Theocracy in America:
It's History and Present Danger
by Harold R. Fray, Jr.
A "Guest Appearance" on A Rock In My Shoe
www.arockinmyshoe.com
In
the beginning was theocracy. It came to this country on the Mayflower. And
the Pilgrims and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony said, “Amen.”
Today, in our country, theocracy is manifesting itself again and people are
asking, “What is happening?” What is happening is a threat to our
democratic society. The American Heritage Dictionary defines theocracy
as:
Government by a god regarded as the ruling power or by priests or officials claiming divine sanction.
Officials claiming divine
sanction. That is the new theocracy in America today.
In the early 17th century,
the Pilgrims and the Puritans fled the intolerance of the Anglican Church of
England. They desired religious freedom for themselves, and were willing to
risk their lives in its pursuit. The irony is that once they established themselves
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they combined their religious faith with their
political institutions and became harshly intolerant of all non-conformist religious
expressions. They believed that their success in settling in America was a mark
of God’s approval, with the corollary that their way of life had divine
sanction. They concluded that other religious expressions were not to be tolerated.
It was our country’s first expression of Praise God, and damn any that
do not conform.
The results were as predictable
then as they are today. The Rev. Roger Williams was banned from the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in 1636, and to his credit, established a more tolerant colony that
is now the state of Rhode Island. It became a refuge for persecuted religious
groups. The First Baptist Church was established in Providence in 1639, a Quaker
meeting house was formed in Aquidneck in 1657. The first Jewish congregation
met in Newport, Rhode Island in 1658 and a band of French Huguenots put down
their religious roots in East Greenwich in 1686.
Theocracy in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, centered in the Congregational Church, and increased its intolerant
and violent expression. The Quaker Anne Hutchinson was banned to Rhode Island
in 1638. Her friend and companion Mary Dyer did not fare as well. For the crime
of publicly espousing Quakerism, she was hung on the Boston Common in 1660.
The home of the free and the brave was off to a poor start. Today, in
front of the Boston State House, there is a statue honoring Mary Dyer as a martyr
in the struggle for religious freedom. When people come to their senses, yesterday’s
enemies sometimes become a new generation’s heroes.
We look north of Boston
to Salem, Massachusetts, to remember another tragic example of what can happen
when religious intolerance gets out of hand and co-opts the political system
as its ally. Between June and September, 1692, nineteen men and women were hung
for the crime of witchcraft in Salem and another was crushed to death for failing
to confess. Dozens of others languished in jail for months, without benefit
of trial.
Those who refuse to yield
to fear and hysteria in a theocratic society often pay a heavy price. Rebecca
Nurse was one who was hung in Salem. On the monument that marks her grave, John
Greenleaf Whittier’s words are inscribed:
O Christian Martyr for Truth could die
When all about thee Owned the hideous lie!
The world, redeemed from superstition’s sway,
Is breathing freer for thy sake today.
The Rev. Cotton Mather,
a Congregational minister, was a chief instigator of the fear and hysteria that
gripped our forbearers during that sordid piece of our nation’s history;
a chapter in America’s story that we dare not forget. It is said that those
who do not learn from the mistakes of our past are destined to repeat them.
I grew up in New England and in 1954 I was ordained a Congregational minister.
I remember my ecclesiastical history when religion and politics were joined
together against a real or imagined enemy.
However, those who suffered
the most during the theocratic period of our nation’s early beginnings
were not the non-conformist settlers, but the Native Americans whose territory
was invaded and whose lands were coveted. The Pequot War of 1637 and King Philip’s
War of 1662 directed against the Wampanoags essentially destroyed the way of
life for the Native Americans of New England. Treaties were broken and their
land was taken. For the Massachusetts Bay and Plimoth settlers, the Pequot and
Wampanoaog Native Americans were an axis of evil threatening their security
and their expansion into the lands they coveted. Native Americans had to yield
or be destroyed.
The rationale was simple
and is oft repeated in our nation’s history. It begins with the declaration
that my god is better that your god, my way of life is superior to your way
of life; therefore I have an obligation to convert you to embrace my god and
my convictions. If you don’t, you bear responsibility for my behavior.
