Believers in the idea that America was established as a Christian state scored a hit last year when the Texas school board, a politicised body in which evangelicals control crucial votes, ordered up textbooks laying out this view. Given the size of the Texan market, school-book publishers across the country often follow its lead. The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s.

Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only joined the Revolution on the understanding that slavery would not be questioned. Strange as his views may sound to most scholars, Mr Barton’s philosophy is taken seriously in Republican circles. When Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential candidate, held a day of prayer for the nation in August, Mr Barton was an acknowledged endorser. One of Mr Barton’s admirers is Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who argues that American history has been distorted by secular historians to play down the role of faith. “I never listen to David Barton without learning a whole lot of new things,” Mr Gingrich has said.

It is easy to see why politicians are attracted by the assertion that America was founded as a Christian land, and is hence called to be a place of exceptional virtue. It elegantly fuses two beliefs: Christianity itself, and belief in American history as another sacred narrative, one that sees the founders as people of near-infallible wisdom and virtue waging a noble war against the forces of darkness.

It is an unfortunate fact that the people who most need to read this Economist article in its entirety won’t and those who do will instinctively or reflexively reject it. Don’t mess with evangelical Texas or Republican myths.

One might think that these tax credits, which result in payments to “private” or religious schools, amounts to state support for such schools. One might also think that such support is prohibited by a long line of Establishment Clause jurisprudence holding that government cannot fund religious organizations and activities.

In the view of five Catholic justices, one would be wrong. Why? They allege there is a difference between tax credit funding and tax funding. In both law and economics, this is a classic distinction without a difference. Justice Kagan, writing for the four justice minority, noted that giving “tax credit funds” to religious schools is no different from giving “tax funds” to religious schools. Both result in tax dollars going to religious schools.

As Garrett Epps (my former law school classmate) uncontroversially observes over at The Atlantic: “The credit funds decrease the amount of money in the state treasury just as surely as a regular expenditure would; the benefit to religion — and the potential insult to Establishment values — is precisely the same.”

Anyone who believes that these five justices — Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy — decided the case “on the merits,” in accordance with legal precedent and without being biased by their Catholic faith, is simply naive.

One of the great fictions of American civil religion, and a pillar of American legal education, is the idea that justice is blind and judges decide cases by applying the law to the facts. No one has greater interest in maintaining this fiction than Supreme Court justices — the high priests of this religion.

The Catholic justices knew what result they wanted. They then searched for law and logic that would support their position, no matter how contorted or ridiculous. In ancient Greece, this was called sophistry. In modern America, it is called law.

At least we can give the Catholic blogosphere credit for calling a spade a spade. The happy headline over at The Catholic Knight declares: “Supreme Court Hands Victory to Catholic Schools.” A more accurate headline would be: “Five Catholic Justices Hand Victory to Catholic Schools.”

Postscript: In an unrelated story, Dahlia Lithwick nicely captured the spirit of this post:  “Because we are a romantic people who want to believe in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, we also believe that something magical happens to justices and judges when they don the black robes.” Of course nothing magical happens, even if the justices want us to believe otherwise.

“God’s words, the concept of godly government, are woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of our nation and this Constitution. It’s rightly called the Miracle in Philadelphia.”

Mr. Manship’s own words, in turn, get at the essence of the Tea Party movement, and in particular its chosen role as protector of the Constitution. Rather than viewing the Tea Party as a political phenomenon — rather than wondering if it is populist or Republican or reactionary — one might better understand it through the prism of religion.

Seen through such a frame, the Constitution is the Tea Party’s bible, and that holy book is embraced as an inerrant text.

Those inclined toward biblical literalism are also inclined toward constitutional literalism, which is never a good mixture when combined with the usual ignorance of drafting history and interpretive skills.  Where is Stanley Fish when we need him?

The first, by Frank Hornig and Michael Sontheimer, discusses the first ever Hitler exhibition at the German History Museum in Berlin.  As one might imagine, the curators had to approach the subject delicately and spent six years working on the presentation.  Why such concern?  Hitler was more than a politician — he deftly combined cultural eschatology with salvation, deliberately employing religious techniques:

Typifying the entire exhibition is an essay by Ian Kershaw, the British biographer of Hitler, who describes Hitler supporters’ quasi-religious relationship to their messiah. “It’s a miracle of our times that you have found me,” the dictator declared to 140,000 excited supporters in Nuremberg in 1936, “that you have found me among so many millions! And that I have found you, that is Germany’s good fortune!”

