A Political History of the Bible in America

Paul D. Hanson

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611646085
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

"Biblical history, enriched by many religious and cultural traditions, flows into and is intertwined with our nation's epic, both for better and for worse. To ignore that history is to cut ourselves off from our roots and to deny the ancestral experiences that forged our individual and collective identity."
from the prologue

This substantial work explores the interplay of religion and politics throughout the history of the United States. Paul D. Hanson traces American history back to colonial times, paying close attention to the role that biblical tradition has played in shaping the national story of the United States. He then presents a detailed study of politics in the Bible that is framed by the challenges and crises in American history. Students will learn how deeply religion has influenced both domestic and international policy and contributed to the nation's sense of identity and purpose. After laying these biblical-historical foundations, Hanson considers a method of biblical interpretation that can speak to the diverse nation of today. He proposes an inclusive form of public moral discourse that invites full participation by members of all religious and philosophical groups.

PART 1

A Historical Retrospective on the Relation between the Bible and Politics in the United States

Introduction

The relationship between religious organizations and government developed over the course of US history in a way that set it apart from Great Britain and the Continent. Drawing on the lessons of the leaders of the thirteen colonies who preceded them, as well as on the political writings of French and English philosophers, the founders, though frequently differing over the specific inferences they drew from their religious and philosophical views, were able to agree upon the principle that, whatever the individual states decided for themselves, the nation as a whole was to eschew the notion of an established church. As for the citizens, their freedom to choose a particular religion or no religion was to be protected from congressional interference. Under the protective canopy of the two religion clauses of the First Amendment, older denominations as well as native-born movements developed within a climate of free expression and intense competition.

As the new nation developed, many citizens as well as their political leaders drew inspiration from the Bible and sought with varied success to achieve a more just, righteous, and compassionate society. Reformers across the generations inspired by biblical ideals sought a wide range of reformist goals. Temperance advocates sought to protect families and children from the scourge of alcoholism. At the same time a coalition of northern Evangelicals petitioned Congress to protect the Cherokee from being expelled from their ancestral lands. Scriptural ideals of equality and liberation for the oppressed inspired Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dwight Weld, Theodore Parker, and the Grimké sisters to organize to abolish the sin of slavery from the land. During the Progressive Era a range of religious leaders sought to improve conditions for immigrants in the inner cities and to restrain the excessive power of emerging business oligopolies. As the twentieth century progressed and the United States assumed a more prominent role in world affairs, biblical ideals shaped both Woodrow Wilson in his quest for a war to end all wars and a just and lasting peace and later generations of pacifists who opposed American intervention in wars ranging from Vietnam to Iraq. Most notably in the last several generations, religiously inspired imagery and reform strategies were central to the nonviolent civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and helped to build bridges between people of goodwill from all races and walks of life.

Yet this sketch of the positive legacies of religion in American life tells only one side of a much more complicated story, wherein Americans all too frequently failed to live up to their highest political and religious ideals. Significantly, the ideal of religious freedom remained an elusive one for many. Though the religious climate in the new land spawned numerous sectarian innovations, the yearning of many nonconformist groups to reach the status of full participation in American society was thwarted by encounters with intolerance and violence that contradicted the notion of equality under the law. Such was the case in the century and a half before the Revolutionary War, and such was the case in the era that followed. Separatists like Roger Williams and dissenters like Anne Hutchinson, who questioned the political and religious authority of the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, fled to Rhode Island after being banished from their communities. Quakers who defiantly returned after being expelled were executed in Boston. Men and women accused of witchcraft were tried and sentenced to execution in Salem, Ipswich, and Andover. As the grinding wheels of intolerance rolled into the first century of the new nation, Mormons, in the face of lethal persecution, fled westward on a route taking them from New York to Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri before they finally found sanctuary in the wide-open spaces of the mountainous West.

