Paul Harvey: Religion and Politics in US Elections ... A Short History
[Mr. Harvey is a Professor of History, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.]
As an historian, whenever I ask students about why we are supposed to study history, they always repeat some variant of the standard cliche, "we have to learn the mistakes of the past or else we are doomed to repeat them." I like to respond with my own counter-cliche, "Yes, maybe, but after learning from past mistakes we'll just go on to invent new ones." More seriously, I find the response annoying because so many of the "lessons of history" are in fact contradictory. As the writer Adam Gopnik has expressed it, "History does not offer lessons; its unique constellations of contingencies never repeat." And that’s certainly the case with the issue of religion in presidential politics from a historical perspective. And yet, maybe there's something we can learn even from contradictory lessons of history.
So I’ll start with a couple of different statements here, both of which are perfectly true, and both of which perfectly contradict the other. The first: in America, religion and politics are, and should be, separate. The second: religion and politics have never been, and should not be, separate. Over the last generation or so, we’ve had our own culture wars raging, and it’s often pointed out that the red state/blue state divide mimick maps of religious geography that you could draw up; this has been the case in fact for much of American political history.
Frequently in my classroom I'll start with this question: "would you vote for an atheist or a Unitarian or someone who denied the divinity of Jesus for President.” Most of the time, no one raises a hand, except perhaps for a long-haired young man in the back row. Then I’ll read out quotes about religion from the founding fathers, without telling my students where those quotes come from --some from Washington, some from Jefferson, some from James Madison, etc, and ask my students if they would vote for someone with those sentiments. Usually, no one, or only one or two students, will profess to do so. I then reveal that they’ve just voted against almost the entire generation of founding fathers, more or less. This leads to a discussion of why we seem to have a de facto religious test for candidates now despite the fact that such a test is expressly prohibited by the Constitution. Student replies suggest that they just wouldn't trust someone who fundamentally violated the common sense of the culture concerning religious matters. Thomas Jefferson famously said, "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists." These classes make me think that, perhaps, now we are all pietists.
The reason for this contradiction I started with above has to do with a lot of things, but I’ll point here to the coincidence of two of them: the ratification of the secular Constitution in 1789, followed closely by the socalled 2nd Great Awakening and the rapid rise of evangelicalism as a dominant form of American religious expression. The first foresaw a tight regulation of religion in politics, and a distinct separation; the second made such a separation impossible. Thus, we have a de jure separation of church and state, and a de jure notion of the separation of the religious from the political; but historically we’ve had a profound de facto intermingling of the two.
When the founders framed the Constitution in 1789, many of them assumed that, while there would certainly be no established form of religion nationally, there might be some safely regulated state establishments, such as the Congregationalist church in Connecticut. The Congregationalist Church in New England was famously described as the Federalist Party at Prayer, much like the Anglican establishment in England was the Tory Party at prayer. Others, like Thomas Jefferson and radical democrats, assumed that freedom of religion would naturally and inevitably lead to the rise of rational religion in America, and the decline of what Jefferson called priestcraft and superstition. The age of the Enlightenment, Jefferson foresaw, and the new democratic Republic of America, would ensure the final elimination of religious superstition from politics....
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Read entire article at http://usreligion.blogspot.com
As an historian, whenever I ask students about why we are supposed to study history, they always repeat some variant of the standard cliche, "we have to learn the mistakes of the past or else we are doomed to repeat them." I like to respond with my own counter-cliche, "Yes, maybe, but after learning from past mistakes we'll just go on to invent new ones." More seriously, I find the response annoying because so many of the "lessons of history" are in fact contradictory. As the writer Adam Gopnik has expressed it, "History does not offer lessons; its unique constellations of contingencies never repeat." And that’s certainly the case with the issue of religion in presidential politics from a historical perspective. And yet, maybe there's something we can learn even from contradictory lessons of history.
So I’ll start with a couple of different statements here, both of which are perfectly true, and both of which perfectly contradict the other. The first: in America, religion and politics are, and should be, separate. The second: religion and politics have never been, and should not be, separate. Over the last generation or so, we’ve had our own culture wars raging, and it’s often pointed out that the red state/blue state divide mimick maps of religious geography that you could draw up; this has been the case in fact for much of American political history.
Frequently in my classroom I'll start with this question: "would you vote for an atheist or a Unitarian or someone who denied the divinity of Jesus for President.” Most of the time, no one raises a hand, except perhaps for a long-haired young man in the back row. Then I’ll read out quotes about religion from the founding fathers, without telling my students where those quotes come from --some from Washington, some from Jefferson, some from James Madison, etc, and ask my students if they would vote for someone with those sentiments. Usually, no one, or only one or two students, will profess to do so. I then reveal that they’ve just voted against almost the entire generation of founding fathers, more or less. This leads to a discussion of why we seem to have a de facto religious test for candidates now despite the fact that such a test is expressly prohibited by the Constitution. Student replies suggest that they just wouldn't trust someone who fundamentally violated the common sense of the culture concerning religious matters. Thomas Jefferson famously said, "We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists." These classes make me think that, perhaps, now we are all pietists.
The reason for this contradiction I started with above has to do with a lot of things, but I’ll point here to the coincidence of two of them: the ratification of the secular Constitution in 1789, followed closely by the socalled 2nd Great Awakening and the rapid rise of evangelicalism as a dominant form of American religious expression. The first foresaw a tight regulation of religion in politics, and a distinct separation; the second made such a separation impossible. Thus, we have a de jure separation of church and state, and a de jure notion of the separation of the religious from the political; but historically we’ve had a profound de facto intermingling of the two.
When the founders framed the Constitution in 1789, many of them assumed that, while there would certainly be no established form of religion nationally, there might be some safely regulated state establishments, such as the Congregationalist church in Connecticut. The Congregationalist Church in New England was famously described as the Federalist Party at Prayer, much like the Anglican establishment in England was the Tory Party at prayer. Others, like Thomas Jefferson and radical democrats, assumed that freedom of religion would naturally and inevitably lead to the rise of rational religion in America, and the decline of what Jefferson called priestcraft and superstition. The age of the Enlightenment, Jefferson foresaw, and the new democratic Republic of America, would ensure the final elimination of religious superstition from politics....
[HNN Editor: This article extends over many pages. Please click on the SOURCE link above to continue reading.]