Kershaw takes a sentence uttered by a Nazi state secretary — that every German should “work toward the Führer to fulfill his goals” — as a good explanation of the inner logic of the Nazi dictatorship and of the crimes committed by a population that sometimes acted on its own initiative.

The German History Museum exhibition includes evidence supporting this thesis. There is a tapestry, for example, embroidered by members of two women’s groups in the town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. It shows Hitler Youth, SA and League of German Girls formations arranged in the shape of a cross, marching toward a church. The embroiderers further embellished the work with the text of the Lord’s Prayer in half cross-stitch.

Here we have a splendid example of the ways in which nationalism amounts to what we might call civil religion.  In the case of National Socialism and much modern nationalism, it might be better to call it uncivil religion.

My German friends would be the first to say, and have often said, that is all in the past and the new generation has moved on.  Apparently not.  In the second article, by Ole Reissmann, a survey of 2,500 Germans reveals that far right attitudes are widespread and on the rise.  Jews, while still suspect, have taken second seat to Muslims:

For the first time, the pollsters asked whether the practice of Islam should be significantly restricted in Germany. A total of 58.4 percent of respondents said that it should be, even though such a restriction would violate Germany’s constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion.

What is particularly pertinent is that 55.5 percent of respondents who tended to otherwise reject right-wing extremist statements agreed with the statement on the practice of Islam. The study’s authors characterized this as a “modern racism,” which is based on cultural differences rather than on supposed genetic differences.

Some 17.2 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: “Even today, Jews have too much influence.”

The survey covered a number of other topics which are indicative of what the researchers call a “unified right-wing world view” (Weltanschauung), and the results are disturbing.  Before Americans and others begin clucking with schadenfreude, it might be best to look in the mirror deeply.

Indeed, there is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century. Michael Klarman of the Harvard Law School has a label for this urge to seek revealed truth in the sacred texts. He calls it “constitutional idolatry”. The[se are] the words of men, not of gods.

When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote.

This civil religion is taken for granted as a manifestation of natural law, always a sure sign that someone’s interests are being served and those interests have been mystified or hidden behind empty slogans such as “democracy, patriotism, and freedom.”

• American Christianity is not well, and there’s evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize — or at least want to admit.
• Culturally, America is still a Christian nation.

Vampire writer and gothicist Anne Rice may be many things, but bellwether of American Christianity she is not — this probably accounts for Lobdell’s confusion.

While it may be true that more Americans are distancing themselves from organized Christianity, the majority of Americans — 78.5% to be exact — claim affiliation with Christian denominations.  The statistic that has Lobdell concerned about Christianity in America is the growing number of people who say they are “Unaffiliated” (16% of Americans) with any particular faith or denomination.

What Lobdell seems to misunderstand is that the majority of these unaffiliated remain Christian; they simply do not identify with any particular Christian denomination or church.  This in fact is what Anne Rice said she was doing — leaving the Catholic Church but retaining her Christian faith in the gospels.  An astonishing 98% of Americans believe in God, and most of these believe in a Christian God.

This churched and unchurched Christianity, in turn, accounts for the widespread hostility to the construction of an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero, and a more generalized hostility toward Islam.  In “Why Has Islam Become So Controversial in America,” Max Fisher puzzles over this hostility and surveys seven attempts to explain it.

While there is some truth to each of these explanations, none address the fundamental issue: most Americans are Christians and American Christianity has long been — and remains today — exclusivist and intolerant.

This is not simply my perception or sense of the situation after too many trips to Wal-Mart.  It is a fact confirmed by sociologist Stephen Merino in his recently published article — Religious Diversity in a “Christian Nation”: The Effects of Theological Exclusivity on the Acceptance of Religious Diversity.

Merino’s findings are hardly surprising:

• 66% of Americans believe it is “important” to be Christian in order to be “truly American”;
• 65% of Americans believe that the founders intended for America to be a “Christian nation”;
• 55% of Americans believe that the US Constitution actually establishes a “Christian nation”; and
• 80% of Americans believe that the nation was founded on “Christian principles.”

Of these Americans, a large majority also profess belief in the principle of “religious freedom.”  But the freedom they have in mind is the freedom to practice a Christian faith — they are quite intolerant and unwelcoming of “other faiths.”  As Merino suggests, “when many Americans think of religious diversity, the have only Christian diversity in mind.”

Among evangelical protestants (and especially those in the south), Merino found that special enmity is reserved for two groups: Muslims and atheists.  This fact may explain Christopher Hitchens’ surprising article defending the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero.  The atheist Hitchens may have concluded that the enemy (Islam) of his enemy (evangelicals) is a friend.

