By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I realize that there are intelligent commentators on the right who are convinced that homosexual activists are pushing for the day when Christian churches will be compelled by law to perform same-sex marriages. I may be wrong, but I do not think that we will see that dictate anytime soon. It is not that I think the activists are too fair-minded to make such a demand. It is just that I think they realize pushing too far could lead to a backlash.
I do agree, however, that the push for same-sex marriage is part of the larger agenda of marginalizing Christianity; that homosexual activists are — as we speak — maneuvering to convince the American people that it is shameful for Christians to advance the case that they disapprove of homosexuality on the basis of passages in the Bible.
For the homosexual lobby to gain ground with that strategy, it is necessary for them to discredit the idea that America is a Christian nation, even in an unofficial way.
An article on the website Salon on April 29 may be the opening salvo in that campaign. The author Andrew Aghapour interviewed Princeton University history professor Kevin Kruse. Kruse maintains that the notion that the United States has always understood itself to be a Christian nation was first advanced as part of a religious revival in the 1950s, when the phrase “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the motto “In God We Trust” were inserted into our public life as a manifestation of what he believes is the “false and novel” notion that Christianity deserves a special position under American law.
It is hard to tell if Kruse is in error about the historical record, or jockeying disingenuously to advance a secular liberal agenda. But it is one or the other. Kruse is entitled to argue that the country would be better if it did not think of itself as Christian, but not that it never did. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts.” The facts are not on Kruse’s side.
Check the record: The compacts that formed the original British colonies spoke specifically of the Christian mission of the original settlers. The Mayflower Compact referred to the goal of the “advancement of the Christian faith” in the New World. The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England described its purpose as the “advancement of the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ” and the “enjoyment of the liberties of the Gospel.” The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) stated specifically that the colony’s goal was “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess.” The Massachusetts state constitution of 1780 required officeholders to declare their “belief in the Christian religion” and their “firm persuasion of its truth.” We could go on.
But did not all this change by the time the Constitution was ratified in 1789? It did not. There were established Christian churches in the colonies that ratified the Constitution. The Church of England was the established church in Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and in West Florida and East Florida. The Congregational Church was the established church in Connecticut and New Hampshire. From 1780 to 1824, Massachusetts residents were all required to attend a Protestant parish church, the denomination of which was chosen by a vote of the town residents.
It is true that most (but not all) of the states disestablished their churches at the time the Constitution was ratified, but that did not mean that they intended to be any less Christian a society. The no-establishment clause of the First Amendment was designed to free up the Christian churches in the individual states to proceed at the task of forming a Christian society. Its purpose was to ensure that there would be no single established church at the national level, so as to avoid the strife between religious factions that was tearing apart Europe at the time.
The Framers’ hope was to promote mutual respect and cooperation between the various Christian communities in the newly formed country, not to make Christianity any less a presence in their societal life. The Framers relied upon Christianity to provide the moral underpinnings that would enable a free society to survive.
That is what John Adams meant when he wrote, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
We can see Adams’ understanding of our political order in the way the country defined itself in the century and a half that followed. So-called blue laws were the order of the day, mandating the closing of many businesses on Sunday. When I was a boy in the 1950s, Major League Baseball games in many cities would end on Sunday before sunset to avoid using lights in the ballparks. Censorship of obscene material was as American as apple pie, with off-color material sold only in “plain brown wrappers” and “under the counter” and only in the “bad parts” of town.
And no one batted an eye when it was learned that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt joined with British Prime Minster Winston Churchill to sing Onward Christian Soldiers on the deck of the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales, as they formed the wartime alliance to battle Nazi Germany.
But isn’t it true that many of the Founding Fathers were deists of one sort or another, with a disdain for the organized Christian churches of their time? Some certainly were. Benjamin Franklin is often cited as an example. But their religious doubts did not lead them to disparage the role of Christianity in society. Franklin doubted Jesus’ divinity. Yet he stated flatly, “As to Jesus of Nazareth…, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see” and that it would be beneficial for society for “his doctrines to be more respected and more observed.”
Franklin also wrote, “Think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security.”
Granted, the above is not a ringing endorsement of Christianity. Franklin is speaking only of the societal usefulness of the inner disciplines that Christianity provides for the average man and woman; he did not think it necessary for enlightened people like himself.
But the point is that if even a deist such as Franklin was eager for the Christian churches of his time to flourish in the newly formed nation, it makes no sense to argue that the Founders, or the generations of Americans that followed, did not want Christianity to be integral to their lives.
I repeat: Modern secularists such as Kevin Kruse are free to argue that it is time to move away from this historical understanding of America as a Christian nation, but not that the American people did not think of themselves in that way. The facts are the facts.
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