So much so that the brightness blinds.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (doing things that would have driven Leo XIII bonkers) is in the midst of rallying Rome’s faithful for another all out defense of religious liberty. As a registered Libertarian Party member (have I ever voted for a Libertarian, I don’t know), who am I to take issue with another communion’s defense of liberty? But as a registered church historian, I am having trouble making sense of the Bishops’ call (which I believe is different from Jason and the Callers’ call).
First, this fortnight coincides with the feast day of Saints Thomas More and John Fisher. Here’s how Timothy Cardinal Dolan explains it:
Our two weeks begin tomorrow, June 21, and include moving feasts, such as June 22, the feast of Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher, both martyrs in England as they prophetically defended the rights of the Church against intrusion by the crown; June 24, the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, the one who defended God’s law to a tyrant and lost his head because of his courage; and, of course, Independence Day.
I understand that evangelical Protestants are not as knowledgeable of church history as they should be, but to bring up More and Fisher is to court some of the old antagonisms that divide Protestants and Roman Catholics. Not that evangelicals would be comfortable supporting the English monarchy, but neither were George Whitefield or Jonathan Edwards forerunners of the kind of evangelical-Roman Catholic co-belligerency kicked off by Evangelicals and Catholics Together. In which case, at a time when the bishops want to support religious freedom more generally, why invoke saints executed by Protestants or bring back memories of times when Protestants and Roman Catholics both advocated religious freedom but for the sake of excluding the other side (I believe we call that religious suppression)?
Second, invoking martyrs has the effect of making contemporary believers’ look ungrateful (for the blessings of religious liberty) and their pligths look pretty tame. Cardinal Dolan highlights the following as instances of “challenges to religious liberty”:
The HHS mandate, which presumes to intrude upon the very definition of faith and ministry, and could cause believers to violate their consciences
Impending Supreme Court rulings that could redefine marriage, which will present a host of difficulties to institutions and people who stand on their faith-based understanding of authentic marriage as between one man and one woman
Proposed legislation at the national and state levels that would expand abortion rights, legalize assisted suicide, restrict immigrants from full participation in society, and limit the ability of Church agencies to provide humanitarian services
Government intrusion into the rights and duties of parents regarding their children
Overt persecution of believers in many countries of the world
All of these are matters for concern, but in the context of martyrdom they seem trivial. One might argue that these sorts of threats to religious liberty are the road to martyrdom, but that would take a conspiratorial w-w. On the other side, one could also argue that this is part of the bargain that religious believers make with modern liberalism — we don’t get our way on how the government should rule or how our neighbors should live but we get to worship our maker and keep our lives. I suspect Christians in Iran and Egypt would take that deal.
Third, the bishops’ understanding of religious liberty is a historical bait-and-switch. On the one hand, they invoke the founders of the U.S. (fine), but then on the other hand bring up the nation’s anti-Catholic Protestant past without identifying Protestants (smart move) but pinning the blame on government (Roman Catholics used to have a higher view of government than Protestants):
Historically, what have been significant religious liberty issues affecting Catholics in our country?
Equal treatment of Catholic Schools: Catholicism was introduced to the English colonies with the founding of the Province of Maryland by Jesuit settlers from England in 1634. However, the 1646 defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War led to stringent laws against Catholic education and the extradition of known Jesuits from Maryland, as well as the destruction of the school they founded. During the greater part of the Maryland colonial period, Jesuits continued to conduct Catholic schools clandestinely. The American Revolution brought historic changes, and in 1782, Catholics in Philadelphia opened St. Mary’s School, considered the first parochial school in the U.S. In 1791, the ratification of the Bill of Rights, with the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, helped Catholics further cement the establishment of Catholic schools.
Regardless, anti-Catholic sentiment in the late nineteenth century led to opposition to parochial schools. State governments opposed providing funds to aid students attending parochial schools, which Catholics founded largely in response to the requirement to pray and read from Protestant Bibles in public schools. Some Members of Congress attempted to block all government aid to religiously affiliated schools with the proposed “Blaine Amendment” in 1875. This constitutional amendment was never ratified at the federal level, but many state legislatures adopted similar legislation and amendments. Those “little Blaine” amendments are still in place in the constitutions of about thirty-seven states, and still operate to block Catholic school students from equal participation in government educational benefits.
