By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Conservatives used to say: “America is a
Christian nation.” Everybody knows what they meant by that, even if many people
pretended not to understand. We are not a country with a national church or a
national faith. We are — or were — a “Christian nation” in the sense that the
United States grew out of a Christian civilization and found its political
basis in Anglo-Protestant liberalism. The Founding Fathers and the influential
men of the Founding generation were — like almost everybody else in the
colonial era — almost exclusively Protestant Christians, albeit Protestant
Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy and observance. Thomas Jefferson’s
religious eccentricities are well-known, and George Washington, a parish
vestryman, rarely entered a church once his public career no longer required it
of him. Back when the states had established churches, there was never any
practical possibility that any of them would have been anything other than
Christian. None of this necessarily argues that Christianity should have some
special place in American political life beyond the predominance that comes
naturally to a religion that still speaks, at least notionally, for two out of
three American adults. In that sense, to say that America is a Christian nation
should be no more controversial than to say that France is a European nation.
Japan is Japanese, even though not everyone who lives in Japan is ethnically
Japanese, of Japanese origin, born in Japan, or even a Japanese citizen.
But even though 65 percent of U.S. adults
identify themselves as Christian, I am no longer convinced that Christianity is
the dominant religious faith of the United States. What most of us profess may
be Christianity, but what Americans corporately practice is an imperial cult, a
religion that puts the state and its officers at the center not only of
national political life but national moral and spiritual life. I do not know
many Americans, including very devout Christians, who are losing any sleep
about the filioque or transubstantiation, and nobody who is
much interested in dispensationalism other than those with a
professional interest in the subject.
But there are millions of Americans, tens
of millions and maybe more than 100 million, who grieve, lament, and despair
when they believe that the wrong man has become president of these United
States. Just at the moment, many of those many grieving millions are people who
believe themselves to be devout Christians. You’d think that these
Bible-reading people would know a golden calf when they see one.
Here is an example of the sort of thing I
am talking about, from Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician who is going to
run for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania, a state with which he has only the
lightest of connections. The good doctor spells out his political agenda thus:
“I’m here to promise you one thing: I am going to help reignite the divine
spark inside every American and empower us to live better lives.”
Set aside the comical notion of this
ridiculous dork taking over for Pat Toomey — what in hell does that gibberish
even hope to mean?
Dr. Oz is a fairly interesting figure on
the religion front. He is a Muslim of Turkish background, and served in the
Turkish army. There was a split in his family between the more traditionalist
Islam practiced on his father’s side and the more secular attitude of his
mother’s family. He married into a family of Swedenborgians — more on them in a
second — and his mother-in-law is a minister in a Swedenborgian sect. When Dr.
Oz decided to run for the Pennsylvania seat, he needed an address in
Pennsylvania, and the one he chose is in the town of Bryn Athyn, which is the
center of the Swedenborgian church. That is probably a matter of pure
convenience — Dr. Oz’s address in Pennsylvania is his in-laws’ home — but his
association with the Swedenborgian church (or cult, as many Christians would
have it) is more than a matter of convenience. He has spoken in interviews
about his embrace of Swedenborgian beliefs and his incorporation of what he describes
as a Swedenborgian approach to patient relations in his medical practice.
The main contemporary organ of
Swedenborgianism is the Bryn Athyn–based General Church of the New Jerusalem,
which operates Bryn Athyn College. (Bryn is Welsh for “hill,” as in nearby Bryn
Mawr.) Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a mystic who claimed to have special
revelations and a unique personal commission from Jesus Christ to reform
Christian doctrine. He published an influential book called Heaven and
Hell (which is not just a great Ronnie
James Dio song!) in 1758. The Swedenborgian churches
established in the United States (the General Church of the New Jerusalem is an
offshoot from an earlier sect) were part of that great 19th-century burst of
religious entrepreneurialism in the United States, which gave us everything
from Mormons to Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists,
Disciples of Christ/Church of Christ, and the Southern Baptist Convention. (The
late-18th-century split of the Methodists from the Church of England was a
portent of this effervescence.) The spirit of capitalism was very much at work
in the church-planting sector in those years. The United States is still
probably the best place in the world to start a technology company or a cult.
(The word cult, as Cultish author
Amanda Montell reminds us, comes with heavy emotional baggage and no generally
agreed-upon definition. I don’t intend to use it here in a derogatory way.
There’s an old joke that a religion is a cult plus
time and money. I’m sure the Swedenborgians are very nice people. Similarly, I
can’t see joining the Mormon church, but I want to
have Mormon neighbors.)
Why did Americans start all those
churches? The New World was vast beyond the comprehension of the first pilgrims
who landed in New England, and Americans were very far removed from Canterbury
— to say nothing of Rome or Jerusalem. As waves of revivalism and awakenings
convulsed North America beginning in the early 18th century, it was only
natural that believers would start looking for local seats of
power and meaning — the First Great Awakening was arguably the first truly
“national” experience of the American colonies and an important factor leading
to the American Revolution. Here, we can blame the Puritans, at least a little
bit: By rejecting church hierarchy and episcopal authority, insisting upon the
ability of every properly educated believer to interpret Scripture for himself,
they created cultural conditions that almost guaranteed the kind of religious
innovation — the start-up mentality — that would lead to the vast
multiplication of what they would have recoiled from in horror as heresies.