As for Native peoples, they were progressively displaced from their land through intimidation by colonial leaders, tricked into shoddy land-purchase agreements, and massacred mercilessly in reprisal for their attempts to reclaim their tribal territories. As the growing young nation pressed inexorably toward the Pacific in response to its growing population, their pleas for redress usually fell upon deaf ears. Even in the few cases where their claims were brought to trial and resulted in a favorable decision, victory in court was no guarantee of justice at home.¹ The same pattern of injustice has reached down to modern times, as demonstrated by the state of Oregon’s denial of unemployment compensation to Native American employees Galen Black and Alfred Smith on the basis of their participation in tribal religious ceremonies that included the sacramental use of peyote.²

Given the all too frequent instances of glaring contradictions between the constitutional ideal and the persistence of discrimination against religious minorities, it is important to cultivate public awareness of our First Amendment tradition and its strengths and vulnerabilities, a goal greatly enriched by a historical perspective. In the following eight chapters, therefore, our objective is to examine the relationship between religion and politics in US history and to identify the theo-political models that were adopted and developed to shape that relationship.

1. Though the court sided with the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), both the state and federal authorities (including President Andrew Jackson, whose policy was articulated in the Indian Removal Act that he signed into law in 1830) ignored John Marshall’s ruling.

2. “Oregon Peyote Law Leaves 1983 Defendant Unvindicated,” New York Times, July 9, 1991, A14.

Chapter 1

The Theocratic Model of the Puritans

The unique political thought of the Puritans cannot be understood without an awareness of the historical and cultural context in which it developed. During the persecutions of English Protestants that occurred under the Catholic Queen Mary (1553–58), many refugees sought asylum on the Continent. Due to the tumult of religious wars that engulfed the German states in which the Lutheran Church had taken root, most of those refugees were drawn to the more peaceful havens of Amsterdam, Geneva, and neighboring Calvinist cities. This twist of history had a lasting effect on the nature of the Christian political theory that many of the reform-minded Puritans brought back with them when the restoration of Protestant rule under Elizabeth I (1558–1603) allowed them to return to their homeland.

Once resettled in England, the Puritans set themselves to the task of preparing the New Israel for the imminent return of Christ. The Puritan divines searched the Bible for direction, being guided by a hermeneutic that sought signs not of the universal body of Christ transcending all political boundaries, in the style of Luther and Calvin, but of the reform of the English nation by God’s redemptive work. Granted, the obstacles that stood in the way of reform were formidable, given their perception of corruption infecting a church with papist leanings and kings (James I [1603–25] and Charles I [1625–49]) not hesitating to exploit the theo-political doctrine of the divine right of kings for blatantly self-serving purposes. The Puritans viewed themselves as God’s agents in carrying on the holy struggle that would inaugurate the new era of righteousness and peace.

The polity that guided the activities of the Puritans blended the theocratic ideals of Geneva with an apocalyptic fervor fired by their expectation that Christ’s return was imminent. They proclaimed that the nation was being summoned to submit to God’s rule as revealed in the biblical commandments and to embody the purity of life that would prepare the land for Christ’s triumphal return.

As seems inevitable throughout human history in the case of apocalyptically motivated political movements, the program of reform brought back by the Puritans from Geneva ended in failure. Leaders of both the church and the state, fearing that England would become consumed by the kind of religious wars that had swept over the Continent, united in repudiating their positions as extreme.¹ During the reign of James I and on into the first half of Charles I’s reign, the tide flowed in the direction of reaffirming the power-sharing arrangement between monarchy, church, and parliament that left the Puritans without a base from which to create the New Israel, at least in the motherland. Increasingly they became an alienated group, and were it not for their fervent faith, they may have withdrawn altogether from politics into the solace of otherworldly sectarianism.