As you can see in the first frame, a cross is prominently displayed.  The symbolism here is powerful — Christian America is at war with radical Islam.

This undoubtedly will be a hot button issue in the upcoming elections.  Politicians will campaign as fervent patriots and condemn as a blasphemer or non-patriot any candidate who does not oppose the mosque.  As is usually the case when religion and politics mix, it will be an ugly race to the bottom.

At about the same time, groups also began to identify themselves with particular city-states — this was the beginning of nationalism, the third major factor that creates group identity.  Today, nationalism surely plays the dominant role in group cohesion around the world.  One of the best treatments of this complex subject comes from Benedict Anderson’s classic book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

Another approach to this subject comes from the sociologist Robert Bellah, who has written extensively on nationalism and what he calls “civil religion.”  Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle elaborated Bellah’s notion of civil religion in their controversial and compelling article, “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion.”  The article begins with a commonplace observation: “Americans live in a culture that is as religious as any that exists.”  Few will argue this point, as the United States — along with countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia — routinely rates highest in the world on measures of religiosity.  Marvin and Ingle are not, however, referring to American Christianity.  The religion of which they speak is American nationalism:

In this article we contend that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States, and perhaps in many other countries. Structurally speaking, nationalism mirrors sectarian belief systems such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and others that are more conventionally labeled as religious. It happens that nationalism also satisfies many traditional definitions of religion, but citizens of nation-states have religious reasons for denying it. We argue that both sectarian and national religions organize killing energy by committing devotees to sacrifice themselves to the group.  We also explore the ritual role of media in propagating national religion. Media are not the most important ritual vehicles for nationalism, but they matter. Though based in empirical observation, our claims are theoretical in nature. Their value lies in re-thinking certain empirical phenomena in relation to notions of nationalism and religion in the contemporary world. Although our examples come mostly from the United States and its majority sectarian faith, and although generalization is risky, the principles we describe are broadly applicable to other enduring groups, defined as groups for which members are willing to give their lives.

The remainder of Marvin and Ingle’s article is devoted to analyzing the ways in which American nationalism (and most nationalisms) are similar to — or are the equivalent of — religion, which they define as “a system of cosmological propositions grounded in a belief in a transcendant power expressed through a cult of divine being and giving rise to a set of ethical prescriptions.”  While I find many of their arguments persuasive, I am less impressed by their use of Durkheim and totemism to explain the parallels.  I also think they have missed many points of similarity between religion on the one hand and American nationalism on the other.

With this in mind, I have created my own list of equivalencies:

• God = United States of America
• Sacred Texts = Constitution/Declaration of Independence
• Exegetical Texts = Laws/Gettysburg Address
• High Priests = Supreme Court Justices
• Ritual Leader = President
• Ritual Acolytes = Congress
• Guardians of Faith = Military
• Saints = Dead Presidents
• Sacred Ritual Object = Flag
• Ritual Icons = Eagle, Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore
• Profession of Faith = Oaths
• Believers = Patriots
• Sacred Text Scholars = Lawyers
• Liturgy = Pledge of Allegiance/National Anthem
• Relics = National Archives/National History Museum
• Hymnals = National Anthem and “God Bless America”
• Ritual Incantations = “Freedom, liberty, democracy”
• Sins = Crimes
• Purgatory/Hell = Prison
• Sacrifice = War
• Tithes = Taxes
• Temples = Lincoln Memorial, Washington Memorial, Jefferson Memorial
• Sacred Places = Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero
• Sacred Myths = Boston Massacre, American Revolution and Civil War
• Badge of Faith = Passport

Given these equivalencies, no one should be surprised by the fact that the most religious Americans also tend to be the most patriotic or nationalistic Americans.  The two go hand in hand.

Marvin and Ingle conclude their article by commenting on how the religion-like attributes of nationalism bind groups together; I will close with their words:

Cohesion in enduring groups is accomplished within a framework of violence as a structural rather than contingent social force, religion as the truth that we are willing to die for, and the re-presentation of society to itself through blood sacrifice rituals performed on the bodies of supplicants. The most powerful expression of this religious framework in the United States, and perhaps not only there, is nationalism. On the surface, we deny nationalism’s religious attributes and functions in order to keep the the killing authority of the group from being challenged by sectarian faiths that have been stripped of the power to sacrifice the lives of devotees. When these faiths or others do challenge totem power, a totem that wishes to endure must fend them off decisively. This means by killing its own, if necessary. If it does not act, a new enforcer may overthrow it.