Anti-Catholic bigotry in presidential campaigns: During the 1884 presidential campaign, candidate James G. Blaine (who proposed the “Blaine Amendment” in Congress) attended a meeting in a church in New York at which a minister chided those who had left the Republican Party by stating, “We don’t propose to leave our party and identify with the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Blaine sat quietly during the anti-Catholic remark. The scene was reported widely in the press, and it cost Blaine in the election, particularly in New York City.
During the 1928 presidential campaign, Al Smith, a Catholic who had been elected governor of New York three times, was the Democratic candidate for president. It is widely believed that Smith’s Catholic beliefs played a key role in his loss of the 1928 presidential election, as anti-Catholic sentiment among the electorate was strong. Many feared that Smith would answer to the pope and not the constitution if elected president.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism became a major issue in the election. Like Al Smith, Kennedy faced charges that he would “take orders from the Pope” and could not uphold the oath of office.
Establishment of diplomatic relations with the Vatican: In the first years of the United States, the new Republic had contacts with the Papal States. However, in 1867, Congress prohibited the financing of any diplomatic post to the Papal authority. This began a period of over seventy years when the U.S. did not have a diplomatic representative to the Pope, coinciding with a period of strong anti-Catholicism in the U.S. In 1940, President Roosevelt sent a “personal representative” to the Pope who served for ten years. However, when President Truman nominated an ambassador to the Vatican in 1951, opposition mounted, and President Truman abandoned the effort. Presidents Nixon and Carter sent personal representatives to the Vatican. In 1984, President Reagan announced that full diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Vatican had been established, and the U.S. has continued to send ambassadors to the Vatican since then.
I hardly approve of this anti-Catholic bigotry in a nation that was supposed to be open to all faiths, but it is a strange narrative of U.S. history that begins with the founders notions of religious liberty (who were opposed to priestcraft and superstition — read Roman Catholicism) and then moves to the devilish ways (without naming them) that Protestants, who also defended religious liberty (and also opposed priestcraft and superstition), mistreated Roman Catholics. When Ray Nothstine writes that “Recapturing the fullness of religious liberty in America will require . . . a fundamental shift in how we view God and man and his relationship to the state,” he may want to consider how a theologically conservative view of God and man was responsible for Protestants and Roman Catholics persecuting each other.
Carl Trueman recently warned about the host of ways that mythologizing politics or religion polarizes the world. He is certainly right to argue that the religious right is not alone guilty of myth-making. At the same time, mythologizing religious liberty obscures how good our times are compared to those when church members actually died for their faith at the hands of members from the rival church. Not to mention that it obscures the rivalry that still exists (spiritually, not temporally) between those churches.
Update: Some Roman Catholics aren’t purchasing the bargain.
Old Life 
He is certainly right to argue that the religious right is not alone guilty of myth-making.
My limited edition print Prayer at Valley Forge says you are really reaching here.
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To the more substantive point of the post, when I hear RC clerics urging for religious liberty, I can at a certain level sympathize, since religious liberty is vital to a free plural society. But, it always strikes me that Rome comes off as at odds with itself – since this holdover Medieval institution only yielded liberty kicking and screaming when they no longer had enough power to enforce hegemony in Europe. Maybe they can point to the developments at Vat II, but to those of us on the outside, Vat II seemed like wallpaper over an authoritarian behemoth.
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Jed Paschall
Posted June 28, 2013 at 6:16 pm | Permalink
To the more substantive point of the post, when I hear RC clerics urging for religious liberty, I can at a certain level sympathize, since religious liberty is vital to a free plural society. But, it always strikes me that Rome comes off as at odds with itself – since this holdover Medieval institution only yielded liberty kicking and screaming when they no longer had enough power to enforce hegemony in Europe. Maybe they can point to the developments at Vat II, but to those of us on the outside, Vat II seemed like wallpaper over an authoritarian behemoth.
