Posted on 05/15/2010 7:50:29 AM PDT by markomalley
In these days of Tea Parties and electoral primary politicking, it seems the nation is embarked on a collective soul-search. Pundits, commentators, and historians are scrambling to explain how it was we got to this point: how a nation that has just elected its first African-American president can be more racially divided than ever; how an ostensibly Christian and religious nation could have elected a government so fundamentally at odds with its putative worldview; how a center-right nation could possibly have elected the most radically leftist regime in its history.
For the American people really are fundamentally conservative in their orientation. Leftist politicians and ideologues know this: It’s why activist judges suddenly turn originalist in their Senate confirmation hearings, why Obamacare advocates cynically insist their proposals inculcate “more choice and competition,” and why even the nation’s radically secularist Democratic Party has to feign respect for, and compatibility with, the religious ideals of the nation’s citizenry.
Yet, for all we hear and read about the nation’s fundamental conservatism, what real conservative victories can the political right boast about in recent decades? Sure, Reagan helped topple the Soviet Union, but what since then? For all the much-ballyhooed “takeover” of the Republican Party and the halls of government by the so-called “Christian Right,” the nation isn’t an inch closer to having realized conservative principles than it was in 2000. In 2010, all three branches of government are in the hands of radical leftists, legal abortion and homosexualism are firmly entrenched in law and public life, and even traditional religiosity is at an all-time low.
Who could have seen this coming?
One man did: Alexis de Toqueville, who wrote quite a bit about the cultural and religious predilections of the Americans he studied in the 1830s. His findings were published in his opus Democracy in America, a work that still remains required reading for anyone hoping to understand the American character. De Toqueville had no doubt that the United States was, in some sense, a Christian nation, and his summary observation is worth quoting at length:
Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion–for who can search the human heart?–but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society. In the United States, if a politician attacks a sect, this may not prevent the partisans of that very sect from supporting him; but if he attacks all the sects together, everyone abandons him, and he remains alone. While I was in America, a witness who happened to be called at the Sessions of the county of Chester (state of New York) declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say. The newspapers related the fact without any further comment. The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.
One wonders how Toqueville would have explained the election of a President who routinely goes out of his way to insist Americans are not, or “are no longer,” a Christian people. But arguably the current state of American religiosity would not have surprised de Toqueville, on the contrary he anticipated it. Toqueville considered the democratic spirit, preoccupied with liberty and with equality, to be such that its adherents would waver between religious anarchy and dogmatism, ultimately between unbelief itself and . . .
. . .
. . . Catholic Christianity:
Two things must here be accurately distinguished: equality makes men want to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in the power that governs society. Men living in democratic times are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and uniform. . . . I am inclined to believe . . . .that our posterity will tend more and more to a division into only two parts, some relinquishing Christianity entirely and others returning to the Church of Rome.
Toqueville was half-right. On the one hand, he would not have been surprised to find that more and more Americans are identifying themselves as “spiritual, not religious,” a faux religiosity divorced from form and from dogmatic content. But there is one important thing Toqueville seems to have overlooked, or at any rate found irrelevant to his analysis: America in the 1830s was (and today still is, if just barely) not simply a Christian nation, but a Protestant nation. He seems to have underestimated the extent to which fundamental Protestant principles, such as sola Scriptura and “private interpretation” of revelation, have uniquely equipped Protestantism to morph according to the spirit of any age and give any doctrine an air of Biblical, and so Christian, legitimacy.
It tends to be lost on observers just how out of the contemporary Christian mainstream today’s stereotypical Evangelicals are. The secular mind today tends not to distinguish between mainline Protestantism and Evangelicalism. Most people do not realize that today, the denominations which collectively claim the affiliations of most Protestant believers, have in fact embraced and dogmatized radical welfare statism and culture-of-death liberalism. Most Protestants today belong to a denomination that teaches that extramarital sexual relations are not necessarily sinful, that abortion isn’t a sin so long as one undergoes or performs it conscientiously, and that homosexual relations are not necessarily sinful so long as they are “loving and monogamous”.
These are not fringe positions. America’s largest Lutheran denomination has just sanctioned the ordination of openly-gay pastors, the Episcopal Church (once known as “the Republican Party at prayer”) is ordaining partnered homosexuals to its episcopate, and the Church of Sweden, the largest Lutheran national church in the world, has just ordained a partnered lesbian to the See of Stockholm. All these denominations, and more, also support “women’s right to choose” and other leftist moral aberrations, and supposedly on Scriptural grounds.