Deftly, though, they introduced into their vision of God’s plans for an earthly habitation a significant alteration: “As sure as God is God, God is going from England,” proclaimed Thomas Hooker in 1633 in his sermon “The Danger of Desertion,” as he embarked from England to sail with his followers (including Anne Hutchinson) to Holland and then on to a land of promise on the other side of the Atlantic.² Depictions of an apocalyptic denouement remained central in his sermons and in the sermons of other Puritan divines like John Cotton; but now, instead of the motherland being the object of God’s redemptive activity, England had become the satanic obstacle that God would have to remove to prepare for the establishment of the New Israel in the fresh soil of America. As John Winthrop expressed it, the new settlements would “raise a Bulworke against the kingdome of Ante-Christ … [and provide] a refuge for many whome he meanes to saue out of the general calamity” that was coming to the churches in Europe. Finally, Winthrop believed the whole enterprise to be “a worke of God for the good of his Church … which he hat reveled to his prophetts.”³

In 1630, aboard the Arbella, Winthrop wrote “A Modell of Christian Charity.” In this oft-quoted thesis, he described the principles upon which the new society would be built. His work is a consistent attempt to translate the teachings of the Bible into a political model. The “city upon a hill” was to be a covenant community, living in faithfulness to the laws of God revealed in the Bible, and opposing every vice and evil that would seduce the hearts of the people and lead to the same punishments that were about to visit the apostates of England. The political model he described is theocratic in nature, and there is little reason to doubt that Calvin’s Geneva hovers over the experiment as a source of inspiration. By interpreting the Bible typologically, the leaders of the early New England settlements were able to identify their bridgehead on the American continent with biblical Israel’s entry into Canaan. For example, William Bradford, the founder of Plymouth Colony, adapted Moses’ words to the Israelites recorded in Deuteronomy 26 to the Pilgrims: “May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voices, and looked on their adversities.”⁴

The theoretical foundation of the relationship between church and state in early New England can best be explored by a close examination of the Cambridge Platform, which was composed in 1648. The seventeenth chapter seeks to delineate the responsibilities and limits on both sides of the divide. Churches have rights that are unique to themselves and do not, for example, need the permission of the state in order to meet. The church and the state should be mutually supporting communities within the larger society. The ministers should counsel obedience to the magistrates, just as the magistrates should aid and support the church. Yet there are clear limits to this relationship. The magistrates, for example, have no authority to compel church membership or participation in the ritual of communion. The platform expresses this separation in the following terms: “As it is unlawful for church-officers to meddle with the sword of the magistrate, so it is unlawful for the magistrate to meddle with the work proper to church-officers.” Yet this separation seems profoundly limited to a contemporary sensibility. Magistrates were specifically authorized to punish “idolatry, blasphemy, heresy, venting corrupt and pernicious opinions, that destroy the foundation, open contempt of the Word preached, profanation of the Lords day, disturbing the peaceable administration and exercise of the worship and holy things of God.” Finally, the magistrates were even given authority to intervene in churches that were deemed “schismatical,” out of communion with other churches, or acting “incorrigibly or obstinately.” These strictures were composed in an atmosphere where only church members in good standing were eligible for the franchise, and ministers were specifically barred from holding political office.

The Puritans thus saw church and state as separate institutions with separate leadership, but mutually reinforcing and supporting. Instead of a wall of separation dividing the two, church and state would provide two of the three pillars, the third being the family, for the growth of a godly commonwealth.⁵ Parents publicly testifying to their conversion and manifesting saintly behavior, children raised in obedience to biblical laws and gaining admission to communion through an account of their own experience of rebirth, magistrates ruling in conformity with orthodox Calvinism, admonished and supported by a patriotic body of clergy: such was the harmonious whole envisioned by the first and second generations of the Puritans as the commonwealth willed by God and attainable through the diligence and commitment of its citizens.

Though the ideal envisioned by the first Puritans was thus theocratic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: Story, Identity, and Making Sense of the Bible
• Part 1: A Historical Retrospective on the Relation Between the Bible and Politics in the United States
• Part 2: Politics in the Bible
• Epilogue: What Is the Bible’s Message for Today?
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects