The Old Religious Disestablishment and the New Religious Establishment

In the 1830's Alexis De Tocqueville wrote: “[T]here is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”

Ely Cathedral

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The Early American Religious Disestablishment

The United States was the first nation in history to officially disestablish Christianity. Even after the Wars of Religion in the early 17^th century, most European nations were officially Christian in some capacity. The U. S. national religious disestablishment was a work of genius, not because, as secularists sometimes opine, it purged the nation of Christian influence in politics (it did not), but because it prohibited any particular Christian denomination (in this case, the Church of England) from getting special privileges from the national government. All of the colonies that had become the first states had Christian establishments well into the 19^th century, and the Founders did not want the Feds intruding into the states’ official religious establishments.[1] The Founders disestablished Christianity at a national level precisely because they were so ardently in favor of Christian hegemony elsewhere. Where did that Christian hegemony chiefly reside? Not even mostly in the state churches or establishments, but in the hearts and lives and non-state institutions of the citizenry, what we today call civil society.

The Early American Religious Establishment

The keenest observer of the early United States was not an American but a French Roman Catholic intellectual, Alexis De Tocqueville. In his perennially relevant and profound work Democracy in America written in the 1830s and 1840’s, he observes that “there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”[2] Tocqueville goes on to lay out the relation of church and state as well as religion and state in early America. He judges the separation of church and state a stroke of genius, because it discourages Christian denominations from acrimonious disputes over which one is officially favored and which ones are disfavored, disputes that had plagued Christian Europe for centuries. Yet America’s official separation of church and state is by no means separation of the state from Christianity. Virtually all citizens embraced Christian morality necessary to a society of virtuous liberty.[3] While the revolutionary skeptics in Europe saw Christianity in its official alignment with the state as an enemy of political liberty, the Americans saw Christianity in its official disestablishment but in its establishment in the hearts of the citizenry as the bulwark of political liberty. No Christianity, no liberty. Christianity bolstered a minimal, liberty-protecting state without entangling with it ecclesiastically. This combination made the early United States an extraordinary society in human history.

The New American Religious Disestablishment

This unofficial Christian establishment has been gradually dismantled in the last century. This disestablishment in the hearts and lives and pre- and non-political institutions (family, church, business, etc.) of U. S. citizens is not the inevitable consequence of the Founders’ original constitutional separation of church and state, as many on today’s New Right claim. Rather, it is the effect of the loss of Christian culture, of the citizenry’s gradual abandonment of the Christian Faith under the influences of alien philosophies like Darwinism, higher biblical criticism, naturalism, and existentialism. In other words, Christianity has been disestablished in the lives and hearts and institutions of the United States.

But since establishment of some kind is an inevitable concept, the Christian establishment in the citizenry has been replaced by a new establishment, and that establishment is radical individual autonomy.

The New American Religious Establishment

Autonomy means “self-law.” It is the antithesis of theonomy, God’s law. A great transformation occurred in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries with the emergence of Romanticism.[4] Romanticism is the idea that reason must be subordinate to feeling, instinct, and intuition, and that the individual should spend his life inventing (and reinventing) himself to his own subjective satisfaction. Before this, most everyone in any culture recognized that man is called to conform himself to objective standards of reality, whether they be God’s written law, as Hebrews and Christians believed; the heavenly bodies, as ancient pagans believed; or natural law, as both sophisticated pagans and even many Christians believed. This all changed with the Romantics. Man’s subjective feelings and instincts and emotions are to be the guiding principles of his life. Man lives a stunted, stifled, stymied existence if he must conform to God’s Word or to creational norms. But if he is “liberated” to follow his internal “authentic” person, he will experience the fulfilled life.

This autonomy plagues every aspect of postmodern life, but it is exhibited most graphically in human sexuality. At first, the Sexual Revolution of the 60s granted autonomy in all consensual adult heterosexual relations. Over time the heterosexual qualification was struck down: homosexuality was normalized, and with the Obergefell decision, “gay marriage” was codified. Simultaneously, “transsexuality” became the spear-tip of the Revolution. Today parents can be ostracized and marginalized, and perhaps even fined, if they stand in the way of their 15-year-old girls getting “top surgery” (a double mastectomy) and phalloplasty to (allegedly) become males. After all, if the birth body is simply a vehicle for carting around the real person, then it can be altered to conform to the Authentic Self. This medical practice (“gender affirmation surgery”) on children is nothing short of child abuse, and the doctors performing it, as well as the counselors that approve it, should be prosecuted. But it is a result of the relentless logic of radical individual autonomy.

Conclusion

The cure to this cultural horror is not, as some new conservatives advise, to capture centralized political power and impose a national political Christian establishment. Nor is it to create the union of church and state as in old, factious Europe. Rather, it is to restore the religious establishment of early America – the establishment of the Faith in human lives and hearts and institutions, like the family, the church, business, education, music, technology, economics, and every other area of life. This is the only legitimate Christian establishment, and it is the only one that can produce relative peace and harmony and satisfaction before the eternal state.

Personal

Sharon and I are finally arriving home after a long Southeastern tour. It was great to see many of you. A highlight of the tour was a visit with my junior high Bible and English teacher and basketball coach, Dr. James Chapman, later a Christian college English professor for many years as well as a textbook writer. I believe it was about 30 years since I saw him last, and it was such a delight to meet his dear wife Ann. His impact on my life at an impressionable young age was extensive, and there’s no way I could do what I’m doing today without that godly influence. His teaching approach was neither aggressively imperious nor passively permissive, but calmly authoritative. His teaching was direct, thoughtful, lucid, understated, and content-rich. He was the consummate grammarian, and even today as I speak and write, I can see the sentences diagrammed in my mind’s eye. His grammar textbooks have been used in many thousands of Christian day schools and home schools.

Jim Chapman cast a huge shadow.

Yours for the King,

Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership

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[1] Daniel L. Dreisbach, “The Constitution’s Forgotten Religion Clause: Reflections on the Article VI Religious Test Ban,” Journal of Church and State, 38 [Spring 1996], 261–295.

[2] Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 303.

[3] P. Andrew Sandlin, Virtuous Liberty (Coulterville, California: Center for Cultural Leadership, 2023).

[4] Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999).