Otherwise Let Men Be Free

Way back when Miami was a much smaller city (and I couldn’t get away with anything because no matter where I went someone knew and reported to my folks) and the family home was getting too small, Mr. and Mrs. Flynn spent weeks searching for the “right lot” in the “right location.”

They found the perfect piece of land - across the street from a three-acre citrus grove that had been homesteaded in the 1930s and surrounded by virgin South Florida yellow-pine forests. (Those once scrubland 100’ x 125’ lots now sell for well over a million bucks.) Mrs. Flynn set herself to the initial planning. They hired a graduating University of Miami architecture student to put her ideas on paper and supervise day-to-day construction. (He watched every single board used in the framing and roofing from the moment he selected it at the lumberyard until it was delivered to 7740.)

Despite all the “blood, sweat and tears” they gave to that home, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Flynn ever said they “built” it. “Planned,” “designed,” “subcontacted” it. Yes. “Built.” Never.

Words have meaning.

Words are important. They can be impressive, dynamic, persuasive, even influential and convincing. Often, however, the power and import of a word demands one or more modifiers.

“Christian” is a word. An adjective or noun. (Thank you, Sisters at Epiphany School.)

There was a time when it had power and meaning.

No longer.

On March 6, an Atlanta Tribune article reported on the startling – and self-righteously judgmental - pronouncements of a White male pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. In a February sermon, John MacArthur declared that Dr. Martin Luther King, “who was not a Christian at all, whose life was immoral,” should not have been honored by the evangelical group Together for the Gospel. He went on to describe King as “a non-believer who misrepresented Christ and everything about the gospel.”

We were – initially – inclined to dismiss MacArthur as easily as he dismissed Dr. King’s Christianity. But his words speak for themselves. In a June 20, 2022 article, Baptist News Global did a deep dive into his preaching. Under the headline “What has John MacArthur said about race, slavery and the Curse of Ham?” writer Rick Pidcock cited Illinois pastor Sharon Autenrieth: “Can we PLEASE stop talking about this guy like he’s the assistant manager of the Trinity?” Pidcock added the observation, “In the world of conservative evangelicalism, MacArthur is held in that kind of esteem.” 

Except.

Except that Pidcock then quoted Lecturer of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University (Emmittsburg, Maryland) Scott Coley:

“John MacArthur has been at the forefront of the anti-justice movement within white evangelicalism (which has spilled over into right wing politics at large) [Parentheses in original text]. And here he is, using the Bible to craft a myth that legitimizes racial hierarchy. He and his colleagues deny that systemic racism is to blame for racial disparities in wealth, income and opportunity. So what explains such disparities? According to John MacArthur, it’s the curse of Canaan…  Not incidentally, 10 out of 10 white supremacist theologians used *precisely* this logic to justify race-based, chattel slavery in the 19th century, as did segregationists in the 20th century. … Whatever you do, stop listening to John MacArthur. He regularly manipulates Scripture to legitimize his own extra-biblical social agenda.”

Some, perhaps too many, Americans – especially politicians – declare themselves “Christian” as though the stand-alone noun (or is it an adjective here?) says it all. 

The Pew Research Center organizes the world’s religions into seven major categories: Christianity – 31% of the world’s population, Islam – 25%, Buddhism – 6.6%, and Hinduism - 15.2%, in addition to “Unaffiliated” – 15.6% and Folk/Traditional – 5.6%.

An insight into the meaninglessness of “Christian” is offered by Wesleyan (Middletown, Connecticut) University’s Christianity Studies Cluster report:

“A recent compilation lists 33,089 Christian denominations world-wide, including the massive Roman Catholic Church (with a billion adherents), 25 principal forms of Eastern Orthodoxy, numerous varieties of Protestantism, and tiny store-front churches with fewer than 100 members. These include churches whose governance is democratic, conciliar, or authoritarian; churches whose worship is ceremonial, ecstatic, or mostly silent; churches whose politics are conservative, liberal, radical, or quietist; churches founded and run by women; churches that seat males and females on opposite sides of the church, and churches whose clergy are celibate, monogamous, or polygamous. It is of course impossible to study the entire panorama of world Christianity.” 

The ambiguity – almost meaninglessness – of calling oneself “Christian” is reflected in our own self-descriptions. Father Tobin might most fully describe himself as “Anglican/ Episcopalian Catholic Christian,” while Father Flynn might use the confession (pun intended) “Roman Catholic Christian.” 

