Detail of Justice
“Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke
Psychological literature is chockablock with case histories of people who suffer from irrational fears, and the run-up to midterm elections in a lame-duck presidency is a fine time to add another one to that collection. Some people fear George W. Bush not because his policies keep them up at night, but because the Christianity he brings without guile or apology to an under-dressed public square marks him as the chief scout for what they imagine is a theocracy coming soon to the United States. Anyone trying to confront this fear must come at it on two fronts, the personal and the political.
When a dear friend described this malady to me, my initial reaction was perhaps more sarcastic than it should have been: if George W. Bush is the harbinger of a theocracy, then the American Christian bench isn’t as deep as we sometimes like to think it is. Whatever his merits as president, everything that the current occupant of the Oval Office has said publicly about his faith suggests that it gives him comfort and strength rather than the kind of paint-by-numbers direction his detractors would prefer to be scandalized by. On the evidence available, one may speculate that the unremarkable religious pedigree bequeathed to George W. from his father was revivified some years ago by a recovering alcoholic’s confidence in a Higher Power. One may also suppose that the evangelical Protestant theology of his loving wife helped the president recognize Jesus as that higher power. The point of these speculations is that nothing in the character of this president’s faith implies the kind of fondness for ecclesiastical authority that ought to mark a proper harbinger of theocracy.
Detail of Justice
“Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke
George W. Bush has been refreshingly blunt about naming evil when he sees it, but he joins past presidents in standing foursquare for religious freedom, and his penchant for “reading people’s hearts” (as he said he’d done with erstwhile Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers) suggests that his administration’s policies are informed more by liberal pabulum than by rigid orthodoxy, even of the so-called “compassionate conservative” variety. Moreover, the president belongs to a Christian denomination that stresses personal rather than communal aspects of worship. Apart from these uniquely Bushian checks on megalomania, the idea of an American Christian theocracy must also be dismissed for political reasons, because American Christians are a fractious bunch. We can and do find common ground on many issues, but we might also thank the Founders for having spared us the drudgery of parliamentary forms that put a premium on coalition-building.
Were America to renounce secular mores in favor of some kind of constitutional theocracy, we Christians would have more work to do than linking hands to sing “what a friend we have in Jesus.” And a sizable number of us would warn anyone who cared to listen about the arrogance of trying to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. In other words, if hippies gave therapy a jump start by growing old enough to sell out to “the Man” and feel guilty about it, wait’ll you see what happens when people who belong to Christ realize that Uncle Sam demands more of their time.
Kenneth Craycraft, Jr., described this conflict in some detail. Writing about what he calls “the myth of religious freedom,” Craycraft put a libertarian gloss on ancient history to explain why Christianity must forever be in the world but not of it. In Craycraft’s reading of late-Roman politics, a coldly calculating Emperor Constantine realized that imperial tolerance for and, indeed, encouragement of Christianity was a more effective way of domesticating the new faith into irrelevance than persecution had been or could be. The emperor’s graciousness was born, Craycraft asserted in a 1999 essay for New Oxford Review, of a Machiavellian need to “subvert [Christian] witness against the violence of his regime.” Applying that lesson to modern America, Craycraft quoted approvingly from philosopher Stanley Hauerwas, who was then making news for having concluded that we might have to leave the problem of church and state “profoundly unresolved.” As Caleb Stegall has quipped in The New Pantagruel, from a Christian perspective, “neither rear-guard actions nor seats at Liberalism’s table are attractive.” Such principled ambivalence is, I submit, more widespread than non-Christians tend to realize, and the reason is theological. Per the gospel according to John, the testimony of Christians through the ages, and the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, “God is love.”
Government, on the other hand, is force.
Is it any wonder that “godly government” ranks as one of those areas where, as Robert Browning famously put it, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” All that said, it’s fun to speculate about what an American Christian theocracy might act like, in the extremely unlikely event that it ever came to pass.
