The Sacralization of Secular Politics and the Politicization of the Sacred

During the 1950s, as the Cold War pulled Americans into a whirlwind of fear over the possibility of nuclear devastation and the reality of ideological competition with Communists at home and abroad, the government of the United States turned to religion, a point elaborated on further by Ira R. Chernus in “Religion, War, and Peace” and Andrew M. Manis in “Civil Religion and National Identity.” With a national faith, it hoped to find protection and victory. In 1954, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and then in 1956 re- placed the national motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“one from many”) with “In God We Trust.” The actions of Congress seemed to defy openly the foundations of American government. The original Constitution makes no reference to God and only one mention of religion. Article VI expressly outlaws “religious tests” for federal office-holding. For those in the 1950s who feared that the United States was fast becoming some form of Judeo-Christian theocracy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had an answer. He sought to clarify the relationship between religion and politics with definitive ambiguity: “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious faith,” he boasted. “[A]nd I don’t care what it is.” Attempts to place religion somehow in the middle of American politics in the 1950s without offending the diversity of faith in the nation reflected a long pattern and problem in the nation’s religious history. How could religious ideas and institutions play a role in the government without jeopardizing religious and political liberty? In the realm of politics, American religion is built on a paradoxical answer to this question. The nation has sought to uphold a “wall of separation” (a phrase from Thomas Jefferson in 1802) between organized religion and the machinations of the state, while advancing itself as a moral, God-ordained country—a point explored further by Jason C. Bivins in “Religion and Politics” and Frank
S. Ravitch in “Religion and the Law in American History.” Perhaps even more paradoxically, the inclusion of religion in the political sphere has done as much to challenge the political status quo of racial, gender, and immigrant exclusion and discrimination as it has done to uphold these structures.
Early British settlers of the colonial era ventured to the “New World” with financial and moral concerns. The plan across the Eastern Seaboard was to create small Christian commonwealths that would stand as beacons of light to the world, convert or kill the Indians, and allow the settlers to practice their brand of Protestantism with freedom and liberty. Of course, sometimes the missionary rhetoric clearly masked outright financial greed, and “Christian” settlers showed about as much regard for the souls of Indians as they did their bodies. “Reducing” the Indians to civility often meant either Christianizing or murdering them. In colonial America, the church and state were anything but separate. Church leaders and civil leaders worked hand-in-hand to administer law, judge the innocent and the guilty, and shape the government. One could be banished from a community or executed as easily for theft as for religious dissent, a fact that many Quakers, Baptists, and any women who wanted to interpret faith publicly on their own learned the hard way. Moreover, in New England, efforts to convert local Indians to Christianity often entailed the formation of “Praying Towns” where Indian men, women, and children would be segregated into their own communities and governed by laws allegedly based on the Bible.
The American Revolution ushered in a new era in American, if not world, religion. Led by a diverse group of Deists, Quakers, and both orthodox and luke- warm Protestants, the Founders endeavored to create a nation that would some- how separate religion and politics for the benefit of both politics and religion. The Founders seemed to envision a nation in which the voice of “the people” (considered to be white men of substantial property) would rule, and not the voices of clerics or gods. While the Declaration of Independence invokes a universal “Creator,” the Constitution fails to mention such a being. The Constitution makes certain, though, that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” But the founding generation left an ambiguous legacy. Article VI says nothing of the use of religious tests by individual states. Moreover, while the Founders avoided mention of God or even a “Creator” in the Constitution, they nonetheless imagined their liberation from Great Britain as akin to the exodus of the biblical Israelites. On July 4, 1776, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were appointed to devise a seal for the newborn United States. Franklin suggested a design featuring Moses with a background of drowning Egyptian soldiers, while Jefferson offered one with children led by “a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.” These Founders seemed to want their religion and politics separated and linked, and Americans have remained similarly conflicted for much of the history of the United States, as Jason C. Bivins explains in his contribution.
As hard as the Founders sought to separate religion and politics, they could not stop individuals from voting their moral consciences or ministers from using their public power for political purposes. Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson became the bêtes noires of devout Christians. During the election of 1800, for instance, Thomas Jefferson found himself assailed by New Englanders as a “French infidel” and a “howling atheist.” Then in the years before the Civil War, religion seemed to be everywhere in political life. Fueled by the Second Great Awakening, which generated mass movements throughout the United States to bring religion to bear on all of society, American politics was overhauled. Leading politicians like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun lamented that the denominational splits of the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, which tended to be sectional divisions over slavery, would hurt national political unity. Historian Richard Carwardine has detailed how American politicians and political parties from the age of Jack- son to the age of Lincoln were compelled to represent themselves as authentically religious and their opponents as immoral. Some in the new and fragile Republican Party of the 1850s boasted that they were “the evangelical party in politics.”
The deep connection built between religion and politics led those without full citizenship and political rights to use moral arguments for their inclusion. Churches and Christian rhetoric were central to the proto-feminist movement of the antebellum era. Female reformers like Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydia Maria Child, and Sojourner Truth routinely relied on religious arguments to advocate for women’s political inclusion. By the end of the nineteenth century, Stanton had become so convinced that the Bible was at the root of women’s political oppression that late in life she dedicated her- self to revising and reinterpreting it.
