AMERICA'S FUTURE: ENLIGHTENMENT OR THE DARK HAND OF RELIGION?

Our heated election is played out against historical forces - the legacy of Enlightenment values and the power of reactionary religion.

The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is played out on an historical canvas that extends back to the founding of the Republic. Behind the competing politics of Trump and Harris are worldviews that have sought to shape American society since the late 18th century. One set of values, vested in reason, looks to the promise of the future. The other is retrospective and is conveyed by the dark forces of religion. I am not an historical determinist, but I affirm what might be described as a “soft dialectic” that courses through history. Difficult times are followed by better ones, while the possibility of reversion to darker moments always looms. Yet, despite ebbs and flows through time, I believe that the slow but incremental improvement of the human condition, however uneven, remains possible and is worthy of our best efforts. The current political environment marks a political inflection point at which this dynamic is brought into stark relief.

The United States, as expressed in our seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, emerged from an intellectual environment nurtured by the ideas of the European Enlightenment. Equality, justice, and the possibility of progress fueled the promise of a more perfect union and reflected a revolution in human thought that opened up limitless possibilities. In the transition from the medieval period, the Enlightenment ushered in the modern world and the revolutionary precept of liberal democracy, wherein the power of government would emerge not from God above but the people below.

Contemporary evangelicals and more extreme advocates of religious nationalism have long fabricated the myth that the Founders were devout believers such as themselves and they intended the United States to be a Christian nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Religion has little to do with the American democratic experiment. The ideas that gave rise to the new nation were drawn from European rationalists and the classical philosophies of Roman thinkers and statesmen. The United States was intended to be not a religious nation, but a secular republic with a secular government. Recognizing that the power of government, as noted, does not come from God but is the product of a social contract, its drafters ensured that by design the American Constitution was to be a totally godless document. The founding of the United States was a bold experiment and it is arguable that were it not for the decades in which doctrinal religion was leavened by deism, our nation as a liberal democracy may not have emerged.

Deists affirmed the existence of God, but once brought into being, “the Grand Architect of the Universe,” as George Washington often referred to the Almighty, actively withdrew from human affairs and permitted his creation to unwind obedient to natural laws that science had uncovered. Reason, not faith, was the governing principle of the Enlightenment.

In the early decades of the Republic, no more than ten percent of the population was affiliated with a church. By the 1820s, and the emergence of “the second great awakening,” religion began to spread through wider swaths of the population. The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian sects experienced meteoric growth. It was the period of God-intoxicated, charismatic, preachers who roamed the countryside, of tent ministries, and religious revivalism that stood in opposition to the rationalism which gave birth to the new nation. Religion was a counter-revolution and such deists as Thomas Paine and Jefferson were construed as infidels and objects of contempt.

It was also the period in which slavery gained full force and bitterly divided the nation. Religion and slavery went hand in hand and religion provided slavery with its most powerful justification. Slavery was preached from the pulpit, mostly in southern churches, but also found its voice in northern churches as well. Arguably race was not the primary driver of slavery, but the insatiable yen for profit, which concentrated great wealth in the hands of relatively few.

The evil of slavery gave rise to abolitionism, and abolitionist societies emerged even before the United States gained its independence. However, an interesting question emerges when considering where the ideas that inspired abolition originated. While some religious groups, the Quakers most notably, adamantly opposed slavery and some evangelicals as well, their numbers were few. For the most part, religion could not compellingly be invoked to counter slavery in that biblical authority provided its justification. A favored biblical verse was relentlessly repeated from the pulpit:

“Slaves obey our earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor, when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.” By keeping slaves and subjecting them to relentless degradation and cruelty, slave owners could readily be assured that they were fulfilling Christian virtue.

The abolitionist movement, which culminated in the Civil War, as noted, could not derive its intellectual foundation from religion. In a recent book,  An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Redounding of America, the philosopher and historian, Matthew Stewart, locates the intellectual foundations of abolition in the influence of German philosophers of the early 19th century. The thought of such scholars as the biblical critic David Strauss, who demonstrated that the Bible is a human creation, the proto-humanist Ludwig Feuerbach, G.W.F. Hegel, and even Karl Marx found their way into the writing and oratory of the leading abolitionists of the day. Clearly, their thought influenced American Transcendentalists. Among the most notable was Theodore Parker, the most left-wing antebellum theologian of the era who broke ranks as a Unitarian minister and was a relentless firebrand of abolition. German thought even influenced Frederick Douglass who incorporated the philosophies of Feuerbach and Hegel into his critique of slavery. A component of the German worldview was to free the mind from the shackles of religion.

