Role of theology in America's divide today

We see many Christian references during the Capitol riots of Jan 6 and many wonder if conspiracy theories and political upheaval in United States at least partly rooted in Christian evangelical theology.  In this article, we explore the role of theology in defining the logical conclusion of the rabbit hole that conspiracy theorists find themselves in.

First, I have to declare that I identify as a Catholic and so may not be the most objective of parties if my opinions sound sectarian but I try to leave my personal beliefs out of this little dissertation.  In this article, evangelism is treated as separate from mainstream Protestantism even though I recognise the two identities are often adopted by the same person.  Neither am I saying the evangelical worldview is monolithically uniform.  Much like most thinking in human society, it is incredibly diverse, multi-faceted and interacts with the world differently in different fields.  Similarly, conspiracy theorists exist within a spectrum from those who may consider the plausibility of only one theory to those who with a affinity, nay addiction, with any idea suspicious of establishment thinking and I recognise too that not everyone whom we consider a conspiracy theorist would identify as one.  It would be a disservice to evangelism in particular and the wider Christian community as a whole, of which I am a member, to conflate everyone who identify as an evangelical with a propensity for some or all of conspiracy thinking.

Human society is just too complex for easy categorisation no matter how much students and observers of sociology may try.  We can only hope to identify some of the many social forces that act in varying degrees on a particular individual with a particular persuasion on a particular issue.  It is not my intention to apply a broad brush to describe wide swathes of human society but to identify some possible origin of the worldview of an individual which can be the starting point for understanding of that particular worldview.

With this clarification, we can perhaps start.

Christian background in America's origins

To start at the very beginning, the first English settlements in America were seen as another part of a conflict with Spain.  While these early settlements failed, they were really in a sense partly driven by religious considerations as Protestant England under Elizabeth seeks to outflank the Catholic Spanish incursions into North America, which at that time had reached modern day Florida.  In some ways, the Protestant English settlements built on their experience in colonising Catholic Ireland, creating a link to shared oppression experience with Native Americans for Irish-Americans long before their arrival after the potato famine.

(Interesting note: the country of Britain did not exist yet at that time: that came later in 1707, though the crowns of England of Scotland were united under a common king in 1603 in the person of James I (or VI of Scotland).  That is why Americans colloquially refer the British as the English and never as British because they were originally colonised by England, not Britain.  There were a few Scottish colonies but they all failed)

While the early permanent settlements in North America were set up in the name of the English crown, many of the subsequent settlements were set up by English dissident Christians persecuted in England when the established church there attempted to assert its ecclesiastical authority.  Included in this wave during the turbulent Stuart rule in the 17th century were Puritans of the Pilgrim Fathers fame and the Quakers.

During the Thirty Year War between Catholics and Protestants in Europe 1618-1648, continental Europeans also migrated to America to escape persecutions and pressures to change their religion, particularly from Germany and France which faced the more horrendous religious violence during the period.  This became the basis for a need to separate church and state in a highly religiousified (is that a word?) society, to avoid the experience of religious wars rampant in Europe.

While the religious truce was is largely observed in America, it was by no means universal.  In Maryland, the only colony set up for Catholics, Catholicism was proscribed in three different periods until the Revolutionary wars.  Having said that, Maryland Toleration Act 1649 was a landmark legislation, being the first of its kind in the English speaking world.

Religious tolerance in colonial America is, therefore, limited and largely extend to Protestantism as the 'default' religion.  Even in Maryland, Catholics number a small minority, as they still do today.  Today, Catholics form a >40% plurality in only one state, Rhode Island.  Political and public life in the colonial era was already dominated by WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, especially of the Puritan Anglican variety, while most crown governors were drawn from the ranks of establishment Anglicans.  Catholics and Jews didn't get much of a look in, as did some English Protestant Dissenters at least for some time in the initial colonial period.  Quakers were then seen as a threat by the Anglican and Puritan aristocracy, probably because their numbers and organisations.

With the freedom to pursue their religion to their logical conclusion, some Protestants soon interpreted their religion in more Protestant terms, with some describing themselves as 'militant Protestants' and became the forerunner of today's evangelicals.  Having said that, the first of America's religious revivals, which sweeps the country regularly, was more rationalist in nature, heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and science, very unlike how a religious revival would be seen today.

Christianity had always had a dominant role in American politics, being the bedrock for the Prohibition of the 1920s.  It is assumed that everyone should be Christian and it is hard to see an atheist being elected to high office today even though some 9% of adult Americans identify as atheist or agnostics.  The issue of religious affiliation has maligned the candidacies of Romney (Mainstream Christians classify Mormons as marginal Christians at best, due to the use of other books as divine scripture) and Obama (falsely perceived as Muslim by 20% of those surveyed in the run up to his first election as President).  I remember a politician in the 1970s whose name I forgot, who castigated Israelis and Arabs for not being able to settle their disputes peacefully 'like good Christians' - seems like he accepted Christianity as the default value system.

Evangelical theology and antithesis to scholarship

Much of Protestant theology (even with a nod to the diversity in Protestant thinking) is a rather revivalism in nature and very much based on the Bible as the sole source of revelation, rejecting the Church as the intermediary in an individual's interactions with God.  

In going back to the Bible, Luther justified his rejection of the authority of the Church by a Scriptural verse that stated that we are justified by faith.  I often encountered evangelical writings, though, that extended this verse to being justified by faith alone.  Catholic doctrine is that scriptures need to be understood under guidance of Church teachings known as traditions - not the ‘old practices’ type but teachings handed down from the Apostles.  Thus, to read the Bible and to teach Catholic teachings, the Church has built up an entire edifice of scholarship of ever-growing complexity, with lots of reference to writings of early Church fathers.  With all that scholarship comes the interpretative role that Luther eschewed.

In rejecting Church authority to be the sole arbiter of Biblical interpretation, much of the body of scholarship itself is rejected.  More fundamental forms of Protestantism (as opposed to more mainstream forms like the Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists) believe that one could understand the Word of God unmediated by any intermediary, eg., the Catholic Church.  Evangelicals therefore are wary of scholars who they think are trying to interpret the Bible for them, and this wariness extend to the knowledge and expertise the scholars had.  The rejection of scholarship seeps into more secular fields: in evangelical thinking, it is hard to separate the secular from the religious as their Fatih informs so much of the way they view the world and understand events around them.  So, it is not difficult for rejection of religious authority to be consistent with rejection of scientific authority.

The more extreme forms of evangelicalism reject science altogether.  The more moderate forms co-opt science into their theology, but often with unusual results.  For instance, one university tried to reconcile Biblical veracity with evolution by debating whether God breathed life into a pre-human for him to become the first Adam.  There is even a Creation Museum with a dinosaur display that dates the year of the extinction of dinosaurs as 2348BC, the supposedly year of Noah’s Flood. To us it may sounds like stretching the use of science, but for evangelicals, there is a need to reconcile what they see as truth with what others see as facts.   

This belief in justification by faith alone means that you get to heaven through your own faith and efforts, not by relying on learning (rejection of scholars) and professionals (rejection of priests as intermediaries).  This is why so much of American culture - evident in Hollywood - vaunts the person with little or no training triumphing over experts with their long training.  I find its epitome, or nadir, in the film Armageddon that is based on the premise that it is easier to teach miners to fly spacecrafts than to teach an astronaut to drill holes.

The rejection of scholarship, and also accepted facts by conspiracy theorists, makes it futile to appeal to the logic of more accepted arguments.  Rational arguments are viewed with suspicions by those with an instinctive revulsion of scholarship while those more religious will see the hand of the Devil in arguments trying to dissuade them from the divine truth.  It is no coincidence that evangelicals are proportionately more among the ranks of conspiracy theorists, be they in the Capitol insurrection or in the Flat Earth Society.

Catholic acceptance into American establishment

This story encountered a twist of late.  Catholics tend to be excluded from American halls of power dominated by WASPs.  A Catholic candidate of the Democratic Party lost the presidential election in the 1920s because of his Catholicism.  JFK won in spite of his Catholicism not because - he famously had to declare that the pope did not determine his policies.  In the 1980s with the advent of John Paul II and Reagan, evangelicals began to realise that they have a lot in common with Catholics in their stance against abortion and homosexuality etc.  Not having their own scholarship that can provide coherent rational-based (as opposed to religious-based) arguments to the public, evangelicals began to reach out to Catholics with their tradition of scholarship to provide the needed arguments in their battle for public opinion. 

Catholics consented to this alliance in order to be accepted into the upper echelons of American power.  As a result of this alliance, Catholics achieved their goal and today of being an undisputed part of the WASP power structure.  As late as 1984, Ferraro, Democratic candidate for VP had to defend her Catholicism and the debate then was whether her Catholicism mattered.  It is only with the candidacy of John Kerry, we finally had a major party candidate whose Catholicism did not matter to Protestant voters.  If anything, his brand of Catholicism was more a point of contention with some Catholic bishops.  That, to me, was the moment Catholicism was accepted in the halls of power.

Catholics are the now majority on the Supreme Court (5 out of 9) with 6 of the 15 Catholic justices ever appointed, having served in the last 5 years.  A aspect of this alliance is that influence worked both ways and American Catholicism got more conservative in the last few decades. To many of us in the rest of the world (and I dare say the exasperation of Pope Francis), American Catholicism seems very single-issue cultural warriors.

At this point, I should add that Catholics the world over do try to balance social justice from social conservatism and there is a wing of American Catholicism that prioritise furthering social justice over social conservative values but they seem to be in a minority, certainly less visible.

Danger of religious justification for political action

It should not be an issue for an individual's religious conviction to influence their political choices.  After all, most political decisions are about moral priorities and propagation of moral truths are often where religions are supposed to excel.  But any political action has to operate within the scope of acceptable legal and social norms of the wider society.  Any conflict should be settled using the institutions of the society in which the individual resides and the religion operates.  Otherwise, the social contract unravels.  If an individual subjugate their rights & responsibilities to society to their rights & responsibilities to their religion, the individual cannot be enjoying all the rights of the society any more than a person holding another passport (ie., having an alternative loyalty) have less than full rights in our country.

If this is coupled with a belief that a political position is required by God, who mandates action to realise that requirement, society would be threatened if individuals undermine society's institutions to further that religious mandate.  Often, this appeal to that higher mandate means that the ends justify the means.  We can see the disregard of democratic norms in some places where voter suppression, gerrymandering and other tools were deployed as parties seek to maintain themselves in power in defiance of the will of the majority, sometimes to remould a better society in the image of their ostensible religious values.

After almost 250 years, the American constitution is still a work in progress and the ideals contained in it are still not yet fully realised.  This is because the identity of what makes an American and the value system underpinning that identity were avoided in those early discussions in 1776 & 1789.  The resulting compromise came up with a formula of words which satisfied everyone because each delegation could walk away with their own interpretation of those words suitable to maintain their own hands on the levers of local power.  That kicking of the can down the road then and since, had the cost in the upheavals America faces today.

While it may be late, America needs to have that conversations today avoided all those years ago.  Talking with rather than talking at; Reconciling values rather than triumphing one's own; Focussing on what is common in that identity rather what differentiates.  This will be the test whether America is that melting pot to meld the many into one or will America be building two separate societies on a single but divided land.  Whichever path taken, the world is watching and any failure of American democracy will only weaken the cause of democracy in our fragile world.