Probably about a decade ago, I took a tour of Christ Church on 2nd Street in the Old City section of Philadelphia. It was once the tallest structure in America, and it served as a place of worship to fifteen signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin is buried in a nearby annex. At the time of the founding of our country, the congregation was led by the Most Reverend William White, who was only the second ordained bishop of the Episcopal Church. There is a church historian who accompanies people taking the tour, and he told an anecdote about George Washington, who attended services there off and on over a period of 25 years. This historian said that Rev. White had approached Washington about his unwillingness to take communion and asked him simply not to attend at all on Sundays when communion was given because a man of his stature rejecting the sacrament undermined belief in the faithful. According to this historian’s account, Washington complied with this request.
I can’t find a specific account of this history online, but Rev. White did report that Washington never once took communion in his church.
In Bishop White’s response of August 15, 1835 to Colonel Mercer of Fredericksburg, Virginia, he writes:
“In regard to the subject of your inquiry, truth requires me to say that General Washington never received the communion in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant…I have been written to by many on that point, and have been obliged to answer them as I now do you.”
It might be lost on the modern mind what the significance of this dispute was really about. In the 18th Century, established churches were the norm in the colonies, and people who did not belong to an established church were disqualified from holding office in most colonies. In practice, however, it was enough to attend a church from time to time to “belong” to it, and thereby meet the prerequisite for office. George Washington belonged to Christ Church when he was in Philadelphia, but he didn’t take communion because he didn’t believe in the Trinity. He didn’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth had turned water into wine or that taking communion was a legitimately sacramental act. Refusing to take communion was an act of personal integrity, but it was also an unstated declaration of independence from Anglican orthodoxy.
He wasn’t abnormal in this respect, but his stature made it an issue. Respectable people who didn’t believe didn’t stay away from church in those days, but they didn’t take communion. There are a few different words for these people, but the most common are “Deists” and “unitarians.”
The second president, John Adams, was explicitly a unitarian, as was his son John Quincy Adams, who served as our sixth president. Thomas Jefferson was famously hostile to trinitarianism. James Madison and James Monroe both displayed deist tendencies. As a result, it’s fair to say that our country did not have a president who believed in the divinity of Jesus until after the end of John Quincy Adams’ presidency in 1829. That’s the first 40 years, or 18 percent of our history as a nation.
President Andrew Jackson was the first president to obviously accept trinitarianism, but he only did it in old age, after he had served two terms as president.
I mention all this because I think it is relevant for understanding whether or not this country was founded on Christian principles and what that might actually mean, even if it is true.
Fundamentalists of all faiths rewrite history. They project an imagined past and then claim to be holding the line against deviations therefrom. In truth, religion was far more moderate than they and those who love to beat on them (e.g. Richard Dawkins) understand, at least dating back to when the reformation gained its footing.
Fundamentalism isn’t religion. It’s a pathetic caricature. Makes a great pinata for those who have no respect for the giant elephant in the middle of the room, the great mystery.
I don’t know about now, but in those days Unitarians, and even most Deists, considered themselves Christians.
There is definitely a Christian influence in the Declaration, especially in the beginning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” etc.
But “self-evident truths” is the language of NATURAL THEOLOGY, i.e. theological truths perceptible to all mankind, not just Christians, and these are enunciated with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” not in accordance with the dogma of any particular religion. It’s more like Spinoza’s idea of God, or Einstein’s. Completely undogmatic.
In other words, the framework is natural religion, and Christian to the extent that Christianity is in harmony with natural religion.
So on the one hand, the American system is not atheistic or anti-religion, but on the other hand it is not Christian in the sense that the RWNJs claim it is.
A president’s personal religious beliefs, or anyone else’s, are not the American system.
The beauty of this system is that while it is entirely compatible with the traditional religions, it is also compatible with secularism, and in fact requires secularism on the governing level. It guarantees FREEDOM OF RELIGION, but that is distinguished from the government. The system has worked very well for over two centuries, but these people just can’t leave well enough alone.
The American Revolution had been preceded by the Great Revival, and those many American Protestants who had been inspired by the Great Revival tended to see the Revolution and the new nation from that (optimistic) millennial perspective. But that never was the “American system”, that was their freedom of belief under that system.
Not all, but certainly most, Christians consider belief in the Trinity to be a basic requirement of the faith. And that was true even back then.
You can be a unitarian christian, and many unitarians will identify themselves as such. Such persons hold that Jesus is a special teacher. Some might go as far as considering him to have some component of divinity. In some unitarian churches, such as King’s Chapel in Boston, communion is given occasionally.
Most unitarians are hyphenated congregants, in that they are buddhist-unitarians, or pagan-unitarians. There are many atheist-unitarians as well.
People can call themselves what they want. I’d never be so arrogant as to tell someone that they aren’t a Christian if they claim that they are.