None of this should come as a surprise. It is this author’s contention that, contrary to popular belief, Evangelicalism is not conservative. Protestantism is built upon radical rupture with the past, a rejection of all hierarchical authority unaccountable to the whim of the private believer, and a rejection of the authoritative nature of a doctrinal tradition. It just so happens that most Protestants of the last half-millenia have convinced themselves that certain moral imperatives are in fact perspicuously Biblical: their conservatism is coincidental, not principled. Conservative habits do not die hard, but after 500 years it seems most of Protestant Christianity no longer has qualms about taking the Reformation to its logical extreme, rejecting the entire corpus of Christian morality as itself a perversion of the Gospel by the partisans of Popery and Romanism.
What lessons do today’s Protestants have to give us? Divorce and remarriage are Biblical. Contraception is Biblical. Abortion-on-demand is Biblical. Lesbian bishops are Biblical. The original Protestant Reformers, by and large, even argued that polygamy was, in fact, Biblical, and surely it won’t be long before their successors today rediscover that.
Making the secular government sovereign over the internal affairs of the Church? That’s Biblical too! Anarcho-libertarianism? Also Biblical. Newly made-up beliefs about the divinely-sanctioned establishment of the modern state of Israel? Also Biblical.
There is literally no doctrine under the sun, and no moral scruple, that is safe from the unfettered Scriptural kama sutra of the Protestant imagination. Protestant Christianity is not, and arguably never has been, a viable unifying creed, and contains within itself the seeds of its own nihilism. And Evangelicalism is not immune to this. Today’s rising Evangelical stars are not the Franklin Grahams and the James Dobsons, but folks like Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, the postmodern “Emergent Church” movement (which apparently must be distinguished from its postmodernist sister, the “Emerging Church”), and a new wave of Christian music stars who are out-of-the-closet gays, having recently joined in the discovery that loving, monogamous sodomy isn’t unbiblical after all. (And even if it is, who cares? They’re saved, anyway!)
It’s no accident that a disproportionate number of the conservative intelligentsia, in America and around the world, are Catholic Christians, though in America Evangelicals tend to be, and heroically so, the conservative foot-soldiers. Catholicism, both in America and abroad, is seeing modest growth while Protestantism is imploding. This is not something Catholics and Orthodox Christians should gloat over: Disconnecting Anglo-Americans from their immediate religious history will inflict untold psychological and spiritual harm. From the poetry of Milton to the hymns of the Wesley brothers, from the tireless missionary endeavors of the Church of England in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the passionate Scripture-peddling of the Gideons, from the Book of Common Prayer and Luther’s Catechisms to the King James Bible, there is a rich liturgical, hymnodic, poetic, literary, and even theological patrimony that has been cultivated by the best kind of Protestantism for 500 or so years. Conservative instinct demands that the best of this be preserved, cultivated, and even inculturated, by the non-Protestant churches.
As Protestants continue to vacillate between drift into theological nihilism and conversion to a more originalist and organically conservative Christianity (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy), Evangelical leadership would do well to consider the future of the Protestant experiment. If reversion to the Mother Church is not a perceived viable option, perhaps a new Reformation is in order, one that can reverently and reflectively reconsider some of the doctrinal presuppositions of that of the 16th century and provide a better basis for doctrinal and philosophical integrity.
It is notable that white evangelicals went for McCain 68% to 23% ... while white (non-hispanic) Catholics went for Obama 47% to 45% (according to a Pew poll on Nov. 3 2008).
Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics likely change those numbers somewhat ... but, when even white Catholics are voted Obama, while white Protestants voted McCain (by a 3-to-1 margin), your position that Protestant Christianity is hurting the conservative cause clearly becomes ridiculous. Protestants are the only thing holding the conservative cause together.
How, exactly, do those statistics indiciate that Protestant Christianity is anti-conservative while Catholic Christianity is anti-liberal. It seems to me to indicate the opposite.
SnakeDoc
You have a very good point. And, considering those Catholics who espouse liberal political philosophy are the same ones who espouse innovation (i.e., liberalism) in doctrine, I am more-or-less inclined to agree with you as far as this statement goes.
Practicing Protestants are far more likely to be conservative than are practicing Catholics.
Depends upon what you call "practicing Protestants." Do you mean, "practicing Episcopals," "practicing PCUSA Presbyterians," "practicing ELCA Lutherans," "practicing UMC Methodists?"
Or are you referring to a different subset? (Of course, this is strictly a rhetorical question)
The most Protestant countries in this world tend to be the freest and most prosperous countries in this world ... led by the United States.
Seems like this Protestant US is neck deep in debt and is about to go into a new dark age. Led by Protestant Presidents and Protestant/Cafeteria Catholic Congresses.
The Catholic Church has been persecuted rather heavily at times in the last century in Mexico.
Yuri Besmenov saw it coming. The destabilization is nearly complete. We are ripe for the next stage: Destabilization!
Yet,...Conservatives have no rational plan for RE-moralizing the nation.
If you are among those who do not know about Yuri Besmenov please do a Google search on the words: Yuri Besmenov and demoralization.
That the Protestant US is having trouble with liberals goes without saying. However, statistics seem to indiciate that Protestants are the ones yelling “stop!”, while Catholics are pushing us down the hill.
SnakeDoc
As others pointed out on this thread, a large fraction of Catholics are actually leftist liberals, like Pelosi, Biden and so on, and voted for Obama.
But this article was so egregious, I couldn't let all the vicious diatribe against other Christian religions stand.
As I said, Catholics need to clean their own house first, Lord knows it needs cleaning.
Acutally it’s Christ’s calling: Luke 6:42. A lesson we ALL must utilize everyday and I absolutely point the finger back at me on this as I am horrible at it...
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
“Seems like this Protestant US is neck deep in debt and is about to go into a new dark age.”
Unfortunately true — THANKS to Catholics who voted for Obama and the Democrats.
Correction.
You have no plan or have not signed on to one.
This happenstance has been discussed for decades and there are any number of plans.
Amen, fellow FReeper.
Further, for Western Civilization to survive Islam, we must rise to define and defend our solid unity as Christians.
The myth of "commonality of religions" is going to kick us in the ass sooner or later; it's inevitable. We want so badly to be tolerant and wise and all-seeing and pronounce all religions equal. Wrongo -- many religions are pretty horrible, some downright destructive, and OUR nation is a CHRISTIAN nation. Religions that can co-exist within the Judeo-Christian ethic get along just fine. If Islam -- a mortal enemy of Christianity for 1400 years, and bringers-on of the Crusades -- doesn't like it, they can piss off.
Refuse further post here. No constructive outcome. I knew before I made my first comment that any comment on this thread would give the same result.
Nothing but stir divisions amoung us. Waste of time and bandwidth.
BTW, just so you know, church-going Catholics were also slightly against Obama, as well. Those who attended Mass on a weekly basis were 50-49 McCain. And if they were able to craft a poll to quickly measure a person's orthodoxy to Catholic doctrine, I have no doubt that those who were orthodox in their beliefs would have polled vastly lower for the Bamster (in most parishes that I am familiar with, only about half those who are in attendance on a weekly basis actually support Catholic orthodoxy).
Just wanted to clear that part up.
Those of us who are actually orthodox in our beliefs have a real struggle on our hands (see this thread that I posted earlier)
Do me a big, huge favor then. Troll the RF every now and again and when you see a group of your colleagues bashing Catholics, remind them of the above statement. Just like how you've reproved me for posting this thread.
Uhhh...sorry to tell you this FRiend, but Catholics were not the only ones who put this islamist in office. Church-going (i.e., go to Mass once a week or more) Catholics actually leaned toward McCain.
In fact, there were anti-clerical revolutions in almost every single Latin American country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Just as there were in almost all Catholic European countries.
Your statistics fail to correct for race. There is simply nothing the Protestant church could teach that would’ve made african-americans vote against Obama. We could’ve proven he was the anti-Christ, and they’d have voted Obama upwards of 95%.
Your stats also lump “other Christians” in with Protestants. I’m not sure what “other Christian” is ... but it apparently is differentiated from Protestantism.
SnakeDoc
My question is — what is included in the Protestants/Other Christians?
I guess Jeremiah Wright is considered “Protestant of Other Christian”.
It caught my attention because it was such a ridiculously ironic query, and my thought was, "That's nerve!"
I don't browse by forum. I browse by thread title.
When I see another thread title that poses a ridiculously ironic statement about any other Christian religion, maybe I'll comment. But I don't surf the RF forum.
Even if I take your statstics ... 50-49 for McCain among churchgoing Catholics is hardly a landslide which shows Catholics standing athwart liberalism. A thin majority against the most liberal President in 30-years does not bode well for the argument of Catholicism saving conservatism.
If church-going Catholics were slightly against Obama (50%-49%), and white evengelical Protestants were (almost) 3-to-1 against Obama (68%-23%) ... what does that say about your initial premise that Protestantism is contrary to conservatism? It looks like evangelical Protestants saw Obama coming and said “NO!” and church-going Catholics saw him coming and said “eh, whatever”.
SnakeDoc
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