Our Senior Senator recently (July 11) proclaimed at the National Conservatism Conference that we live in a Christian nation:
Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having? …It has been our moral center and supplied our most cherished ideals. Just think: Those stern Puritans…gave us limited government and liberty of conscience and popular sovereignty.
Because of our Christian heritage, we protect the liberty of all to worship according to conscience. Because of our Christian tradition, we welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to join a nation constituted by common loves.
Hawley claimed that Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, better known to us as St. Augustine, originated the idea of Christian Nationalism, “a nationalism driven not by conquest but by common love; a nation made not for the rich or for the strong, but for the ‘poor in spirit,’ the common man.”
He went on to proclaim this country was defined by Augustine’s vision—the dignity of the common man, as given to us in the Christian religion; a nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith—love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home, and country.”
Christian nationalism is not a threat to democracy, he claimed. In fact, it founded American democracy. “It is..the most just, the most free, the most humane and praiseworthy,” he said.
Hawley has called for the recovery of “the principles of our Christian political tradition…for the sake of our future.”
He charged “the modern left” with wanting to “destroy our common bonds and replace them with another faith, to dissolve the nation as we know it, and remake it in our image. This has been their project for 50 years and more.”
Let’s take a closer look at Hawley’s demagoguery—the appeal to, as one definition tells us, “the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than using rational argument.”
Note that he claimed our Christian heritage protects “the liberty of all to worship according to conscience” and leads us to “welcome people of all races and ethnic backgrounds to join our nation constituted by common loves.”
Is that the kind of Christian heritage that has motivated his close buddy, Donald Trump, to try to ban Muslims from this country and to threaten mass deportations of a scope never before seen?
Shame on “the modern left” for plotting to “dissolve the nation as we know it?” Is he saying the “modern left” wants to make this a Muslim country?
Is Trump’s “beautiful wall” welcoming “people of all races and ethnic backgrounds” to come here? Are his wildly untrue claims that all of the people crossing the Rio Grande are escaped mental patients, fentanyl smugglers, rapists and killers an example of “welcoming people of all races and ethnic backgrounds” to become Americans, a “nation constituted by common loves?”
Let’s take a somewhat long journey to see just how much Hawley or anybody else would like to live in the so-called Christian nation that he claims we were founded to be. He is, after all, correct in maintaining that we have drifted away from that era.
As well we should have.
History teaches us that the New Testament admonition that one should love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself was not a foundation of those pious founders. Perhaps the most unloved people were—-
Baptists.
Professor Thomas Kidd from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary says Baptists “were the most likely ‘well meaning’ Christians to be thrown in jail on the eve of the American Revolution.”
Our Pilgrim and Puritan founders believed in freedom of THEIR religion—and woe be unto anybody who did not embrace their interpretation of the Anglican faith such as Baptists who insisted immersion baptism was the biblical way to do it. But the Anglicans held that baptism was for infants and, says Kidd, waiting until a person was old enough to understand the ordinance of baptism amounted to child abuse.
Baptists also refused to attend Anglican services. They refused to pay taxes to support churches. Their preachers refused to get licenses from the government. And they wouldn’t stay put. They circulated their heretical beliefs and practices by having preachers traveling throughout the colonies performing baptisms in creeks, rivers, and lakes.
In Massachusetts, the cradle for the birth of our “Christian nation,” a law was passed in 1645 calling Baptists “the incendiaries of commonwealths” and accused them of being “the troublers of churches in all places.”
In 1651, one Obadiah Holmes was sentenced to receive thirty lashes for proselytizing among the Baptists. He told the whipping officer, “I am now come to be baptized in affliction by your hands, that so I may have further fellowship with my Lord, and am not ashamed of his suffering, for by his stripes am I healed.” Afterward he smiled at his critics and said he had been struck “as with roses.” Kidd’s telling of the story does not include the reaction of the Christians who ordered him whipped.
One reason James Madison wanted freedom of religion in the Constitution was because he had seen this oppression of Baptists firsthand. He wrote a friend in 1774 to complain of the “diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution” that had landed “not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men in [jail] for publishing their religious sentiments.” He urged his friend to “pray for liberty of conscience to revive among us.”
Quakers were enemies of the state, too. Several missionaries were kicked out of the colony in the years after the Holmes whipping and told not to return. Three did go back. The Massachusetts Christians hanged them.
And THIS is the Christian heritage that Hawley says we should revere as one that protects “the liberty of all to worship according to conscience?”
