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\nIf we want to consider the place of Christianity in America, we must first remember that the country was not born in isolation, but in the frame of the European Enlightenment, and therefore and more generally, it is a component of European civilization. The problems that are are affecting the US today are problems common to both Europe and North America. The differences between them are not differences of culture but minor differences that arise out of a separate development for about two centuries. If it is wrong to treat the Founding Fathers as Christian zealots–the Jefferson Bible witnesses against it–they were no atheists either.<\/p>\n
One of the most important dates in US history is the landing of the Mayflower pilgrims on the coast of New England in 1620. These pilgrims were Puritans who sought separation from the Church of England, seen as corrupt and oppressive. The Americans colonies were a haven for the persecuted, and those persecuted for religious reasons found there a land where their communities could flower and bloom in tranquility. Religious plurality is therefore a characteristic of early America. It is important because we have here an aspect that will later find its way into the Constitution.<\/p>\n
In the 18th century, the Enlightenments reached their climax in Europe. By that time, Christendom had relinquished much of its religious fervor, and substituted for it a rationalist fervor. Yet, we would be mistaken in seeing even in this period a complete abandonment of any religious belief. Rather, this was a gradual process, that began not even with the Renaissance, but that progressively, slowly took shape. In the Renaissance, the principal topic for painters were taken from the Scriptures. Copernicus was also a priest and Newton had an interest perhaps as great, if not greater, in theology than in science. Darwin certainly had no intention of destroying Christianity to replace it with scientific reason. What all these exmaples show, is that while religion in general, and Christianity in particular, were not necessarily the target–this came later, and once again progressively–the interest was no longer on God but rather on the natural world.<\/p>\n
Deism sought to answer this new situation, by leaving God as the ultimate cause of all, by now removed from human affairs. Thus, men were left with their reason to organize themselves into society, and to utilize nature to further their ends and improve their lives. In France, deism took a radical form, in the writings of Voltaire especially, in which everything that did not conform to reason was literally dangerous. This led to the infamous Terror, and the ‘cult of Reason’ installed during that time. France today is widely known as the model of a radical secularism, where even the slightest mention of the word God in public speeches is now unimaginable. In England, however, the situation was slightly different, in that the rationalist philosophy never reached such extreme. There never was a Terror there, nor were churches reconverted into ‘temples of Reason.’ This is the rationalism that the Americans inherited: the emphasis on the natural order, but a natural order that was not necessarily anti-religious.<\/p>\n
All the Founding Fathers were believers in some sort–except perhaps T. Jefferson, but even he was not an atheist either–but all were wealthy men of the 18th century, and American institutions today bear thus mark. The Fathers’ religiosity is to be taken in that context. When Jefferson wrote that there is “a wall of separation between Church and State,” he meant by this that–contrary to England, from which they sought to liberate themselves–the State is not to support a Church, nor is a church to support the State, in the spirit of plurality that we saw above. The goal was to prevent the imposition of a creed above another. It was also in the deist spirit, which saw God as not intervening in human affairs. Therefore, a church, which deals with the relationship between man and God, could not pretend to direct human institutions. But it does not mean, however, that all forms of religiosity is to be suppressed. Rather, this problem, like so many aspects of the US Constitution, was left voluntarily vague and obscure. <\/p>\n
We argue today over this issue as we argue over the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. The American Constitution is famous for its brevity: it does not pretend to regulate every aspect of political life (this is the essence of a Constitution), nor did it seek to annihilate every aspect of religiosity even in public life. It was rather up to men, and human reason, to deal with these details later. In this sense American institutions today reflect the situation which was America’s in the late 18th century. The development that occurred in Europe since the French Revolution did not affect it. the differences between American and (Western) European secularism reflect a different evolutionary direction, with the Americans retaining characteristics of the Enlightenments. American secularism is the direct product of 18th century Anglo-saxon Enlightenment: human affairs are foremost among our occupations, but God is not discarded altogether.<\/p>\n
The fact that God was still present in the 18th century, albeit a far removed, impersonal God, derives from a much longer tradition, that began with the inception if Christianity in the West. This will be the subject of the next post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently attended a lecture hosted by the Secular Coalition of America, whose topic proposed to explore the spread of religiosity in American politics. As could be expected from the very name of the group, the discussion turned into a denunciation of the mixing of faith and politics, of church and state, and into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6595,6],"tags":[166,251,6596,2221],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity-general","category-politics","tag-christianity","tag-religion","tag-secularism","tag-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}