Bringing (False) Christianity Into the Public Square

OKLAHOMA CITY — It is one of the prime paradoxes of the 2016 election: A twice-divorced candidate who has flaunted his adultery, praised Planned Parenthood and admitted to never asking for God’s forgiveness is the favorite of the Christian right.

The above appeared in the New York Times about two weeks ago in an article outlining the paradox of American Evangelicals supporting the political ambitions of a –well a not very evangelical, in fact somewhat of a counter-evangelical –candidate.  The article was referring to Donald Trump, officially a member of the liberal Protestant denomination the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)  The article continues:

Mr. Trump is winning with evangelicals, as he does with other Republican primary voters, by promising uncompromising immigration and trade policies and a hard-driving leadership style. “Evangelicals see all that’s going down, and they just like somebody to be strong and stern and consistent on issues,” said J. Hogan Gidley, who was a senior adviser to Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and onetime Baptist pastor, before Mr. Huckabee quit the race.

But this is only once facet of the enigma.  Candidate Ted Cruz, himself a declared evangelical, has earned the reputation of being a liar for his campaign’s creating the misimpression just before the Iowa Caucus that fellow candidate Dr. Ben Carson was dropping out of the race and that Carson supporters should switch to Cruz.  Carson was not, at that time, dropping out of the race and the Cruz strategy was exposed as nothing less than a bold-faced lie.  Amazingly enough—for a proposed Christian of any stripe, evangelical or mainline—Cruz repeated this strategy of deceit before the Hawaii caucus.  Sort of makes me wonder what Cruz thinks of John 8:44? 

I have to admit that I have always been distrustful of so-called evangelicals because I don’t find very many of them, well, evangelical.  While I will—in fact in my respect for them, will gladly—accord some Protestants such as the Mennonites the honor of being called evangelicals, I think most evangelicals with their mega-churches and prosperity gospel panderings are religious frauds.  Forget Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell and certainly Franklin Graham—whitewashed sepulchers, beautiful on the outside but inside filled with the bones of the dead.  I’m sorry Rick Warren and your Saddleback Church but you are just a bit too pallid and you, Joel Osteen, beneath the charm and the silky words there is no substantial echo of the Gospel of Christ.   And as for your little corner “bible Church” that encourages, even be it so subtly, hatred and prejudice towards Muslims, Gays, Catholics, immigrants, mixed race families, evolutionists, and other nonconformists, I can only wonder what εὐαγγέλιον to which they hold, ‘cause it sure ain’t the Gospel of Christ.  Evangelical comes from the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news” and specifically the news of a victory.  The Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ, the Victory of Christ over sin and death which is the authentication of his message of the Kingdom of God.  A true evangelical announces the Good News of the Kingdom of God, the central message of Jesus which he handed on to his disciples to be preached to the four corners of the earth until the end of time.  Sorry Senator Cruz but a liar lacks the “call” to be a witness of Christ’s victory.  And those people who rally behind you because they, like you, have an erroneous understanding of what it means to be an evangelical, are no more than those about whom Jesus refers to in Matthew 7:21.  I am not saying that they aren’t good people or they aren’t Christian or they won’t be saved—I am only saying that they have invested in a Christianity without roots, a “faith” that is all about the fluff and the froth and the feelings but which doesn’t require the radical commitment of discipleship. 

The article in the New York Times continues:

Mr. Trump is winning with evangelicals, as he does with other Republican primary voters, by promising uncompromising immigration and trade policies and a hard-driving leadership style. “Evangelicals see all that’s going down, and they just like somebody to be strong and stern and consistent on issues,” said J. Hogan Gidley, who was a senior adviser to Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and onetime Baptist pastor, before Mr. Huckabee quit the race.

“You’re voting for a president; you’re not necessarily voting for a pastor,” said Less McNiff, a retired human resources executive who heard Mr. Trump address thousands at the Oklahoma City rally on Friday. “He’s not necessarily orthodox, but I like the fact that he’s strong.”

