The Tea Party and Civic Religion, Part III: Separation Philosophical Breakdown
By Andrew Dyrli Hermeling
The Final Installment
Part III: Separation Philosophical Breakdown
(Or: Oh snap! My own historical argument doesn’t make sense!)
I have to be honest, I knew I was painting myself in a corner all along. In fact, in many ways, my frantic pleas for help while surrounded by wet paint are the endpoint I have been trying to illustrate. And to continue my honest streak, I really don’t know how to get past the incongruity of some of my beliefs.
I hate civic religion. I find it dangerous and insulting to both history and faith. When Sarah Palin and her followers use faith as a selling point, my faith tells me to run away as fast as I can. Yet under a little self analysis, I really am no better. ALL of my political views are informed by faith in Christ. If I had my druthers, my faith and state would be congruent, despite my aversion to using God as justification. Galatians 3:28 tells me there is no male or female, which is the basis for my firm belief in the equality of men and women and the necessity for political advocacy for women in order to make this world more like the kingdom of heaven. Furthermore, the same verse, in my heart, justifies advocacy for more controversial gender issues and the full rights of transgendered individuals. Similarly, Micah 4:3 is the basis for my firm spiritual and political opposition to war as a diplomatic tool and the exorbitance of the nation’s military spending. Finally, as mentioned in my previous post, I would argue that the civil-rights achievements of the middle of the 20th century would have been impossible without the aid of strong biblical language. No complaints from me.
So philosophically, how am I different from Sarah Palin or the rest of the religious right. Yes, obviously faith in Christ has led me to very different political opinions, but am I philosophically different?
At this point, I cannot see how the individual can conceivably separate faith and politics. And this is where perhaps we need to abandon our allegiance to the thoughts and political theories of the Founding Fathers. According to them, if one could not argue in favor or opposition of a political action using reason alone, then the argument was invalid. But how can we continue to maintain this litmus test of feasibility when we live in an age where we admit that there are no spheres of thought wholly separate from one another. If my faith is holistic, then it follows that all of my opinions and causes will be informed first by faith. So I have, as I see, a shortage of attractive options. I could abstain from political discourse altogether, as the most traditional of Anabaptists do. But politics are too important, the consequences of my non-participation too great. I could vote and support only “Godly” politicians and their causes, as the religious-right does, and try and make the church and government become congruent. But then I would be alienating not only practitioners of other faiths along with those without faith but a great many Christians as well, just as the religious-right would alienate me and the Christ I have come to know. Or I could exist in this space of philosophical and ethical tension, where I am upset by the intermixing of faith and political dialogue, despite the fact that there are many instances when I am comfortable with it, and run the constant risk of being a hypocrite, if I am not one already.
So there I go, undermining all of my historical arguments against the Tea Party and their tendency toward faulty memory and civic religion.
The Tea Party and Civic Religion, Part II: Church and State
by Andrew Dyrli Hermeling
Part II: Church and State
Let us begin with a little compare and contrast, reminiscing on our middle school days [daze] and our teachers’ affinity for Venn diagrams. On the one hand, the European nations of Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Greece (to name but a few) all have official state religions (Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Reformed, and Eastern Orthodoxy respectively). Yet most would agree that the prevailing cultures of these nations are decidedly secular. The church has been relegated to the position of glorified census and records bureau and holds very little sway over mores and cultural movements. On the other hand, the United States was founded upon a firm commitment toward political secularism. While the New England colonies did indeed adopt a policy of state religion, the concept was abandoned by the time of the Revolution. However, despite our tradition of political secularism, mores and cultural definitions within the nation are often critiqued and defined using theistic, if not specifically Christian biblical language.
As stated in my previous post, the founders attempted to create a system of governance based upon the principles of reason, a power that many of them perceived as being diametrically opposed toward the failings of human passions. Thomas Jefferson cites the First Amendment of the Constitution as creating a “wall of separation” between church and state during a letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802. This view is rooted in the writings of John Locke, who felt that the government had no say in the individual conscience. Furthermore, in 1797, a treaty signed with Tripoli stated that the government was not founded in anyway in accordance with the Christian religion. Moreover, James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, clearly stated that his intent in the writing of the First Amendment was to secure separation of church and state. “We are teaching the world the great truth that Govts. do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Govt.”
So where does the false memory of a time when God was an official member of political discourse come from? I believe that two theories hold water (not to suggest that they are the only two), appealing to two very different political movements. The first was the necessity of moral language and a religious imperative during the struggle for the full citizenship of African-Americans. The inability of the emotionally disconnected language of politics to fully deal with the issue of slavery forced abolitionists to change their rhetoric and voice their cause by illustrating why slavery was in fact evil in a very spiritual sense. Abolitionists argued against the practice of slavery in much the same way that conservatives argue against abortion today. Logic and reason has very little voice in the dialogue, and most people today would agree that it need not in the case of slavery, yet the nation is woefully divided over the appropriateness of such language in the dialogue over abortion rights. Moreover, it is a rare outlier who is offended by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, despite the fact that it deliberately combined the spheres of religion and politics in order to achieve a purely political goal.
