By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, February
28, 2025
The United States is a Christian nation in the same sense
it is an English-speaking nation. There isn’t any law mandating it—that’s just
the way it is: Go out on the street, and you’ll mostly hear people speaking
English, obeying (more or less!) laws written in English by English-speaking
people in accordance with a Constitution written in English by people who had
been, until the Revolution, Englishmen annoyed with the English king, whose
court had been speaking English mainly since the time of Henry IV. That English
king was the titular head of a Christian church, from which Christian
dissenters had separated themselves by founding a colony in Massachusetts,
which eventually joined with other colonies—many of which were explicitly
Christian, with taxpayer-supported churches and clergy—and their overwhelmingly
Christian populations, whose members often could be found reading English
translations of the Bible named for another king of the English. (But not an
“English king”—a Scottish one.) The population remains
in the majority Christian, with the share of Americans who identify as
Christian outweighing those who identify as Republicans or Democrats combined.
But to say “This is a Christian nation” is a kind of political and social
shibboleth—as is denying the obvious fact that this is a Christian nation. Of
course there are people who live here who aren’t Christian or who don’t speak
English, just as there are people who live in Japan who aren’t ethnically or
culturally Japanese or who don’t speak Japanese—but, even though Japan has some
pretty aggressive nationalists who worry the liberals, nobody really gets bent
out of shape if someone says Japan is a Japanese nation: Who could deny it?
Who doubts that Hindustan—the Hindustani name for
India—is Hindu? Yes, there are Hindustani Muslims and Hindustani Sikhs and
Hindustani Christians and Hindustani Jains there, but if you put a replica of
New Delhi on Mars and rocketed any halfway culturally literate human being to
it, he’d get out of the landing module, take a look at that 108-foot-tall
statue of Hanuman and say: “Oh, look: Hindu civilization.” Even though they
have McDonald’s and rock ’n’ roll and polo shirts.
I have this on my mind because I recently participated in
a Poynter Institute presentation for journalists on what we now call, for lack
of a better term, “Christian nationalism.” I have some unhappy
history with these people, but I try to do as many of these events as I can
in the hope of making some marginal improvements in my struggling occupation.
It was a very fine example of “diversity” as imagined by progressives: a panel
of people with different demographic features who all basically agreed about
the subject at hand. (We was agin’ it.) I’m a longtime merciless critic of
these “Christian nationalist” fanatics and the riffraff they milk for power and
profit, and I was the most sympathetic member of the panel by a mile. Journalistic
groupthink is poison, and it is a real threat to the credibility (and economic
viability) of the business.
One of the panelists, a very well-intentioned pastor with
a new book out, objected to the host’s citing an organization critical of
Christian nationalism because the group supposedly has retrograde views on
other subjects and isn’t as opposed to Christian nationalism as she wishes it
were. And there’s some great diversity for you: It isn’t enough that we’re all
critics of the idea in question (and that nobody thought to invite anybody
sympathetic to it to present an alternative point of view) but, apparently, we
all have to be critical in the same way and to the same degree. That this is
preposterous did not seem to occur to anybody except me.
What I tried to explain to the viewers—and I am afraid
this fell on deaf ears—is that the Christian nationalists have a kernel of
truth at the heart of their complaint, and it is a kernel of political truth
rather than a kernel of religious truth. The heart of the matter isn’t revealed
truth but democratic legitimacy.
The so-called wall of separation between church and state
in the United States may be excellent policy—the more time I spend in churches
and talking with politicians, the more I think it is!—but it has a problem:
Nobody voted for it.
The First Amendment prohibits the “establishment” of
religion, which means the creation of a national church—a state church is what
an established church is. And while many of the men who negotiated, argued
about, wrote, and ratified the Constitution had wall-of-separation (the phrase
itself is, of course, Thomas Jefferson’s) views and many didn’t, none of them
thought that they were proposing or voting for a document that might make it
illegal to put up Christmas decorations at a public building in Jackson
County, Indiana, a couple of centuries hence.
It is worth reminding modern Americans what the actual
politico-religious landscape of the United States looked like before the
Revolution, in the Founding era, and in the generation after. Most of the
colonies (and, later, the states) had established churches, by which I do not
mean that they had state education budgets that included money for students who
might prefer to attend a school with a religious affiliation (many did; this
was generally uncontroversial until Catholic immigration ticked up in the 19th
century) but that they had state churches, i.e., taxpayers paid taxes that were
used to finance the ministries and clergy of particular Christian
denominations, such as the Congregational Church in Massachusetts and
Connecticut. Henry David Thoreau complained about this, and Jefferson (along
with James Madison) worked for the disestablishment of the Anglican church in
Virginia. Antidisestablishmentarianism (it is rare that one has an opportunity
to use the word correctly!) was stronger in New England than in the South,
where the established churches were mainly Anglican and, as such, suspected of
being tainted with monarchism.