Linda Sharp, an elementary school music teacher from Moore, Okla., who attended the rally and plans to vote for Mr. Trump, said, “He’s made moral choices that are not stellar, but I lay that against his business plan or the economic growth for America, and I choose that.”

But her husband, Phillip Sharp, who is pastor of Heavenly Heights Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, cautioned those who would argue, like the younger Mr. Falwell, that voters should choose a strong leader rather than a pious one.

“I don’t know that Trump is the person to bring God back into our country, but I think if we don’t we’ll have much bigger problems,” said Renae Ehler, an insurance saleswoman from Davenport, Okla., who planned to vote for Mr. Trump. “The business part of things, I think, is going to make a big difference.”

Well, I’m not sure if the above “evangelicals” see the discrepancy here between the faith they profess and the “faith” they vote, but at least they are honest and not trying to wrap their candidate in the pages of the Bible.  There’s God and there’s mammon and hey, when it comes down the bottom line, no man can serve two masters and they are casting their lot with mammon.  I appreciate their honesty but I expect more of someone who bedecks himself or herself with the jewels of evangelicalism. 

Now, just to be fair.  Neither Senator Sanders nor Secretary Clinton meet the litmus test of authentic Christian evangelicalism, but nor do they profess to nor do they pander to that audience.  Senator Sanders seems to be a fine man and is, of course Jewish.   Secretary Clinton has a bit of a shadier record in several respects—including truthfulness—and she is a member of the United Methodist Church.  Mainline Methodists used to be evangelicals but then a lot of people used to be evangelicals until it got just a bit too demanding.  Speaking of Methodists, however, one of my favorite Methodists—whom I understand isn’t much of an evangelical himself but who articulates well the call to Evangelical Christianity—Duke University Professor Emeritus   Stanley Hauerwas has a great story about Evangelical Christianity (the authentic kind) and our Christian commitment to life in the public square.  The story is about one of my favorite American Christians, Clarence Jordan who was a mentor to both former President Jimmy Carter and to Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. 

Clarence Jordan was the founder of the Koinonia Farm near Americus Georgia.  It was set up to be an interracial community before anyone knew what civil rights were all about.  Jordan himself was a pacifist as well as an integrationist and thus was not a popular figure in Georgia, even though he came from a prominent family.

The Koinonia Farm, by its very nature, was controversial and, of course, it was in trouble.  McClendon reports that in the early fifties Clarence approached his brother Robert Jordan (later a state senator and justice of the Georgia Supreme Court) to ask him to legally represent the Koinonia Farm.  Robert responded to Clarence’s request:

“Clarence, I can’t do that.  You know my political aspirations,  Why if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I’ve got.”

“We might lose everything too, Bob.”

“It’s different for you.”

“Why is it different?  I remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the church the same Sunday, as boys.  I expect when we came forward the preacher asked me about the same question he did you.  He asked me, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.’ And I said, ‘yes.’  What did you say?”

I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point.”

“Could that point by any chance be—the cross?”

“That’s right.  I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross.  I’m not getting myself crucified.”

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple.  You’re an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his.  I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer not a disciple.”

“Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”

“The question, (Clarence said,) “is Do you have a church?”

(from: Stanley Hauerwas, “The Insufficiencey of Scripture,”  Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America,  Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993.  pp. 50-51.)

I don’t know, I read the gospels pretty much every day and I can’t help but think that if Jesus wandered into most of our churches and heard our views on universal access to health care, on immigration, on the death penalty, on warfare, on the poor both here and abroad, on violence as entertainment and on weapons of violence, on care for the environment, on the gross disparity of wealth in our society he would wonder whose disciples we are.  We clothe ourselves in the sanctimonious veneer of anti-abortion slogans and “Defend Marriage” jingles and that let’s us think we are good Christians while most of the world beyond our doors suffers unbelievable deprivation and we piously tell them “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” without giving them the necessities of daily life.  The consequences in the short run could be fearful; in the long run they are catastrophic.