This was equally true for oppressed African Americans. According to the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the fiction of liberty contrasted with the reality of slavery constituted a political and religious problem. To the slave, Douglass contended, Fourth of July celebrations—where white Americans commemo- rated their national independence and existence as the handiwork of God— were a sham: “Your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; . . . your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” For many African Americans like Douglass, reli- gious motivations became central to their political imaginations, especially in the light of the biblical story of Exodus. The story of the subjugation and libera- tion of the ancient Israelites supplied a political meta-narrative for northern and southern blacks who put their faith in God to liberate them from slavery and discrimination.
During the Civil War, religion merged with politics as never before. In his second inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln claimed that both the North and the South “read the same Bible and prayed to the same God,” but did so in very different ways. Southern Confederates built their defense of secession, in part, on the pro-slavery theological consensus that God had ordained the American slave system. Several Confederate states, in addition, rhetorically inserted “Christ” and “God” into their state constitutions in an effort to improve on the original federal Constitution. In the North, Lincoln—although himself of unorthodox Christian faith—called for numerous prayer and fast days so that northerners could have God on their side. He also, as part of the Union crackdown on political and military dissent, squelched the voices of Protestant Democrats by imprisoning or threatening them. By the war’s end, even Lincoln was speaking of slavery as a religious wrong that could be righted only through political and military action.
In the decades after the war, religion continued to play a powerful role in American politics. Jurists used religious ideas and concepts to decide court cases, and presidents prayed to God to determine whether to initiate wars. Oftentimes, political imperialist efforts around the globe followed missionary activities. By the time of the Spanish-American War of 1898, American Protestant missionaries were all over the world and routinely calling for the federal government to intervene in foreign lands. President William McKinley spent a night in prayer to decide whether to invade the Philippines. On the home front, a growing number of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious leaders felt a deep concern with the transformation of the United States into an industrial and urban nation. Through politics, this new breed of “Social Gospelers” looked to state and federal legislation to curb child labor, to purify the nation’s food, to limit the amount of alcohol consumed, and to root out vote buying, boodle, and corruption. This group of Progressive reformers sought to clean up the nation by, as Theodore Roosevelt said, battling “for the Lord.”
There were limits to religion’s power over politics during the nineteenth century, though. Following a congressional law in 1810 that mail in the United States would travel every day of the week and that all post offices that received mail must be open each day, some evangelicals swamped the federal government with petitions for the termination of Sunday mail delivery. To them, this was a clear violation of the biblical injunction to rest on the Sabbath. But Congress refused to bow, and it was not until 1912 that Congress determined to close all post offices on Sunday. This change, however, had much more to do with labor laws and techno- logical changes than religious pressure. Also, in the years following the Civil War, the federal government time and again resisted petitions to amend the Constitution to include recognition of God or Jesus Christ or to proclaim that the United States was a “Christian government.”
At the middle of the twentieth century, a politicized black Protestantism took to the streets in the civil rights movement. Through the efforts of the churches and religious culture of African Americans throughout the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, American politics at the local, state, and national level were transformed. Black churches served as organizational locations for marches, petitions, and civil rights planning. Black preachers became the moral voices of the nation and took an active role in challenging white supremacy in American law and government. While the doctrines of nonviolence and civil disobedience may have been based in Gandhi’s teachings or those of Henry David Thoreau, biblical archetypes like Jesus, Moses, and Daniel seemed more pervasive in the hearts and minds of many civil rights activists. Perhaps the greatest political speech in American history, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, was not only delivered by a minister, but also based on the prayers of a black civil rights worker in Georgia.
The lessons of the civil rights movement—the use of church organizations and religious language to wield political leverage—were learned by politically conservative white evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Catholics. In the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a general backlash to the various civil rights crusades of the mid-century and to new cultural forces in popular entertainment, a new so-called moral majority of Protestants—predominantly although not exclusively white—empowered what some called the “conservative resurgence.” Led by Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye, moral majoritarians used the tactics first created by civil rights activists. With grassroots organizing, marches, rallies, and political speeches in the guise of sermons, they sought to outlaw abortion, stop the teaching of evolution in public schools, reinstitute prayer in schools, and drive liberals from politics. For the most part, the moral majority supported a distinct brand of Christian politics, despising political liberals like President Jim- my Carter, an avowed evangelical Baptist, and supporting political conservatives who seemed to hold lukewarm personal faith, such as Ronald Reagan.
If there has ever been any semblance of a “wall” separating church and state in the United States, it has been either very low or moveable or porous. More often than not, it has been nonexistent. The contentious and intimate relationship of religion and American politics has continued to play a vital role in the culture wars of the twenty-first century. Should nativity scenes of Christ’s birth be placed in civic spaces? Must public schools teach both evolution and intelligent design, a thinly veiled version of creationism? Should granite tablets symbolizing the Ten Commandments be placed in courthouses or outside state legislatures? Did President George W. Bush violate the Constitution when he claimed in 2002 that he would appoint only federal judges “who understand that our rights were derived from God.” It may be impossible to imagine American religious history without the constant interaction and struggle of religion and politics.