I recently watched a segment of “God in
America” called “A New Eden” that discusses the problems that the US
encountered with Faith in its infancy. I think it’s safe to say that in this
modern day most American people believe in the separation of church and state,
and that our country was never founded on a basis of faith, or at least one
particular faith. However this was not the case, America’s faith at one point
played a massive role in its cultural identity.
During
the 17th century, the most powerful church in North America was the
Anglican Church. It was state sponsored and was maintained by an elite class of
individuals, they maintained a tight grip on their faithful and made efforts to
prevent other sects of Christianity (or any religion) from coming in. However,
history has taught us that when there is an abusive ideology that benefits a
small elite, there is likely to be an ideology that comes along to challenge
it. In this situation that would be baptism, which declared that everyone had
the responsibility to go out and find god for themselves, with or without the
church. This of course didn’t sit right with the Anglicans, and they tried to
limit the locations in which Baptists where permitted to speak. This is
ultimately what gives birth to the discussion of liberty and freedom of
religion. Thomas Jefferson would take up the Baptist cause to ensure that religious
freedom would become a key American value. What was even more interesting was
the fact that he himself did not support the Baptists religious message but
rather there right to speak their message freely without opposition from the
state. This was surprising to me because I typically thought of Jefferson as an
anti-religious intellectual, be he was intensely spiritual, and he even created
his own version of the gospels. That being said, he believed that all these
ideals should be free to compete for the approval of the common man. We see
that Jefferson wanted to create a completely new kind of national identity,
were we weren’t united by a religion or ethnicity, but rather the belief in
individual rights and freedoms. Thomas’s efforts ultimately made freedom of
religion of America’s key values, but this left a “spiritual gap” in the
country now that it was without a state religion. Less and less American’s took
an interest in spiritual values after the revolutionary war. People became
conflicted about what religion they should follow. Out of this “spiritual gap”,
Protestantism would rise to become the major religion in America and it
eventually began to become a part of America’s maturing cultural identity.
Protestantism was even taught in public schools, and it came to be associated
with the progress that America was making. However this led to conflict because
now that America was a nation where all religion was “legal”, people from
Europe came in droves to escape religious intolerance in their home countries.
One of these places was Ireland, which had a Catholic majority ruled by a Protestant
minority at the time. Needless to say that there was some intense conflict
between the new catholic population and the protestant population in the US. Many
Americans declared that Catholicism
was against the ideals of liberty and civil rights believing that their loyalty
was to Da Vatican. A lone Catholic priest John Hughes fought the state to deny Protestant
teachings in public schools and eventually succeed. This time period in American
history can be described as a culture war or culture crisis in which it was
conflicted with its founding ideals of freedom of religion, and its newly
acquired protestant identity.
I personally like culture wars very
much because they give as an opportunity to observe how culture interact with
one another, which is always interesting for me, so needless to say I really
like this documentary. This particular culture war shows us some interesting
things like how just because a country is tolerant by law doesn’t mean the
public is tolerant of foreign beliefs and customs. It also shows us just how
much of a new idea this was at the time. This idea of religious freedom was nowhere
to be found in the rest of the developed world at the time, and the reaction to
it was very diverse because this was uncharted territory, no one really knew if
any religion could sustain itself without state support. But I think the main
point this documentary brings up is America’s cultural identity. When America
was founded many theorized it would slowly evolve into an aristocracy like
Britain, and thus enforce a national religion, but this wasn’t the case at all
(in fact they became more and more like us over time) this was the birth of
something completely new. The idea that people could be held together by national
ideals as opposed to a state religion was ground breaking. But as a result
there was a tremendous conflict to discover a completely new cultural
identity.