Something to Consider

President Eisenhower meeting Pope John XXIII

We will take just a little break on this issue of how the bishops came to live like princes because I want to reflect on something I heard in homily today.  The preacher said that he is old enough to have lived in the United States when Christian values still shaped the culture.  He explicitly tied this to “The Eisenhower and Kennedy Years.”  This Christian culture, he claimed, shaped “western” (European and American) culture from the time of Constantine the Great (c.312) until our own day.  But then, he said, in the fifty years subsequent we have morphed into a “post-Christian” culture shaped by the values of secularism.  He wasn’t criticizing this evolution but only saying that even as in the pre-Constantinian era Christians had to be witnesses to their faith in a non-Christian culture, so too today we need once again to speak up for Evangelical values.  To fail to do so is to be like Peter who declared, “I do not know the man.”

What has caused this slide into the post-Christian West?  First of all, it probably wasn’t quite as sudden as the preacher claimed.  Its roots can be found in the rationalism of the scholastics, in the nominalism of William of Ockham, in the Reformation’s challenge to Church authority, certainly in the Enlightenment, in the French Revolution’s ending the alliance of “Throne and Altar,” in the anti-clericalism of 19^th century Freemasonry, in the nihilism of Nietzsche, and the materialism of Marx.  There are no sharp curves in history—or at least very few of them.  But still, for those of us old enough to have lived through the Eisenhower years, there is a very different tone in America today and it is troubling to those of us who feel alienated from the cultural mainstream because we hold on to our Christian faith not simply as private devotion but as a set of practical teachings which we believe that are individually and collectively in our best interest as a society.

Some put all the blame on the Second Vatican Council and claim that the Church itself has abandoned its traditional values, but in fact it is not Catholicism that has lost its influence, but Christianity.  Religious groups, and particularly so-called “Evangelicals” who experienced nothing at all like the Council and its revision of teaching and practice, are as culturally alienated as are the most committed Catholics.  The cultural attempts to push religion out of the public square are not limited to Catholics—or, for that matter, Christians.  Muslims and religious Jews find it no easier in America today to fit in culturally.  The ascendant culture is a type of secularism that does not treat the various religions as on a level field—it is a rabid secularism that wants to sweep all religion from the public square. 

When one recalls the role that religion, and especially Christianity, played in the Civil Rights movement and has played in the peace movement, the loss of the religious voice in the public square would not only be unfortunate, it could be dangerous.  Admittedly Catholicism was late in coming to both movements—and admittedly mainline Christianity did not have a mitigating influence on the introduction and maintenance of slavery into this country, but you can tell neither story of the Civil Rights Movement nor of the Peace Movement without talking about Christianity and Christians. 

I think Christians need to take a long serious look at the compromises we have made with what is termed “liberal” society and ask ourselves if we really want to go down in complacent acquiescence with this ethically bankrupt culture that has taken over our lives.  On the other hand, to hold on to the shreds of Eisenhower’s America is no way to go morally.  The “Christian” America of Eisenhower years allowed for racism; it allowed for sexual violence within the family, the military, and even the Church; it allowed for glass-ceilings that prevented women from rising in the professions; it caricatured Jews; it limited the opportunities for Latinos, Blacks, and immigrants.  Men were held to different (and lower) moral standards than women.  Justice was not equal for all.  Lives and careers were destroyed by rumors and blacklists that had nothing more for basis than rumor or revenge. 

If we want to re-introduce Christianity to the predominant culture in our society we are going to have to take a radical re-look at many of the ideas we take for granted. We are going to have to develop an authentically Christian feminism and this has to go way beyond the pious prattle that a women’s highest vocation is motherhood.  We are going to have to critically reexamine how we can stay faithful to our understanding of human sexuality and yet not foster discrimination, much less violence, against those whose gender identity doesn’t fit our concepts.  We are going to have to look at marriage and family in far more complex ways than we have looked in the past.  We are going to have to evolve a theology of the human person that doesn’t incorporate cookie-cutter “givens.”  In other words, if Christianity is going to influence our culture in the future, it will have to be a very different Christianity than that of a generation ago.  This doesn’t mean it will forget its Tradition, but that it will see Tradition as a living, therefore evolving, reality.

