The American Creed
In the medieval Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the Danes are repeatedly under siege by the demon Grendel. Each night, he attacks their mead hall Heorot and kills many of their men. However, Grendel is not allowed to touch the king Hrothgar, since the king is an embodiment of God on earth and Grendel is a descendant from Cain, who was banished thence from God’s presence for his brother’s murder. This medieval tale exemplifies how the government was understood to represent God as the protector of morality and his people. Today, we have made the state the church, with the king not merely representing God, but taking on the person of God incarnate. While many clamor for the “separation of Church and State,” this trite idiom ignores the fundamental principle that all states have churches, which dictate their code of morals. When a state does not have a church, it will soon create its own church for all citizens to adore.
A survey of the ancient cultures would suggest that religion must always be made a hallmark of any society. Religion is the guiding principle of a society’s moral code and its legislative function. Religion may give credence to certain practices and condemnation to others. The Greek historian Polybius wrote in his Histories that “but where reverence to the gods, succor of parents, respect to elders, obedience to laws, are traditional and habitual, in such communities, if the will of the majority prevail, we may speak of the form of government as a democracy.” This observation makes clear the fact that in order for a democracy to function, the people must first be able to rule in accordance with the law of heaven, not the will of man. Sophocles, the ancient Greek playwright, also expounds this idea in his play Antigone. When Creon, the king of Thebes, bans his niece Antigone from burying her treacherous brother Polynices, Antigone responds by reminding Creon of his limited powers. Antigone states, “yes, for it was not Zeus that had published that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the gods below. Nor did I deem that your decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but from all time; no man knows when they were first put forth.” Although a pagan, Antigone is wise indeed to discern that there are statutes of heaven that bind men, whether they agree with them or not. When God is banished from society and its legislation, then man will rise to take the place of God, promulgating his laws without any moral inhibition, just as the injurious Creon did in the tragedy of yore.
In modern history, the Soviets excoriated religion, but not without instituting their own humanistic faith, which placed man as his own God. In his writings, the Russian communist Leon Trotsky explains that “faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them.” The Soviets did not abandon the idea of virtue and leave morality for the wolves, but rather adopted the morality of wolves itself. The Darwinian notion of “survival of the fittest” became immersed in Soviet culture. In 1920, the Soviets became the first nation to officially recognize the murder of babies in their laws, with their liberalization of abortion. They also raised mere human qualities to the pantheon of virtue, work being the foremost of these. Work is certainly not something condemned by Christianity. After all, the beginning of Genesis tells of how God worked to create the world in seven days. The Soviets, however, elevated work to the primary test of a person’s worth and their virtue. The Stakhanovite movement, which began in 1935 showcases the devotion of one’s work. Alexei Stakhanov, who was an ordinary Soviet coal miner, worked to such an extent one August day that he produced 102 tons of coal, fourteen times his expected quota. The Soviet government made Stakhanov a saint of their state religion and honored him not with incense and processions, but with wealth and temporal goods. The Czech Marxist philosopher Karol Kosík sums up the quandary with Soviet focus on work in his 1965 essay “Man and Philosophy,” saying, “it is true that man is a living being who produces tools, but it is equally true to say he is a living being who employs symbols, who knows of his own mortality, who is capable of saying ‘No,’ who is a social being, and so on.” The Soviet definition of man focuses on only one aspect of human nature, at the expense of man’s other undeniable functions, thus making him a being of production, nothing more and nothing less.