It was a precursor to the American declaration of manifest destiny that
under girded the westward movement in a later century and led to what one has
described as America’s first drive-by shootings. A good Indian was a
dead Indian. It was a callous, dehumanizing conviction, grounded in a theological
idolatry, that the life of another has no intrinsic value, because god is on
my side. Through the centuries it is a formula often couched in refined diplomatic
language, but the end results are always the same: I insist on having my
way and if you resist, the consequences that befall you are your fault for not
seeing and responding to my superior mandates.
When the United States
ratified our country’s Constitution on June 21, 1788, it required a separation
of church and state. Those who believe that their political policies are ratified
by God are the most dangerous and anti-democratic citizens of a nation.
During World War II as
an American soldier, I had no reluctance in singing Praise the Lord and pass
the ammunition. Hitler and the Nazi regime were such demonic forces; I welcomed
the opportunity to participate in their demise. On April 13, 1945 I walked into
Buchenwald Concentration Camp and saw up close and personal an expression of
evil beyond my comprehension. But I had other experiences in Europe. Toward
the end of the war I was handling German prisoners. They were men over 60 or
boys 16 years old and younger, who were scared to death. They were not human
monsters. They were not a part of Hitler’s fanatical SS troops. They, too,
were victims of their nation’s history led by depraved leaders, who proclaimed
that they were a superior race destined to bring all others under their rule
by whatever means necessary. At the end of the war, I saw hordes of men and
women wandering aimlessly along the highways and byways. I did not know their
nationalities or their countries of origin. I did know they had no place to
go.
In Berlin, Germany outside
the iron picket fences that encircled the compound in which I was billeted in
the fall of 1945, gaunt, emaciated men and women pushed tin cans through the
pickets in the hope that a morsel of food would be shared by those of us who
ate our meals in the courtyard. They spoke not a word. Never before had I experienced
the sound of silence. At night our secured compound was filled with young
girls and women exchanging sex for food. Under such circumstances, who could
blame them? The needs of the stomach far outweighed the morality of the Book.
Those people were not our enemies to be despised. They were raised with the
hopes and aspirations we all share. They had lost everything. They were the
victims of a depraved theocracy.
I returned from Europe
in 1946, and under the G.I Bill of Rights, I entered Wesleyan University in
Middletown, Connecticut. I majored in history. Having received my college degree,
I spent four years in graduate school at Union Theological Seminary in New York
City.
It was not until the 1960’s
that I took seriously the theocracy, expressed as racism, that plagued our American
society. Idealistically I had fought in World War II for the cause of liberty.
Germany, Italy and Japan had been defeated at an enormous cost. But the civil
rights and privileges, which I took for granted and were guaranteed to all by
the U.S. Constitution, were systematically denied to a significant portion of
our population. The sole reason: the color of their skin was black. Many
in our white population considered themselves superior to other ethnic groups
and utilized the political systems of state and local governments to enforce
their power and privilege at the expense of the underclass. It was a covert
and overt expression of theocracy that was not confined to the color of one’s
skin, but included a distinctly religious bias expressed in anti-Semitism. The
Christian churches’ history of Jewish bias stretches back to the earliest
formation of Christendom and is documented in detail by the former Roman Catholic
priest, James Carroll, in his book, The Sword of Constantine.
In 1943 I was drafted into
the U. S. Army. In the 1960’s, I volunteered to join ranks with those who
would make an assault upon racism and the religious and political structures
that supported it. Equal educational opportunities and open-housing were major
battlegrounds. Battles over the integration of eating establishments were headline
stories on nightly television programs. Violence disrupted our cities. It was
said that the most segregated hour of the week was eleven o’clock on Sunday
mornings.
In all of this, I am not
suggesting that church and government should not work together. The question
is how? To what end? In my ministry in Massachusetts, I learned what could be
done in behalf of those who had no political voice or power. I discovered how
church and government together could meet a major social need. Through a consortium,
known as Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries, churches and synagogues utilizing
the federal housing code, 221-d3, developed millions of dollars of low cost
housing in Boston to meet an urgent social problem created by the city’s
urban renewal projects.