However, my point is that most Christians (and in this country I think it is a very large majority) think that belief in the Trinity is a threshold issue. If you don’t believe it, you can’t be confirmed, for example. But even if it isn’t enforced in a technical sense, it is expected.
If you ask most American Christians what it means to be a Christian, they’ll tell that you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. If you follow of Jesus of Nazareth, that’s not good enough. If you go around questioning the validity of the Trinity, however timidly, people will try to get you fired.
On the other hand, most Christians spend almost zero time thinking about the Trinity. What’s important isn’t so much the division of godlikeness as the insistence that Christ can grant eternal life or eternal condemnation. So, the problem with unitarians is that they deny Jesus his Christlike powers. And that’s a major threat to the Trinitarians, whether they even know that they are Trinitarians or not.
In fact, you are exactly corroborating the point that the United States does not allow the establishment of any particular church. Remember, when that doctrine was instituted, the founding fathers were thinking overwhelmingly in Christian terms.
Everything you say is correct, but the important point is that Christianity in this country is not one church (far from it!), and each church has the right to determine its own doctrines. Unitarianism, as a Christian denomination, was considered mainstream (socially) in this country at least in the 19th and most of the 20th century, and Unitarianism has been considered “a” Christian theology.
Once again, I was talking about the 18th century, the time of the founding fathers. Today it appears that a large proportion of Unitarians do not identify themselves as Christian. Nevertheless, “conservative” forms of Unitarianism do exist. Here’s a resumé from Wikipedia:
“… in terms of denominations today which could be identified as “biblical unitarian”, the two most visible names are the Church of God General Conference (CoGGC), with 5,000 members in the USA, and Christadelphians, with 60,000 members worldwide. Both of these groups share Non-Trinitarian, specifically Socinian, Christology and both have historians – Anthony Buzzard among CoGGC, the geographer Alan Eyre among Christadelphians[36] who have acknowledged works such as the Racovian Catechism and Biddle’s Twofold Catechism as prefiguring and compatible with their beliefs. Marian Hiller, professor of philosophy and biochemistry at Texas Southern University, is another academic associated with reexamination of these links.
“Christadelphians are more reserved than CoGGC in association with the name “Unitarian”, given that the Unitarian Church still exists in Britain and many of its independent congregations are post-Christian.[37] Although the Christadelphians’ early growth in Scotland in the 1850s was partly a result of intake of Scottish non-conformists and Free Church members including conservative Unitarians, members more notably came from the disaffected nontrinitarian wing of the Restoration Movement.[38] Dr. John Thomas, founder of the Christadelphians, was equally unsympathetic to Trinitarians and Unitarians, saying that an exposition of scripture clears away a lot of ‘rubbish’ from discussion on the Godhead and delivers a ‘quietus’ to Trinitarianism and Unitarianism.[39]
“There is also a third, much smaller group – Spirit and Truth Fellowship – which separated from Victor Paul Wierwille’s The Way International,[40] and which has taken an interest in the works of biblical unitarians in New England in the 19th century.[41]
“Other small groups include the Chiesa Cristiana in Italia, a small breakaway group from the Assemblies of God.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Unitarianism
yes. Also the incarnation – “Christology” i.e. was Jesus a good person or in some definition divine.
“You can be a unitarian christian”. Right, but don’t forget, I was talking about in the 18th century, when Unitarians certainly identified themselves as Christians. Unless they went so far as to become Judaizers.
What you’re talking about took off in the later 19th century. It was called Transcendentalism, and grew within and then outside of Unitarianism.
Yes, most Christians have and do believe in the Trinity. But the ones that didn’t were called Unitarians, at least since the late 17th century. Unitarianism was revived in the 16th century in Poland and Lithuania.
There has always been a unitarian strain in Christianity. It was declared a heresy in the fourth century, under the name Arianism, as taught by the Alexandrian presbyter Arius.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unitarianism
Arianism was about when was Christ’s divinity conferred – was Jesus born with it, or was it conferred at baptism (Arius’ view). both are supported by New Testament texts. [did Mary give birth to “God” or to a human being on whom divinity was conferred at baptism?]- the next stage of the controversy was about how the divine and human natures combine in the person.
“The Christology commonly called “Arian” holds that Jesus, before his human life, existed as the Logos, a being created by God, who dwelt with God in heaven. The Christology commonly called “Arian” holds that Jesus, before his human life, existed as the Logos, a being created by God, who dwelt with God in heaven. There are many varieties of this form of Unitarianism, ranging from the belief that the Son was a divine spirit of the same nature as God before coming to earth, to the belief that he was an angel or other lesser spirit creature of a wholly different nature from God.[citation needed] Not all of these views necessarily were held by Arius, the namesake of this Christology. It is still Nontrinitarian, because according to this belief system, Jesus has always been beneath God, though higher than humans. Arian Christology was not a majority view among Unitarians in Poland, Transylvania or England. It was only with the advent of American Unitarianism that it gained a foothold in the Unitarian movement.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism#.22Arian.22_Christology
I consider NONE of the language of the DOI (written by Jefferson, a deist) nor the Constitution, to have SPECIFICALLY christian roots. Rather, the roots are the Church of the Greater Good or the Church of the State. Obama is the Chief Priest of this church. It is the Church of Public Mourning and the Church of Public Celebration and the Church of State Retribution of Offenses against the People as a Whole. But this is not a Christian church in any way.
