The United States ....

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first
example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and
if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of
artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider
this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the
formation of the American governments is at present little known or
regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an
object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons
employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any
degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon
ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will
forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by
the use of reason and the senses.

iflis a écrit:"Les "Founding Fathers" sont protestants."

James Carroll

Religion and nation

By James Carroll | October 15, 2007

ONE OF MY proudest boasts as a schoolboy was an
ability to both identify and spell what my teacher insisted was the
English language's longest word: antidisestablishmentarianism. I had,
of course, no idea what it meant. Now I know that it defines the
political third rail onto which John McCain threw himself when he
recently said that the United States was established as a "Christian
nation."
No, it wasn't! Or so answered a chorus of critics, heading off an
inevitable denigration of minority religions - and no religion. The
disestablishmentarians always point out that the Constitution nowhere
mentions God, and that the founders were Deist gentlemen whose God was
so impersonally detached from history as to be not recognizably
Christian at all. The framers of the American political system,
appalled by what "establishment" had led to in Europe, took pains to
set their government on a religiously neutral path.

But government is not nation. Just because McCain's assertion is
dangerous - as I believe it to be - does not mean it is untrue. For one
thing, what the founders intended may weigh less than how the nation
developed over the next two centuries. The Constitution created "an
open national space," in the scholar Mark Noll's phrase, but, Noll
says, instead of it being filled with Alexander Hamilton's economic
planning, Thomas Jefferson's yeomanry, or John Adams's communalism,
that space was seized by unexpected 19th-century "awakenings" of
evangelical fervor.

Christian religion, from prairie preachers to
elite universities, became the main "arbiter of national culture."
Eventually, Protestant revivalism, immigrant Catholicism, and
African-American Gospel jelled into the public zealotries of "civil
religion," a term coined by Robert Bellah in 1967 when such religion
braced the nation - and the government - in its contest with "atheistic
Communism." Jewish participation in this implicitly Christian consensus
was necessarily uneasy. When Dwight D. Eisenhower underwent baptism in
the White House 12 days after his inauguration in 1953, he showed how
these pressures could squeeze the national leadership. This was the era
of Billy Graham's "Crusade," a word Ike himself had used to define his
war making.

The danger in mixing religion and nation lies in the
way these two enterprises have exploited one another, each to advance
its separate cause. This is as old as the early-4th-century emperor
Constantine, who used Christian orthodoxy as a club with which to
enforce political control of his vast empire. (The Nicene Creed was a
loyalty oath composed at his order, by the Council of Nicea in 325.) At
the same time, Christian leaders happily enlisted Constantine's legions
to suppress heresy. When the word "Christian" is used today, the broad
movement it defines owes as much to Constantine as it does to Jesus
Christ.

Even pious Americans have been properly wary of efforts
to use state power to enforce uniformity of conscience. The vaunted
separation of church and state is a minimal protection from such abuse,
but civil religion points to a need for the broader separation of
religion and nation. That protection comes not from law, but from the
knowledge of citizens, which is unreliable. The fact that, since the
founding of the United States, Christianity has been much used, against
the intentions of the founders, to justify governmental impositions and
adventures is one cause for concern. That is what McCain's critics warn
of, in the name of a better America. The last thing needed today is a
Christian nation embarked on a new crusade, at home or abroad.

But a warning must be sounded in the name of a better Christian religion,
too. What's bad for the state can be worse for the church. Jews,
Muslims, Hindus, and all religious minorities are assaulted by even
implicit claims of a "Christian nation," but so are Christians. A
government that blesses itself in the name of Jesus Christ, while
waging war and advancing empire, must first demolish the meaning of who
that man was - three centuries before Constantine.

Scholars know
very little about this Galilean rabbi (nothing, for example, about his
attitude toward homosexuality), but there are two things that can be
said with certainty. Jesus lived and died in resistance to the Roman
empire. And Jesus rejected violence. If there are two notes of identity
that go to the heart of what America has become, they are violence and
empire. A Christianity that makes its peace with those, as has so often
happened, is an apostate religion. John McCain, and the objects of his
appeal, betray the nation - and the faith.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.