policy, the seeds of long-term national decline. His concerns about the narrowing of the American mind are worth taking seriously.
If the 21st century is an epoch in which increasing numbers of American children study “Creation Science” and substitute “Intelligent Design Studies” for biology, while increasing numbers of Indian and Chinese students master differential calculus in the eighth grade and major in molecular biology as undergraduates, then Kevin Phillips is correct that America’s golden age will inexorably begin to fade into history.
On the other hand, if American Hindus and American Parsees are all studying calculus in the eighth grade while their American Christian comrades are lost in Biblical literalism, then perhaps America’s salvation will lie in our escape from our 18th origins as a Christian nation.
Either outcome is sobering.
I am skeptical, and I think we have very good reasons to be skeptical. We should not immediately trust anyone who is selling a "long-term national decline." Your characterization of his book is probably accurate, but it just places it among all the other jeremiads that have ever been written. When was the last time one of those was right? Was Jeremiah even right?
Jeremiads are designed to raise indignation--to wake society up so that it will change. What needs changing though? You are concerned with religiously determined social policy and religiously determined science.
What religiously determined science? It doesn't exist in the United States. Creationism is out. Creation science is out. Intelligent design is out. Evolution is in. As far as education goes, we ought to be more concerned about challenging our students more than we are concerned that at some time, some where, some school board might try to get ID back into schools.
What religiously determined social policy? Would you dislike social policy that favored assistance to the poor if it were driven by Christian concerns? Or stronger environmental policies? Would you be against progressive policies driven by Christian beliefs? I suspect not. We ought to be against bad policies and favor good ones with origin or support irrelevant.
Anyway. Feel free to complain and worry. No one's going to stop you.
March 21, 2006 7:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think the fundamental question is what people mean by "Christian nation." Obviously, America is a country where most of the people are Christian, but that's not what the Christian Nationalists, as I call them in my">http://www.kingdomcoming.com/">my book, mean when they use the phrase. The idea of the Christian nation is based on a political ideology and revisionist history that holds that the founders intended for Christianity to govern America, and that separation of church and state is a lie fostered by devious liberals to undermine the country. For the most part, they have no problems with non-Christians living and practicing in America, as long as they know their place. As Fox News anchor John Gibson, author of "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought," told Christian right radio host Janet Parshall, American Christians tolerate people "following the wrong religion…as long as they're civil and behave." This vision of America isn't exactly theocracy, but it's definitely not equality, either.
The growth of other religions -- and the non-religious -- only exacerbates this kind of nationalism. The religious historian Karen Armstrong has written a lot about how fundamentalism works symbiotically with secularization. Those who feel that Christians have an essential right to rule America -- perhaps a minority within the GOP, but a significant and powerful one -- are only going to get more aggrieved and radical as other belief systems become more visible.
March 21, 2006 7:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think the fundamental question is what people mean by "Christian nation." Obviously, America is a country where most of the people are Christian, but that's not what the Christian Nationalists, as I call them in my">http://www.kingdomcoming.com/">my book, mean when they use the phrase. The idea of the Christian nation is based on a political ideology and revisionist history that holds that the founders intended for Christianity to govern America, and that separation of church and state is a lie fostered by devious liberals to undermine the country. For the most part, they have no problems with non-Christians living and practicing in America, as long as they know their place. As Fox News anchor John Gibson, author of "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought," told Christian right radio host Janet Parshall, American Christians tolerate people "following the wrong religion…as long as they're civil and behave." This vision of America isn't exactly theocracy, but it's definitely not equality, either.
The growth of other religions -- and the non-religious -- only exacerbates this kind of nationalism. The religious historian Karen Armstrong has written a lot about how fundamentalism works symbiotically with secularization. Those who feel that Christians have an essential right to rule America -- perhaps a minority within the GOP, but a significant and powerful one -- are only going to get more aggrieved and radical as other belief systems become more visible.
March 21, 2006 8:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
How strong is the fundamentalist chauvinistic brand of American Christianity? Two other trends inside American evangelism seem to point in the other direct.