Churches were desecrated and removed, but only to be replaced with Soviet edifications. Notably, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was destroyed and the design for a colossal “Palace of the Soviets” was begun. The palace was designed to house state offices in the bottom and have a large statue of Lenin, the Soviet founder at the top. Unlike the Romans and all other cultures preceding the Soviets, they believed ardently that it was man and man alone who begot their nation and birthed it into being. The art of the Soviet era also shifted from a focus on religious iconography to the glorification of the state and its neo-pagan worship of man. Under Joseph Stalin, beginning in the 1920s, the Socialist Realist movement began to materialize in the realm of the arts. This art was meant to “connect” with the working masses, so they could have an appreciation for their new government. Paintings of Stalin or the people marching for the revolution became popular. These characteristics superseded the staples of former art, such as reverence or humility in religious relics or classical architecture in buildings, leading to a reinvigoration of Soviet culture and the building up of the “New Soviet Man.” The “New Soviet Man” was nothing more than the ancient Adam, who rejected God and his covenant and instead sought pleasure and knowledge in worldly desires. In short, the “New Soviet Man” was not so new. The Soviet Union did not exist as a nation alone, but as a religion. The Soviet Union’s religion has always been defined as state atheism, but it was not state atheism; it was a belief in the church of man, which traces its roots back to the very serpent in the Garden of Eden who bellowed the words “for God doth know that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.”
Our nation is different in practice, but identical in principle to the Soviets. While we are not murdering races of people or declaring a “reign of terror,” we in America have embraced the idea of a public state religion, perhaps more so than almost any other group. As with all other nations that have been discussed, America was once a Christian nation, although in spirit only. The 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights explicitly stated that citizens had not only the right, but the duty to worship God. It furthermore stated in Article III that “as the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality.” In the colonial mind, religion was not something separate from the state, but meant to influence the state itself. In fact, the First Amendment was only understood to apply to the federal government at the time of the founding. Many states had official churches until the 19th century, with Massachusetts recognizing Congregationalism as its state religion until 1833. By the time of the 14th Amendment’s ratification in 1868, the Bill of Rights was beginning to be incorporated against the states and the Supreme Court would officially incorporate the First Amendment against the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). However, this history is generally overlooked and America has since sworn fealty to a “separation of Church and State,” an idea found neither in the Constitution nor American history.
The idea of a separation of Church and State in American culture is one that traces its roots back not to the Constitution, but an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists. Jefferson writes, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” This statement first became popularized in the aforementioned Everson v. Board of Education, in which the Court upheld a New Jersey law that allowed parents who sent their children to private school to receive reimbursements from the state if they used public transportation, although 96 percent of the recipients were Catholic school families. The First Amendment and this phrase were not meant to bar religious people from receiving benefits from the state if they wished to educate their children in a school of their faith, nor from getting elected and even enacting laws that derive from their faith, but rather to bar the government from enforcing its edicts on the churches. In the aftermath of this decision and the following 1962 case Engel v. Vitale, which banned prayer in public schools, the idea in America became that indifference to religion is our religion.
The problem with this indifference is that a state cannot be without a religion to guide it. If the traditional tenets of Christian morality are forsworn, then the state will soon create its own religion, adorned with all the trappings of ethics, rituals, and saints. Over the last several decades, America has created its own religion, which has been brewing ever since the founding. My remarks may seem contradictory, but they are certainly not. While the nation was Christian at the time of the founding, the revolutionary ideals on which the nation was founded, provided a basis for a new “exceptional” religion, which disregarded the laws of nature like Creon and venerated man. While the rituals in the small churches of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were integral to the collection of colonies, the source of true worship is better found in the tearing down of George III’s statue in Bowling Green, New York on July 9, 1776. The revolutionary fervor which swept the colonies in the latter 18th century was a religion unto itself, one which denied authority and concentrated power in the mind of the individual, a rather pertinent concept at the acme of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Revolution, November 5 was celebrated as “Pope Night.” This was the anniversary of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, when Robert Catesby and other Catholics attempted to assassinate James I of England to restore the Catholic monarchy. The night was characterized by straw men wearing papal and priestly garments, while being jeered and destroyed by the townsfolk. The hatred of the Catholic faith was not based on truth, but on a fear that all Catholics were controlled by the pope. The hatred of the Catholic faith by these colonists was rooted in a rejection of authority. Considering that the Catholic population remained stagnant around 1.5% of the colonial population, the colonists soon turned their rejection of authority towards something more tangible, namely King George III and the institution of the monarchy. Thomas Paine summed up the American moral mindset stating, “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
