Rep. Chuck Owen recently wrote an essay trying to clarify misunderstandings surrounding the phrase ‘Christian nationalism’.  Unfortunately, it gets a little muddled at times.  Let’s start with this:

‘This country was founded on the premise that we would have religious liberty.   We were founded on the notion that the government SHALL MAKE NO LAW establishing a religion.’

This is not the case.  All of the colonies had some sort of established Christian Church, and some of these lasted well into the 1800s.  Furthermore, the colonies/States became independent of Great Britain in 1776; the 1^st Amendment to the Philadelphia constitution wasn’t ratified until 1791.  And it also applies only to the federal government, and not at all to the States.  Thus, it is incorrect to claim that disestablishment of Christianity is a foundational part of US thought and life.

However, that is not to say that the 1^st Amendment didn’t have an impact on religion in the States.  The secularism of it and the Philly constitution as a whole frightened plenty of folks who understood the impact they would have on the health and vitality of Christianity.

In 1811, ‘Samuel Austin, President of the University of Vermont, warned his congregation in a published sermon that the Constitution “has one capital defect which will issue inevitably in its destruction.  It is entirely disconnected from Christianity”’ (Christopher Ferrara, Liberty: The God That Failed, Tacoma, Wash., Angelico Press, 2012, p. 525).

Samuel Taggart of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, who served as a Presbyterian minister and as a US representative, warned in 1812, ‘ . . . it [the US constitution] takes no notice of, and is not at all connected with religion.  . . . It is a bold experiment, and one which, I fear, can only issue in national apostasy and national ruin’ (Ibid.).

‘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”’ (Ibid., pgs. 533-4, 535).

And so it has come to pass.

The whole idea behind the religious pluralism of constitutional items like the 1^st Amendment is also misunderstood.  Those who promoted it, like Locke, Madison, and Jefferson, saw it as a way to weaken Christianity so that the government would have more freedom to implement whatever agenda it wanted to.

‘Hobbes and Locke did not merely seek to separate Church and State, but rather to subjugate the Church to the State by stripping the Church of any direct or indirect power over politics, reducing churches to the status of private clubs whose authority is strictly limited to enforcing club rules against their respective members’ (Ibid., p. 80).

‘As Locke foresaw, the unchallenged monism of state power that is at the essence of Liberty would be insured by a multiplicity of Christian sects.  . . . in the Essay Concerning Toleration, Locke advised that when any sect is “grown, or growing so numerous as to appear dangerous to the magistrate” the magistrate “may and ought to use all ways, either policy or power, that shall be convenient, to lessen, break and suppress the party, and so prevent the mischief”—the “mischief” being the mere existence of a dominant religious faction capable of posing a challenge to the State.  Both Jefferson and Madison, following Locke, expressly recognized the division of Christianity into sects as a primary safeguard of Liberty.  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson observes that the “several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other,” preventing any one sect from installing the “Procrustean bed” of “uniformity” via government.  Likewise, in Federalist No. 51, written to persuade the holdout states to ratify the Constitution, Madison declares, with the supreme religious indifference of the Deist he was, that:

‘“In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.  It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.  The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects, and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of the country and number of people comprehended under the same government. . . . In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good. . . .”

‘Like Locke, Madison viewed the very multiplicity of sects as necessary to secure “justice and the general good,” by which he means what Locke means:  “to preserve men in this world from the fraud and violence of one another” and “promoting the general welfare, which consists in riches and power” as determined by “the number and industry of your subjects.”  Christianity divided poses no threat to the power of the State . . . .  Lockean polities require for their equilibrium and survival a divide and conquer strategy toward Christianity as their only serious rival.  This is why, to recall Peter Gay’s startling observation, “political absolutism and religious toleration [are] the improbable twins of the modern state system”’ (Ibid., pgs. 542-3).