Perhaps the key to this new Christianity that is needed if we are not to be swept off the stage of public life is found in the thought of Avery Dulles.  In his book The Catholicity of the Church Dulles asserted that the first thousand years of the papacy was about evangelizing; the second thousand about power; and the third thousand will be about service.  We are on that tectonic plate—it is time to shift from the power model to the service model.  While Dulles explicitly speaks of the papal office, I think it about the Church as a whole.  If we want to be players in the next thousand years, we must become the servants of all.  Actually, I think Jesus said something to that effect.  

A Contemporary Reflection on the Becket Controversy, continued

Statue of Becket in

Canterbury Cathedral

The first generations of Christians did not have a comfortable relationship with the culture in which they lived.  They were persecuted and despised by the government.  They certainly were in no position to write the laws by which the empire was governed, nor did those laws reflect their values and beliefs.  Nevertheless they were admonished by their scriptures to be good and obedient citizens.  The author of First Peter (most probably not Peter himself and probably written during the persecution of the Church under the Emperor Domitian) instructed his readers:

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right.  For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men.  [Act] as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but [use it] as bondslaves of God. Honor all men; love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king.

Called to responsible citizenship in the Empire and obedient to its laws, Christians were guided in their moral choices by a superior law—the Law of Christ and his Gospel.  In a culture that saw no problem with adultery, fornication, homosexuality, pederasty, and any number of other sexual variations they strove to honor marriage and family life by their own committed example.  In a society that knew and used abortifacient drugs and various forms of contraception they recognized that the killing of the unborn was evil and did not practice it.  Nor did they endorse contraception.  (at the time, their understanding of contraception saw it as a form of destroying human life as they believed that the entirety of the human person was contained in the male semen and to block the semen from the womb, where they thought the seed matured into a fetus, was to cause the death of that human person.)  They lived in a society where unwanted children were left exposed to die. They, of course, did not practice infanticide.  They lived in a world where the head of the household had life and death power over not only his slaves but his children—yet they did not take lives.  There were other “liberties” granted under law in which they did not engage. Nor did they did serve in the military or undertake duties in which they might have to take a human life.  They did not go to the theatre.  In a culture that was fairly “wide open” they lived life by the narrow path that Jesus had prescribed. 