In regards to the second theory, I would argue that the adaptation of “God language” within the political vernacular happened as a direct response to the political language of atheism used by Communism during the middle of the 20th century. This is most evident in the addition of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance as adopted in 1954. In the 18th century, the opposition to theistic language in politics was an overt attempt to distance the political system of the United States from those of Europe, where God was used as justification for authority. The same need for linguistic contrast in the 20th century caused this reversal. As a nation we insisted that we were diametrically opposed to the godless “Russkies” and began illustrating this polarization by overtly stating that we were “one nation, under God.”
However, despite the adoption of theistic language in political discourse, it is clear once again that this was not the Founders’ intent. In part III of this critique, we will analyze whether the intent of the Founders is reasonable.
The Tea Party and Civic Religion, Part I: The Founding Fathers
By Andrew Dyrli Hermeling
This is the first part of a three part critique of the Tea Party movement from a historical and philosophical perspective.
Part I: The Founding Fathers
The Tea Party Movement is a political expression rooted in the mythology of the nation’s founding moments. (Fear not, I am fully aware of the obviousness of this statement.) Starting with its very name, moving through its shouted slogans, and ending with the Gadsden flag, the philosophical aim of the movement is that of a proverbial reset button. The nation, according to the movement’s members, has just seen all of the work started during the Reagan years disappear, leaving them to stare lividly at Obama’s “Blue Screen of Death.” Newt Gingrich, Reaganomics, private enterprise, and limited government, all gone in an instant. With all of that work lost, all that is left for Tea Partiers is to cram the nation into Bill and Ted’s phone booth and ride the lightning back to 1776, when taxes were evil, God had a voice in government, everyone had a musket, and black people knew their role.
Unfortunately for them, I seriously doubt they would like 1776 as much as they seem to think they would.
Let us put aside for a moment that the seeds of abolition and equal rights were already being sown, or that most hard evidence seems to indicate that guns were not so omnipresent as many care to believe, or even the fact that by 1787 any political thinkers with half a brain realized that a centralized taxation system was essential for national security. (Alexander Hamilton is on the ten dollar bill for a reason.) Yes, even despite these glaring historical pot-holes on the Tea Party’s golden highway, there is no more pervasive historical untruth at the forefront of the faulty Tea Party memory banks than the assumption that the Founding Fathers were any more comfortable with the role of religion in politics than the Democratic Party. Yes, there were some old-timers who still held dearly to the memory of the Great Awakening, but by and large the Founders of this nation were philosophers worshiping at the altar of the Enlightenment. And the central tenet of the Enlightenment was the belief that rational thought, infallibly logical and devoid of the influence of human passion, could lead to an efficacious system untainted by the failings of human faults. In layman’s terms, our Founding Fathers were aspiring Vulcans.
Thus we arrive at the great failing of the Tea Party’s mythological narrative. Yes, the Founders often made mention of God, but this was not a God of divine action bringing about salvation through the washing of sins. It was a theopomorphized conceptualization of reason, the antithesis of the passion of humanity and the God of the Great Awakening. It was this God of reason, as described by the pseudo-religion of deism as practiced by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, that the Founders sought guidance from in order to create a constitution immutable in both word and deed by the hands of humans with such fetid drives as power and pride. The failings of the British constitution (the amorphous, unwritten concept that sought to protect Britannia from the even greater failings of French absolutism) were the inspiration for a concept of governance that neither had room for the voice of the Church or any person with any semblance to Tea Partiers. The government that Washington et al. sought to create was designed to eliminate the opportunity for another Charles I to lay claim via divine right, a government where no man or woman from any state, especially one due east from Russia, could bolster their credentials with the assumption that God had chosen them. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife.
This is the tragedy of the civic religion with its “holy” mythology that our nation has created. It lumps Common Sense with The Federalist Papers, despite the fact that John Adams hated Thomas Paine just as much as he hated George III. It makes the Founders out of be saints, writing ideas about governance in the margins of their sermon notes taken at Philadelphia’s First Presbyterian Church. It tells stories of Paul Revere and Ethan Allen galloping around New England, heroes of freedom shouting “Don’t Tread on Me.” It paints a picture completely removed from any sort of historical scholarship. Heck, even the History Channel, which no historian would ever be caught watching, would never try to pass off such a simplistic picture of the Revolutionary period.
Yet this is the peg that the Tea Partiers are hanging their collective hat upon. And I guess at the end of the day, they have every right. Just don’t call it history.
1 comment