Religion, Politics, and the Seduction of Empire

Jesus was executed as a criminal after a public trial, nailed to a cross on top of a very visible hill. He was convicted of the crime of sedition. He was a traitor to the Empire.

All Jews were in danger of this crime because the Emperor was considered part-god, a god the Jewish people wouldn’t recognize. To deny the divinity of the Emperor was treason. Jesus was a traitor to his king.

For the next three centuries, Christians joined the Jews as suspicious actors. Pagans held the seats of power. Civic activities started with prayers or rituals in honor of the Emperor-God. Jews and Christians refused to participate in those rituals making them ineligible for positions of authority, government jobs, military service, or any political leadership. The State and their system of belief were inseparable, and those with a different belief had no access.

Worse, they were traitors. They were criminals. They were a danger to the people, the king, the empire. And so, in waves through those centuries, they were arrested, charged, and executed. They were brought to the arenas where they were attacked by lions and tigers to the cheers of the crowds. There are reports of children, and pregnant women being mauled with the sounds of applause surrounding them.

In the year 311, there was an internal power struggle, and Constantine needed an army. Most people were pledged to his rivals, so he made a deal. If the Christians would fight on his behalf and if he won, he’d make Rome a Christian empire. They did. He did. And we entered a new age.

Before that, Christianity was practiced in people’s homes, in catacombs beneath the city, in small, private chapels. It was centered on communal love, on the sharing of resources, on community care. It was literally underground, a secret religion, a subversive, counter-cultural movement committed to egalitarian social structures and radical love. And participation was an act of treason punishable by death.

So, hell yes, Mr. Constantine. Legality sounds really good. You want to institutionalize Love, bring it to the mainstream? God is answering our prayers. We’re in.

They won, and the rest is history. Christianity became the way of the empire.

Those relationships merged so profoundly, there was no way at all to tell the difference between church and state. They were one and the same. Belief was dictated by people in power. Emperors, Royals, political leaders decided what the people believed, and they appointed clergy, theologians, ministers, and other practitioners to be the point people on the ground. Disagreeing even in the smallest ways was a crime with varying degrees of punishment from public humiliation to imprisonment to death.

When the Protestant Reformation broke out, 1200 years after Constantine’s victory, the radical changes sweeping Europe weren’t entirely about personal belief but about national power. There were significant theological underpinnings to everything that happened, but the massive cultural transformation was the result of a new national consciousness. Individual leaders were convinced of a new way and shifted their own nations from the Catholicism of their ancestors to a new Christianity made manifest in their own cultural and political contexts.

Church and State were still one and the same thing. Taxes were levied to support churches. Coronations were religious affairs. There was still very little daylight between the two.

As part of the Reformation, there were a few fits and starts around Europe, attempts to disentangle church and state or to widen the lens through which we understood that relationship, but it’s not until the founding of this nation did this concept get enough room to live into its potential.

When the original colonies were founded, each had a sponsor and reason for being, and each established the religion of the land, in relationship to the land owners in Europe. Roman Catholics started in Florida. Anglicans owned Virginia. Congregationalists took Massachusetts. Rhode Island and Connecticut were founded after theological disputes. Aside from New York, every colony had their theology, and their established church. Taxes were collected to serve owners, the crown, and the clergy. Fun fact - one of the most common means of paying clergy was a tax on tobacco. The more you smoke, the richer we are.

The relationship between church and state was controversial in a land that was trying to promote freedom of thought. With so much space, with the Enlightenment taking hold, surely we can disestablish the church, letting each one stand alone without the support of the government.

And, the Puritans thought, the state is messy. The work of the government is fraught and potentially corrupt. It always involves compromise, a stepping back from its values, and often sucks people in with the allure of power, carrying them further and further from the purity of the church. We don’t want their yuk on our yum.

Thus, the clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Establishment in this case doesn’t simply refer to founding a church, but of allowing any church to become Established, to become intertwined in the State, to be the State Church like, for instance, the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church, both implicated in their names. These new United States will be free of any Established Church, at least as far as the federal government goes. It was actually another four decades before individual states disestablished churches with the Congregationalists in Massachusetts being the last to go in 1833.

In 1954, then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a soon adopted provision in the tax code that prohibits tax-exempt organizations, like churches, from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. It doesn’t affect speech regarding social issues, voter information campaigns, or public statements about laws either in effect or debated. But, if John Haynes Holmes had endorsed Roosevelt from the pulpit today as he did way back then, we’d be in trouble. Johnson proposed this change because two non-profits in Texas were collecting tax deductible donations from their members and using that money to actively campaign against him.

