I was fascinated by a claim Jacob Neusner quietly made in Death and Birth of Judaism: The Impact of Christianity, Secularism, and the Holocaust on Jewish Faith. The assumption is found in this quote:
[M]y view is that when, in the late eighteenth century with the French and American revolutions, Christianity lost its status as self-evident truth to Christians in parts of the West, the Judaism framed centuries before in the encounter with that claim likewise lost its self-evidence to Jew in those same areas, and died. [page xii]
Is Neusner right that by the time the United States was founded “Christianity lost its status as self-evident truth to Christians”? I think he’s right, but it’s been a couple decades since I stopped believing the United States was ever a Christian country. Though the Declaration of Independence has never had any status as a true founding document of our government, its words regarding `self-evident’ truths should be taken seriously. A different set of truths than those in the Bible or the Creeds of Christianity had become self-evident. Jefferson, and most of the other Founding Fathers, had taken up a set of `self-evident’ truths proposed by lines of English thinkers dedicated to the idea that society could be at peace only if Christianity and other religions were stripped of their public status, purged completely from society or at least driven into the private realm. Most specifically, rights were no longer granted by God or even won by human effort in a Creation which rewarded certain sorts of moral efforts. Rights were metaphysically grounded and truly belonged to human beings, though with a polite nod to a rather domesticated Creator. Stripped of giftedness, rights and, in fact, all of Creation was no longer the work of a generous and Almighty Father; what exists had become our possession and God Himself had better not try to take it from us. (It’s actually quite natural that we descended from that denial of Christian truths to a situation where we let our political leaders take our rights and property by frightening us with tales of the dangers in this botched Creation, but I’ll let the reader imagine that story-line.)
Clearly, the main concern in Neusner’s book is with Judaism, but I’m concentrating in this essay upon this denial of the self-evident status of Christian beliefs by the leaders, religious and cultural as well as political, of the emerging United States and revolutionary France. Leaders in greater regions of the West soon enough joined in. The Founding Fathers of the United States acted in a manner much more calm and much more rational the anti-Christians to follow, to be sure, but the United States was founded as a non-Christian country with an optional Christian vocabulary to be used only to support ideas which had come from those efforts to remove religion from public life.
I repeat: the United States government formed under the Constitution was fundamentally a non-Christian government, not a Christian government tolerant of religious belief of others. A true Christian has no choice but to be such for the entirety of his life, for all hours of the day and for all the different roles he takes on. A Christian can’t participate as a citizen in a country when such participation requires he leave his faith at home. The Constitution requires a Christian to shed his beliefs when he takes the oath of office as President or as an officer in the U.S. military.
Because of the non-Christian nature of the American state, Americans eventually—but American communities early on—took a strange form in which there was a radical separation of realms of human life. Some were clear-sighted and saw this process of fragmentation of individual and communal human life, saw the process and some of its horrible results. For example, the Norwegian-American professor and writer, O.E. Rolvaag wrote a troubling middle book to his trilogy about Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas. In that second book, Peder Victorious, we see an honest vagueness, but clear attribution of motives and causes, about the way that the school teachers sent from the Eastern states took away the Lutheran faith and much of the old-world culture of the children and grandchildren of Norwegian pioneer families. Little House on the Prairie with the school teachers singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic with all their might as they stared, stars in their eyes, at the statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the school. I think Rolvaag got it right in that novel and I think what he was describing was a realization of the greater meaning of the Constitution. Any religious beliefs which might make it difficult for the United States to function as a secular nation must be left at home or, still better, purged.
Neusner is clear in his discussions that he believes, as do I, that religion is not only a very strong and basic part of human life but also the foundation of more complex human communal life, certainly the foundation of civilizations. I’ve met some atheists who, as individuals, would make better neighbors than most devout Christians and faith-filled Jews, but atheists don’t found civilizations. Nor can they maintain or nurture them. As I’ve noted before, a civilization is inseparable from a people’s understanding of the world, however broadly or narrowly they define that entity. An atheist who has such an understanding becomes, by definition, at least a pantheist or some other sort of pagan.
In a prior essay, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, I’d quoted from Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity: “In the Western Protestant tradition of Edwards and Schleirmacher we take it for granted that emotions speak for the private individual, not the nation.” I’ve never read any of Schleirmacher’s works or even any books about his thought but I’ve read an allegedly complete collection of Edwards’ writings and was impressed by the power of his mind but not by the lines of thought he chose to pursue. He saw the world as one not to have been made by a God who would have have taken on human flesh. We’re left alone in our terrible situation and a brutal sort of Calvinism, perhaps stated more honestly and with more insight by Edwards than by Calvin, is the logical result. Or else, perhaps a pagan incoherence is your pleasure. In any case, we aren’t part of any Body of Christ, not even in terms of hope and faith and love. How could you have hope in a God who is infinitely distant from you? How could you have faith in a God who seems to have thrown you into a world in which the provision of human welfare comes through secular institutions? How can you love a God who doesn’t gift you with anything because it belongs to you in a self-evident way?
It’s not just coincidence that Etienne Gilson identifies a general Catholic retreat into an intellectual ghetto as having occurred around 1800, pretty much the same time as the American adoption of a non-Christian Constitution which prepared the way for an eventual all-out anti-Christian assault upon the core beliefs, the very foundations, of Western Civilization. A Brave New World had been born. We’ve seen only some of the horrors which will occur before something new and good can be founded and the United States has been a major protagonist in those horrors of the past two centuries and is currently more active in waging war against God’s Creation than is any other nation.