Calvin’s Geneva was no different.
See, it’s more a development in political philosophy than theology. From the beginning of man’s history, religion and government were intertwined. Having everyone on the same religious page was the best way to political stability.
Religion was a public enterprise. Even the Romans, in accommodating the countless gods they ended up conquering, dealt with it by a pluralism, a polytheism. But when the Christians insisted theirs was the One and Only God, there was a threat to the state. [Indeed, Constantine fixed the problem by institutionalizing Christianity!]
Medieval thinking still had a hangover from that. And remember in the early days of the Reformation, Luther approved of the slaughter of the Anabaptists and of course the Calvinists saw heresy as a civil crime and a threat to the political-social order as well and made it a capital crime.
I think it’s not just the Reformation, but the splintering of Protestantism beyond Lutherans and Calvans–it’s the multitude of “dissenting” sects, etc., that made pluralism a social-political necessity.
For religious liberty and freedom of conscience we must credit the reformation, but the theology followed the practical reality, not the other way around.
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Jed is right about the discontinuity in Protestant theology coming AFTER a defacto discontinuity in Protestant praxis.
“Samuel Rutherford and liberty of conscience,” Westminster Theological Journal 71:2 (2009),
pp. 355 reminds us that there are different definitions of “conscience” working in different “protestant” ideologies.
“On 9 February 1646 the divines at the Westminster Assembly debated the “abrogation” of both the
ceremonial and judicial laws. Their position had moderated by the final draft of the Confession, however, when only the ceremonial laws were described as having been “abrogated,” while the “general equity” of the “expired” judicial laws was thought to remain in force (WCF
19.3-4). Similarly, on 26 March 1646 the Assembly discussed a draft chapter on Christian liberty and liberty of conscience, concluding that “the gospel consists. . . in freedom from. . .the ceremonial and judicial law.” By the final draft of the Confession, however, the status of the judicial laws had again been implicitly changed; WCF 20 contains no reference to the believer’s freedom from the judicial law…
Discussion of the public aspects of the judicial laws seems to have been deferred to WCF 20.4, which discourses on the power of the godly magistrate without explicitly referring to the biblical mandate for his rule.20.4 demands that those who publish opinions or maintain practices contrary to the “light of nature,” the “known principles of Christianity,” or the “power of godliness,” or
those whose opinions or practices are “destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the Church,” may be called to account by the “censures of the Church, and by the power of the civil magistrate.”
mark: Though many in England were more welcoming to Roger Williams (on “conscience”) than the churches in New England, even most of the English baptists took sides with the violence Cromwell used to enforce his version of “tolerance”….Some “wallpaper” is less violent than others, but the theory of one (and only one) visible true church tends to be less than truthful about the boundaries work….
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And the dream of Christian imperialism is not yet dead. In his Between Babel and Beast, Leithart lists the ways in which the Abrahamic promises mirror Babel. Abraham is promised a “great name,” a
“mighty nation,” to be the “father of kings,” as well as “land and a seed” . Leithart points to Psalm
72:8-11. Isaiah 2:2-4, and Isaiah 60:10-11 as evidence that Abraham’s covenant children are intended to be a world power. Israel and Babel are “contrasting paths of political salvation”.
In this version, Constantine’s production of martyrs is the price which must be paid for the elimination (or relocation) of “sacrifice”….
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Good post. Better to be thankful for what we have than walk around bitter all the time about what we don’t. There is this realm known as “after death” when God sorts it all out. Catholics of all people should understand this.
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“Samuel Rutherford and liberty of conscience,” Westminster Theological Journal 71:2 (2009),
pp. 355 reminds us that there are different definitions of “conscience” working in different “protestant” ideologies.
Whoa, Samuel Rutherford, author of the 1600s ‘Calvinist resistance theory’ tract “Lex, Rex”? [The law is king?] Now we’re getting somewhere. Props, bro MarkMcC. I’d hoped some folks would be inspired to hit the books. The truth hides in
palinplain sight.Maybe Darryl will let us see the whole article.
