Dissident Dispatches
Page 22
The American Revolution as a War of Religion
Indeed, from its beginnings in a petty colonial rebellion to its latest incarnation in Obama’s Transnational Republic, the American Revolution has waged continuous religious and civil war on established trinitarian ideals and traditions in state, church, and civil society. The colonial rebels effectively turned their rowdy assaults on the established authority of throne and altar into a symbol of liberation for all mankind. Within a few years, what began as a parochial battle to preserve the particularistic liberties of the free-born Englishman became a permanent (and ongoing) crusade to vindicate the universal rights of man, first, on both sides of the Atlantic and, since then, around the world.
The conflict was initially “about” legal aspects of political authority, taxation and trade, but JCD Clark demonstrates that it was also “about” religion: “not only because religion created intellectual and social preconditions of resistance but also because religion shaped the way in which British and colonial legal thinking developed and came to define certain practical problems as non-negotiable”. He characterizes the Revolution of 1776 “theologically, as a rebellion by groups within Protestant Dissent against an Anglican hegemony, a rebellion which played on divisions within the Anglican Church itself”.276
Anglo-American constitutional discourse spoke in the language of both law and religion. A large majority of American colonists were Protestants who “defined themselves against Rome at a time when Protestantism was loud in proclaiming that it alone promoted civil liberty”. But “proliferating diversities” were the hallmark of Protestantism both in Britain and its American colonies. Not even the Church of England was spared “conflict and schism over the interpretation of its status and its theology”. All those “denominations which had separated from it in turn — Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker and others — competed for members with each other as well as with their parent”. Particularly in the colonies, the “uneasy and insecure existence of the sects,” together with the “need continually to justify their separation from a parent both powerful and attractive, acted as perpetual irritants” encouraging “Dissenters to wage a guerrilla war, sometimes desultory, sometimes militant, against the Church”. Clark contends that “the rebellion of Dissent against hegemonic Anglicanism” and the “rebellion of natural law against common law” were two sides of the same constitutional coin. The target of both rebellions “was the unified sovereign created by England’s unique constitutional and ecclesiastical development: King, Lords and Commons, indivisible and irresistible, credited (according to Blackstone) with absolute power by the common law, dignified with divine authority by the Church”.277
The American Revolution, on this account, was a war of religion not a national liberation struggle. American nationalism was the product, not the cause, of the break with Britain. Anglo-America experience in the colonial era “suggests that national identity during the Anglican ascendancy had a legal and religious structure quite different from the conceptual structure” of nationalism in the subsequent era of the nation-state. Clark suggests “that the denominational, monarchical formula of the Anglican ascendancy occupied the ideological territory so completely that it successfully inhibited the development of a nationalism built around culture and ethnicity”. For Clark, race-as-ethnicity is a one-dimensional, historical construct grounded in the secular, republican framework of the modern nation-state.278
In describing the religious war launched by the American Revolution, Clark’s sympathies plainly lie with the Anglican ascendancy. He mourns the passing of the old order and is not much impressed by the new scheme of things. In his view, “the sense of collective identity which existed within the framework of the monarchical state took a form importantly different than that to be found in the nineteenth century nation-state”.279 Its conceptual structure was provided by law and religion, not ethnicity. Indeed, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word “ethnick” was a synonym for “heathen; pagan; not Jewish; not Christian”.280 It belonged “by definition to the province of religion”. By religion, the Englishman identified himself as a Protestant Christian; by law, he was a subject of his king. The “personal, indefeasible relation between sovereign and subject” was “expressed simultaneously in terms of the God-given natural law and of the patriarchal relations of parent and child”. Well into the nineteenth century, a “[h]ierarchical social order, monarchy and religion formed an interlocking matrix of national identity for British subjects”.281
Before 1776, this was true for colonial Americans as well. On both sides of the Atlantic, “the relation of an individual to the state was still…legally defined…in terms of the subject’s allegiance to a particular monarch”. Allegiance “had a religious dimension”: it therefore bound the soul and conscience of every subject. Puritans and Anglicans alike “treated ‘kingdom’ and ‘nation’ as almost synonymous”. Both “assumed an identity of church and state”. Similarly, common lawyers felt a pressing “need to identify natural law with divine law, and so implicitly with Anglican Christianity”. Establishment “meant…that the Church represented the nation in its spiritual aspect, the two united in the person of an anointed king.” In the seventeenth century Anglican dream of national harmony elaborated by Richard Hooker, the Commonwealth of England established the Church as one of the three estates which together were the incarnation of the holy Trinity.282 Each comprising a separate social order, “those who prayed” stood, under the monarch, alongside “those who fought” in the House of Lords, while “those who worked,” were “virtually” represented by the landed gentry in the Commons.
