Separation of Church and State – A Series of Articles
This is the first in a series of articles on the Separation of Church and State and its relation to Christian Nationalism. This first article deals with the origin of Christian Nationalism in settling the US. Future articles will cover other aspects of this issue.
Jefferson Humanists has received a grant from the American Humanist Association to host two programs on Christian Nationalism. The first is on September 22nd when we will hear a detailed discussion of this topic by our special speaker, Nichole Shea Niebler, an officer of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The title of her program is: Preserving Church-State Separation Amidst Christian Nationalism and Project 2025.
The second is on October 20th. Americans United for Separation of Church and State editor, Bruce T. Gorley will offer his talk, Christian Nationalism: Historical Perspective and Effective Responses.
See www.jeffersonhumanists.org for more details
The Roots of Christian Nationalism
The term “Christian nationalism” has recently emerged in the social sciences and the media as a way of describing a worldview that has a long history in the United States.
Two starkly conflicting moral visions have struggled for ascendancy since the first Europeans landed on these shores five centuries ago.
- Is America a divinely ordained promised land for European Christians, or
- Is America a pluralistic democracy where all stand on equal footing as citizens?
The ideas of Christian Nationalism date back to long before the founding of the United States. Founders debated about whether the government should mirror the English Monarch or be something new. Still, the roots of the divine rights of kings and white supremacy were already deeply embedded in the new world. This was mostly due to edicts issued by two 15th century Catholic Popes.
Bestselling author, Robert P Jones has provided us with a detailed history of what has led up to what today we call Christian Nationalism. (1) White Supremacy began, he writes, with Christopher Columbus’s second trip to the New World. He was commissioned to return to the Americas in 1493 with a fleet of 17 ships, nearly 1,500 men, and more than a dozen priests to speed the conversion of Indigenous people who inhabited what he, along with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, still believed were Asian shores.
The return of Columbus in 1493 also precipitated one of the most fateful but unacknowledged theological developments in the history of the Western Christian Church: the creation of what has come to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. Established in a series of 15th-century papal bulls (official edicts that carry the full weight of church and papal authority), the Doctrine claims that European civilization and Western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races, and religions. From this premise, it follows that domination and colonial conquest were merely the means of improving, if not the temporal, then the eternal lot of Indigenous peoples. So conceived, no earthly atrocities could tilt the scales of justice against these immeasurable goods.
The Doctrine of Discovery merged the interests of European imperialism, including the African slave trade, with Christian missionary zeal. Dum Diversas, the initial edict that laid the theological and political foundations for the Doctrine, was issued by Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452. It explicitly granted Portuguese king Alfonso V the following rights:
“To invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
This papal decree, and others that extended and developed its principles, provided the moral and religious justification for an unfettered European colonial race for “undiscovered lands” and fertilized the blossoming African slave trade. The most relevant papal edict for the American context was the Bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in May 1493, with the express purpose of validating Spain’s ownership rights of lands in the Americas following the voyages of Columbus the year before. It praised Columbus and again affirmed the church’s blessing of and interest in political conquest, “that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”
That all changed in the 18th century with the Declaration of Independence which rejected rule by a despotic monarch and the resulting Revolutionary War. By the war’s end, multiple religions existed in the newly formed United States.
The framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights struggled with how to deal with the disparity between faiths and how these disparities might affect the role of government in the lives of Americans. The answer was to create a secular government that played no role in religious belief except for the guarantee of religious freedoms. The First Amendment to the Constitution was the result.
On September 22nd we will hear a detailed discussion of this topic including a call to arms by our special speaker, Nichole Shea Niebler, an officer of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Please don’t miss it.