And the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ought
to be understood as having at least as much to do with monarchy as it does with
a liberal Anglo-Protestant sympathy for religious liberty. At the time,
established churches were everywhere in the Protestant world (Catholic
“establishment” is a different kettle of ichthyses) institutions of monarchy.
And that is still mostly the case: If you consider the few remaining countries
in the Western world with established churches—the United Kingdom, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway—what you will see is not countries with a great deal of
Christian passion (these comprise some of the least-religious countries in the
world) but countries that are constitutional monarchies. Iceland is unusual in
having an established church (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland) but
no monarchy, while Canada is unusual in the opposite way, having a monarch as
head of state but no established church. (The Church of Canada isn’t.) Many of
the Founders would have agreed with Thoreau that forcing a man to pay a tax to
support a church with which he wishes to have no association is wrong, but none
of them thought the First Amendment prohibited that. Which is why the
disestablishmentarians were obliged to take other action—sometimes statutory,
sometimes constitutional—to accomplish those ends. With Massachusetts being the
last holdout, the states eventually did disestablish their churches—mostly
democratically.
Americans tend to accept democratic outcomes more readily
than outcomes arrived at through undemocratic or antidemocratic means. That is
partly a matter of time (democracy is slow), partly a matter of voice (everyone
who wants a say gets one), partly a matter of these changes often being
gradual, and—in considerable part—because the democratic process itself confers
legitimacy in the minds of most Americans. To take one relevant example: There
were many social changes affecting the lives of American women in the 20th
century that were much, much bigger than the abortion right exnihilated into
existence by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. But Roe became
a rallying point, while there was no successful 50-year campaign to overturn
the 19th Amendment or to strip women of their gradually acquired
equal economic rights or to undo the no-fault divorce laws.
The extent to which the democratic process provides
political lubrication is remarkable: Ronald Reagan ran for president as the
champion of American conservatives, including Christian social conservatives;
in California Gov. Reagan had signed into law the nation’s first laws
legalizing abortion and no-fault divorce. By contrast, the Supreme Court in Roe
claimed to discover a right to abortion in the Constitution—but that was a
constitution no one had voted for. The actual constitution, ratified in 1788,
has nothing to say on the question, and the people who voted for it surely did
not believe they were creating a national mandate for abortion or for same-sex
marriage—or for unquestionably desirable things such as the abolition of
racial discrimination.
When the Christian nationalists insist that our current
climate of aggressively enforced secular homogeneity is an ahistorical
innovation imposed on American life by progressive activists and allied judges
over the course of the past several decades and that this regime lacks
democratic legitimacy, they are not wrong in the particular—a fact that
should be obvious even to people who do not share the Christian nationalists’
political agenda, including those of us who find it generally contemptible as
politics and as religion both.
When John Adams was a grown man visiting Philadelphia for
the first time, he saw something he never had seen before: a Catholic Church.
In Massachusetts, the law allowed for the hanging of Catholic clergy simply for
being present there. And while the revolution did provoke a good deal of
welcome liberal sentiment throughout the new republic, the first public Mass
was not celebrated in Massachusetts until years after the Revolution. The
established church at the state level survived the founding generation into the
age of Jackson. Government support of religious schools was an accepted and
common fact of life until the post-Civil War era, when Irish Catholics started
showing up in numbers that made the old Puritan elite nervous. But even such
exercises in bigotry as the Blaine Amendments were generally enacted by
democratic means.
If you want people to accept social change, then give
them a voice, a vote, and, above all, a little bit of time. Or a lot of time,
as needed. That isn’t what you want to hear if you are a member of an oppressed
minority group or a marginalized community demanding change. But the
undemocratic imposition of radical social change is a near-guarantee of radical
reaction. There may be times when we judge that this is worth it, but how much
better would it have been for the country—and everybody in it—if desegregation,
for example, had been achieved more through democratic means and less through
judicial fiat? The Union Army may have flattened the South, and the federal
government could have imposed whatever it wanted under martial law, but it was
critically important that Congress pass and the states ratify the 13th
Amendment. Unless you are a hopeless utopian, you have to realize that there
are trade-offs in all things political: Democratic processes are slow and
halting, often by design, while nondemocratic methods provoke backlash and
impose other long-term political and social costs.
One of those costs is giving juice to batty radical
movements and providing career opportunities for irresponsible demagogues—not
that we blessed Americans know anything about that!
There are a few intellectually serious Christians out
there with some profoundly illiberal ideas about the relationship between
church, state, and social order. Amusingly, about half of them are Catholics
(team Leo XIII) and half Calvinists (team R.J. Rushdoony), meaning that each
half sees the other as heretical. But, ultimately, this isn’t about
theonomy—it’s about democracy.
And two
cheers for that, maybe two-and-a-half.
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