In 312 things changed drastically for the Christian population.  The newly victorious Emperor, Constantine, not only legalized their religion but gave them a religious preeminence over the other cults common in that society.  Constantine did not close the pagan temples or the theatres with their gladiator shows and sometimes somewhat pornographic entertainments.  Christians still refrained from going to the theatres or worshipping at the temples.  Eventually Christians became not only the established religion but for all practical purposes the sole religion of the Empire.  In the fifth century the temples and theatres were closed.  Laws were written to proscribe sexual practices that were contrary to the Judeo-Christian revelation.  Those laws were not always enforced but the mentality gradually shifted that the State should base its legal system on the religious moral code.   This was not only a Christian moral principle.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Islamic states also determined their civil and criminal law according to the revelation proper to their religion.  In Christian Europe, Judaism and Christianity more or less shared a moral code, especially in regard to sexuality, marriage, and family life.  The one difference that comes to mind was the permission in Judaism for divorce and the law codes of the developing European societies did not attempt to restrict that privilege among the Jewish community.  In fact, a blind eye was often turned towards divorce and concubinage and sometimes homosexuality in the Christian community as well.  In fact, while laws governing moral behavior were often “on the books” they were just as often not enforced.  Nevertheless the standard remained that the law should reflect Christian moral principles. 
With the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century cracks appeared in the relationship of Church and Law.  Some Protestant States began to look differently on some issues, most notably divorce, than Catholic tradition.  (Ironically, at least at first, England was not one of those States.)  In fact, among some of the radical reformers such as the Anabaptists of Münster, traditional marriage gave way to a sexual libertarianism.  Of course, even here, the laws permitting this were written in accord with the religious doctrines governing the state. 
More to the core of the issue, the religious diversity created by the Reformations of the sixteenth (and seventeenth) century were responsible for the creation of a secular mentality.   The conflicting religious claims of the various Churches and sects led the philosophes of the Enlightenment to look for a morality grounded not in religious doctrine but in human reason.  This was the outlook of the majority of the founders of our Republic—Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Madison and others.  Even Catholic thinkers at the time did not disagree as Catholic doctrine, always more positivist than Lutheran and Calvinist, held that the moral Truth of revelation was attainable through human reason—the so-called Natural Law.      
While the Catholic Church in America supported the idea that Church and State should be separate, Rome did not.  And even though Catholic thinkers said that Natural Law was apparent by reason as well as by revelation, the Church insisted that the State should draft its laws to preserve and protect the Church and its teaching.  In countries where the Catholic Church was established by law or accorded a special constitutional place—Italy, Ireland, Spain, among others—divorce was illegal, contraception unavailable, abortion a criminal offense. 
This relationship of Church and State became shaky in the twentieth century and after Dignitatis Humanae of Vatican II assured that the sovereignty of each conscience should be respected cracks appeared in those legal systems that had formally incorporated Catholic teaching in the legal codes. 
This brings us to our current dilemma.  There are many in the Catholic community, including many Catholic bishops, who want the laws that govern our society to be written to incorporate Catholic moral principles.  Yet it is clear to many others of us that the laws in democratic society must reflect not the teachings of one specific religious group but the moral consensus of the entire society.  This does not mean that we have to abdicate our moral principles in favor of a least-common-denominator morality much less yield to an amoral social code.  We have every right to persuade others in our society that our moral principles have a validity that transcend our doctrinal stance.  The key word here is persuade.  We have no right to impose our moral code but we have every right to offer persuasive evidence to help our fellow citizens to form their own moral conscience without our imposing our beliefs on them.
A particular urgency in this matter concerns our need to protect the unborn.  Every day hundreds of unborn children are deprived of the lives for which they were created.  It is tempting to try to force a unilateral solution to this tragedy by attempting to use politics to impose laws that protect the unborn.  The problem is that a significant number of our fellow citizens either do not accept the premise that the unborn are human lives or they prefer to close their eyes and ignore the moral quandary of conflicting interests between the unborn and the women who carry them.
I remember reading Cider House Rules by John Irving.  I probably read it twenty years ago.  It is an exceptionally well-written novel.  Inj the context of the story between the director of an orphanage, Dr. Wilbur Larch and his young protégé, Homer Wells, Irving manages to give clear and unbiased statement to both sides of the abortion issue.  While the pro-life case is well presented, it does lose out in the story to the pro-choice argument. This is not surprising as Irving had been commissioned to write a novel to win the audience to the pro-choice view.  Indeed he is to be commended in stating the pro-life views as fairly as he did.  At the time I read the book, I could not but help think that it was tragic that American Catholics had not employed a novelist of Irving’s stature to make the emotional and intellectual appeal to win public opinion to the cause of the unborn.  But this is the failed strategy.  We have tried to force laws on people rather than win their intellects and their hearts to our cause.  Jesus never gave his Church a commission to change laws.  The Apostles never undertook a political agenda in the Roman Empire.  Our commission is to preach a Gospel that changes hearts.  We will, no doubt, make enemies if we change hearts for the good but not nearly as many enemies as we are making now by trying to force a political solution that does not have the support of the vast majority of the population. Moreover, while we will make some foes if we are successful in evangelizing with a Gospel of Life we will have the moral high ground and be faithful to our mission.  Our attempts to coerce rather than to convert are not only doomed to failure; they betray the mission we have been given as a Church.      