Churches were not the target of this provision and were rarely mentioned in any enforcement of it. In fact, until the rise of the religious right in the 80s, it was barely noticed. But in the 80s, Evangelical preachers wanted to tell their congregations which candidate did or didn’t live by what they called “biblical values”, and argued that the Johnson Amendment curtailed their freedom of speech. The IRS would, occasionally, issue warnings, leading to the Right claiming government overreach.

By 2008, the Religious Right was so frustrated by the limitation, they declared Pulpit Freedom Sunday during which they endorsed candidates (remember who was on the ballot?), daring the IRS to challenge them. They were ready for a fight.

I’ll tell you, I wasn’t entirely sure they were wrong. Isn’t it fair for a church to want to know who their minister is voting for and why? And, isn’t it fair for someone like me to tell people about racist dog-whistles like “show us your birth certificate” and why I won’t support it and even how it stands in opposition to our core beliefs? I want to name names! And when we have a candidate who is clearly going to round people up because of their browner than tan skin and deport them to torture prisons or into war zones, can’t I tell people not to vote for that? You have free will. You don’t have to – and almost never – do what I tell you to do. I’m not buying a vote, which, it turns out, is suddenly also acceptable.

But here’s where this gets sticky. How closely associated with the state should the church be? Should we partner with a political campaign to get our person in office? Is that different from the Christian bishops in 325 climbing into Constantine’s cushy carriages, heading to a Council to make religious/state policy?

What’s the benefit of the separation?

Empire is seductive. So much power. So much money. I can hear her whisper in my ear, promising me fame and fortune. My values become everyone’s values, enshrined into law, enforced by the state. Delicious.

And so helpful to our nation. We’re in a massive moral crisis and can use some ethical clarity, some clerical voices, to break through and lead us away from the corruption that has penetrated the entire Executive branch, and much of the Judicial and Legislative as well. We need our clergy to tell us how to untangle this deadly knot; we are desperate for authentic leadership.

And the IRS told us it’s fine. This summer, they changed their rules! No more Johnson Amenment. I can endorse a candidate and it won’t put our non-profit status in jeopardy.

So why not?

In 1917, Former President of the United States Howard Taft was serving as President of the American Unitarian Association. My predecessor, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, an avowed pacifist, had been charged with the creation of a statement that was supposed to articulate our denomination’s support of the war we now call World War I which the nation had just entered. Holmes and Taft had clashed over this issue publicly several times, as did Holmes and President Woodrow Wilson. Holmes’s proposal for our national statement included a resolution affirming both “conscientious support and conscientious objection” to the war, establishing the right of Unitarians to either support or refuse. Taft declared Holmes “unpatriotic” and said the proposal was “treasonable”. The conference upheld Taft’s resolution to support the war whole-heartedly. Homes, and later our beloved church, left the Unitarian Association entirely.

Church vs State. Church And State. Church With State.

Are we instruments of State? Partners with State?

Or are we distinct from State?

Taft went on to become the only person in our history to hold the offices of both the Presidency and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Power was his, as was wealth.

Holmes remained Senior Minister of Community Church of New York leaving him with very little money and a voice that has been largely forgotten.

In a contest for the most toys, Taft won.

In a contest of morality, Holmes beat Taft hands down.

Taft was standing in for the State. Holmes for the Church.

Taft was calling the Church to serve the State.

Holmes was calling his colleague and the entire denomination not to serve the state, but to be its conscience.

The proper role of church in relationship to state, is not partner, but prophet.

We don’t endorse candidates not because it’s manipulative or in violation of some tax code. We don’t endorse candidates because we are called to stand apart, to critique, to become outside voices of justice, to entice the state toward morality.

And if ever the outside voices of conscience were needed, it’s now.

Our nation is fractured, vulnerable, weak with anger and suspicion.

And our government has aligned with one brand of Christianity, creating a dragon born of power and performative piety breathing enough fire to set us all ablaze.

So, I stand before you not in support of the current Republican administration or ethos and not in support of Democrats, but in support of our shared faith. A faith that tells me pluralism, equity, and empathy are worthy of my devotion, of my whole-hearted, full-bodied endorsement. A faith that tells me that any policy, any government action that chooses the rich over the poor, the healthy over the sick, the privileged over the marginalized, or that intentionally withholds life-giving support or encourages or even just allows violence in our streets or in our schools, is immoral and in opposition to all I hold true.

We are not instruments of State, but of Love. We are the voices of a Love that will not be enticed into silence; we are the bodies of a Love that will not cease to act even with promises of power. We will not climb into the carriages of Empire, comfortable as they may be. We are prophets of a new world, a world not yet, but one we will never stop calling into existence.

There are no threats, and there are no promises, that will make this church or our beloved faith, a chaplain to Empire.