If the power of religion was an assault on the Enlightenment, the abolitionist movement, so informed, was the rediscovery of Enlightenment ideas, which was a major force in bringing on the Civil War and ending slavery on the North American continent. Among Parker's most devoted followers was William Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's law partner. Herndon introduced Lincoln to Parker's sermons, which brought Lincoln's praise, and Parker's most notable ideas about slavery and American freedom found their way into Lincoln's thought and oratory.

It was such thinking that also gave rise to the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution; the Thirteenth Amendment irrevocably abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed birthright citizens and equality before the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment ensured male Black suffrage throughout the reunified nation. These amendments marked an extraordinary constitutional transformation. The noted historian Eric Foner identifies them with the “second founding” of America. Matthew Stewart asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment gave substance to the American ideal of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness far more than Jefferson's proclamation in the Declaration of Independence.

These Amendments that came into force during post-Civil War Reconstruction immediately enabled former slaves to hold political office and furthered the humiliation of the South. The end of Reconstruction in 1877 resulted in a vicious backlash in the service of white supremacy and an effort of former slaveholders to regain their power. The Amendments were interpreted by the states to almost totally suppress Black voting. It was the era of Jim Crow that segregated the races and held Blacks in check through violence and terror, inclusive of widespread lynching. It was among the bleakest periods of American history.

The churches played their role in sustaining the backlash. They were prominent in promoting the southern myth of the Civil War as “The Lost Cause.” Protestant sects were aligned with promoting the Southern culture of racism and white superiority. The 1880s also marked the beginning of the waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe which engendered widespread nativism. Reminiscent of the current moment, cries were heard that immigrant “hordes” were destroying the American dream.

The Ku Klux Klan after World War I grew into a grassroots organization of more than 3 million members. Needless to say, Blacks were the primary targets of the Klan's violent hatred. But second were Italian and Irish Catholic immigrants. Recent generations are probably unmindful of the dominant role of Protestantism in shaping American society, more precisely white, male Protestantism. And contempt for Catholicism, replete with conspiracy theories alleging planned subversion of the American government issued from the Vatican, was commonplace. If the post-Civil War Amendments recaptured Enlightenment ideals, the demise of Reconstruction in great measure was propelled by reactionary religion and the culture of white supremacy of which religion was a primary agent.

Religion is a complex phenomenon that takes many forms. While religion of the period was primarily a conservative, even reactionary, force, movements also emerged to counter the evils wrought by the Industrial Revolution. The period was equated with the golden age of liberal theology, which inspired progressive religious movements. Most prominent was the Social Gospel which sought to apply Christian ethics in the service of social justice. It aimed to ameliorate poverty, economic inequality, slums, child abuse, and related forms of oppression. Ethical Culture, founded in 1876 and with which I have been professionally affiliated with for half a century, created a new religious movement based on the realization of ethical ideals absent religious creeds or belief in a supernatural Deity. A child of the Enlightenment, Ethical Culture sustained a rigorous program of social reform. The authority of science in the late 19th century, which had never been greater, served to both liberalize religion as well as create a backlash out of which Christian fundamentalism emerged and spread its influence.

The 1930s and 40s, the rise of Fascism, often with the support of the churches, marked the darkest period in human history. It can trace its origins to the counter-Enlightenment of the 18th century. Led by such thinkers as the German historian Johann Herder, and the Englishman Edmund Burke, the counter-Enlightenment served as a basis for the modern conservative worldview. Those who opposed the Enlightenment promoted a Sturm and Drang sensibility that prized ethnic and religious solidarity over rationalism as a foundation by which to cultivate values and interpret society.

Out of the descent into Nazism and Fascism and the horrors of the Second World War, the West reclaimed the prominence of liberal democracy. The European continent experienced decades of peace and unprecedented solidarity. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s held the promise of economic egalitarianism that led the way to the creation of a robust middle class in the post-war years.