Sovereignty was vested in a composite institution, the Crown-in-Parliament, not in an abstraction called “the people”. King, Lords, and Commons together constituted an earthly icon of divine majesty. In the old order, “religious discourse was not an anachronism”. On the contrary, “Anglicanism had been a powerful agency of state formation”. The hegemonic status of Anglican discourse was “profoundly expressed” not just in “the Church’s conception of itself” but also in the devolved power of ecclesiastical courts to enforce canon law upon the subjects of the King. Although ecclesiastical courts were “in marked decline” throughout the eighteenth century, bishops retained the right “to correct, deprive, suspend, excommunicate and stop the mouths of offenders”. When hearing cases involving moral transgressions such as defamation and fornication, church courts punished offenders “either with fines or the infliction of public penance”.283
In the Age of Enlightenment, the residual power of the canon law provided an easy target for the sceptical and the disaffected. “Both in England and the thirteen colonies, it was Dissenters and especially men of heterodox views in religion who were most articulate against the Blackstonian conception of sovereignty, since it was they who were most sensitive to its essentially Anglican nature”. The heterodox intelligentsia led by men such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams used the issue of ecclesiastical authority as a dog whistle to mobilize denominational opposition to the Crown-in-Parliament. They issued warnings against or denunciations of tyranny whenever rumours circulated about supposed plans to appoint an Anglican bishop for the colonies. Protestant sectarians offered fertile soil for conspiracy theories. Charges of “Popery” inevitably accompanied efforts by Anglican clergymen to assert their primacy even though no bishops or separate Anglican church courts were ever established in the colonies. As a consequence, Hooker’s conception “of the state as a single, corporate religious body” was “gradually, though unevenly, lost,” even in the colonies where Anglicanism was strongest. Almost everyone in America viewed the Anglican establishment as little more than as an unjust system of legal privileges, immunities, and material rewards denied to Dissenters.284
The theological consequence was denial of the incarnation of divine law in the institutional authority of “those who pray”. Arianism — the belief that Christ was not God like the Father but was
a lesser being created in time— or outright Deism (denying the divinity of Christ and, a fortiori, of the ecclesiastical Body of Christ) replaced the doctrine of the Trinity Accordingly, the cross was not a divine act of atonement for the sins of carnal, national Israel; rather, Christ’s suffering provides a moral example, deriving its force from the private judgement of individual believers. All Dissenters, however, saw the hand of Providence in the historic struggle against Popery. Speaking the language of natural liberty, they saw the separation of church and state as an essential safeguard against tyranny. The well-known Arian John Adams “created a scenario of world history” which stigmatised both the canon law of the church and the feudal law of the early English monarchy as “systems of tyranny”. More “vividly than any other development in denominational discourse,” Adam’s invective “steadily grew in its ability to persuade” his fellow colonists that the Stamp Act would restore the “inequalities and dependencies of the feudal system”. Similarly, opposition to an Anglican bishop for New England was portrayed as a struggle between “the people” against “the wicked confederacy” of temporal and spiritual tyranny.285
Clark observes that the constitutional consequence of Adam’s rebellion against the Anglican ascendancy was the creation of a unitary republic in which the power of the people was “paramount to every constitution, inalienable in its nature, and indefinite in its extent”. As a consequence, neither the separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial powers in the national government nor the federal sharing of powers with the States could effectively divide sovereign authority. The irony is that the political theology of sovereignty in the United States “proved to be as transcendent and absolute, as despotic and uncontrollable as in the United Kingdom”.286