The most famous exclusions from Massachusetts are Roger Williams and his wife Mary and Anne Hutchinson. The Williamses were charged with sedition and heresy. In addition to circulating his public differences with the Church of England, Williams also publicly condemned the King’s charters for the Massachusetts colony and argued the Plymouth settlers had no right to take land from the Native Americans.
As for Anne Hutchinson—probably this country’s first “Uppity Woman”—she not only questioned the traditional Puritan teachings and sermons, but also held study groups of other women to discuss those differences at a time when women were to be silent and obedient to their husbands. AND her meetings became so popular that she began holding them for men, one of whom was the governor of the colony. In 1637, a provincial court convicted her—without saying specifically of what—and banished her.
The Williamses and Anne Hutchinson were among the founders of the Colony of Rhode Island and of Providence Plantation. Williams ruled the colony would not have any state religion and all who lived there would be free to practice their beliefs.
One of those Williams had corresponded with was William Penn, a Quaker who had been expelled from the Church of England and was later imprisoned in England for advocating religious pluralism, He protested against mistreatment of Quakers in Massachusetts and when King Charles II decided o pay off a debt to Penn’s father, Sir William Penn, by granting a charter to an area in the new World he called “Pennsylvania, Sir William’s son decided to create a “tolerance settlement” where persecuted Christians could take refuge. Although there was no established church, the colony’s 1776 Constitution required all government representatives to swear, “I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration.” .
Baptist historian and pastor Isaac Backus, who lived through some of those times, recalled that when Baptists in Sturbridge, Massachusetts refused to pay taxes to support the Congregationalist Church, they were imprisoned for tax evasion. One of them was Backus’s mother in 1752. Four years before that, says contemporary Baptist historian William Lloyd Allen, “a Congregational minister convinced authorities to clear Baptist homes of cookware, tools, spinning wheels and even livestock used to make livings, among other valuable goods.”
When Backus went to the Massachusetts delegation to the 1775 Continental Congress—at a time when the phrase “no taxation without representation” was being shouted—his complaint that state church taxes on Baptists, none other than John Adams responded that Baptists “might as well expect a change in the solar system as to expect they would give up their establishment.”
In 1617, the Governor of the Virginia Colony decreed, “Every Person should go to church, Sundays and Holidays, or lye Neck and Heels that night, and be a Slave to the Colony the following Week; for the second Offence, he should be a Slave for a Month, and for the Third, a Year and a Day.”
More than thirty Baptist preachers were jailed in Virginia in the decade before Madison and Jefferson forged Virginia’s Bill for Establishing Religious Liberty in 1786 a few years before Madison’s religion clause was added to the Bill of Rights.
But state-supported religion hung around well after that. The 14th Amendment left any religious requirements for voting or holding office moot. New Hampshire in 1875 and North Carolina in 1877 were the last states to actually remove such references from their state constitutions.
New York was “intolerantly Protestant,” as one source puts it. The Dutch Reformed Church was the established church in New Amsterdam until the English seized control in 1664. They continued the Dutch Reform policy. The 1683 New York Charter of Liberties and Privileges vowed to “guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests and princes have sourced mankind,” a seeming reference to English opposition to the Catholic faith.
Maryland’s 1632 charter professed, “It is the duty of every man to worship God in such manner as he thinks most acceptable to him, and all persons professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection of their religious liberty…” But the legislature had the power to “lay a general and equal tax for the support of the Christian religion.”
Mayland had begun as the only predominantly Catholic colony. Adelaide Mena wrote for the National Catholic Register that the first English Catholics fleeing persecution in England arrived in Maryland on March 25, 1684 and held the first Mass in the British colonies. Maryland passed a Toleration Act in 1649, she says, marking “the beginning of a framework of religious freedom.”
Delaware had no official religion in its 1637 Charter issued to the South Company of Sweden.
Connecticut’s1630 charter established the Congregational Church was the “onely and principall end of this plantation.”
South Carolina’s 1778 Constitution not only declared, “The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.” It also required any group wanting to form a church to meet five criteria: That there is one eternal God, and a future state of rewards and punishments; That God is publicly to be worshipped. That the Christian religion is the true religion; That the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are of divine inspiration, and are the rule of faith and practice; That it is lawful and the duty of every man being thereunto called by those that govern, to bear witness to the truth.”
New Jersey, in its 1776 constitution, provided that ‘No Protestant inhabitant of this Colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right, merely on account of his religious principles.”