The most significant experience
for me, however, was to go to Greenwood, Mississippi in 1964 at the request
of the national Council of Churches, to lend support to African- Americans who
were seeking to gain their voting rights. One hundred years after the Emancipation
Proclamation, some in my congregation told me that black people were moving
too fast. In Mississippi, I encountered the hatred and the violence that helped
me understand my experience in Buchenwald Concentration Camp twenty years earlier.
I returned to Boston from
Mississippi with a better understanding of the Christian Church. Many who participated
in the Mississippi Summer were young college men and women. In effect, they
were the core of the civil rights troops that were exposed to genuine danger.
Before I arrived, four had been murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Parents were fearful for
the safety of their sons and daughters. Some came to Mississippi urging their
children to come home out of harm’s way. Some of the children said,
Mother, father, you taught me at home to love our neighbors as ourselves and to respect and honor the needs of others. That is what I am doing.
The children took seriously
what were only pious words for their parents.
In the 1950’s and
1960’s, Republican and Democratic administrations supported the struggle
for the civil rights of African-Americans, by being willing to enforce laws
that guaranteed the constitutional rights of all. Theocracy at the state level,
which combined religious convictions of segregation and political power, were
doomed.
The Little Rock, Arkansas
School Board had asked the local courts for, and was granted, an injunction
against integration of the public schools. But in August, 1958, the United States
8th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the injunction. It was a decision that
was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court on September 12, 1958.
In response, Governor Orval
Faubus signed a package of segregationist bills passed by the Arkansas legislature,
including the right of the governor to shut down the public schools in any part
of the state. The governor acted and closed the doors of four Little Rock high
schools with the declaration:
If Daisy Bates (an NAACP leader) would find an honest job and go to work, and if the US Supreme Court would keep its cotton-picking hands off the Little Rock School Board’s affairs, we could open the schools.
On August 12, 1959, the
Little Rock School Board reopened the high schools, whereupon Governor Faubus
dispatched the Arkansas National Guard to prevent integration. President Dwight
Eisenhower responded by sending federal troops to Little Rock to force compliance
with the law and to protect the nine black students who entered Central High
School. Governor George Wallace met a similar fate on June 11, 1963 when he
stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama in his effort to block integration.
Theocracy at the state level was trumped by federal law.
In Arkansas the cost to
the black students was enormous as they endured the intense hatred of the racist
white students. Parents of three of the students lost their jobs. Four families
moved away, as Roger Williams was forced to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony
more than three hundred years earlier. Prejudice, grounded in religious convictions,
is a challenge for every generation.
When I married in 1948,
between my sophomore and junior years at Wesleyan University, condoms were illegal
by Connecticut state law. They had to be purchased under the counter. When the
law was challenged, it was laughed out of court. However, the impulse that originally
put the law on the books was not a laughing matter. It was an act to enforce
the entire population of Connecticut to conform to one group’s moral code.
That is the current threat
to American democracy. There is a coordinated and energized effort today that
extends from our local communities to the federal government, to impose a restrictive
code of ethics upon all of us. The ground troops for this assault upon our democratic
values are collectively known as the radical religious right. The autocratic
religious zealots of today, who want to shape our society to their values, are
as dangerous and intolerant as were the theocratic Puritans of New England.
Recall the trademarks of
theocracy.
1. It makes a claim to absolute truth—relieving itself of the need to consider any other points-of-view.
2. It claims divine sanction for its “truths.” The mantra is my god is better than your god. My way is better that your way. Racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing are expressions of that perspective.
3. The projected ideal goal justifies any means to achieve it. Secret agreements are made that trample the requirements of an open, responsive government, essential to a democratic society.
4. Political decisions are cast in the framework of a holy war. Foreign
policies describe opponents as an “axis of evil,” combined with a
declaration to our friends that they are “either with us or against us,” thereby eliminating the need for any discussion or compromise of our nation’s actions. At the domestic level, it means “follow the leader,” or be labeled subversive. It is an echo during a recent period of our country’s history of calling dissenters “communists."
Today, at the local level
some are seeking to gain control of the school board in order to introduce “creationism”
into the classroom. Another objective is prayer in the classroom. But whose
prayer? How many realize that this coming Sunday there will be more religious
gatherings in Boston that are non-Christian, than Christian. That data comes
from a survey done by students at Harvard Divinity School. Boston is not an
isolated example. Our nation is becoming more religiously diverse than many
desire or care to acknowledge. The exclusion of sex education from school or
church curriculums is another target at a time when all surveys of teenage sexual
behavior point to the need for something more than simply encouraging abstinence.
