Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (129 page)

So a racial revolution, shaped by Evangelical Christianity, took shape quietly alongside a different revolutionary uprising by whites against whites. In the 1770s a gradual poisoning of relations between the British mother-country and the thirteen colonies became a political crisis, which ended in a colony-wide Declaration of Independence in 1776. The relationship of the Awakenings to this great fracture in anglophone power is not straightforward. One element in it was paradoxically the British victory in the Seven Years War, which in 1763 delivered New France (Canada) into British control. This forced the British government to face the problem of how a Protestant power might govern an overwhelmingly Catholic territory. One precedent was Protestant 'Ascendancy' government in Ireland, but already the punitive policies against Irish Catholics produced by two centuries of warfare after the Reformation were beginning to be modified; and the political situation in Canada, where there was no loyalist Protestant aristocracy with whom to ally, was very different. The British answer, embodied in the Quebec Act of 1774, imitated the success of a small-scale previous experiment in the Catholic Spanish island of Menorca, a British-ruled strategic base in the Mediterranean: it was a pragmatic alliance with the local French elite, and therefore inevitably with the Catholic Church. Protestants in the thirteen colonies were furious at this arbitrary outflanking of their culture and shared British values. A Continental Congress summoned to Philadelphia in 1774, amid statements on many commercial and taxation grievances, recorded its 'astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a Religion, that has deluged your island in blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world'.
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When anger turned to open war, American Evangelicals were divided. Scotch-Irish clergy, with their own traditions of warfare against Westminster, were influential in articulating opposition to British misgovernment; Princeton University, forcing house for leaders of the Presbyterian Awakening, was a ready source of morale-boosting sermons and literature, and its Scottish President, John Witherspoon, was a leading figure in the Continental Congress through the revolutionary years.
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Yet Baptists gave no single opinion on the Revolution, mindful of the angry reaction which they had provoked in that same Continental Congress when they had complained about New England's compulsory levies for the established Congregational Church. The irony of the revolutionary slogan 'no taxation without representation' was not lost on Baptists.
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Quakers were harassed by the revolutionaries for their pacifism and, in ugly incidents echoed recently amid the American outburst of flag displays after the 9/11 attacks of 2001, they had their houses trashed for not displaying candles after the British defeat in 1783.
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Methodists, taking their cue from John Wesley's emphatic Tory loyalism, opposed the Revolution; so, unsurprisingly, did many Anglicans. When, in 1775, the Rev. Samuel Andrews of Wallingford, Connecticut, received Congress's order to lead his Anglican congregation in observing a day of fast, he obeyed it with aggressive wit by choosing his sermon text from Amos 5.21: 'I hate, I despise your feast days.'
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It was not surprising that Andrews was among those loyalists who could find no place in the new Republic, and who trooped north (often suffering great hardship) to take refuge in the remaining British territories of Canada.

Nevertheless, because the revolutionary leadership sprang from the social establishment in several colonies, it included many who were Anglicans by denominational loyalty, no less than two-thirds of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.
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Elite education tended to lead these Founding Fathers not to the Awakenings but to the Enlightenment and Deism (see pp. 786-7): cool versions of Christianity, or virtually no Christianity at all. The polymath Benjamin Franklin seldom went to church, and when he did, it was to enjoy the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer
decorously performed in Christ Church, Philadelphia; he made it a point of principle not to spend energy affirming the divinity of Christ. Thomas Jefferson was rather more concerned than Franklin to be seen at church on key political occasions, but he deplored religious controversy, deeply distrusted organized religion and spoke of the Trinity as 'abracadabra . . . hocus-pocus . . . a deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign to Christianity as is that of Mahomet'.
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In the face of such low-temperature religion, many on the present-day American religious right, anxious to appropriate the Revolution for their own version of modern American patriotism, have sought comfort in the ultimate Founding Father, George Washington, but here too there is much to doubt. Washington never received Holy Communion, and was inclined in discourse to refer to providence or destiny rather than to God. In the nineteenth century, patriotic and pious artists often spiced up Washington's deathbed with religion, giving him on occasion an almost Christ-like ascension into Heaven accompanied by a heavenly choir (see Plate 40), but the reality of the scene in 1799 did not include prayers or the presence of Christian clergy.
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What this revolutionary elite achieved amid a sea of competing Christianities, many of which were highly uncongenial to them, was to make religion a private affair in the eyes of the new American federal government. The constitution which they created made no mention of God or Christianity (apart from the date by 'the Year of our Lord'). That was without precedent in Christian polities of that time, and with equal disregard for tradition (after some debate), the Great Seal of the United States of America bore no Christian symbol but rather the Eye of Providence, which if it recalled anything recalled Freemasonry (see pp. 771-2).
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The motto 'In God We Trust' only first appeared on an American coin amid civil war in 1864, a very different era, and it was 1957 before it featured on any paper currency of the United States. Famously, Thomas Jefferson wrote as president to the Baptists of Dan-bury, Connecticut, in 1802 that the First Amendment to the American Federal Constitution had created a 'wall of separation between Church and State'. There was no one more shrewdly aware than Jefferson of the complexities of American politics, and he was speaking exclusively of the federal 'State', not of the constitutions of individual states.

Nevertheless one by one, those state Church establishments were dismantled; Massachusetts Congregationalism, almost the first establishment to be created, was the last to go, in 1833.
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Those Anglicans who had not fled north to Canada quickly saw sense and formed themselves into an episcopally led denomination suitable for a republic, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America; but their future was as a relatively small body with a disproportionate number of the wealthy and influential, their restrained and European ethos of devotion rather countercultural amid American Protestantism. Thus though the first lasting American English-speaking colony was Anglican Virginia, the rhetoric of covenant, chosenness, of wilderness triumphantly converted to garden, has descended in American political and religious consciousness from Governor Winthrop's expedition to New England. Since Winthrop's would-be monolithic Congregational Church establishment has also long gone, American Protestantism in its exuberant variety has adroitly grafted on to its memories of Massachusetts the obstinate individualism and separatism of the Plymouth Pilgrim Fathers - an ethos which Winthrop and his covenanting congregations deplored. All of this is served up with a powerful dose of extrovert revivalist fervour ultimately deriving from the Scottish Reformation.

The consequences of the British upheavals between the 1620s and 1660s were thus wholly out of scale with what could have been expected in the seventeenth century from a marginal, second-rank European power. Because Protestant anglophone culture has until the present century remained hegemonic in the USA, the American varieties of British Protestantism are the most characteristic forms of Protestant Christianity today - together with their offshoots, the most dynamic forms of Christianity worldwide. American Roman Catholicism too has largely left the Counter-Reformation behind, and in much of its behaviour and attitudes, it has been enrolled as a subset of the American Protestant religious scene. This is a Christianity shaped by a very different historical experience from western Europe, and similarities in language and confessional background may mislead us into missing the deep contrasts. In the next century, American and European Protestants went into partnership with the aim of creating a new Protestant empire of the mind across Asia and Africa; but when they set out to bring the Gospel to new lands, they did so from countries increasingly in disagreement about the nature and content of that Gospel and the God which it proclaimed. When the literary executor of C. S. Lewis, the British novelist, literary scholar and Christian apologist, gathered together a set of Lewis's popular apologetic essays, he gave the little book and one of its chapters a title from Lewis's metaphor of God standing in the accused's box in an English courtroom - 'God in the Dock'.
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To see how God arrived there, we need to venture into a meeting with the Enlightenment, that transforming force of Western culture which took shape alongside the Reformation itself.

