A Christian country?

A Christian Country?

WHAT IS going on here? Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post professes to have been scared--that's right, scared, by the overt presence of Christian themes and delegates at the Dallas Convention. The New York Times resorted to a word infrequently heard in those quarters, "sin," condemning "Mr. reagan's trespass into the moral world." This applied to his remarks at a prayer breakfast, and is a singular formulation. The normally sober columnist William Safire hypothesized that Reagan might in his second term by contemplating a "struggle to impose a religious government on people who prefer to practice their religious freely."

In short, 1) Mr. Reagan has a right to his religious opinions; and 2) anyone who objects strongly to his brand of Protestant Christianity is encouraged to vote against him on that ground alone.

to be sure, a more complex reflection is called for. In case anyone has not heard about it, America is experiencing a tremendous religious revival, mostly outside the Boston-New York-Washington media corridor. This religious revival has cyclical precedents in American history; it has many sources and it takes many forms; but it is vital, growing, powerful. In the most general sense, it responds to the universal human intuition that there is something important beyond the Humean time-space envelope. The powerful return of that temporarily repressed human intuition is simply a cultural and political fact.

The first settlers in this country were religiously motivated; the Massachusetts Bay Colony was conceived as a dissenting Protestant utopia. Spanish traders and priests pioneered the West, where the Democrats held their recent convention in a city named for st. Francis. The movement to abolish slavery had its moral sources in John wesley and William Wilberforce, and the Union Army marched to the millennial strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The wagons and railroads moved westward for land and gold but also for God. Bryan campaigned against the "Cross of Gold" and Franklin Roosevelt, in his Declaration of War speech in 1941, promised victory over the Japanese, "so help us, God." The civil-rights movement had religious content, as does the peace movement. Religious books today make the sales of James Michener and Judith Krantz look trivial.

The United States survived as a freedom-enjoying nation for 180 years while school prayer was legal. What is so "scary" about the desire of the President and much of the community to bring it back?

One root of the bombast about Reagan's religious expressions is no doubt political. Liberals are justifiably afraid that he is tapping the energies of the present religious revival. But there is another factor operating. His critics appear to be afraid that he is attempting to reconstitute the Protestant consensus.

The fact of the matter is that for most of its history America was a Protestant country and brooked no argument about it. Both John Kennedy in Houston and Father John courtney Murray in his theoretical writings went far toward assimilating Catholicism into the American Protestant consensus, and Judaism has also flourished, mostly in its Reform or assimilationist branch. The older, mainline Protestant churches have weakened, meanwhile, and four strong contenders for power have emerged.

The first into the political arean was organized secularism, as epitomized by the ACLU. This thrust challenged the older consensus, going so far as to sue in court to abolish Nativity scenes on public property. The secularist thrust has aimed to make religion a purely private matter. In 1970, the government was actually sued over "In God We Trust." The government won. And the Supreme Court has now ruled that a creche can be displayed in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at Christmastime.

Chronologically considered, the second contender, and increasingly powerful, is the Protestant movement that has grown up outside the mainline churches, and is in part a protest against them. It has earlier roots in the great evangelical tradition, but it is also a response to the secularist thrust. It is committed to traditional values, especially in matters pertaining to sex. Some forty million Americans today attest that they are born-again Christians, and anyone who thinks that this is going to go away soon as a political force is whistling in the dark.

The third contender in American religious politics is the Jewish organizations that support Israel. They have a good deal of political power, and it is in part a religiously motivated power.

The fourth contender is the Catholic Church, which is especially militant on the subject of abortion. Someone is bound to ask Mrs. Ferraro or Mr. Cuomo at some point just why they are "privately" opposed to it--that is, on just what grounds--and then we will see some definitional scurrying.

These four religious forces are today potent in the American culture and therefore potent politically, and Mr. Reagan is doing very well with three of them. Perhaps that is what's "scary." But there is another force that has prevailed historically, and probably always will in this country, which could be called the manners of pluralism--an accommodating public theism that allows for diversity within its boundaries but is by no means "neutral" regarding religion. In God They Trust.