In God & War: An Audit & An Exploration, Greg Austin, Todd Kranock and Thom Oommen explain the goal of their study and conclusions:

One organising feature of this article is what it calls the ‘Religious War Audit’. BBC asked us to see how many wars had been caused by religion. After reviewing historical analyses by a diverse array of specialists, we concluded that there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel/Arab wars from 1948 to now, often painted in the media and other places as wars over religion, or wars arising from religious differences, have in fact been wars of nationalism, liberation of territory or self-defense.

This article concludes that at a philosophical level, the main religious traditions have little truck with war or violence. All advocate peace as the norm and see genuine spirituality as involving a disavowal of violence. It is mainly when organised religious institutions become involved with state institutions or when a political opposition is trying to take power that people begin advocating religious justifications for war.

It is not hard to identify the difficulties which afflict any study of this kind.  Disentangling religion from nationalism is a nearly impossible task.  The rise of organized religions coincides with the rise of city-states; religion has been married to power from the beginning.  The problem with the religious war audit (found on pages 13-14 of the study) is that it does not recognize this marriage, and thus seriously underestimates the role of religion in many of the wars that are listed.

The first war listed in the chart, the First Battle of Megiddo (1469 BCE), was undertaken by an Egyptian pharaoh, who was a self-proclaimed god-king.  The soldiers in his army were not fighting on behalf of a secular Egyptian empire; they were fighting because their god-king commanded it.  Despite this fact, the war audit authors rate this battle as a “zero,” which means that religion played no role in the conflict.  This is absurd.  There are several additional examples.

Take, for instance, the Greek-Persian Wars (499-488 BCE) which are also rated as a zero (i.e., religion supposedly played no role in these conflicts).  These wars actually started much earlier, given that Cyrus the Great conquered Ionia in 547 BCE and successor Persian kings (Darius the Great and Xerxes the Great) — all of whom proclaimed themselves to be deities and were worshiped by their peoples as such — continued fighting the Greeks until 451 BCE.  These were  not simple wars of empire — in each case, the Persians were commanded by god-kings and the Greeks knew that if they were conquered, they would be forced to give up their gods and worship Persian deities.

I could go on with similar examples, but the point is clear: we should treat this religious war audit with considerable skepticism.  Rossano, however, largely accepts the war audit findings:

Brace yourselves, those for whom religion equals war. The majority of all wars (44/73 or 60 percent) had no religious motivation whatsoever — a zero rating. Only three wars — the Arab conquests of 632-732, the much ballyhooed Crusades, and the Reformation Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries – earned a 5, and were thus considered to be truly religious wars. Only seven wars earned a rating of 3 or more — less than 10 percent. Thus, the vast majority of all wars involved either no religious motivation or only a modest one. The authors concluded by noting that “there have been few genuinely religious wars in the last 100 years. The Israel/Arab wars were wars of nationalism and liberation of territory” (p. 16).

There are many Jews and Muslims in the Middle East who surely would be surprised to learn that the Israeli/Arab wars rated a mere 2 on the religiosity scale, and that those wars were driven mostly by nationalism and territory.  I think if someone surveyed the participants, they would say something much different.

Rossano concludes his article with this observation: “Outside of kinship, nature has come up with nothing more effective for creating group cohesion than religion.”  He is right about kinship — for the vast majority of human history, it has served as the primary bond for group cohesion.  Nature did not, however, come up with religion — humans created organized religion to serve specific needs and goals.  One of these goals has been to organize people for war.

In more recent times (i.e., over the last 700 years or so) another factor has played a major (if not dominant) role in group cohesion.  That factor is nationalism, and it has much in common with religion.  In tomorrow’s post, I will detail the many ways in which nationalism is analogous to religion.

In most cases, functional explanations revolve around proximate rather than ultimate causes.  A good analogy would be the feathers on birds.  Looking at birds today, many of us would say that the purpose — or function — of feathers is to enable flight.  If, however, we look deeper into the evolutionary past, we learn that feathers first appear on proto-birds (i.e., dinosaurs) that could not fly.  The function of feathers, at least initially, was for thermoregulation.  This function of feathers was an ultimate cause.  Feathers kept these flightless dinosaurs warm.  Only later were feathers used for flight.  This function of feathers was a proximate cause.  Feathers are a perfect example of what Stephen Jay Gould usefully called an “exaptation” — something evolves for one purpose (ultimate cause) and at a later time is adapted for a different use (proximate cause).

With these things in mind, Philip Goldberg’s recent article on the several functions of religion was quite interesting.  With alliterative flair, Goldberg lists these functions:

1. Transmission: to impart to each generation a sense of identity through shared customs, rituals, stories, and historical continuity.