The American church is the church of the mind. It is both private and public. Unlike the Soviets or Nazis, America does not oppress religion on its face, but relegates it to the mind, where it is to stay dormant like Beowulf’s dragon. However, one is encouraged, even coerced, to repeat the platitudes of Americanism with fervor and unfailing devotion. The American capitol, replete with its ceiling murals, shows the American religion best. It is not coincidental that these paintings harken memories of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, which glorify God’s revelation through the scriptures. The paintings in the Capitol are meant to arouse us to a religious devotion to our American faith, the one which Washington and other patrons of the revolution fought for with vigor. The American faith is also filled with religious documents and articulations of a perverted magisterium. The Constitution is not just a piece of paper meant to guide the nation’s laws, but is an exalted piece of the American canon meant to be recited in a like fashion as the Torah by a rabbi. The 19th-century orator and Massachusetts Senator Rufus Choate once said “we have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.” This does not merely sound like the Capitol and Constitution are of a political nature, but of a theological essence, to be worshiped and consulted as if they were inerrant. The closing two lines of the Preamble to the American Legion Constitution, a bastion of the American faith, explain the duty “to safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom and democracy; to consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness.” Consecrating and sanctifying are not merely things everyone does, but are actions of a religious figure. The bishop may consecrate a priest or perhaps even more so the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi. One would not be sanctified by a government or a polity, unless that government and polity is also the de facto religion of the jurisdiction. Democracy, something which our country is certainly not, is a form of government. But, in the American sense, it is a subject of veneration. If a person says they have qualms with democratic values, the American mind immediately jumps to accuse that person of heresy of the highest degree. According to Americanism, those who do not laud democracy, for instance, a monarchist, are not only different in their political outlooks, but also different in their nationality. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, the most ardent republican might look at a nationalist with disgust, but never as someone who is not Spanish. We cannot do the same in America and brand everyone who does not shout the pledge loud enough or show the utmost reverence for our Constitution and our so-called democratic principles as ignominious heretics who are un-American and worthy to be beaten on the cross of liberty.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the regicidal King Claudius states in a personal confession “my words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” While they may not go to heaven, they do go to the Capitol. The American piety is one of repetition, not of a devout essence. Then again, it was never meant to be anything more than an “idea” as we are so commonly told. Instead of prayers and soliloquies of faith, we are given a word bank of idioms and catchphrases that we must utter, such as “The American Dream” and the aforesaid “separation of Church and State,” which cannot and does not exist in reality. The object of the American “experiment” is best summed up in the words from the 1970s musical Godspell. The refrain is all too familiar when it says “We can build a beautiful city, Not a city of angels, But we can build a city of man.” America is building the city of man and the religion of man has helped it flourish thus far. In his opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Justice Anthony Kennedy famously wrote his “Mystery Passage,” which may be akin to Shakespeare or Keats in poetic romanticism. Justice Kennedy states “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” While the Soviets had their “New Soviet Man” or the Germans their ubermensch (Superman), the Americans have made their “New American Man,” who reigns supreme as both absolute monarch and lord omniscient unto the ages of ages.
References
“Everson v. Board of Education.” Tile.loc.gov, tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep330/usrep330001/usrep330001.pdf.
Hadas, Moses. The Complete Plays of Sophocles. Bantam, 1967.
Handlin, Oscar. “Bill of Rights.” Bill of Rights: Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Pt. 1, press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_rightss6.html.
Jefferson, Thomas. “Jefferson’s Letter To The Danbury Baptists .” (June 1998) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin, www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html.
Kosík, Karol. “Man and Philosophy.” Marxists.org , www.marxists.org/subject/humanism/kosik/man-philosophy.htm.
“P269 Fragments of Book VI.” Polybius • Histories - Book 6, 29 Mar. 2022, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html.
“Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Et Al. v. Casey ... - Justia Law.” JUSTIA US Supreme Court Center, supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/833/case.pdf.
“Preamble to the Constitution.” The American Legion, www.legion.org/preamble.
Schwartz, Stephen. “Beautiful City Lyrics by from Godspell Soundtrack.” Beautiful City Lyrics - STLyrics.com, www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/godspell/beautifulcity.htm.
Vile, John R. “Established Churches in Early America.” Established Churches in Early America, 2009, www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/801/established-churches-in-early-america.