Is
Christianity foundational to the identity of the people who live within the
United States?
The answer
to that question will be found by answering another question: Can the acceptance of Christianity be
officially established as the end goal of all of them, or even of a portion of
them, e.g., of the folk of one of the States, with laws being passed to help
make that a reality (laws against pornography, sodomy, commerce on holy days;
laws honoring saints, etc.)?
The answer
to the latter is No, and thus the answer to the first is also No. The view of most in the US is that
Christianity (or any other religion) may be practiced by individuals unless it
interferes with another person’s way of living, no matter how freakish or
immoral it may be. The central article
of faith for the US, then, is not that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity
united our human nature to His own in order to heal us of the wounds caused by
our sins, but instead that the unhindered exercise of individual human freedom
is the pinnacle of historical development.
That was not
always the case in the US. Most of the
original 13 colonies had established churches and/or laws showing preference to
Christianity prior to US independence from Great Britain. One of the major steps that put them on the
road to their reigning agnosticism/relativism/atheism was the adoption of
something US Christians wrongly take great pride in – the US constitution
drafted in Philadelphia in 1787, which made no reference to God. We have often been critical of the Yankees of
the Northern States for the harmful ideologies they have foisted on the South
and many other peoples of the world, but in this instance, some of them,
members of an organization known as the National Reform Association that formed
in the latter part of the 19th century, saw with great clarity where
that document was leading the States:
‘Even more
explicitly prophetic was the President of Wheaton College, Prof. Charles
Blanchard, whose address to the 1874 convention, entitled “The Conflict of
Law,” predicted that, failing adoption of the proposed Christian Amendment, no
state law favorable to Christianity “can stand a suit in the Supreme Court of
the United States. . . . This conflict
of law is inevitable and irrepressible. Our
laws will be heathenized or our Constitution Christianized, and Americans
must soon decide which they will have done.”
In like manner, Felix Brunot’s address warned that while “Our nation is
Christian . . . the Constitution is unchristian. . . . Can this anomaly continue? Impossible.
One by one your Christian laws . . . and all the Christian features of
State Constitutions, must come to the test of the Constitution of the United
States; and they must fall before it.” ’
‘ . . .
Under the influence of the Godless Constitution as wielded by anti-Christian
forces, predicted Tayler Lewis, it would not be long before “our whole
political page becomes a pure, unbelieving, irreligious, Christless, Godless
blank” ’ (Christopher Ferrara, Liberty: The God That Failed, Tacoma,
Wash., Angelico Press, 2012, pgs. 533-4, 535).
This is
exactly what happened, as the federal Supreme Court, in ruling after ruling
from the middle of the 20th century onwards, struck down even the
most innocuous State laws regarding Christianity, such as the oral reading of
Holy Scripture in the public schools in the name of ‘freedom’.
But there
were intimations early in US history that the whole project was going end
tragically, that they would be a foe of Christ and not His friend. Such is the case with the idolatry one sees
in the years of the American Revolution:
‘After 1770,
writes Albanese, “songs began to appear which celebrated the Goddess [of
Liberty]” and “preachers took up the cause of the Goddess in their turn.” For example, Jacob Duché, the Chaplain to the
Continental Congress who delivered its opening prayer, gave a sermon explaining
how Liberty “true to her divine source, is of heavenly abstraction” and that
both Liberty and the “divine virtue” which is her “illustrious parent” come to
dwell “in the hearts of all intelligent beings” where “they ought jointly to
be worshipped.”
‘The sign and
sacrament of this veritable cult of the Goddess Liberty was the Liberty Tree in
Boston . . . . As Oliver’s brother
wrote, Liberty Tree had been “consecrated as an idol for the mob to worship”
and was the place for imposing the discipline of the “Tree of Ordeal [on those]
whom the Rioters pitched upon as State delinquents.” In addition to being both a totem and locus
of the power of Liberty, Liberty Tree was a place of worship where
revolutionary liturgies were enacted. In
Providence, Rhode Island a Liberty Tree was dedicated during a ceremony in
which the participants laid their hands on the sacred object as a local
minister invoked the worldwide unity of a kind of mystical body of Liberty . .
. .
‘The “sacred
elm,” writes Albanese, became “a kind of transcendent cosmo-historical tree
around which the other Liberty Trees and liberty signs of the colonies took
root . . . Like the sacrament it was, Liberty Tree was the reality which
oriented the patriots, yet it pointed beyond itself to another source of
power”—the power invoked by Paine with his talk of remaking the world and
regenerating man in a disquieting analogy to the working of divine grace’ (pgs.
150-1).
So many
‘disquieting’ signs in the past, and yet how many conservatives in the US are
genuinely shocked that so many of their institutions – governments,
universities, major corporations – have ended up as promoters, at home and
abroad, of the wickedness of feminism, easy divorce, homosexual rights,
transgenderism, abortion, etc.?
One of the
principal roots of the modern US attitude toward Christianity and individual
liberty is, as Mr Ferrara shows, John Locke’s political philosophy:
. . .
The rest is
at https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/uss-internal-war-christianity.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
