The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong

⁵⁸ Even the more educated colonists fell prey to this fear of hidden cosmic conspiracy. The presidents of Harvard and Yale both believed that the colonists were fighting a war against satanic forces, and looked forward to the imminent defeat of popery, “a religion most favourable to arbitrary power.” The War of Independence had become part of God’s providential design for the destruction of the Papal Antichrist, which would surely herald the arrival of God’s millennial Kingdom in America.⁵⁹ This paranoid vision of widespread conspiracy and the tendency to see an ordinary political conflict as a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil seems, unfortunately, to occur frequently when a people is engaged in a revolutionary struggle as it enters the new world. This satanic mythology helped the colonists to separate themselves definitively from the old world, for which they still felt a strong residual affection. The demonizing of England transformed it into the antithetical “other,” the polar opposite of America, and thus enabled the colonists to shape a distinct identity for themselves and to articulate the new order they were fighting to bring into being.

      Thus, religion played a key role in the creation of the first modern secular republic. After the Revolution, however, when the newly independent states drew up their constitutions, God was mentioned in them only in the most perfunctory manner. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson disestablished the Anglican church in Virginia; his bill declared that coercion in matters of faith was “sinfull and tyrannical,” that truth would prevail if people were allowed their own opinions, and that there should be a “wall of separation” between religion and politics.⁶⁰ The bill was supported by the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of Virginia, who resented the privileged position of the Church of England in the state. Later the other states followed Virginia’s lead, and disestablished their own churches, Massachusetts being the last to do so, in 1833. In 1787, when the federal Constitution was drafted at the Philadelphia Convention, God was not mentioned at all, and in the Bill of Rights (1789), the First Amendment of the Constitution formally separated religion from the state: “Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Henceforth faith would be a private and voluntary affair in the United States. This was a revolutionary step and has been hailed as one of the great achievements of the Age of Reason. The thinking behind it was indeed inspired by the tolerant philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the Founding Fathers were also moved by more pragmatic considerations. They knew that the federal Constitution was essential to preserve the unity of the states, but they also realized that if the federal government established any single one of the Protestant denominations and made it the official faith of the United States, the Constitution would not be approved. Congregationalist Massachusetts, for example, would never ratify a Constitution that established the Anglican Church. This was also the reason why Article VI, Section 3, of the Constitution abolished religious tests for office in the federal government. There was idealism in the Founders’ decision to disestablish religion and to secularize politics, but the new nation could not base its identity on any one sectarian option and retain the loyalty of all its subjects. The needs of the modern state demanded that it be tolerant and, therefore, secular.⁶¹

      Paradoxically, however, by the middle of the nineteenth century the new secularist United States had become a passionately Christian nation. During the 1780s, and still more during the 1790s, the churches all experienced new growth⁶² and began to counter the Enlightenment ideology of the Founding Fathers. They now sacralized American independence: the new republic, they argued, was God’s achievement. The revolutionary battle had been the cause of heaven against hell.⁶³ Only ancient Israel had experienced such direct divine intervention in its history. God might not be mentioned in the Constitution, Timothy Dwight noted wryly, but he urged his students to “look into the history of your country [and] you will find scarcely less gracious and wonderful proofs of divine protection and deliverance … than that which was shown to the people of Israel in Egypt.”⁶⁴ The clergy confidently predicted that the American people would become more pious; they saw the expansion of the frontier as a sign of the coming Kingdom.⁶⁵ Democracy had made the people sovereign, so they must become more godly if the new states were to escape the dangers inherent in popular rule. The American people must be saved from the irreligious deism of their political leaders. Churchmen saw “deism” as the new satanic foe, making it the scapegoat for all the inevitable failures of the infant nation. Deism, they insisted, would promote atheism and materialism; it worshipped Nature and Reason instead of Jesus Christ. A paranoid conspiracy fear developed of a mysterious cabal called the “Bavarian Illuminati” who were atheists and Freemasons and were plotting to overthrow Christianity in the United States. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800, there was a second anti-deist campaign which tried to establish a link between Jefferson and the atheistic “Jacobins” of the godless French Revolution.⁶⁶

      The Union of the new states was fragile. Americans nurtured very different hopes for the new nation, secularist and Protestant. Both have proved to be equally enduring. Americans still revere their Constitution and venerate the Founding Fathers, but they also see America as “God’s own nation”; as we shall see, some Protestants continue to see “secular humanism” as an evil of near-satanic proportions. After the revolution, the nation was bitterly divided and Americans had an internal struggle to determine what their culture should be. They conducted, in effect, a “second revolution” in the early years of the nineteenth century. With great difficulty and courage, Americans had swept away the past; they had written a groundbreaking Constitution, and brought a new nation to birth. But this involved strain, tension, and paradox. The people as a whole had still to decide the terms on which they were to enter the modern world, and many of the less privileged colonists were prepared to contest the cultural hegemony of the aristocratic Enlightenment elite. After they had vanquished the British, ordinary Americans had yet to determine what the revolution had meant for them. Were they to adopt the cool, civilized, polite rationalism of the Founders, or would they opt for a much rougher and more populist Protestant identity?

      The Founding Fathers and the clergy in the mainline churches had cooperated in the creation of a modern, secular republic, but they both still belonged in many important respects to the old conservative world. They were aristocrats and elitists. They believed that it was their task, as enlightened statesmen, to lead the nation from above. They did not conceive of the possibility of change coming from below. They still saw historical transformation being effected by great personalities, who acted rather like the prophets of the past as the guides of humanity and who made history happen. They had not yet realized that a society is often pushed forward by impersonal processes; environmental, economic, and social forces can foil the plans and projects of the most coercive leaders.⁶⁷ During the 1780s and 1790s, there was much discussion about the nature of democracy. How much power should the people have? John Adams, the second president of the United States, was suspicious of any polity that might lead to mob rule and the impoverishment of the rich.⁶⁸ But the more radical Jeffersonians asked how the elite few could speak for the many. They protested against the “tyranny” of Adams’s government, and argued that the people’s voice must be heard. The success of the revolution had given many Americans a sense of empowerment; it had shown them that established authority was fallible and by no means invincible. The genie could not be put back into the bottle. The Jeffersonians believed that ordinary folk should also enjoy the freedom and autonomy preached by the philosophes. In the new newspapers, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and other specialists were ridiculed. Nobody should have to give total credence to these so-called “experts.” The law, medicine, and religion should all be a matter of common sense and within the reach of everyone.⁶⁹

      This sentiment was especially rife on