But the most dramatic phenomenon expressive of the Enlightenment values was what can be framed as the human rights revolution. The adoption in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the world community was a portentous achievement. With values traceable to the Enlightenment, the Declaration vouchsafes the unqualified and universal equality of all people. Historically the rights a person held was dependent on his or her ethnicity, religion, sex or social status. The consequences of the Universal Declaration were radical. It inaugurated a human rights revolution, whereby these qualifications no longer mattered. The circles of inclusion of people who had been historically marginalized were widened to give them a place at the table. The women's movement, the gay rights movement, and most significantly, the Civil Rights movement, were all the products of a newfound commitment to universal human rights. This, in just a few decades.

The period also saw the most liberal Supreme Court in the American history. Justices such as Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan reasserted the rights of the individual and reconfirmed the separation of church and state.

Much of this progressive ferment took place in the 1960s, which also experienced a democratization of popular culture. It, too, met with a response issuing from the right.

After the Scopes Trial of 1925, wherein the prohibition of the teaching evolution in the schools was upheld, the evangelical churches, greatly embarrassed by the scorn they received, retreated from the public square. After five decades of quiescence, they reentered the political realm in the late 1970s and thereby created what was the greatest shift in the American political landscape subsequent to World War II, moving it far to the right. The repoliticization of evangelical Protestantism opened the floodgates of religious power. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, and a legion of kindred groups, at one point held hundreds of members of Congress in their grip.

The cause of the evangelical engagement with politics was not in reaction to the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. It was rather a response to the removal of tax exemption from segregated Christian academies created after the Brown v. Board of Education decision that integrated the public schools. Hence, behind the conservative politics of today's evangelicals looms a racist rationale that has spread out to inform the extremist white supremacy surrounding Donald Trump and his followers at the current moment.

More than generally appreciated, it is my contention that the conservative values professed by the Christian Right are a major cause of the strife that has torn our society apart and threatens the end of American democracy. The conservatism and support for the Republican Party have transmogrified into the extremism exemplified by Donald Trump and his legion of acolytes and followers; tribalism, xenophobia, scapegoating, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and other forms of disparagement intent on shoring up his base of white, older males. Inclusive of Trump's appeal has been the embrace of irrationalism pervading the minds of tens of millions of Americans. This, too, I see as sustained by right-wing religious forces. Religious fundamentalists and extremists base their belief on faith, and against faith, reason can have no influence. And when reason loses its persuasive capacity, conditions are set for the emergence of authoritarianism.

Donald Trump and his legion of MAGA followers ominously conjoin the forces that history has revealed lie at the foundation of authoritarianism and fascism. The assault and scapegoating of marginalized people, the misogyny, the promotion of those construed to be “real” Americans, the loyalty demanded to a supreme leader, and the intensified rhetoric espousing hatred of others fall into recognizable patterns laying the groundwork for despotism.

Aligned with and fueling such authoritarian politics are the certitudes and sanctions that religion provides. We witness religious power coming from the right that is especially menacing. Evangelical Protestantism has virtually abandoned its spiritual character and has become little more than an extremist political movement promoting hatred of gays, restricting abortion, and greatly limiting the rights of women. While not all evangelicals are fundamentalists, many are. It is the intent of fundamentalism by definition to transform religious doctrine into the laws of the land binding on all.

It is such totalistic commitment that has given rise to Christian nationalism, which, despite our nation's identity and purpose established at its founding would transform the United States into a Christian nation as these zealots envision it. Needless to say, such a country would have little place for democracy or the fundamental freedoms that constitute the body and soul of America as we have known it.

Despite his religious indifference and his extraordinary reprobate character, Donald Trump is held up as the champion of the values that religious extremists seek to impose, and he could not have won the presidency in 2016 and will not win it again without their support. The authoritarian, narcissistic, and violent worldview he exemplifies and promotes is the culmination of the blood and soil religion that throughout history has seen democracy, freedom, reason, and pluralism as its enemies. Trump's vision looks backward to a time long past of white, male, hegemony, held together by an ethos of authoritarianism.

By contrast, Kamala Harris is forward-looking and speaks to an American future of expanding opportunity. She has made her commitment to democracy, our Constitution, and the rule of law major components of her message. By her politics and her persona, she exemplifies that American future. Harris recognizes, as did her venerable forbearer, Frederick Douglass, that the only possible future for America is a pluralistic one founded on the equality of all with citizens who engage each other in the spirit of mutual respect and cooperation. In so believing, Harris places herself on the side of the Enlightenment and the greatest sources of inspiration that have animated American achievement throughout its history.