Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s recent First Things essay, “Our Christian Nation,” may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists and confound historians and theologians who worry about continuing threats to the separation of church and state.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s recent First Things essay, “Our Christian Nation,” may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists and confound historians and theologians who worry about continuing threats to the separation of church and state.
Okay, tap the breaks. America is absolutely a nation of Catholic and Protestant migrants, with much of the lower half dominated by Spanish/French missionaries while the northeast was originally settled by English, French, German, and Scandinavian Protestants fleeing the 30 years war, the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars, and their attendant aftershocks.
De-Christianization in the US is a very new phenomenon, largely stemming from the economic expansion of the post WW2 era and the rapid circulation of professional workers during the Reagan Era. To say we “were never a Christian nation” you really need to explain where all these damned churches came from. Some of them are really old.
Yes, but we’ve been having religious revivals in this country straight back to before the original founding. A big part of our history involves different sects of religious diaspora migrating to the US as refugees fleeing this or that pogrom, from French Huguenots fleeing to Louisiana to West New York Mormons fleeing to Utah to Polish Jews fleeing to Brooklyn to Black Baptists fleeing to Harlem.
The “In God We Trust” thing was the comical low-hanging fruit passed by a 1950s Congress that wanted to conflate the broadly popular idea of Christian religious doctrine with the far more controversial idea of Market Capitalism.
Yeah, the people that came to build european colonies on this land were christian extremists, but that doesnt make America a christian nation… Especially since the very foundation of the nation, a staunch separation of church and state with no law establishing one religion over another, was one of the very beginning principles.
Its right there in the first amendment.
America is a land where religion should have no more presence but between a person and their god, as far as Jefferson was concerned at least, and I’m sure many other founders shared that sentiment.
Not anymore. But that’s a product of the current generation divesting (or simply losing touch with) the religious communities of their elders. Go back 40 years and you could very credibly claim that America was a Christian Nation in every way that mattered. Billy Graham was a fixture in every White House. Religious fundamentalism was driving foreign and domestic policy. Individual elected delegates were de facto required to be members of large religious communities in order to take and hold office or mobilize large bodies of political activism.
The First Amendment has no teeth. Religious minorities in the US are routinely persecuted, by the state, both explicitly and implicitly for their membership and their beliefs. This hit the ceiling in the wake of 9/11, when any kind of Muslim religious affiliation was borderline criminal. Police wiretapping and surveillance and extrajudicial punishment of Muslim individuals and groups (very obvious breaches of the 4th and 5th and 8th amendments) was routine. People were deported entirely on the grounds of their religious affiliation. States passed laws outright banning the practice of Sharia custom and culture. And that’s just in the last few decades.
You can find all sorts of crazy prohibitions, sanctions, and outright persecution of religious minorities, from the hounding of Mormons across the American Midwest to the denial of legal asylum to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.
Okay, sure, that’s a beautiful ideal. But it isn’t the reality on the ground. Certainly not in a country where clery post the names and addresses of abortion providers, encourage their congregants to kill them, and then suffer no meaningful legal culpability.
The separation between church and state, in practice, is a fig leaf that serves more to protect religious institution from taxation and regulation than to keep religious beliefs from affecting public policy or election results. If anything, it has created a kind of paradox in which religious leaders have more influence over politics than lay congregants.
The United States of America, the nation standing above all others as being most desperately in need of being put out of the collective misery of all the people of the Earth. I wish I had something positive to say about it however I have that odd compunction against lying.
Well fuck the United States, it is a shithole of a country (despite hoarding a good chunk of the worlds money and power).
Turtle Island though? That place is dope.
If you’ve never felt the need to lie, you’ve lived a blessed existence.
It’s a common theme. Why lie? Why live in denial blaming demons for urges when if you face reality you live a much happier existence.
Cause your parents will throw you out of the house if they know your true feelings toward people of the same gender or what’s in that vape pen.
Cause your teachers will fail you if you express your real political views or historical understanding on a term paper. Or your future prospective employer won’t hire you, if they know you’ve got union sympathies.
Cause the ER won’t treat you if they know you’re pregnant, in a state that has made it politically dangerous to care for someone having a miscarriage.
Cause your migrant status means always lying about your real nationality.
Cause you live in a Christian Nation and your financial, social, and physical well-being are predicated on people believing you aren’t some kind of baby-eating Satanist for holding heretical beliefs.
When the truth is an excuse to do violence against people, lies are a commonplace means of self-defense.
Your entire rebuttal is right wing fantasy. Not everyone has religious parents they live with, let alone have the need to lie to constantly. You may perceive this country as religious, but it is not, by law. Law and money run things in this country. Not sky Fairies.
I think you’ve lost the thread. They are explaining why you are privileged not to have to lie by giving examples of situations that would compel many people to lie.
Would you say that you’ve been in any of those situations?
Not a right-wing fantasy. Its what happens when you live in a right-wing community.
When the law and the money believe in the sky fairies, they will enact the Sky Fairy Will in some truly brutal fashion.
Nope, felt the need to occasionally. I just don’t it frivolously.
Nation of christians and christian nation are two very different things, despite using the same words. America has historically been populated by a Christian majority, but from its foundation America has existed with separation of church and state as one of its core principles
A nation of Christians will form a legal and social system with decidedly Christian characteristics.
Its foundation has been one of a detente between Catholics and Protestants, in an era when Europeans were slaughtering one another over this schism. But come on. You can’t possibly have missed that every President from George Washington to Dwight D. Eisenhower came from the prevailing Protestant majority? Or that a host of our legal tenants emerged from Biblical precepts and taboos?
So what if there’s no officially designated National Pope. How many politicians made their start campaigning from the pulpit? How many turned to their congregations to fund raise and canvas for votes? How many are literally clergymen? Mitt Romney is an ordained Mormon Bishop, ffs. You can’t just ignore that.
No, they won’t form anything. The Law will smack them in their seditious treasonous faces.
When the cops are overwhelmingly Trump supporters, I’m not holding my breath.
Cops who have to follow the what? Is it follow the law ? Or follow their bible? Choke on it as you spit out.
In a Christian Nation, the Bible trumps secular laws. And we’ve got a majority on the SCOTUS that seem content to whittle away secular authority in favor of religious impulse.
Citation needed. This is not a Christian nation.
Which version of the Bible exactly? So many translations and editions I can’t keep track. Just like the house speaker joke, they’re all fighting for control and stabbing each other in the back. It’s a really good thing you people aren’t better educated.
The Mormon One, given the current direction of American politics.