Neither would use the description “christian nationalist.” [EDITORS’ NOTE: We consciously refuse to capitalize those words when used together.]

While it is politically popular (perhaps even persuasive) to refer to the author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson as “Christian,” it’s historically inaccurate. Although one of his favorite mottos was “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” Jefferson, like many other Founders, was a Deist, professing a strand of religious/philosophic thinking that values reason over revelation and rejects traditional Christian doctrines, including the Virgin Birth, original sin and the Resurrection of Jesus.

Vilified by his Federalist opponents who described him as an atheist and libertine, he attributed their abuse to an “irritable tribe of priests” – a reference to New England Calvinists - and compared his harassment by New England clergymen to the crucifixion of Jesus. 

New England-born and Baptist-by-religion, John Leland was no fan of the established Anglican Church of Virginia when he travelled there to “spread the word” in 1775. Leland developed strong ties with James Madison, often referred to as “the Father of the Constitution” and pivotal in drafting and promoting the Bill of Rights, and Jefferson with whom he shared a passionate belief in religious liberty. Leland was convinced that the church must be protected from interference by the state and opposed any form of state support of religion. He also believed that the state must be protected from overzealous clergy and organized religious groups. On December 15, 1791, these ideas were enshrined in Second Amendment to the Constitution of the newly formed United States.

Leland wrote:

“Every man must give an account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience. If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”

On New Year’s Day 1802, the newly elected President Jefferson invited Leland to the White House and two days later Leland delivered the Sunday sermon in the House of Representatives – with the president in attendance. 

Prior to the Revolutionary War, Virginia had been Ground Zero in the struggle of some colonists to redefine the relationship between church and state. Basically, there were  three attitudes or lines of thought involved in the clash of ideas: Traditionalists who believed that religion was essential to maintaining social order and, therefore, sought to continue financial support of churches (as had been the case in England and under the Virginia Charter); dissidents, including Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists, who wanted to keep the church free of the corrupting influence of government; and rationalists like Jefferson and Madison who believed that separation of church and state was essential to guarantee liberty of conscience. Leland sided with the rationalist Madison and Jefferson.

In October 1801, the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut wrote Jefferson celebrating his electoral victory and his commitment to religious liberty. The letter was not received until months later and Jefferson labored over various drafts of his response, even consulting with members of his Cabinet, including Attorney General Levi Lincoln. Famously, his response quoted the language of the First Amendment and one of the most overly used (not always “well used”) metaphors in American history:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate wtyh sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & state.”

Ultimately, Leland was an effective fighter in the struggle to bring about the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in Connecticut (1818) and in Massachusetts (1833).

In his 1845 A Chronical of His Time in Virginia, Leland famously wrote:

“The notion of a Christian commonwealth should be exploded forever. … Government should protect every man in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another. The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”

And, just for fun, the next time a politico speaks about his or her “christian” religion, ask if they’re referring to Jeffersonian-style Christianity and the Jefferson Bible. 

Jefferson was a masterful wielder of the razor blade and skilled with a pair of scissors. Although no copies of his 1804 The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth survive today, by 1820 – again using a razor and glue – he completed The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, often and mistakenly referred to as “The Jefferson Bible.” 

In a letter to fellow Virginian Rev. Charles Clay, Jefferson explained:

“Probably you have heard me say I had taken the four Evangelists, had cut out from them every text they had recorded of the moral precepts of Jesus, and arranged them in a certain order; and although they appeared but as fragments, yet fragments of the most sublime edifice of morality which had ever been exhibited to man.” 

In an October 12, 1813 epistle (pun intended) to Founder and former President John Adams, he wrote: 

“In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to them. We must dismiss the Platonists & Plotinists, the Stagyrites & Gamalielites, the Eclectics the Gnostics & Scholastics, Logos & Demiurgos,  Aeons & Daemons male & female, with a long train of Etc. Etc. Etc. or, shall I say at once, of Nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the Amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an 8vo of 46 pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”

To paraphrase Shakespeare: “The Jefferson Bible, sans Virgin Birth, sans miracles, sans Resurrection, sans almost everything – in 46 pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines….”

The moral here: The next time you hear someone describe themselves as a “christian nationalist,” mess with them. Addle their brains. Ask “What denomination?” and “Do you use the New International Version, KJV, Douay Rheims or the Jefferson Bible?” And just to really confuse them, ask “Where’s your Asherah pole?” 

Duck on that one. They might not understand.