One of the key influences of the DOI (and Bill of Rights, and many other early US legal documents) is the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted on June 12, 1776. I’ve quoted from this many times before here as it has clauses that provide deep insight into what was going on at the time.
The final article states:
Section 16. That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other. Written by George Mason, and adopted by the Virginia Constitutional Convention on June 12, 1776.
So the word Christian was used, although the context is very different than what a lot of xtians think today.
So you agree with Dick Cheney that the Constitution provides freedom OF Religion, not Freedom FROM Religion?
In that case I choose to practice the real old type religion, the worship of the Great Mother.
But…but…but…. What Fox News says!!!!
Why trust historians, when you have faith that the Authoritarian Leaders at the pulpit, or in politics, or on the radio or TV, are telling you, a Conservative Authoritarian follower, the REAL inside truth?
What are “facts,” “numbers,” “statistics,” and “charts,” when you have faith that you know the “truthiness” of something?
and this is pretty accurate summary of the situation.
Thanks, Boo.
Forrest Church, son of US Sen Frank Church, wrote a number of books of theological history of the US. What is fascinating is that unitarian and congregational churches were the “establishment” churches back then. Methodist and Baptist churches were the “revolutionary” new churches, and were very important in the movement to NOT impose parish fees on all residents.
The Unitarian church was not really formally organized until about 1825, but was a hugely important influence in the early life of the US. Harvard became a formally unitarian university at some point. There were unitarian churches, but no national organization. As Boo correctly notes, many of the founders were either Congregationalists who were not trinitarians, or were Unitarians.
Unitarianism was often termed the “unitarian heresy”, as many unitarians were Christians who did not hold with trinitarianism.
While Unitarians claim Jefferson, he was, to the best of my understanding, more of a deist than a unitarian. He shares with most unitarians the lack of belief in the trinity, an unwillingness to make Jesus into a magician, and an interest in theology as a moral guide.
John Adams (POTUS 2) was very pious and attempted to declare a National Day of Prayer as a public holiday. Jefferson explicitely rejected this. It’s very interesting to read the book of Forrest Church “So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State”. Here you can read about the National Day of Prayer.
Adams began as a Congregationalist, but ended as a Unitarian.
Let’s not forget, however, that there was a strong Puritan influence in the colonies at the time (the Salem witch trials had happened just 80 years before). The mainstream founders saw these ancestors of today’s teavangelicals as nut jobs and this was a big reason for their staunch insistence on separation of church and state.
Don’t forget that Massachusetts was founded by the Plymouth colony – some of the craziest right wing fundamentalists of their time. And although half of them died the first year due to utter incompetence they ultimately influenced many others with similar views to follow them to the new world.
All the American colonies were Christian in the sense that that was the demographically dominant religion.
American is still Christian in that sense.
But numerous colonies and after them states went in for both full-scale establishment of a unique, true church and also for intolerance of other denominations or churches, though over time all that wore out.
All the same, the Mormons got persecuted out of the East, all the way to Utah and even in Utah, not because polygamy irked liberals and incensed feminists but because, as everyone knew at the time, polygamy is un-Christian.
The Congress even refused statehood to Utah except on condition Utah ban the offending, un-Christian form of marriage.
Until the sexual revolution of the second half of the 20th Century, divorce was impossible in Catholic states and only allowed for proved infidelity in states with more powerful Protestants.
Porn was heavily prosecuted and a very strict censorship was in place suppressing sexuality in not popular but all levels of culture.
All of this was establishment, in fact though not in name, in my opinion.
As were the laws criminalizing any sex outside marriage (of course, between one man and one woman), at all.
Yes, adultery was a crime, as was fornication.
And these things were prosecuted.
To this day, though divorce is mostly fairly easy and most states now allow same-sex marriage, only monogamy is countenance, anywhere.
America not a Christian country?
Well, now.
Better think about that.
Founder of Liberation Theology Hailed in Vatican
As astute observers have been commenting, this was coming:
Not stated is that Mueller and Gutierrez have had a long and close professional relationship. How Mueller managed to forge close relationships with Ratzinger, Gutierrez, and Pope Francis could be in the realm of miracles.
btw – Rodriguez Maradiaga has previously been noted as close to Pope Francis.