Warning: Overcoming the Great Fallacy may be harzadous to your faith
But let us not proceed too fast. Overcoming the Great Fallacy, and rejoining things falsely severed, provides no automatic victories. In some cases, the cure may be worse than the disease. This is particularly true in relation of religion and politics.
The early Jews were under no temptation to equate their religion with the dominant politics of the time, since they were always the persecuted minority under attack, kicked this way and that, enslaved, imprisioned, bought, and sold. They could not have equated with their Jewish faith with Pharaoh’s politics even if they had wanted to. However, when they finally did get establish a divinely approved monarchy of their own, generations later, things went so rapidly that the dream of a society in which there was equivalency between God’s will and the king’s decrees was a short-lived and ill-fated nightmare.
The early Christians, all originally Jews, were likewise a tiny minority at first, and it took four centuries behore religion and politics became so intermingled as to be almost indistinguishable from one another. The Emperor Constantine, discovering that he couldn’t lick the Christians, decided to join them and with a single stroke of the stylus made Christianity the “official religion” of the Roman empire. State policies now began to receive religious sanction, and wars of conquest were now fought under the sign of the cross. The taste for power was so heady that for a time even under the papacy had an army and fought its own wars, likewise under the sign of the cross.
When Constantine’s “Christendom” began to unravel, at the time of the Reformation, there emerged the extraordinary spectacle of Europe being divided into areas whose religious affirmation were determined by the religious affiliation of their king, on the principle of Cuius regio eius religio (meaning roughly that if a king is Lutheran his subjects are Lutheran, ditto Calvinist, Catholic, or Anglican).
Calvin’s rule in Geneva (which often gets a worse press than it deserves and included many social programs for the care of the sick and poor) was enforced by those fully persuaded that they knew the minutiae of God’s will and could apply them to the minutiae of civil government. Michael Servetus, fleeing persecution in Catholic Europe because of his heretical views (he held that Jesus was a son of God but not the Son of God), was burned at stake in Protestant Geneva, just as he would have been burned at the stake in Catholic Florence, in order that God’s will be done.
Fanaticism, in other words, is not something from which religious people are automatically immune. Indeed, they are particularly susceptible. One can believe that religion and politics do mix without being persuaded that every mix is a good one.
This helps us understand the new situation in the United States. During the 1960s, when the “liberal” Christians were involved in first in civil rights demonstrations and later in protest over United States involvement in Vietnam, many “conservative” Christians challenged the appropriateness of such activities by involving the familiar rubric, “Religion and politics don’t mix.” And yet, within a decade, many of the same conservative groups were lobbying, registering voters, and vigoriously pushing political agendas of their own, such as prayer in the public schools, antiabortion legislation, and the need for a bigger defense budget. The earlier cry, “Religion and politics don’t mix,” was replaced by the claim that religion and your politics don’t mix, but mine do.”
The real issue goes: Since religion and politics do mix, what is the nature of the mix? What sort of religion, what sort of politics? A religion that claims, according to one Southern Baptist leader, that “God does not hear the prayers of the Jew” will have important political consequences, since if Judaism is a spurious religion, its adherents can appropriately be excluded from public office in the building of a “Christian America,” an agenda dear to the hearts of many religious conservatives.
But let us not proceed too fast. Overcoming the Great Fallacy, and rejoining things falsely severed, provides no automatic victories. In some cases, the cure may be worse than the disease. This is particularly true in relation of religion and politics.
The early Jews were under no temptation to equate their religion with the dominant politics of the time, since they were always the persecuted minority under attack, kicked this way and that, enslaved, imprisioned, bought, and sold. They could not have equated with their Jewish faith with Pharaoh’s politics even if they had wanted to. However, when they finally did get establish a divinely approved monarchy of their own, generations later, things went so rapidly that the dream of a society in which there was equivalency between God’s will and the king’s decrees was a short-lived and ill-fated nightmare.
The early Christians, all originally Jews, were likewise a tiny minority at first, and it took four centuries behore religion and politics became so intermingled as to be almost indistinguishable from one another. The Emperor Constantine, discovering that he couldn’t lick the Christians, decided to join them and with a single stroke of the stylus made Christianity the “official religion” of the Roman empire. State policies now began to receive religious sanction, and wars of conquest were now fought under the sign of the cross. The taste for power was so heady that for a time even under the papacy had an army and fought its own wars, likewise under the sign of the cross.
When Constantine’s “Christendom” began to unravel, at the time of the Reformation, there emerged the extraordinary spectacle of Europe being divided into areas whose religious affirmation were determined by the religious affiliation of their king, on the principle of Cuius regio eius religio (meaning roughly that if a king is Lutheran his subjects are Lutheran, ditto Calvinist, Catholic, or Anglican).
Calvin’s rule in Geneva (which often gets a worse press than it deserves and included many social programs for the care of the sick and poor) was enforced by those fully persuaded that they knew the minutiae of God’s will and could apply them to the minutiae of civil government. Michael Servetus, fleeing persecution in Catholic Europe because of his heretical views (he held that Jesus was a son of God but not the Son of God), was burned at stake in Protestant Geneva, just as he would have been burned at the stake in Catholic Florence, in order that God’s will be done.
Fanaticism, in other words, is not something from which religious people are automatically immune. Indeed, they are particularly susceptible. One can believe that religion and politics do mix without being persuaded that every mix is a good one.
This helps us understand the new situation in the United States. During the 1960s, when the “liberal” Christians were involved in first in civil rights demonstrations and later in protest over United States involvement in Vietnam, many “conservative” Christians challenged the appropriateness of such activities by involving the familiar rubric, “Religion and politics don’t mix.” And yet, within a decade, many of the same conservative groups were lobbying, registering voters, and vigoriously pushing political agendas of their own, such as prayer in the public schools, antiabortion legislation, and the need for a bigger defense budget. The earlier cry, “Religion and politics don’t mix,” was replaced by the claim that religion and your politics don’t mix, but mine do.”
The real issue goes: Since religion and politics do mix, what is the nature of the mix? What sort of religion, what sort of politics? A religion that claims, according to one Southern Baptist leader, that “God does not hear the prayers of the Jew” will have important political consequences, since if Judaism is a spurious religion, its adherents can appropriately be excluded from public office in the building of a “Christian America,” an agenda dear to the hearts of many religious conservatives.
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