Orthodox Reflections

In an essay at the Chronicles magazine web site – ‘Will Africa Save America?’ – Mr. Daniel McCarthy makes some rather extravagant claims about Europe and the United States:

Early Christians believed that the Roman empire, for all its sins, served a providential role by creating the worldly conditions for the spread of Christianity, even among the peoples who ultimately conquered the Roman west.

Europe and the United States have likewise fostered an environment in which Christianity flourishes, on a global scale. Will a post-Christian Europe and America sustain that environment—or if Christianity succumbs to culture wars here, will Christianity everywhere be in mortal danger?

Conservatives are right to take heart from the religion’s growth in Africa.  Yet if the civilization that Christianity created in Europe and America cannot survive here, the prospects for Christian civilization anywhere are bleak.

The West is not the faith—but it is the moral battleground on which the future of the faith on several continents depends.

There is a disturbing lack of knowledge about the post-independence goals of the US project present in those lines.  Yet this is far from an outlier in the US:  A large portion of Evangelical Protestants and others of the MAGA variety ardently believe, for instance, that the federal constitution drafted in 1787 is quite literally divinely inspired, making it akin to the Holy Scriptures themselves.  Some corrective notes are therefore in order.

A Roman Catholic writer, Christopher Ferrara, has written a profound rebuke of the notion of a deeply ‘Christian America’ with his book Liberty: The God That Failed.  There are some significant passages that lay bare the un-Christian foundations of the US:

As Locke foresaw, the unchallenged monism of state power that is at the essence of Liberty would be insured by a multiplicity of Christian sects.  . . . in the Essay Concerning Toleration, Locke advised that when any sect is “grown, or growing so numerous as to appear dangerous to the magistrate” the magistrate “may and ought to use all ways, either policy or power, that shall be convenient, to lessen, break and suppress the party, and so prevent the mischief”—the “mischief” being the mere existence of a dominant religious faction capable of posing a challenge to the State.  Both Jefferson and Madison, following Locke, expressly recognized the division of Christianity into sects as a primary safeguard of Liberty.  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson observes that the “several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other,” preventing any one sect from installing the “Procrustean bed” of “uniformity” via government.  Likewise, in Federalist No. 51, written to persuade the holdout states to ratify the Constitution, Madison declares, with the supreme religious indifference of the Deist he was, that:

In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.  It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.  The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects, and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of the country and number of people comprehended under the same government. . . . In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good. . . .

Like Locke, Madison viewed the very multiplicity of sects as necessary to secure “justice and the general good,” by which he means what Locke means:  “to preserve men in this world from the fraud and violence of one another” and “promoting the general welfare, which consists in riches and power” as determined by “the number and industry of your subjects.”  Christianity divided poses no threat to the power of the State as the guarantor of a “social peace” limited to the absence of aggression against property rights, including the right to own slaves (as Madison, Jefferson and Washington did), or, as contemporary libertarians contend, the right to abortion as incident to Lockean “self-ownership” [to which we many now sadly add things like transgender mutilation—W.G.]. . . . Lockean polities require for their equilibrium and survival a divide and conquer strategy toward Christianity as their only serious rival.  This is why, to recall Peter Gay’s startling observation, “political absolutism and religious toleration [are] the improbable twins of the modern state system” (Tacoma, Wash., Angelico Press, 2012, pgs. 542-3).

Post-1776 arrangements within the US, contra McCarthy and others, were not designed to create a Christian republic but a safe haven for a vague ‘pursuit of happiness,’ however one wishes to define that, as the Declaration of Independence famously put it.  To do that, as Mr. Ferrara says, one must neutralize Christianity.  And that is precisely what the clauses in the federal and State constitutions like the First Amendment do (by forbidding the establishment of any religion/denomination and guaranteeing the free exercise of religion to any and all).

But Mr. Ferrara is far from done.  Here is another important passage:

This business of freeing the world from its monkish ignorance and superstition [a phrase of Jefferson’s describing the effect of the ‘American experiment’ on the peoples of the wider world—W.G.] was the culminating practical project of the Enlightenment, designed precisely to preclude the intrusion of divine claims into politics—above all the claims of Christ on men and nations so handily excised from the “Jefferson Bible.”  John Adams explained in perfect Enlightenment style why the Framers had rejected any divine intrusion into their work:  “It was the general opinion of ancient nations that the Divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men,” he wrote, but the new state and federal governments of America “have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature”—principles that had somehow eluded man’s understanding until 1787.  Further, Adams declared, it must not be pretended that those involved in devising these new governments “had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise and agriculture. . . .”  Rather, Adams predicted:  “[I]t will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”  Nor would Locke have had it any other way (Ibid., p. 550).