My guesses:
Beyond those issues, it’s tough to guess what an American Christian theocracy might do in terms of federal policy. One Jewish friend raised the Catholic objection to artificial contraception, but that’s not a view held by all Christian denominations, so even a theocratic government is unlikely to pursue litigation against manufacturers of contraceptive pills. A smart Christian theocracy would likewise steer clear of mandating the study of Intelligent Design alongside neo-Darwinian macro-evolution, if only because ID advocates rightly point out that theirs is an argument from observation rather than from Christian dogma. No Christian theocracy in America would risk a return to Prohibition, because too many Christians drink. For every storefront church serving grape juice to the faithful on occasional Sundays, there’s a Catholic parish only too happy to point out that Jesus’ first public miracle was changing water into wine (some exegetes claim it was enough wine to keep the whole village of Cana in its cups for three days).
An American theocracy wouldn’t frown on dancing, either. Witch burning and forced conversion? Likewise out. The Puritan influence, while not insignificant, has been diluted, and John Calvin’s sixteenth-century rule over Geneva has no parallel in a country where southwestward expansion fueled by “Manifest Destiny” mixed with French and Spanish Catholicism to take the edge off predestination even among those who subscribe to it. Vice squads in various police departments might have bigger budgets to work with than they do now, but you still wouldn’t find “What Would Jesus Do?” on the news crawl below broadcast images at CNN, or cops citing their fellow citizens for misdemeanors like, for example, “failure to pray the Angelus at noontime.”
What’s ironic about this whole thought experiment is that it’s occasioned by the fears of people who probably look at life through the secular humanist lens that so many progressives claim as their own, mouthing platitudes about religious “superstition” while forgetting that everything from Soviet gulags to Cambodian killing fields to Nazi death camps was justified in the name of secular humanism.
Essayist J. A. Gray once examined a few of the fallacies associated with this kind of thinking. On reading a long statement of belief mailed to him by New York’s Council for Secular Humanism, Gray, a Christian, raised several piquant objections to it. The humanist declaration of belief in joy “rather than guilt or sin” struck him as particularly muddle-headed:
When [joy, guilt, and sin] are used as counters merely, as in this Humanist slogan, one discovers nothing – except that the Humanists seem to be as incurious about their chosen Good Words as about their selected Bad Words. One also wonders if being a faithful Humanist means suppressing one’s full, ragged humanity. Feeling guilty? Feeling sinful? We Humanists don’t believe in that, so please feel something else.
Gray continued like a man on fire:
The Humanist creed also claims “We believe in reason rather than blind faith.” This sounds nearly plausible until you recall that the tools essential to reasoning are taken up and used strictly on faith: faith in the order of nature, faith in the reasoning process, faith in the possibility of communication. That the Humanist creed blandly implies mutual exclusion where it is well known that there is mutual dependence does not encourage me to trust the creedmakers.
Gray’s verdict: secular humanism has failed.
But that doesn’t mean we Christians are working for or toward a theocracy. Any such government would harm the church more than it helped her. Again comes the under-remarked libertarian strain in Christianity—that cracked reflection of freedom in Christ—to point excitedly to the chasm between God and government, even in self-consciously godly government. As a gospel song performed by Allison Krauss and Union Station puts it, “I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold; I’d rather have Jesus than riches untold.”
People who fear Christianity don’t seem to understand that. Most realize that government doesn’t need divine sanction to go around smiting people. What they forget—sometimes with good reason—is that even suspect formulations like “Mere Christianity” serve to check the smiting impulse, not least because Christian faith is based on a Savior who told Peter to stop his desperate swordplay in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26:52), and nicknamed an impetuous pair of apostles “sons of thunder” when they wanted to call a first-century air strike down on a recalcitrant Samaritan town (Lk 9:51-56).
Varsity cheerleading captains will be writing mash notes to astronomy club secretaries before a “fundamentalist American Christian theocracy” comes calling, but working knowledge of probability, history, theology, and human nature isn’t as widespread as it should be, which is another reason why we who claim citizenship in Heaven always have something to pray for here on Earth.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel The New Pantagruel.