Editor’s Note: This sermon was preached at the 66th meeting of New Hope Presbytery of Rocky Mount, N.C., on October 15, 2005.
Scripture texts: John 15:12-17; 1 Peter 2:9-17
Though our U.S. Constitution was produced by a congress consisting mostly of Christians, the first clause of the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of an official religion. The apparent irony goes deeper when we acknowledge the contributions of Christians in the formation of our government, beginning with the revolutionary war itself. This was something particularly true of Presbyterians. Historian Lefferts Loetscher1 said that the fires of the American Revolution were fanned from Presbyterian pulpits sufficient for the British to describe it as “the Presbyterian Rebellion.” When King George III asked what the trouble was in the American colonies a member of Parliament replied our “colonial cousins had run off with a Presbyterian parson.”
The organizing pastor of First Presbyterian Church New Bern, John Knox Witherspoon, was the grandson and namesake of the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. (I’m required to say that!)
Whatever you may think of the disestablishment clause, the biblical wisdom and Reformed theological stamp that shaped our Constitution is unmistakable. Its principal author, James Madison, was educated at Presbyterian Princeton where he was a student of John Witherspoon. Remembered as “The Father of the United States Constitution,” Madison helped produce what Lutheran historian Martin Marty has called “a thoroughly Calvinist document.” Marty claims that the Constitution supplies the checks and balances any Presbyterian would love, for the unspoken implication found throughout, “is the conviction that while humans have a great capability, self-interest would always turn them against the common good if left to themselves.”2
Madison believed that human beings, religious or not, should not be trusted on their own. It was held that this healthy suspicion would actually serve the greater good of those very persons and in turn, the lives of those people they would be entrusted to govern. Madison learned from Witherspoon what the Bible had taught concerning human nature nearly two millennia before Lord Acton was inspired to make his famous quip “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”3
Marty claims that the Constitution supplies the checks and balances any Presbyterian would love, for the unspoken implication found throughout, “is the conviction that while humans have a great capability, self-interest would always turn them against the common good if left to themselves.”
While early on the “disestablishment clause” prevented our nation from ever choosing one Christian brand or denomination over another, it could not prevent our national conscience to assume Christianity to be, however unofficially, the “established” religion. So, it was essentially for nearly two hundred years, our Jewish friends looked upon as a tolerated though benighted minority. Challenges to this assumption were to come from brand new religions, spawned upon American soil: the Mormons in the 19th and Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 20th centuries.4 However unanticipated, these challenges were bound to multiply and accelerate with the passage of the Naturalization and Immigration Act of 1965.5
With national quotas lifted, immigrants of the so-named “Fifth Wave” came to our shores in numbers as never before; not only from Europe and Mexico, but in the hundreds of thousands from Asia and the Orient. Introduced into our tax-paying citizenry have come Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and followers of other religions. Where have they settled? San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Chapel Hill no doubt — these are some of the places you might expect. But when the December 2002 issue of Our State Magazine featured an article on a Buddhist Temple outside the Brunswick County town of Bolivia, N.C., well, it got my attention.6
Though Christians in the United States will continue to significantly outnumber adherents of other religions for the foreseeable future, the landscape of religious life in America will never be the same. No longer is the net effect of the disestablishment clause that which prevents one brand of Christianity lording over the others. It now takes the form of not showing preference for the very religion of Christianity over any other. The ground under our feet has shifted, caused not so much by the popular target of atheism and secularism, as by a more expansive religious pluralism. It has changed much that we as American Christians have for too long taken for granted, beginning with our privileged status. Some ten years after the passage of the First Amendment, when in 1802, Thomas Jefferson coined the slang phrase “Separation of Church and State,” he surely misspoke. Were he alive today, he would have stayed closer to the Constitutional wording of, “separation of Religion and State.”
The First Amendment squabbles being debated in the courts today, come as a consequence of our nation’s evolving religious pluralism. These divisions, I know, go on not merely among us but inside each of us. When it comes to “intelligent design” my heart is with the Bible enthusiasts, but my head is with the Constitution and the methods of scientific inquiry. Like any of you, I am troubled by the impersonal materialistic assumptions easily presupposed when discussing evolutionary biological processes like mutation and natural selection. Yet, “intelligent design” is not particularly biblical, and only raises the larger question: Whose intelligent design. …The deistic god of Newtonian physics? Marduk and Tiamat of the Enuma Elish? Uranus and Gaia of the Greek Poet, Hesiod? Or is it the design resulting from the work of the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. …to name only a few intelligent designers?
When it comes to prayer in public schools, my heart and head are likewise split. We know prayer as a means of grace opening us to the movement of God’s Spirit, reviving God’s image within us, and equipping us to ever more grow in the likeness of Christ. There is nothing like the intimacy God makes real to you and me in prayer. But when classmates and teachers can be of another religion or none whatsoever as protected by the Constitution, any compromise praying to a generic Higher Power, only disgraces the relationship of sincere devotees of different faiths, and violates the constitutional rights of those of no faith.
My heart and head are similarly divided when it comes to posting the commandments in government buildings or displaying them in monuments on public grounds, when done to the exclusion of any other commemorative or historical markers. The role of the Ten Commandments in western jurisprudence is unquestioned, and any revisionist history that suggests otherwise needs to be challenged. But when religious groups surprise us with claims that the commandments are not religious per se, then tie their witness to several thousand monuments erected half a century ago as a publicity scheme of Paramount Studios to hawk Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 Hollywood production, I’m left to wonder what faith is being witnessed.7
These First Amendment battles are the wrong places in government and society to witness our faithfulness to Christ. The efforts of our denomination and those ecumenical alliances to which we belong on state, national, and global levels, have and continue to offer faithful attempts to witness to the gospel in the public sector, controversial and troublesome as they may be at times. But these realities are not my concerns today, nor do I imagine for any of us as pastors or elders of congregations.