First, there has been a rise of ecumenism evem among the religious right - the idea that traditional "people of faith" of other religions share more values than secularists and modernists of the same religion. (Clearly there are many in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that have far more vitriol for Reform Judaism than they do for evangelical Christianity)
Second, the trend toward "market-based" religion. Increasing switching of denominations and religions leads to pressures for American religious institutions to take a more consumer-friendly attitude. Alan Wolfe argues that the fasting growing evangelical megachurches eschew fire and brimstone and instead preach messages of inclusions and personal growth. Doesn't fundamentalism have a cap in such an environment?
Finally, since everyone agrees that fundamentalists are a minority - won't their increasing radicalism lead to a backlash? Isn't it as likely a scenario for American fundamentalists to sullenly retreat and withdrawal from American political life than to fully capture it?
March 21, 2006 8:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
I actually don't think those two trends point in the other direction, although some others do (for example, the increasing activism around global warming by some evangelicals). The rise of ecumenism is, if anything, a huge factor in the current political power of the religious right. Conservative Protestants and Catholics used to spend a lot of energy fighting each other; that they've joined forces against secularism is not great comfort to anyone who cherishes the 1st Amendment. Alan Keyes, Phyllis Schlafly and Sam Brownback are all Catholic -- does anyone really doubt that they're partisans of Christian rule?
As for market-based religion, I've spent the last year traveling around the country and going to a lot of these megachurches, and it's the fundamentalist ones that are growing fastest. That doesn't mean they're all fire and brimstone -- they have the trappings of anodyne suburban life -- but they espouse an intensely political sort of biblical literalism. The fact that these churches serve so many social functions -- gyms, day care, dances, libraries, etc. -- in exurbs without much else in the way of community space makes them incredibly powerful conduits for the ideology I call Christian nationalism.
Will their fundamentalism lead to a backlash? Sure, I suspect it will. But given the rural bias of our electoral system and the religious right hegemony in so many local Republican machines, the Christian right will continue to exercise disproportionate power whether or not majorities of Americans vote against it.
March 21, 2006 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
What I've recently come to realize I find so appaling of Christianity is not any failure of logic on their part of the sort that atheists would find, but rather it's tendency to lack imagination. To the extent that any population increases its memetic diversity, I cannot help but think that is extraordinary good news regardless of political implications.
March 21, 2006 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, what does it mean for the USA to be "Christian?" Christianity in America has little to do with Christ and everything to do with ethics. American Christianity is akin to Confucianism, a standard of mores and social behaviors with most of its emphasis on SEX. Jesus taught and warned about the evil effects of money. After sex, American Christianity is most concerned with money - how to get it and hoard it. The whole lot of them (us) are nothing but hypocrites.
Regarding the immigration flows, sure there are plenty of new non-Christian immigrants but the flows and the natural increase are coming from the Hispanic population and the trends are for this to continue well into the future making this not only a "Christian" nation but possibly a Catholic one as well. And along with that Catholicism will be more obsession with sex, money, and superstition -- hardly Christian concerns.
"Where the bulk of the population cannot read, true democracy is impossible." -- Bertrand Russell
March 21, 2006 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is my understanding that in a world felt to be increasingly secular devout Catholics, Evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Jews all have aligned with each other to make Godliness more powerful.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
March 21, 2006 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Two disparate points. The American Founders had an awareness more than we do today what it means to live with an estabilished church. The English Dissenters who came to America took their relgious as seriously as any Fundamentalist today. They refused to conform feeling the rites of the Church of England too Papist. What those who today insist we are a Christian nation that should be ruled by such tenets don't seem to realize how badly it is likely to work out for the faithful to have the state be involved in their religion.
It is ironic to me that as Kevin Phillips raises the issue of the dangers of Evangelical Rightwing Christinianity to the United States over at America Abroad one of Ivo Daalders post has given rise to support and discussion of John Mearsheimers and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby." This article however, academically prettied up is about the Jewish cabal controling Amerian foreign policy. These two ideas strike me as fundamentally contradictory.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
March 21, 2006 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Being Wiccan, I am long used to being overlooked in the nation's religious community (although we're everywhere online!). But this quote reminded me of something some friends and I have been talking about:
<blockquote>One of the things that was most interesting about the rise and contestation of the Bush administration's faith-based initiative during the winter was the presumption of so many people about what "faith-based" meant. And when they started to realize that it might mean Islam or Scientology or Hare Krishnas or Hindus, they were startled and not so sure this was OK” </blockquote>
We live in Ohio, which is a school voucher state. We've been considering setting up a homeschooling co-op, a form of charter school, and then trying to get voucher funding. This hits the fundies in two places...first, it shows them that their precious voucher may very well go to funding Paganism! And to top it off, they also may be gun shy about attacking it because of it's homeschooling nature, another thing beloved by the right-wing.
