I find myself thinking a good bit these days about the
relationship of the church and Christianity to American culture. It has changed
and continues to change at a dramatic pace. Some believe that the church and
Christianity have completely lost any standing and that in fact the culture
will eventually turn against Christianity and even persecute the church. This
understanding is held by the outgoing Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago who says
that he expects to die comfortably in his bed, that his successor (already
named) will die in prison and that his successor will die a martyr in the
public square. If nothing else, you have to admit that is an attention getting
way of describing the trajectory of our country and its relationship to
Christianity.
Others hope for the pendulum to swing, that there will be a
renewal of the relationship of Christianity with the church again having a healthy,
wholesome light, salt, and leaven impact on American culture. Who knows?
What follows is a Pew report on what many Americans are
thinking now:
Here is an interesting video from Professor Clay Christensen of the Harvard School of Business:
Concerns about religious freedom in America are
beginning to be articulated by academics and progressives as well as by
conservatives.
I believe the historic record is clear and unambiguous that
the framers of our constitution had no intention whatsoever in creating a
purely secular republic and as a group would have agreed with the sentiments
expressed in this quote by Edmund Burke (1729-1797), member of Parliament, supporter of the American revolutionaries and
opponent of the French Revolution:
Men are qualified for liberty in
exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own
appetites….society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and
appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within (that is within the individual), the more
there must be without (that is from an external source). It is ordained in the
eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate disposition cannot be
free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Each day’s news seems to bear out the truth of Burke’s
observation. The paradox and dilemma of freedom is that if we do anything and
everything that we are free to do, then we will wind up not free and slaves to
one thing or another. The counter-intuitive claim of the Gospel is that true
and perfect freedom comes from choosing to make ourselves servants of Jesus
Christ.
The genius of the framers was in recognizing that the freedom
available in a democratic republic requires a virtuous people and their survey
of history and philosophy convinced them that religion better than any other
force, fosters in people a desire and an intention to voluntarily restrain
themselves. At the same time, they recognized from their interpretation of
history, that whatever the truth claims of any religious faith, they are not
well-served by theocratic government and imposition, hence no religion was to
be established under the new constitution of the United States.
Freedom of religion is one of the many tensions that
American civic and political life must manage for us to thrive and prosper as a
free nation and people. I believe the balance is currently out of kilter, the
collective result of incessant challenges and subsequent judicial rulings on
the question over the last fifty years. These rulings have unintentionally
relegated religion to the institutional sideline of the public-square conversation
that creates American culture, mores, policies and law.
Is this why religion in America is so impotent when it comes
to positively influencing the quality of national culture, manners, civility, cooperation,
and behavior?
I find myself thinking a good bit these days about the
relationship of the church and Christianity to American culture. It has changed
and continues to change at a dramatic pace. Some believe that the church and
Christianity have completely lost any standing and that in fact the culture
will eventually turn against Christianity and even persecute the church. This
understanding is held by the outgoing Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago who says
that he expects to die comfortably in his bed, that his successor (already
named) will die in prison and that his successor will die a martyr in the
public square. If nothing else, you have to admit that is an attention getting
way of describing the trajectory of our country and its relationship to
Christianity.