It was 1960, five years before the landmark Naturalization and Immigration Act, cited by historians as the year marking the end of Western Christendom. The symbolic date was timed with the elimination of the blue laws in the United States. It was the last legally protected Protestant convention to fall, born of the efforts of the moral reformers of the 19th century to combat the three social sins: no drinking, no gambling, and lastly, no “Christian Sabbath” (or Lord’s Day) breaking.
Pressures for this change came not from atheists or adherents of other religions, but from the commercial and business interests of Christians just like you and me. Buoyed up by emerging wealth and increased recreational opportunities, other places to go and other things to do became more attractive than participation in the life of a local congregation. Worship on the Lord’s Day became an interruption. The pretense of church commitment was no longer necessary for social respectability; many of us became nostalgic for more of that pretense.
For those of us ordained as elders or pastors 25 years or so ago, it was old news when in the late 1980’s Robert Lynn reported to the Lilly Foundation on the increasing challenges and pressures on congregational life. There once was an “ecology,” he called it, of such things as public (essentially “Protestant”) education, the Sunday Schools, youth programs, conference centers, publications, mission societies, that formerly aided the congregation in Christian acculturation of her members. Many are gone and those few that still exist, he said, are but a shadow of what they once were.8
All this is to say, what every elder and pastor knows or needs to: That working at congregational life may never have been more demanding than it is today, and perhaps never more important. I don’t know when simply showing up has mattered so much. We who have been nurtured in the church that we’ve by now also loved and served for years, have always known that the congregation is where “the action is.” Now it is the only place, and perhaps this is best. As nothing can be taken for granted, we realize nothing ever should have been. Faith formation and spiritual development to form the peculiar people we are called to be, is again our proper task.9
No one can do it as well our congregations, yours and mine, trusting the Spirit of God to lead us along the way. It is in and through congregational life that we affirm the Supremacy of Christ’s Lordship, by embodying his humble servanthood in our witness to and sometimes sharing with, those of other faiths and no faith. It is in congregational life that we explore the depth of the affirmation, “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,” who is at one with the Divine Logos and the Spirit that both broods over and gives life to all. Our faith provides that wider and broader perspective to the instrumentality of science, both its theories and findings. It is in congregational life that we experience personal and corporate prayer opening us to the love of God and neighbor unknown and unavailable in any other way. It is in congregational life that the keeping of the commandments are found at the center of a constellation of practices and disciplines that shape Christian conscience and form us as the aliens and exiles the New Testament says we are, prodding us to “honor everyone and love the family of believers.”
The intrinsic worth of congregational life, like a sleeping giant, rises up now and again, to wow a nation. While traditional disaster-response organizations have been faulted for acting slowly following the Gulf Coast hurricanes, the churches and her agencies knew immediately what to do and how to do it right the first time with congregations of every stripe: welcoming, housing, clothing, and feeding thousands of victims.10
No technology, no pleasures, no activities or opportunities that are now or will ever come available, can replace or supersede the priceless experience of a Christian congregation, worshiping, living, studying, praying, and serving together. There is no greater good that can be accomplished, no better work that we as pastors and elders can be about, than our labor of love to build up the church “Christ gave himself up for,” and “against which the gates of hell shall not prevail” (Ephesians 5:25b; Matt 16:18b).
There is never a better time for you and me to be Christian than right now, otherwise the Lord would not have put us here! “You did not choose me, but I chose you,” said the Lord Jesus. Friends, let us claim our chosenness by building up the community of faith, seeking to do so in the love and humility, courage and fortitude of Christ himself.
END NOTES
1 Lefferts Loetscher, “A Brief History of the Presbyterians”, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1978, pp. 73-76)
2 “Celebrating Our Presbyterian Heritage: John Witherspoon, James Madison and the U.S. Constitution,” Dean K. Thompson, Presbyterian Outlook, July 4, 1991.
3 Richard B. Morris, “Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries”, (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
Madison said that this separation (religion and state) formed, “the great barrier against usurpations on the rights of conscience. So long as it is respected and no longer, these will be safe. Every provision for them short of this principle, will be found to leave crevices at least through which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster, that feeding and thriving on its own venom, gradually swells to a size and strength overwhelming all laws divine and human” (p. 206).
4 “Progressive Christians Speak: A Different Voice on Faith and Politics”, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr., Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, pp. 14-15, 17-18 (esp., pp. 315-317).
5 Diana Eck, “A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation”, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 6-7.
6 Our State, “The Faith Issue,” December 2002, “The Road to Enlightenment: In An Unexpected Corner of North Carolina, Followers of the Buddha Live Gently, Practice Charity, And Make Big Plans for the Future,” by David La Vere, pp. 68-71.
7 “The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay,” by Frank Rich, New York Times, March 27, 2005.
Paramount Studios accomplished this project in collaboration with the “Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide association of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners…”
8 “As I See it Today”, A Publication of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, spring 1994, Back to the Future: The Pastor as Resident Theologian, by T. Hartley Hall IV.
9 How else do we account for the annual statistics of the PC(USA) reporting the 2004 category of “other losses” at 108,871. In his “Wake-Up Call to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),” Kirkpatrick comments, “Statistically, we are not losing people to other churches. Our problem is that we are losing our people to the secular world — to no active church affiliation. All of us — pastors, elders, and deacons — need to give special attention to nurturing our members. …”
10 PCUSA.NEWS@HALAK.PCUSA.ORG, After Katrina, church agencies out-quicked government, secular groups. Wednesday, 21 September 2005, Note # 8916.
William L. Hawkins is pastor of First Church in New Bern, N.C.