To attack, they'd have to shed any cover and come out as religious bigots...not exactly news, but something they try to hide.
Blessed Be
March 21, 2006 12:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's hard (for me) not to see some sort of connection between the role these churches play within exurban areas--social services--with the explanations for the success of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, Hamas having been credited with gaining the confidence of Palestinians by, in part, supplying schools and hauling garbage, etc. What's interesting is that the enabling factor in this process was a deeply corrupt, dysfunctional (according to common understanding anyway) government . We don't have that in the US, except to the extent that the party with the strongest ties to the religious right has in the past six years exerted itself to establish one.
As the first respondent to Blocktons's original post suggested, its wise to be reluctant to credit jeremiads, but when I compare the trends Phillip's book describes, along with my read on the culture at large, to the hold Islamic fundamentalism has on the middle east--this sort of underlying and profoundly unselfconscious momentum towards religious extremism--I conclude that the one thing religious and secular moderates must do is crystallize their vision of a just and sensible society and then argue for it vigorously, whatever the consequences that might exist or which we might imagine. While Civilizations endure, they also decline, and even vanish. Whether we're responding to trends that represent the natural ebb and flow of our fortunes and those which signify catastrophic change is to my mind irrelevant. We need to argue for our vision in both contexts.
March 21, 2006 1:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I should have been specific that I was referring to interfaith ecumenism. The question is whether Orthodox Jews, Muslims and other non-Christian religious traditionalists are viewed as genuine partners against secular society or merely convenient window dressing. I think the evidence on this question is definitively mixed.
As you aptly note, megachurches pretty much are civil society in many exurbs. I think the crictical issue therefore is to what extent do the megachurches shape the worldviews of their congregants and to what extent they adapt to these worldviews. Alan Wolfe concludes, based on mainly anecdotal evidence, that megachurches are if anything too adaptive, too consumerist, too open to mainstream cultural influence. You seem to come down on the other side of the debate based on your observations. I think that serious social science research needs to be done in this area to get a better sense of what the long-term impact of the exurban megachurch movement is going to be.
March 21, 2006 3:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Bush admin does not talk about some of the real junk science it has instituted in a real way. This article is behind the subscription firewall, NOAA's Flood - The government's junk science, but it illustrates only one of the ways junk science exists in the US.
I remember seeing this policy instituted shortly after the Katrina/Rita fiascos last summer and thinking how odd that the govt would want to muzzle one of its most effective orgs. (As a native of So. Fla, I am familiar with NOAA). So that article makes sense of the edict I saw on their website.
"War does not determine who is right—only who is left." — Bertrand Russell
March 21, 2006 11:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Michelle, I've read your articles in Salon and have some questions. After reading Steven Waldman's Jefferson, Madison & Their Evangelical Pals - Religious freedom resulted from an unlikely alliance: evangelicals and skeptics in Washington Montly last week, I've done some research.
Is it accurate to say there is a difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists and the differences are (more or less): (1)The fundamentalists are a subset of the evangelicals, but they consider the evangelicals to be practically liberal. (2) And one of the main differences is that the fundamentalists regard the Bible as inerrant and infallible while the evangelicals consider it an authority.
Dr. Richard Land, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which is the Southern Baptist Convention's policy arm, writes frequently of his support for separation of church and state, opposition to religion in public schools and faith-based charity groups funded by tax dollars.
Is this mostly true of evangelicals, or just this particular group? Is it even really true of this group?
What are groups such as Dobson's Focus on the Family? According to their policy? on church and state which reads:
Are they implying that the famous Christians who made worthwhile social changes, under the same laws we have now, could now not make those changes? What changed? And is Focus on the Family a Dominionist type group? Last question, I think, is FotF a part of the Armegeddon deal that Bush was questioned about, and didn't answer, on Monday?
Thanks. It seems important to get the players straight.