Click to access 71.2%20WTJ%20FA09.pdf
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mark: Though many in England were more welcoming to Roger Williams (on “conscience”) than the churches in New England, even most of the English baptists took sides with the violence Cromwell used to enforce his version of “tolerance”….Some “wallpaper” is less violent than others, but the theory of one (and only one) visible true church tends to be less than truthful about the boundaries work….
Cromwell’s Calvinist tyranny too? Man, this is off the hook. I’m like, yo bro, all this abuse i’ve taken has been worth it.
BTW, Puritan New England hanged Quakers [the Quakers were quite annoying]. And Roger Williams was a visionary, but his postage stamp-sized kingdom is quite overrated in the history of things.
http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2012/07/roger-williams-first-american-some.html
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Erik Charter
Posted June 29, 2013 at 12:03 am | Permalink
Good post. Better to be thankful for what we have than walk around bitter all the time about what we don’t. There is this realm known as “after death” when God sorts it all out. Catholics of all people should understand this.
My mother was a Catholic FDR Democrat. She was very angry that Republicans of her day “never did anything for anybody.”
She is now “sorted out,” as Erik puts it.
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This is the kind of nonsense that occurs when “Christian conservatives” (and all involved claim to be) get overzealous about what politics can achieve (and when they make their livings from politics):
Bachmann campaign reaches settlement in email list case
A settlement has been reached in a Polk County lawsuit alleging that U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign stole and misused an email distribution list maintained by an Iowa home-school group.
A 12-page lawsuit filed last July alleged that two Iowans, Barbara and Richard Heki, suffered “severe emotional distress and loss of current and future business opportunities” after two unapproved emails were sent in 2011 from the Bachmann campaign to members of the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators.
A brief legal document was filed Friday in Polk County District Court to dismiss the claims. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was described as a dismissal “with prejudice,” which means the case can’t be refiled.
The lawsuit had named the Minnesota congresswoman and her campaign; state Sen. Kent Sorenson of Milo, who was Bachmann’s Iowa campaign chairman; and five other Republican operatives, along with their personal business entities.
The suit alleged that Sorenson stole the home-schooler database off Barbara Heki’s personal computer in early November 2011 as it sat in a Bachmann campaign office in Urbandale.
Court documents alleged other campaign officials knew of and supported the theft, which quickly led to the Hekis being removed from the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators’ board of directors.
Theodore Sporer, a Des Moines lawyer who represents Sorenson, said Friday the settlement included a release of all claims with no admission of wrongdoing by his client. Sorenson declined to comment Friday, saying he had just learned of the settlement.
Lawyers for Barbara and Richard Heki and the Bachmann campaign couldn’t be reached Friday for comment.
Sorenson still faces an ethics investigation in the Iowa Senate relating to his work for the Bachmann presidential campaign in 2011 and the alleged theft of the email list.
Sorenson has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. He is accused by two former Bachmann campaign aides of violating Iowa Senate ethics rules by accepting payments for working on Bachmann’s campaign. The rule is aimed at preventing political campaigns from buying influence with prominent lawmakers in the nation’s leadoff presidential caucus state.
Another ethics complaint alleges Sorenson broke the law by taking the home-schooler email list. That matter is also the subject of an Urbandale police investigation.
Sorenson quit as Bachmann’s Iowa campaign chairman shortly before the January 2012 Iowa caucuses, switching his allegiance to former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.
Bachmann dropped out of the presidential race and was later re-elected to Congress, but she has announced she won’t seek re-election in 2014. Investigations continue against her campaign by the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Congressional Ethics.
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RED ROCKERS WAS ONE OF MY FAVORITE BANDS
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It is widely believed that Smith’s Catholic beliefs played a key role in his loss of the 1928 presidential election, as anti-Catholic sentiment among the electorate was strong.
Maybe it was because of radio, where non-New Yorkers recoiled at Smith’s accent.
Those “little Blaine” amendments are still in place in the constitutions of about thirty-seven states, and still operate to block Catholic school students from equal participation in government educational benefits.
Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine / Continental liar from the State of Maine. /Burn this letter!
Blaine amendments also serve as an impediment to “school choice” in several states.
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