There is an interesting confirmation of Mr. Adams’s view in an article at the Tenth Amendment Center, detailing the influence of the rational, mechanical thinking of Isaac Newton upon the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the federal constitution:

Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t a political thinker like Marcus Cicero or John Locke. He was a scientist. Indeed, he exemplified the Scientific Revolution—an event that changed not only how people thought about the physical universe, but also how they thought about politics and government. In that way, Newton and his scientific colleagues greatly affected the U.S. Constitution.

 . . .

The Scientific Revolution, and particularly Newton’s work, taught men that the universe wasn’t willful or chaotic, but governed by rules of order. Once you knew the rules, the physical universe became predictable. The physical world was, in 18th-century parlance, a “mechanical” place.

Newton’s fame encouraged others to tinker with mathematics, machinery, and astronomical models. Garry Wills’ book “Inventing America” describes both the 18th-century fascination with mechanical order and balance, and the efforts to apply “mechanics” to politics. Wills wrote of the Declaration of Independence, for example, “The Declaration’s opening is Newtonian. It lays down the law.” Wills added that “Newton’s ordering of the inanimate universe led men to seek an equivalent pattern in human activity.”

Participants in the 1787–1790 debates over the framing and ratification of the Constitution frequently drew analogies between scientific law and political and constitutional systems. . . .

Much of the final Constitution resembles an interlocked and finely tuned machine. As Charles Carroll of Carrollton wrote:

“The three distinct powers of the federal Govt. are skilfully [sic] combined so as to balance each other, by that reciprocal check & counterpoise, which the most approved writers on Govt. consider as its chief perfection … [T]he several State-Governments will always keep it within its own & proper sphere of action: [T]hus while it restrains the State-Governments within their orbits, it is by them retained within its own; acting, & acted upon it will produce that order, that stability in the civil, which we see exists in the physical world, where if I may compare great things to small, every planet, every center of each system attracting & attracted, repelling, & repelled keeps that station, & rolls within those spheres, which the great Author of all being has prescribed to each.”

Mr. Ferrara, however, is not finished.  He continues:

 . . . the legal historian John Witte observes, a century after Locke proposed his paradigm of the modern, religiously “neutral” and pluralist state, “American Enlightenment writers pressed Locke’s theses into more concrete legal and political forms.”  With Locke’s principles in mind the “enlightened” and deistic Founders knew that what they called Liberty could not be established so long as government remained in any way subject to the dictates of revealed religion.  Quite simply, religion had to be subordinated to politics, but especially the Christian religion with its claims on both men and nations.

“The origin of free government in the modern sense,” writes Walter Berns, “coincides with and can only coincide with, the solution of the religious problem, and the solution of the religious problem consists in the subordination of religion.”  As Berns concludes approvingly elsewhere:  “The Constitution was ordained and established to secure liberty and its blessings, not to promote faith in God.  Officially, religion was subordinate to liberty. . . .”  Or, as George Will has put it:  “A central purpose of America’s political arrangements is the subordination of religion to the political order, meaning the primacy of democracy. . . . It is the intent of the Founders.”  More specifically, as Hancock recognizes, “America is based upon a Lockean subordination of Christianity to secular ends.”  Locke’s political theory, says Thomas Pangle, is aimed at “moderating religion and subordinating it to the needs of a society designed according to rational principles” (Liberty, pgs. 550-1).

The United States, and all those countries that have followed their lead in establishing regimes that have clauses like the First Amendment or like Article III, clause 6, that eliminate religious tests or oaths as a qualification for office, are paragons not of Christian society but of what the Orthodox priest Father John Strickland calls the saeculum – the secular – in his book The Age of Utopia (Volume 3 of his series Paradise and Utopia: The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was).

The US is a grim fulfilment of the distortions caused by the separation of the West from the Orthodox Church.  The loss of Orthodox beliefs and practices plunged the West into despair, illustrated all too well in the life of the humanist Petrarch.  Fr. John writes:

The cultivation of an ardent love of God could assuage what was otherwise demonic despair about God’s impending judgment.  But it was a love that could be consummated with its divine object only after death, not in this world.

The second conviction growing in Petrarch’s mind was that without the ability to know God in this world, man’s experience of transformation here could be only secular, that is, “of this age.”  It would not be heavenly.  This was the origin of secular humanism, a belief that the natural, spiritually untransformed world provides the means of human fulfillment.  It was a belief radically at odds with traditional Christianity, and it would forever alter the character of Christendom (The Age of Utopia: Christendom from the Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, Ancient Faith Publishing, Chesterton, Indiana, 2021, p. 15).