2. Translation: to help individuals interpret life events, acquire a sense of meaning and purpose, and understand their relationship to a larger whole (in both the social and cosmic senses).

3. Transaction: to create and sustain healthy communities and provide guidelines for moral behavior and ethical relationships.

4. Transformation: to foster maturation and ongoing growth, helping people to become more fulfilled and more complete.

5. Transcendence: to satisfy the longing to expand the perceived boundaries of the self, become more aware of the sacred aspect of life, and experience union with the ultimate ground of Being.

I want to take a closer look at Goldberg’s list and briefly comment on each item.

Transmission:  Although religions (especially post-Neolithic and modern ones) can indeed “impart to each generation a sense of identity through shared customs, rituals, stories, and historical continuity,” religion does not always function this way and in the deeper past rarely functioned this way.  A sense of identity can come from many sources other than religion.  Few hunter-gatherer societies, past or historic, derived their sense of identity from their supernatural beliefs (“shamanisms”).  In modern times, perhaps the most powerful source of identity comes from nationalism or what the sociologist Robert Bellah calls “civil religion.”  The same is true of shared customs, rituals, stories, and history.  These have many sources, not all religious.  Think about the customs, rituals, stories, and history surrounding the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, which are not considered by most to be religious holidays or occasions.

Translation:  With this function, Goldberg is getting closer to an ultimate cause.  The various aspects of mind which give rise to supernatural beliefs (and which eventually led to the formation of religion in more recent times) assist us in perceiving and interpreting the world, even if these perceptions and interpretations are often mistaken.  Humans are hard-wired to think in terms of cause and effect.  This is part of our unique evolutionary history.  Whenever we observe an effect — whether it be a birth, a disease, a death, an accident, or a natural disaster — we almost universally will attribute a cause.  When we are lacking an empirical explanation — which has been the case throughout most of human history — the explanation will be supernatural.  Religions are built on this foundation.

Goldberg’s translation function falters, however, when he claims that religion helps us acquire “a sense of meaning and purpose.”  Although this is certainly one function of modern religions, it was not a function of the earliest religions or the supernatural traditions (shamanisms) which preceded religions.  I have read hundreds of hunter-gatherer ethnographies and ethnohistories, and have yet to encounter a hunter-gatherer society in which the meaning and purpose of life was unclear or even a question.  People began to wonder about the meaning and purpose of life during the Axial Age, during a time of mass urbanization, increasing social stratification, widespread warfare, despotic rule, and disintegration of kinship groups.  Along with these changes, large numbers of people experienced — for the first time — disease, poverty, oppression, and slavery.  Under these conditions, it is easy to see how people might begin to question the meaning and purpose of their miserable lives.  Ironically, when Hobbes characterized life in pre-state societies as “nastie, poore, brutish, and shorte,” he was much closer to describing life in more recent, large-scale societies.  Life in industrialized and capitalist societies has simply amplified the question of meaning and purpose.

Transaction:  Here we again encounter the canard — or historical fiction — that religion creates and sustains morals and ethics.  As I discussed in this post (“Religion Functions to Sustain the Moral Order — Starkly Wrong“) and several others (use the blog’s search function and type “morals, morality, or ethics”), this idea is quite recent and originates with Zoroastrianism and later, Judaism (i.e., the Ten Commandments).  It received major support from Plato, whose metaphysical ideas were incorporated into Christianity initially by Saul/Paul and subsequently by Augustine.

Transformation:  There are many paths to maturation and growth without religion.  The study of history and other cultures demonstrates that many peoples are “fulfilled” and “complete” without recourse to religion.

Transcendence:  There does seem to be a universal human longing to experience altered states of consciousness.  Whether these altered states amount to “the sacred” or “ultimate being” is another question altogether.  In shamanisms, these altered states of consciousness were induced not to seek union with the sacred or divine, but instead were used for instrumental purposes — to accomplish a specific goal related to some aspect of life that was troublesome.  Shamans seek contact with the spirit world — and hence transcend the physical self and world — in order to prevent misfortune, cure illness, and promote success (in hunting and other matters).  They did not seek transcendence for its own sake.  Indeed, it was considered dangerous to do so.  Having said all this, it is easier to understand why people in large-scale modern societies might seek to transcend an existence that is either actually or experientially impoverished.

Supernatural thinking arises naturally from the normal operations of the evolved human brain-mind.  Any attempt to explain religion that does not begin with these aspects of mind will fall short because the many functions of supernatural thinking and religious belief are proximate rather than ultimate causes.