Having dutifully followed the Enlightenment principles of the 1^st Amendment and related constitutional provisions of religious liberty/pluralism for a couple of centuries now, with the predicted result that Christianity has grown divided and weak, the predicted corollary has also come to pass:  Governments promote whatever they think is in their own interest, whether or not it is morally repugnant, and Christians generally lack the strength to oppose them in any meaningful way – the federal government and various State and local governments (Illinois, California, etc.) are grooming kids to become members of the LGBT community; the Feds are carrying this out overseas, too; etc., etc.

For Mr. Owen, this doesn’t seem to be problematic.  Religious divisions are fine as long as all the sects ‘love America’:

‘There are Americans who love America who are also Christians.   There are also Americans who love this country who are Jew, Muslim, B ’Hai, Wiccan, deists and rock worshippers.    And we’re all Americans and we must all be treated the same.’

But we think he may not like the ‘America’ in which he finds himself if all of these religious groups and their beliefs are ‘treated the same.’  Government under Muslim influence is of the despotic strongman variety and quite cruel; Wiccans have no problem with abortion; and so forth.

If Mr. Owen values the traditions of limited, representative, participatory government, rule of law, protections against cruel and unusual punishments, forgiveness, second chances, mercy, etc., that have grown out of the Christian tradition, he needs to rethink his commitment to religious pluralism.

But perhaps the most insidious problem with Mr. Owen’s disestablishment ideology is that it is at war with the idea of Jesus Christ’s Incarnation.  The Orthodox priest Fr. John Strickland explains:

‘ . . . traditional Christianity assigned a redemptive purpose to the world.  The Church had been placed in the world to sanctify it and to bring it into a correct relationship with God.  According to the Gospel, the world existed in a corrupted and demon-riddled condition.  But since God had become man and had joined Himself eternally to His creation, He had opened the way toward reconciliation between the creation and Himself.

‘The Church was therefore given a ministry of sanctifying the world.  All areas of human life became subject to this ministry.  . . .

‘Could not that realm of human culture and civilization known as government, then, also participate in the sanctification of the world?  With Constantine’s conversion [St. Contantine the Great, Roman Emperor, reposed in 337 A. D.—W.G.], even this part of the creation now came within the scope of the Church’s cosmic ministry’ (Paradise and Utopia, Vol. One: The Age of Paradise, Chesterton, Ind., Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019, p. 104).

To separate and insulate government from Christianity as Mr. Owen and other adherents of Enlightenment beliefs suggest is tantamount to negating the fulness of Christ’s Incarnation, since Its redemptive effects are not to be ever felt there.  And if that is the case, then we have just resigned ourselves to submitting government entirely to rulership by the demons.

Votaries of the Enlightenment tend to dismiss spiritual things like God and demons, but they are quite real and we ignore them at our peril.  To quote Rod Dreher, ‘There is no middle ground’ in the spiritual war between God and the devil that has been going on since time began:  If we are not allied with God, by default we have sided with His opponents – Satan and his demons.  Let all supporters of religious disestablishment note that well.

Yet Christ came to sanctify everything human:  art, music, the work of the laborer, language, family, and also human laws and government.  The original States of the current Union once applied traditional Incarnational theology to those latter two endeavors, joining them to the Christian political tradition that goes back to the early 4^th century.  All the States have been gravely harmed by their abandonment of that tradition.  There have been abuses at times under the arrangement of an established Christian Church (what institution in the world hasn’t gone astray because of man’s sinfulness?), but that is no more reason to throw it aside altogether than it is to abolish the traditional Christian family because of abuses of mothers, fathers, grandparents, cousins, etc.

The greater harm to society lies in obstinately digging in our heels in support of the Enlightenment disestablishment doctrine, not in bringing government within the scope of the Church’s sanctifying ministry, as true human happiness would be nearly impossible under the regime of religious pluralism and moral relativism supported by Mr. Owen and those who share his views:

‘True knowledge of God is the foremost and chiefest part of happiness, the root of immortality. Man’s happiness consists of two things: first, of a true conception of God; and second, of the acts that man as a rational being ought to perform. “To know You is the whole of righteousness, and to comprehend Your power is the root of immortality” (Wisd. of Sol. 15:3)’ [St. Athansios Parios, +1813—W.G.].