The transferral of sovereignty to the people had the effect of homogenizing political power. The division between different branches of government no longer represented a Trinitarian balance of the One, the Few, and the Many. Now, all governmental officials — governors, senators, representatives, even judges — could be viewed as representatives of the people at large. The separation of executive, legislative, and judicial branches became simply a functional allocation of powers. The new regime employed the language of popular sovereignty to dissolve “the historic distinction between rulers and people, governors and representatives…and all parts of the government became rulers and representatives of the people at the same time”.287
The disintegration of the traditional trinitarian concept of representation not only homogenized political power, it also licensed the effective and permanent delegation of sovereign authority to the “agents and trustees of the people”. Indeed, “the people were not really part of the government at all”. Government was not a balancing of people, aristocracy, and church “but only the distribution and delegation of the people’s political power”. Radical democrats and Dissenters hoped that “the people” would retain their supremacy even as they stood outside the formal institutions of government by somehow “watching, controlling, pulling the strings of their agents in every branch or part of the government”. But, as we have come to realize, unless the power of the people becomes firmly institutionalized, political power must inevitably become the practical monopoly of those who occupy the formal institutions of government.288
As the trinitarian ideal of mixed and balanced government was displaced, Spirit, water, and blood were dissolved into the unitarian image of good King Demos. At first, homo Americanus was a white man. But, following the abolition of Negro slavery and the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the polite fiction that the United States was founded as a “White Republic” was no longer sustainable. “The people” have since been transformed into a bloodless, borderless, and gender-neutral abstraction. Meanwhile, Spirit can find no secure dwelling place within a “living Constitution” driven by the absolute imperatives of capitalist development in a society of perpetual growth. The life-giving force of water, too, has been degraded by the promiscuous offer of citizenship in a universal nation which refuses to recognize the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Well before the final break with Britain, Tory Loyalists warned their fellow colonists that “a secular republic could not, by definition, offer the prospect of a stable order”. America’s revolutionary democracy was the first state to exist “without a religion of some sort being united to it”. Loyalists predicted the eventual ruin of “those who fondly dream that the Christian religion would thrive equally well if the king were an atheist, and if it had no more protection from him than Mahometanism, Judaism, or Deism. Woe be to that king and to that nation in which such maxims should ever prevail”.289 In such circumstances, neither race-as-biology nor race-as-ethnicity could or did prevail against the solvent effect of the political theology of popular sovereignty — as white nationalists today know to their cost.
But, worse was still to come. Experience in Germany has shown that the formal existence of an established church is no guarantee that the trinitarian character of Christian nationhood will survive when both race-as-ethnicity and race-as-theology are subordinated to race-as-biology. Certainly, those who pray cannot survive as an autonomous social estate in the novus ordo seclorum inaugurated by the American Revolution. By establishing the one-dimensional matrix of modernity in the religion of the Republic, American revolutionaries set in motion the chain of events that eventually led to the catastrophe of German defeat in the Second World War.
The Holy Spirit of the German Volk
As things turned out, the creation of the American Republic was both a remote and a proximate cause of the destruction of the trinitarian social order and its theological underpinnings throughout Europe. The American Revolution inspired the enemies of the ancient regime in France to launch their own democratic revolution. In studied opposition to their own king, Dissenters and their political allies in England gave aid and comfort to colonial rebels during the American War of Independence. With the American and, soon afterward, the French examples before their eyes, English radicals worked steadily to undermine the Anglican ascendancy at home. By 1832, the long-term success of revolutionary modernism was assured. Elsewhere in Europe, the abolition of Christian monarchy unfolded steadily over the next century and a half, more or less dramatically, depending upon circumstances.