Note that several of the charters specifically referred to the Protestant religion.
Catholics were a different matter.
The Georgia charter of 1732 simply banned Catholics from the colony, proclaiming, “There shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God, to all persons inhabiting, or which shall inhabit or be resident within our said provinces and that all such persons, except papists, shall have a free exercise of their religion…”
The Georgia Historical Society says early Georgians, concerned that Spanish Florida bordered the colony, feared Catholic settlers would be Spanish sympathizers if Spain and Britain went to war.
Georgia Trustees also didn’t want Jews, but circumstances forced the issue. When summer heat and sicknesses that came with it left 60 of Savannah’s colonists in fear of their lives—with the town’s only doctor also sick—the arrival of a ship full of Jews that included Dr. Samuel Nunez, saved the day. Nunez accepted no pay as he nursed all sixty ailing Georgians back to health. Colony founder James Oglethorpe saw that the colony’s charter allowing religious freedom for all non-Catholics meant the Jews, not being Catholics, could stay and more could settle. The nation’s third oldest Jewish congregation is in Georgia.
We have not even scratched the surface of our colonial history when we were a “Christian Nation,” as Hawley and his associates incorrectly maintain, hoping that public ignorance of our history—which these folks want to make national policy—will let them establish their theocracy.
We doubt that Hawley would want to live in the nation that he thinks we need to return to. Of course, if he’s the Presbyterian Puritan Elder it would probably be okay with him.
Our “Christian” founders punished Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and Catholics. They thought slavery was fine and saw fit to banish non-adherents to some other place—in their day, it was to Rhode Island.
And they also relied on the Doctrine of Discovery, which proclaimed the right of Christian nations to take possession of lands held by non-Christians. The doctrine was enacted in the 15th century, the last one after Columbus’s discoveries in the new world. Non-Christians were not considered legitimate possessors of the lands and the European discoverers were authorized to take them in order to Christianize the heathens and save their souls, thus clearing the way for Europeans to seize Native American lands, by force if necessary, a policy that produced what some call our Native American genocide.
Ironically, the doctrine used by our Christian forbears had been proclaimed by Popes whose later followers were not considered Christians by Hawley’s Christian founders.
Even today, there are those who still maintain that Catholics are not Christian—you can ask the person whose pickup truck I saw a few years ago that had “Catholics are not Christians” painted on the tailgate. We will leave it to others to determine if there is any significance in the fact that it has been 64 years since the election of our first, and so far, only Catholic President, and the election of our first black President still has some on Hawley’s side of our politics still arguing he wasn’t (and I guess, therefore is still not) an American.
And good gracious, our southern border is a sieve that is allowing thousands of people from Catholic countries in central and South America to flood into our Christian nation where they are—as the Republican nominee for President has put it—“poisoning the blood of our country.”
We are reminded of a small orange card in the massive collections at the Smithsonian in Washington from an organization that claimed about 1930 to be “a religious movement of American Brotherhood.” It says it stands for “a dozen “tenents of the Christian Religion.”
—The Upholding of the Constitution of the United States
—The Separation of Church and State
—Freedom of Speech and Press
—Closer Relationship of Pure Americanism.
—Much needed local reform.
—Closer Relationships between American Capital and American Labor
—Limitation on Foreign Immigration
—The Upholding of our States Rights
—Prevention of fires and Destruction of Property by Lawless Elements
—Preventing the Causes of Mob Violence and Lynchings
—Preventing Unwarranted Strikes by Foreign Labor Agitators.
—Protection of Our Pure Womanhood
And the top tenant of the Christian Religion:
—White Supremacy.
The title on the card reads, “The Creed of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Christian Nationalism boiled down to a 3×5 orange card.
We must be careful whose definition of “Christian” we are told is best for us. We must be skeptical of those who twist history and religion to seek power over us. We cannot protect our freedoms if we are comfortable being ignorant of our past—and there are those who ARE comfortable relying on that ignorance. In fact, they are counting on it to achieve their goals.
The Bible teaches us that the greatest quality we can have is love of others as of ourselves. Those who proclaim that hate and fear of others while proclaiming to know the true definition of Christianity must be challenged.
Senator Hawley is only 400 years behind the times. Our country has been there and it wasn’t good enough to go back to. He can go ahead by himself. We’re going to stay behind, happy that our church is next to a Baptist Church and we got along fine. We love our Catholic neighbor. And we fear Josh Hawley more than any of the Hispanic folks we meet on the street.