PART VII

God in the Dock (1492-present)

21

Enlightenment: Ally or Enemy? (1492-1815)

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL PHILOSOPHY (1492-1700)

In 1926 Max Ernst, Surrealist German artist, lapsed Catholic and hag-ridden veteran of the First World War, created a startling image of the Christ Child (see Plate 65). It may be read merely as a piece of smart modernist irreverence: Ernst painted the Virgin Mary delivering young Jesus a good slapping over her knee, with the naked Child's halo fallen ignominiously to the ground. Yet, as with so much of Western culture over the last three centuries, Ernst's risky creation is resonant with echoes of ancient Christian themes. Quickly apparent is its reversal of one of the commonest cliches of Western medieval art. Many a devotional painting in the churches of medieval Europe had portrayed the donors directing their gaze to the Virgin and Child; now, in 1926, Ernst and his friends the writers Andre Breton and Paul Eluard turned their cold and casual glances on the scene almost covertly from a window.

Ernst would have known that he and his Surrealist friends were viewing another persistent motif from the medieval Age of Faith: the delinquent boy Jesus. It originated in apocryphal 'Gospels' from the first few centuries of Christian history which tried to improve on the scanty amount of information in the Bible about Jesus's childhood, and the stories descended into medieval poetry. Our Lord's apocryphal childhood misdemeanours could be extremely disagreeable, up to and including the murder of his playmates, albeit followed by his shamefaced restoration of the victims to life.
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Unsurprisingly, Our Lady considered it her parental duty to punish him, and she can be found doing precisely that, carved in wood and stone. There do not appear to be any extant examples of these spankings in stained glass; although glass was a favourite setting for visual images of the Mother of God (see Plate 30), it was more consistently elevated than sculpture in its doctrinal content, probably because it was more consistently visible. Christian music too took up the theme: a ballad probably seventeenth century in date, since it was sung in both old England and the American Appalachian Mountains, is entitled 'The Bitter Withy Tree'. It sings of the Christ Child cursing the tree from which his Mother has fashioned a cane with which to beat him for his brutal arrogance:

Then he says to his Mother, 'Oh, the withy! Oh, the withy!
The bitter withy that causes me to smart, to smart,
Oh, the withy, it shall be the very first tree
That perishes to the heart!'

Behind the story of European Enlightenment, which is sometimes told as a fairy-tale progression from Christian (and clerical) short-sightedness to a secularized clarity of vision, there lies a more interestingly complex narrative in which religion and doubt, blasphemy and devotion remained in dialogue, as they had done throughout Christian history. Western Christianity has faced the problem of Enlightenment more directly and perhaps more honestly than its devotional cousins among the Orthodox and non-Chalcedonians, and those who follow Western paths have often found the journey taxing and distressing. Yet there remains a Christianity which can claim to be a child of the Enlightenment, while still asserting its birthright in the past, rather as Ernst's picture can only be read within the Christian tradition which it might seem to be mocking. We may begin to see how this tangle developed if we return to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Amid the theological storms which fractured the Western Latin Church are repeated glimpses of other eddies of ideas which disrupted the assumptions of medieval Europeans about the world around them. Humanist scholarship was a vital force in these currents, because it opened up much new non-Christian literature surviving from the ancient world, innocent of Christian theological preoccupations. Renaissance humanists and the Protestant Reformers both tried to break away from old thinking, but they might have radically different goals. Luther and Zwingli saw many humanist concerns as no more relevant than any excess of scholasticism to humanity's absolute need for salvation by external grace. Accordingly the archetypal humanist scholar and activist Zwingli supported the primarily scholastically trained lecturer Luther rather than his former humanist hero Erasmus in the clash over human free will in 1524 (see pp. 613-14). Rival Churches commandeered humanist scholarship for their own purposes in theological warfare. They deployed skills like philology and historical criticism, but rarely valued objectivity; they drew on creative humanist discussion of schooling, the more efficiently to drum uniformity into young minds. The suppression of humanist doubt proved temporary, yet confessionally engaged scholars kept on trying.