After the kings departed in defeat and disgrace from Germany and Austria after the First World War, ethnic nationalism stepped into the spiritual vacuum.290 Indeed, such an outcome was the predictable result of American entry into the Great War. By signing the Diktat imposed by the Allies at Versailles, the new republican government in Germany bought little more than a phony peace. For more than a decade afterward, German nationalists and conservative Christians were compelled to fight a cultural war on two fronts. They confronted two rival models of revolutionary modernism: in the East, the bloody spectacle of Bolshevik Russia and, to the West, the glitz and glamor of plutocratic, Jazz Age America. Germans were unprepared for this two-pronged Kulturkampf, not just because their anointed kings had disappeared but also because churches could no longer perform the traditional role assigned to “those who pray”.
Defeat and revolution in 1918 completed the century-long process which undermined the traditional spiritual ascendancy of the church in Germany. Since the Reformation, each of the regional Protestant churches “in the German territories had constituted themselves as organizations bound to a geographic region, its secular ruler, and its baptized population”. Each of the German Länder had its own Landeskirche. With the rise of German ethnic nationalism in the nineteenth century), the local and regional Protestant churches came to be called Volkskirchen, or people’s churches. This development occurred even before Otto von Bismarck masterminded the creation of an immensely powerful German nation-state. In the new Reich, “those who fight” and “those who work” soon overshadowed “those who pray”. The spiritual estate received the coup de grâce when the Kaiser abdicated and all the other regional princes
were removed as summi episcopi — heads of the church — in the Länder.291 No longer was the German nation a complex, confederal union of churches and kingdoms. After the war, conservative and nationalist Protestants were caught in a cleft stick; they feared a complete separation of church and state even as they loathed the democratic state established by the Weimar Republic.
But recent history taught them that while states come and go, the Volk remains the wellspring of national identity. Even before the war, many Protestant theologians defined the German nation exclusively in cultural, ethnic, and racial terms. By the 1930s, race-as-theology could not compete on equal terms with race-as-biology or race-as-ethnicity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, under the sceptical gaze of the higher criticism, trinitarian theology withered on the vine. Strange though it now seems, it was liberal Protestantism in Germany which transmuted Spirit from the realm of theology into that of biology and culture. This move was in no small part a romantic nationalist response to the revolutionary challenge of the secular Enlightenment. Enlightened minds enthroned in the theological faculties of German universities agreed that, as the medium through which Spirit becomes incarnate in human history, blood is much thicker than water. A vital step in that direction was taken by Hegel when the idea of the Volk “became an essential part of [his] narrative of world history”. He argued “that art, culture, and myth were ultimately reflections of the spirit of the particular people that produced them”.292
For Hegel, Spirit (Geist) was the “active force that shapes and drives history by the inner force of its own logic”. In the Hegelian dialectic, Spirit, or the “cunning of history,” produces a movement “from lower to higher levels of consciousness”. According to Shawn Kelley, that movement “also develops geographically and racially, as the levels of consciousness are assigned to particular races and particular peoples”. Hegel’s “racialized views of art and of history” quickly migrated into biblical scholarship where they exercised a formative influence on practitioners of the higher criticism. In particular, FC Baur, founder of the enormously influential Tübingen school, absorbed and promulgated an axiom of Hegelian historicism, the belief that the Greeks had created a fundamentally new civilization unprecedented in the history of the world. According to Baur, “[w]ith the Greeks we have the birth of the West and the triumph of Western individualism and freedom over Oriental despotism and servility”. Kelley’s work shows how Baur interjected “this fundamental antithesis between Western (free) Greeks and non-Western (servile) Orientals…into the very heart of his analysis of emerging Christianity”.293