This is deeply embedded in American culture: Our first public-education law,
which bears the splendid name of the Old Deluder Satan Act, was written with a
mind toward educating Christians up to a level that would allow them to engage
directly with Scripture, thereby (the thinking went) giving them an
intellectual inoculation against European popery and Anglican crypto-popery.
The Puritan enthusiasm for Hebrew came from the same source — not, alas, from
any particular tender feeling toward Jews, and Puritan clergy were educated in
Greek, where possible, for the same reason.
Armed with literacy and a smattering of
theology, looking upon the vastness of America, culturally alienated and
physically distant from the institutions of British and European Christianity,
Americans looked for spiritual anchors. And unlike their British and European
cousins, those Americans did not have monarchies and other ancient institutions
to which they might cling. Having ceased to think of themselves as essentially
British, they were not part of an ancient nation with a deep foundation in
blood and soil. Americans are a particular people — much more so than we often
appreciate — but they are not a particular people defined by a shared ethnic
history, which is why a Korean can become American but an American cannot
become Korean, even if he moves to Korea, speaks Korean, takes Korean
citizenship, etc. A big piece of our national identity is a set of generally
shared political beliefs (incorporating a religious premise: that men are
endowed with their unalienable rights not by the state but by God) and
political documents (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence)
which have for us a totemic character as well as legal and political
significance.
And so, from the very beginning, we were
in a peculiar position: that of a nation founded in religious ferment but
having political documents and a shared political faith as central elements in
our national character. France is on its Fifth Republic, there was an England
long before there existed what we now call the United Kingdom, there was an
Italian nation long before there was an Italian state, the Chinese people have
had many different forms of governmental organization, etc., but the United
States isn’t really the United States without the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution. Politics in the United States is culture war —
inevitably.
Depending on how you count, the United
States has either a few hundred or several thousand Christian denominations —
and there are millions of self-professed American Christians who are associated
with no particular church, practicing their own eccentric
choose-your-own-adventure models of Christianity, and, beyond there, is the
one-third of Americans profess either some other religion or no religion. What
that means (among other things) is that Americans looking for a national basis
of spiritual and ceremonial life cannot find one in any particular religious
mode except one: the imperial cult. Of course, we don’t call our state cult
that (or even generally acknowledge the imperialistic and sacramental qualities
of the state), and we don’t acknowledge it directly the way the Romans do or
even indirectly the way the English do by making their monarch the head of
their national church. (National churches are always and everywhere
in the Christian world the spiritual wreckage of earlier efforts to
reconstitute pagan imperial cults.) But if you doubt that we have a genuine
state cult, ask yourself how it is that a man running for a Senate seat from
Pennsylvania can launch his campaign by promising to “reignite the divine
spark” without getting laughed across the river back to Delaware?
Instead of laughing at this sort of thing,
it is precisely what Americans expect of Senate candidates, House candidates,
gubernatorial candidates, and, above all, would-be presidents. Joel Osteen and
David Remnick both have written about the “Joshua Generation”; Osteen’s sermon
was about Christian devotion, while the Reverend Remnick’s New Yorker homily
was about Barack Obama.
Every presidential candidate has, for
years, promised that his election would lead to a national spiritual revival.
Sometimes, the restorationist thinking it put into obvious language (“Make
America Great Again”) and sometimes it is part of an explicitly messianic
campaign (looking at you, Barack Obama), but it is an element even of the
campaigns of such modest republicans as the late Bob Dole, who, no less than
Barack Obama or Donald Trump, sought moral histrionics from the American
people, demanding “Where’s the outrage?”
and offering himself as the necessary instrument (and personification) of their
righteous wrath.
(This is not a slight to Bob Dole: The
debased Republican Party of 2021 would have to hike up a very steep and
difficult hill to look him in the eye. Bob Dole may have ended his days selling
credit cards and erection pills, but next to Lindsey Graham he looks like
Abraham Lincoln.)
My friend and colleague Jay Nordlinger,
reading Dr. Oz’s “divine spark” nonsense, did a very fine job suppressing an
eye-roll that no doubt would have seemed like a bit much if Linda Blair had
done it in The Exorcist. “Isn’t anyone willing to balance the
budget?” he asked.
The difference between a Republican who
says that he is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and a Republican who says
that he’s going to balance the budget is that somebody might believe the first
guy.
A nation that looks to its politicians to
provide spiritual nourishment needs that nourishment badly — and it is going to
starve.
It is also going to face endless political
disappointment and misgovernment. It is important to bring the right tool to
the job: Bananas are great, but you can’t hammer in a nail with one.