"War does not determine who is right—only who is left." — Bertrand Russell
March 21, 2006 11:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
mgoldberg, in your research, do you see a dominant theme or two in this fundamentalist's war on secularism? Is it energized by one or two hot issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, for instance, or is it more generalized alarm or fear for which these two items are simply symbolic? What's the basic fuel for the fire, in other words.
It's always seemed to me that, at least since the 1960s, there's been a growing sense of alarm at what the fundamentalists see as a spread of negative social beliefs and practices. A generalized reaction, basically.
March 22, 2006 6:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
sorry. duplicate post
March 22, 2006 6:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Religion should be affectionately known hereafter as The God Theory and it should not be lost on anyone that more lives have been lost in world history due to religious intolerance, in one form or another, than from any other cause. Coincidence? I think not. Anyone want to move to Guyana and drink Cool Aid?
March 22, 2006 6:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
mgoldberg, another question. I've been doing a lot of reading for a writing project, on the history of the early church and the nature of society in the 1st. century AC. (or AD, if you prefer). It's a complicated picture, but Christianity was seen as a threat by the dominant secular culture then, too, and the most extreme measures were taken to stamp it out, from social ostracism to prision to beatings by mobs to crucifiction. It's hard not to feel some sympathy for the underdog then
A hunch I have is that the more fundamentalist the believer, the more they see their battle in the context of the early church's struggle to survive as underdogs in a pagan and often quite hostile Greco-Roman context, the more likely they are to draw parallels to modern secular society and to fight what they see as the same battle all over again. In other words, to engage them on what our founders believed 200 years ago is to miss the point: their focus (and I don't believe they really get this right, either, but it's what they believe) is on a different founder 2,000 years ago. These are people who take the long view, and that's why appeals to tolerance and ecuminism go right past them.
Does this sound right to you?
March 22, 2006 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I always look at things from an economic viewpoint. The rise of anti-intellectualism and the defunding of science education and basic R&D has put the US in a weaker competitive position in the world. The number of Chinese and Indian engineers graduating from college now exceeds that of the US. In addition the new anti-terrorist immigration policies have made it harder for foreign students to do graduate training in the US. In some disciplines they accounted for up to half of the incoming students. Many stayed in the US after getting their degree.
Theocracies are bad for the economy. Take Iran as a recent example. Before the revolution they were on the way to become a modern industrialized nation. They have now slipped back into third world status. Unemployment is as high as 30-40%. Women are excluded from much of the workforce and many well educated people have left or been "eliminated". As a consequence they have gone backwards about 100 years worth in development.
The Chinese and Indians will be perfectly happy watching while the US shoots itself in the foot by replacing science with religion. We have already fallen behind in electronics and much advanced bio-medical research is happening elsewhere. Suppose China comes up with an anti-cancer vaccine. Also suppose they refuse to sell it to us. Imagine how much more competitive they will be then by not having the social costs of treating the disease. It is probably too late to regain world dominance in science and technology, but if we keep going on the current course we won't even be in the running.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
March 22, 2006 7:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
rdf
Granted, the Baby Boom generation was a miserable failure for those of us who wish to see the erosion of religious influence in politics. But I would say both Generations X and Y may prove all of us wrong. There has certainly been no religious revival among the 40 and under set in the United States. In addition, a stark rise in race tolerance among the younger Americans is also very promising. The rub, of course, is that younger Americans also like sex and drugs more than even their parents--which is a scary thought.
March 22, 2006 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Religion should be affectionately known hereafter as The God Theory and it should not be lost on anyone that more lives have been lost in world history due to religious intolerance, in one form or another, than from any other cause.
Nonsense. Far more lives (by whole orders of magnitude) have been lost due to good old fashioned greed and power lust.
March 23, 2006 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
JPF311
Greed and power lust? What do you think religion is? If you think the Vatican, for instance, isn't guilty of wanton power abuse, you'd be fooling yourself. Remember Martin Luther's disgust with the Catholic Church's hypocricy and coersion with indulgences, etc? It's all a game and the power strucutres atop the leading churches of the world are shockingly similar to those atop world governments.
March 24, 2006 7:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Even if I grant your hyper-cynical premise that all religious leaders are frauds out to enrich themselves, that still doesn't disprove my contention that the overwhelming majority of wars and atrocities have been fueled by largely secular interests seeking wealth and power. Religious are actually rather rare, considered over the whole sweep of world history.
March 26, 2006 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink