Religion and the Republican Debate

Religion and the Republican Debate

| January 27, 2012

Daniel McCarthy at American Conservative has some
interesting thoughts on
attitudes about religion shown in last night’s GOP debate:

Political Christians today have a hard time understanding the
religious configuration of the early United States. The difficulty
is that the least conventionally religious Americans of the day
were often political allies of people we would now identify as
ancestors of the Religious Right. Deists and Baptists alike did not
want to be taxed to support established Anglican or
Congregationalist churches, and there was a strong strain of
anti-clericalism and emphasis on individual judgment among both the
philosophers and the extreme Protestants. Total disestablishment
and liberty of conscience were policies that appealed to both
types; each was absolutely confident that within a generation it
would inherit the earth if the marketplace of religious ideas were
left free.

Most Americans did not take as hard a line on church-state
relations as Jefferson, Madison, and the devout among their allies
did; the poles of opinion back then were those who saw
establishment in anything less than a “wall of separation” and
those who thought that a vague but public Christianity was an
indispensable prop to civil order. Even those poles did not always
attract the alliances you might expect; a doubting Unitarian like
John Adams was quite firmly on the side of a civil — but certainly
not established — Christianity.

It’s fair to say that Ron Paul is very much in line with Madison
and Jefferson. (Indeed, one suspects a President Paul, like
Madison, would have reservations even about declaring a day of
thanksgiving and prayer — where does the Constitution say the
president should do that?) It would be interesting to see a
politician who could articulate the civil Christian point of view
in anything other than a rote manner. Alas, instead we have
Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum.