Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong [Armstrong, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-35310-6
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes to none other for his faith and worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with solemn 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 of Church and State.

While such separation could be beneficial to both church and state, it was not, as Jefferson assumed, written into the very nature of things but was a modern innovation. The United States was attempting something entirely new.

Jefferson had borrowed the image of the “wall of separation” from Roger Williams (1604–83), founder of Providence, Rhode Island, who had been expelled from New England because of his opposition to the intolerant policies of the Puritan government.46 But Williams was less concerned about the welfare of the state than that of his faith, which he believed would be contaminated by any involvement with government.47 He intended Rhode Island to be an alternative Christian community that came closer to the spirit of the gospels. Jefferson, by contrast, was more concerned to protect the state from the “loathsome combination of church and state” that had reduced human beings to “dupes and drudges.”48 He seemed to assume—quite wrongly—that there had been states in the past that had not been guilty of this “loathsome combination.” It remained to be seen whether the secularized United States would be less violent and coercive than its more religious predecessors.

Whatever the Founders wanted, most Americans still took it for granted that the United States would be based on Christian principles. By 1790, some 40 percent of the new nation lived on the frontiers and were becoming increasingly resentful of the republican government that did not share their hardships but taxed them as harshly as the British had done. A new wave of revivals, known as the Second Great Awakening, represented a grassroots campaign for a more democratic and Bible-based America.49 The new revivalists were not intellectuals like Edwards but men of the people who used wild gestures, earthy humor, and slang and relied on dreams, visions, and celestial signs. During their mass rallies, they pitched huge tents outside the towns, and their gospel songs transported the crowds to ecstasy. However, these prophets were not pre-Enlightenment throwbacks. Lorenzo Dow may have looked like John the Baptist, but he quoted Jefferson and Paine and, like any Enlightenment philosophe, urged the people to think for themselves. In the Christian commonwealth the first should be last and the last first. God had sent his insights to the poor and unlettered, and Jesus and his disciples had not had college degrees.

James Kelly and Barton Stone railed against the aristocratic clergy who tried to force the erudite faith of Harvard on the people. Enlightenment philosophers had insisted that people must have the courage to throw off their dependence on authority, use their natural reason to discover the truth, and think for themselves.

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