Post-Newtown Choices

I mentioned in my last post H. Richard Neibuhr and his book Christ and Culture, or more specifically I referred to his “Christ of Culture” model drawn from that book.  Neibuhr, the younger brother of theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, was a Protestant theologian coming out of the Evangelical and Reformed tradition (now the United Church of Christ) a German based denomination that embraced both Lutheran and Calvinist roots.  Neibuhr, who died in 1962 at age 68, represents the “neo-orthodox” movement in American Protestantism of the first half of the twentieth century that provided an important corrective to the modernist-leaning liberal trend in American and European Protestant Christianity of the period.  Neibuhr held his Ph.D. from Yale in 1924 and after serving several years as president of Elmhurst College and two stints of teaching at Eden Theological Seminary, he returned to Yale to teach in 1931 and remained there until his death.  As a “neo-orthodox” Christian, Neibuhr drew his chief inspiration from Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth.    Typical to this Calvinist heritage, Neibuhr stressed the absolute Sovereignty of God.   His acerbic critique of contemporary liberal Protestantism remains a classic and I often quote it in my talks as it applies equally well to the American happy-clappy Catholicism that I detest for its lack of gravity and historical context.  Neibuhr wrote of liberal Christians that they believed in

A God without anger

Who led a people without sin
Into a kingdom without judgment
Through the ministry of a Christ without a cross. 

If that just doesn’t sum up what is wrong with a lot of contemporary Christianity —Catholic and Protestant—I don’t know what does.

In any event, the “Christ of Culture” position which Neibuhr scores can  basically be described as the socio-political-economic stance of the “Christian” who uncritically endorses the cultural status quo.  I always use the example of the Russian Orthodox Bishops standing on the railway station platforms blessing the Czarist troops as they are sent off to World War I.  National flags flanking the altar or singing “America the Beautiful” in a worship service would be other examples.  The identification with America as the new “Promised Land” or Americans being the new “chosen people” is yet another.  All these are examples of the unhealthy alliance of public culture and religious institutions.  They are usually wed to a moralism that takes no account of the modern sciences and a free-market capitalism that leaves every man to himself and leaves women and children to be victimized by a system based on rabid individualism and unbounded greed.    
But the relationship of the Christian to the prevalent culture is even more complex today than in Neibuhr’s time.  We are in the midst of what is being called “culture wars” as two competing ideologies strive for recognition as the predominant American culture.  The competing culture to the neo-cons is a libertarian/libertine society in which the individual has no accountability to the common ethic—for there is no acknowledged “common ethic.”  This society would advocate a feel-good world of total subjectivism, addictive consumerism, actions without accountability, sex without commitment, and narcissistic me-firstism.  Neither “culture” is consistent with core Christian values.  The fatal flaw in both pseudo-cultures, the neo-con and the liberal, is the American lie of individualism.  I, the individual, is not the subject of supreme good.  “My rights,” my good, my desires, and even my freedoms must be subordinated—freely, but subordinated none the less—to the common good.    
The Newtown Tragedy demands the Christian, Catholic or Protestant, must step into the culture and redeem what is redeemable within it and repent of what is not.   What is not redeemable in contemporary America is our fascination with violence and our addictions to anger.  What threatens to destroy us as a society is the ever widening gap rooted in rage that makes dialogue impossible and reconciliation no more than a dream. 
By the way, yesterday (Thursday, Dec 20) Terry Gross had a great discussion on the challenges facing those who advocate stronger gun-control policies from the NRA and from the gun manufacturers--and the relationship between NRA and manufacturers.

Of Leesburg Lawns, Gorgeous Prelates, and Minnie Jackson's Pie

 The Loudon County Courthouse in

Leesburg Virginia where the controversy

began between a Knights of Columbus’

sponsored crèche and several atheist

sponsored displays that spoofed religion

leading to an examination of whether

or not the American Tradition has

stamped us as a Christian Nation.   

