Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults 28% have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion - or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today 16.1% is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

Munson: Krauthammer is a neoconservative whose views on foreign policy are myopic–to put it mildly. But this column demonstrates that neoconservatives can be quite sensible when not discussing foreign policy.

Charles Krauthammer, An Overdose of Public Piety, washingtonpost.com, December 14, 2007

Mike Huckabee explains his surge in the polls thus: “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher. In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

George F. Will - None of The Below - washingtonpost.com, December 2, 2007

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee’s candidacy rests on serial non sequiturs: I am a Christian, therefore I am a conservative, therefore whatever I have done or propose to do with “compassionate,” meaning enlarged, government is conservatism. And by the way, anything I denote as a “moral” issue is beyond debate other than by the uncaring forces of greed. His is a moralist’s version of the intellectual vanity once ascribed to Oxford’s Benjamin Jowett:

My name is Jowett

Of Balliol College;

If I don’t know it,

It is not knowledge.

Many Iowans think it would be wise to nominate a candidate who, when the Republicans were asked during a debate to raise their hands if they do not believe in evolution, raised his. But, then, Huckabee believes America can be energy-independent in 10 years, so he has peculiar views about more than paleontology.

Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And — 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note — America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin — William Jennings Bryan — argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney’s campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

Most Americans, including Senator John McCain, believe that that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Jon Meacham does a good job of demonstrating the inaccuracy of this notion. But when he writes that the “founding principle of the nation” was that “all men are created equal,” he fails to mention the obvious fact that men like Washington and Jefferson, who eloquently defended the separation of religion and state, did not really believe that “all men are created equal.” This famous phrase appears in the Declaration of Independence, the original draft of which Jefferson wrote in June of 1776. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other members of the Continental Congress made some changes to Jefferson’s draft before it was finally approved on July 4. In the list of the offenses of the British king listed in this text, we find the sentence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Jefferson and his colleagues had no trouble understanding the grievances of the European colonists vis-à-vis the British, but they were incapable of understanding the grievances of the “Indian Savages” who were defending themselves against foreign colonists who were taking their land. When he was president, Jefferson wrote Secretary of War Henry Dearborn on August 28, 1807 that “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Missisipi [sic].” In a later letter to John Adams, dated June 11, 1812, Jefferson wrote that despite the progress of some “Indian Nations,” many “will relapse into barbarism & misery, lose numbers by war & want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains.” As for Jefferson’s slaves, he obviously did not see them as equal to white men. He also obviously did not view women as the equals of men. (Women did not gain the right to vote until the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920.) So when Jefferson and his peers declared that “all men are created equal,” they meant that all white males are created equal. Like most people, they shared most of the biases that prevailed in the society in which they were immersed. There were some things they simply could not see.

Meacham, A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation - New York Times, October 7, 2007

The only acknowledgment of religion in the original Constitution is a utilitarian one: the document is dated “in the year of our Lord 1787.” Even the religion clause of the First Amendment is framed dryly and without reference to any particular faith….

Thomas Jefferson said that his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination.” When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city’s clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time) - a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., saying, “happily the government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. … Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a “Christian party in politics.” Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed “Christian amendment” to the Constitution to declare the nation’s fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.

The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation - that all men are created equal - in the divine.

John McCain on Islam, Mormonism, America as a Christian nation, his move from an Episcopal to Baptist church — Beliefnet.com, September 2007

Interview by Dan Gilgoff

McCain:

I admire the Islam. There’s a lot of good principles in it. I think one of the great tragedies of the 21st century is that these forces of evil have perverted what’s basically an honorable religion. But, no, I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles…. personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn’t mean that I’m sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president. I don’t say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would–I just feel that that’s an important part of our qualifications to lead.*

A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think?

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.

Burston, Yes, Sen. McCain, America is a Christian nation - Haaretz, October 3, 2007

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain sparked outcries from Jewish organizations this week, after saying in an interview that he would rather see America led by a Christian, and that “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

Asked if a Muslim candidate could be a good president, McCain replied, “I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles … personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith,”

…Every Jewish kid in America who has ever worn a kippah, every Muslim who has worn external evidence of his or her devotion to Islam, knows very well that Senator McCain was right. Every public school child who was raised in a home where Jesus was not believed to be God, and who was made to sing “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” with devotion and feeling, know just how right McCain was. Every high school football player who began every game hearing invocation to the Lord Jesus Christ cannot help but wonder what all the fuss is about.

firstamendmentcenter.org: news, September 24, 2007

WASHINGTON — Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that the nation’s founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation and 55% believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the “State of the First Amendment 2007” national survey released Sept. 11 by the First Amendment Center.