Any discussion of homosexuality is met with fierce hostility.
The opposition of evangelical
Christians to granting basic civil rights to homosexuals has come to the fore
again following the decision of the US Supreme Court on November 18, 2003 in
its decision Lawrence v. Texas overturning Texas’ anti-sodomy laws. That
was followed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declaration that gay
couples have a constitutional right to marry. The decision brought an immediate
outcry by the religious right to amend the US Constitution.
The reproductive rights
of women, guaranteed by the 1973 US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade,
are under constant assault. The most direct attack is to place on the bench
judges attuned to the religious agenda of those who would subvert the rights
of women. An example was the nomination of Alabama attorney-general, William
Pryor, to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Pryor has called Roe, “The
worst abomination of constitutional law in our country.”
The religious sexual agenda
has already impacted US foreign aid. Money channeled through the United Nations
to educate and support women in Third World countries has been sharply reduced
in response to the religious body in this country that fear that some of the
money might be used to teach family planning through the use of contraceptive
devises. In like manner, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have made
it difficult for generic drugs to be used in the fight against AIDS in those
countries that need them the most. To placate our largest pharmaceutical companies,
we have sacrificed urgent health needs to the god of money.
My greatest concern is
an attitude that has been growing in this country since 9/11. In an October
2000 presidential debate, candidate Bush, with respect for other nations, said,
“If we are an arrogant nation, they will resent us…If we are a humble
nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.” Unfortunately, President
Bush’s prediction has come to pass. As a nation we have been arrogant beyond
measure, and for many people we have become a pariah, a self-righteous bully
on the international highway.
Theocracy lies at the base
of the shift that has occurred. Since the destruction of the Twin Towers in
New York City, and the declaration of a war against terrorism, President Bush
has increasingly seen his presidency as part of a divine plan. Richard Land
of the Southern Baptist Convention recalls the President saying, “I believe
God wants me to be president.” After September, 11 Michael Duff wrote in
Time magazine that the president spoke of “being chosen by the grace
of God to lead at that moment.” I wonder how Pharaoh must have thought
of himself when the Israelite terrorists rose up against him.
On the first anniversary
of the 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush said at Ellis Island, “The
ideal of America is the hope of all mankind….That hope still lights our
way. And the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness has not overcome
it.” Those last two sentences come from the first chapter of the Gospel
of John. But in the Gospel the light in the darkness is the Word of God, not
the policies of a holier-than-thou nation, which is the way our country is being
unapologetically portrayed to the nations of the world.
In his aspiration for an
American Empire, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said,
“If people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.” Kristol
adds that Europe is unable to lead because it has been “corrupted by secularism.”
Such is the mood and attitude that has gripped many in America, and if you and
I don’t go along, we are unpatriotic or weak on fighting terrorists. Sound
familiar?
In his Christmas card,
our vice-president, Dick Cheney, leaves us with this thought, “And if a
sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an
empire can rise without His aid?” That is bad theology and bad foreign
policy.
I call to your attention words from Eugene Peterson in the introduction to his book about the Biblical prophet Amos,
Religion is the most dangerous energy source known to humankind. The moment a person or government or religion or organization is convinced that God is either ordering or sanctioning a cause or project, anything goes. The history worldwide, of religion-fueled hate, killing, and oppression is staggering
Judaism and Christianity
are both politically oriented. Synagogue and church can and must work with governmental
agencies to promote the causes of peace, justice, and human rights. But when
the government becomes the moral agent and enforcer for a particular religious
body or consortium, the results are unequivocally disastrous. That is when the
combination of religion and politics is lethal.
The authors of our nation’s Constitution were correct in making the separation of church and state an imperative. Religion is a motivator and a key to our spiritual lives. But there is no room for liberty in a theocracy. History is our witness.
© copyright 2004 by Harold R. Fray, Jr. All rights reserved.
Harold R. Fray, Jr. is a United Church of Christ minister and has authored three books—Conflict and Change in the Church, The Pain and Joy of Ministry and Choices I Made: One Man's Journey into Freedom.