We all know Patrick Henry for his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech given to the Virginia Convention in 1775 which swung Virginia into the independence camp of the burgeoning American revolution.  What many people don’t know about Henry is that he was a devout Christian.  Like other Virginia planters he was an Episcopalian but seems later in life to have preferred Presbyterianism which was closer to his Scots roots and evangelical soul.  He was strongly evangelical and while supporting religious tolerance (at least for Protestants) had little tolerance for those of no religious stripe.  (I have not been able to find any evidence of anti-Catholicism but there is something in the back of my memory that associates him with the level of anti-popery common among the Virginia frontier folk who were embracing the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodists revivals of the last decade of the eighteenth century.  I could be wrong on this point.)   He supported legislation that would have required each citizen to pay taxes for the support of the Church of his choice and he also supported legislation that would have paid teachers of religion from the public purse.  This seems to us today to suggest a political conservative but in fact until he saw the excesses of the French Revolution he was pretty radical politically—an extreme democrat who opposed the Constitution for being a threat to personal liberty.  He turned down Washington’s 1795 offer of being Secretary of State because the Federalist Government of Washington and Adams was too powerful for his vigilant concern over individual freedoms. I suppose today he would be a libertarian which makes his evangelical views appear all the more idiosyncratic.  Libertarianism ultimately leaves the door open for there to be no societal brakes on individual moral behavior and that is at odds with the evangelical agenda that believes that moral questions such as premarital and extramarital sex, homosexuality, use of recreational drugs, sale and use of alcohol, etc. need to be regulated if not criminalized.  Of course most of these current issues were not in Patrick Henry’s purview as the social parameters of the eighteenth century were far more restricted than ours but then, like now, there are always those who think that they government should stay out of their business but not necessarily yours or mine. While we cannot know for sure what Patrick Henry’s thoughts would be on the Christmas display on the Loudon County Courthouse lawn, his strong evangelical faith and his minimalist approach to government interference might indicate that he, probably like Sam Adams and Charles Carroll would be likely to support a Christian display on government property without endorsing any right for atheist groups to put up a display disparaging religion.  Again one cannot second guess in history so this is only a likely conjecture given his strong endorsement for government support of religious practice.  It is, I think, a reasonable surmise that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and James Madison would oppose the idea that we are a “Christian Nation” while Patrick Henry, Charles Carroll, and Sam Adams may well have endorsed that position.  But we will never know, not at least this side of eternity.  Ms. Curtis’ claim that “there is no disputing” that we are a “Judeo-Christian Nation” is far from accurate.  It reflects the smug comforts of a Loudon County housewife whose Hilly Holbrook lifestyle affords her the time to blahg blahg blahg Junior League nonsense.  Go have a slice or two of Minnie Jackson’s pie, Hilly, and leave history to those whose profession it is.      
     And this brings me back to why I write this blog.  For one thing I hate to see our Catholic heritage—our real heritage, especially as American Catholics—dressed up in the rags of nineteenth century neo-Baroque ultramontanism and paraded out as if it was somehow or other the answer to the world’s hunger for The Way, The Truth, and the Life.  Frankly I think Cardinals in cappis magnis (that’s not a mistake, “in” takes the ablative case) and priests in pompomed caps make a travesty of authentic Catholicism.  The antiquarian liturgies sponsored in various Cathedrals by the Latin Mass Society reduce the Eucharistic Sacrifice to a pious Aida. The “canons” of Gricigliano in their self-aggrandizing pomposity are nothing less than an Alice-in-Wonderland charade.  And the whole clutch of retro Catholic zombies parade Mother Church like the naked emperor through the modern world.  Avery Dulles wrote that power was characteristic of the Church in the second millennium and service would be the distinguishing mark in the third. It is time that we make the paradigm shift that will conform us to the One who came not to be served but to serve.  Only a Church of service, scrubbed of the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy, can bear the witness of the new evangelization.