The recent uptick in Christian Nationalism presents lawmakers with a conundrum with respect to freedom of religion and its incongruence with other constitutional and legislative protections for citizens of the United States. The problem lies in the notion that liberty and justice for all, as stated in the country’s Pledge of Allegiance, suggests a fundamental equality for all the peoples of the United States as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution when in fact, the United States has largely operated as a so-called “Christian Nation.”
Many have wrongly assumed that the “founding fathers” were Christian. While it is true that Christianity is not a monolith, it is also true that most of the founders were likely deistic or quasi-deist in belief—often rejecting core orthodox Christian doctrines. This fact is firmly established by Richard T. Hughes in his manuscript Myths That America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning.
Hughes chronicles what he terms the 7 myths: 1) America as “the chosen nation”; 2) America as “nature’s nation”; 3) America as the “Christian nation”; 4) America as the “Millennial Nation”; 5) The mythic dimensions of American capitalism; 6) America as the “innocent nation”; and 7) the myth of “white supremacy.” The myths America lives by signals the wrongheadedness of American ideology consumed in national patriotism and suspect forms of Christianity that stray from the Spirit of the Gospel. As such, the landscape of the nationalist terrain gives rise to a conquering motif that symbolizes America as the bastion of power and zeal able to rule the world.
In service to this ideal, early churches wished to distance themselves from the bulwark. The Danbury Baptist Association, for instance, wrote President Thomas Jefferson requesting that there be an insularity from government interference with religious communions. When Jefferson replied to the Danbury Baptists on January 1, 1802, in response to their concern that government had the potential for overreach in religious matters, his response intimated an impenetrable wall of separation between church and state. He espoused a commitment that serves as a standard, in theory, for religious institutions to this present day. However, uninterrogated government entanglement with certain religious entities suggests that in fact a marriage of sorts has contrastingly occurred.
In this essay, I will explore that marriage and its implications for freedom of religion for religious institutions unaffiliated with white Christian Nationalism and its progeny. Marriage, as a metaphor, here represents the covenantal relationship between statehood and religion that presents the problematic nature of religious freedom as a constitutional standard.
The encroachment upon the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment is that the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause should protect the right to religious freedom. However, in practice, the federal government continuously closes the gap that separates state and church such that Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ is reduced to a thinly veiled partition. Government overreach hinders the free exercise of religion and consistently narrows the parameter of what the religious are free to do.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This protection fundamentally must apply to non-Christian and Christian religious expression alike.
James Madison was a staunch proponent of freedom of conscience and Thomas Jefferson authored the Virginia statute recognizing Religious Freedom. The nation has seemingly drifted from this firm declaration. Increasingly we are seeing the erosion of several narrowly crafted democratic principles washed away by the vortex of White Christian Nationalism. Unlike the American Civil Religion that Robert Bellah identified in 1967, this maelstrom operates like a tsunami tearing down the principled ‘trees planted by the rivers of water’ and everything in its wake.
Bellah’s American Civil Religion points to things like presidential inaugural addresses paying homage “to almighty God,” citizens offering the Pledge of Allegiance, placing one’s hand on the Bible to swear to tell the truth, printing “in God we trust” on money and stamps, and other common rituals and symbols, which point to a kind of religious good shared by all Americans. He writes in “Civil Religion in America”:
While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of “the American Way of Life,” few have realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with Bellah, it should be a cause for concern that such an American Civil Religion has now morphed into a state sanctioned practice that condemns anyone whose belief system fails the test of patriotic overtones espousing a connection to the nationalist ideologies inherent in a nation state’s religious observance. Moreover, not everyone practices or observes the same religious content, civil or otherwise. In that case, sameness becomes anathema to the concept of religious freedom.
A glaring example of this occurred when President Obama was forced to denounce his pastor of more than 20 years because of a message the Pastor, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. preached at his church, Trinity United Church of Christ. The use of media to distort the message represented by select sound bites was a tremendous factor in the scandal that was created. However, at its core the issue was one of freedom of religion.
As a constitutional lawyer, shamefully, politics held such a grip on Obama that he forwent his own right to stand up for himself and his pastor to practice their religion free from government intervention. Instead, Obama took to social media to distance himself from his pastor and to figuratively throw him under the bus. There was no separation between church and state, no privilege for the free exercise of religion, and certainly no regard for the truth of the message. There was only patriotism or not.
Another example is former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s bold display of religious resistance when he knelt during the national anthem prior to a game on September 1, 2016. Kaepernick was reacting to the insurgence of police brutality against black males across the nation. In most cultures taking a knee is considered a prayer posture. However, Colin’s bent knee evidenced a lack of patriotism.
Despite its religious intonations, Colin was the victim of a nationalist flogging that eventually cost him his position on the team and his football career. A docudrama was made to commemorate the experience. Nonetheless Kaepernick always maintained his protest stemmed from his belief that ‘the United States was not living up to its ideals of freedom and justice.’
Historian of religions, Charles H. Long is helpful to this discussion. Long argues, drawing on Michel Foucault, that the epistemological problem of religion qua human science, or religion studied as a human phenomenon, is that it is a product of human culture and cognition with deference to social and philosophical structures, which mitigate or militate against its function, evolution, and influence on societies. Long writes, “Foucault’s notion of the episteme moves us beyond the automatic progressive notion of an evolutionary history of ideas, but he fails to make adequate sense of the correlation of epistemic structures to the other (emphasis mine) meanings and levels of human reality.”
In both examples cited, The American way overruled any belief system counter to the patriotic claims of white Christian nationalism. As such, freedom to express one’s religion is divorced from the citizenship rights conferred by the First Amendment so long as it fails to comport with the narrowly drawn lines of this invisible covenant ‘to have and to hold from this day forward,’ which is the right to be and act in accordance with the American way. In essence, you have the right to be free in your religious expression if it fits within the thinly veiled rights of patriotism animated by American Civil Religion on steroids.
In the 21st century, as so much of the fabric of our democratic way of life seems to be slipping away, one would hope to retain the right to one’s beliefs. However, even the right to believe what you believe is threatened by marriage (in)equality. Your freedom of religion has strings attached. Unless you are joined together with white Christian nationalism, other expressions may just be adjudged a breach of your vows.
Pamela Cooper-White, author of The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide, states: “[b]ased on the best research to date, approximately half (52%) of Americans either fully embrace or lean toward the main tenets of Christian nationalism.” We are at a crossroads as Americans. Democracy is on life support, and the doctor is about to pull the plug. What freedoms will you sacrifice for the American way?