This view of a world bereft of God’s transformational presence helped to create the conditions that led to the triumph of the secular/political in the United States:

And so the pietistic Christianity that de Tocqueville observed in the new republic was ambiguous.  It drew all men to respect democracy.  But it also made all men slaves of an impassioned piety that tended to serve individual concerns.  This individuation of belief, he claimed, created a religion of the public sphere or of civil society.  Because believers had little or no experience of a transcendent God present in this world through ecclesiality and a sacramental liturgy, they reverted to a faith in an immanent body politic that took the place of such a God.

In this way democracy became a substitute for heavenly immanence (Ibid., p. 227, bolding added).

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The US view of God and creation is at odds with what the Orthodox Church confesses.  Some writings of St. Maximus the Confessor help illustrate the difference, showing the immanence of God in the world:

Of the several layers of meaning in the vision itself [i.e., the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus Christ on Mt. Tabor—W.G.], the one that concerns us here relates to the luminous garment of Christ.  Maximus finds in this a symbol “of creation itself, disclosing like a garment, . . . the worthy power of the generative Word who wears it.”  The physical creation is the garment of the Word, from which the Word itself shines forth to those who are able to see.

Evidently to perceive the divine Logos in creation, and to perceive the logoi which are the formative causes of things, are one and the same.  As Maximus states in the Mystagogy, “it is in Him [God the Word] that all the logoi of beings both are and subsist as one in an incomprehensible simplicity” (David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom, Cambridge UP, New York, 2004, p. 204).

The US, like the rest of the West since the separation of the West from the Orthodox Church in 1054, have imbibed so thoroughly St. Augustine’s mistaken view that the Fall made mankind and all the creation a ‘mass of damnation,’ and that God is a simple, unknowable essence, as to create an unbridgeable dualism and distance between God and His creatures, so much so that no real respite can be found even in the Western churches, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic.  Thus, the attempts of Petrarch, the United States, etc., to create utopia here in the saeculum.

The Orthodox bishops of Russia, in their beneficial work Bases of the Social Concept, have something profoundly important to say at this point about the kind of religious freedom enshrined in places like the US:

The principle of the freedom of conscience, which emerged as a legal notion in the 18th-19th centuries, has become a fundamental principle of interpersonal relations only after World War I. It was confirmed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and included in the constitutions of most states. The emergence of this principle testifies that in the contemporary world, religion is turning from a «social» into a «private» affair of a person. This process in itself indicates that the spiritual value system has disintegrated and that most people in a society which affirms the freedom of conscience no longer aspire for salvation. If initially the state emerged as an instrument of asserting divine law in society, the freedom of conscience has ultimately turned state into an exclusively temporal institute with no religious commitments.

The adoption of the freedom of conscience as a legal principle points to the fact that society has lost religious goals and values and become massively apostate and actually indifferent to the task of the Church and to the overcoming of sin.

The corollary is undeniable:  A truly Christian country will have an established Church that cooperates with the government for the well-being, including the spiritual well-being, of the citizens of that country, all the while respecting the proper boundaries of one another.  Neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants practice that corollary.  Roman Catholics believe that their Pope is supreme over both Church and state/government; there is no cooperation but rather subordination of the state to the Church (read Dictatus Papae sometime for a glaring example of this; thanks to Jay Dyer for mentioning it in one of his recent videos on the Papacy).  Protestantism leads to all kinds of distortions between Church and state – the subordination of the Church to the state as in England, apocalyptic theocratic dictatorships as in Munster, Germany, the aforementioned Lockean system in the US, etc.

The Orthodox concept is usually referred to as a symphony between Church and state.  From the Bases:

St. Justinian in his Sixth Novella formulates the principle lying in the basis of church-state symphony: «The greatest blessings granted to human beings by God’s ultimate grace are priesthood and kingdom, the former (priesthood, church authority) taking care of divine affairs, while the latter (kingdom, government) guiding and taking care of human affairs, and both, come from the same source, embellishing human life. Therefore, nothing lies so heavy on the hearts of kings as the honour of priests, who on their part serve them, praying continuously for them to God. And if the priesthood is well ordered in everything and is pleasing to God, then there will be full harmony between them in every thing that serves the good and benefit of the human race. Therefore, we exert the greatest possible effort to guard the true dogmas of God and the honour of the priesthood, hoping to receive through it great blessings from God and to hold fast to the ones which we have». Guided by this norm, Emperor Justinian in his Novellas recognised the canons as having the power of state laws.

The classical Byzantine formula of relationships between state and church power is contained in the Epanagoge (later 9th century): «The temporal power and the priesthood relate to each other as body and soul; they are necessary for state order just as body and soul are necessary in a living man. It is in their linkage and harmony that the well-being of a state lies».

The form of the government in this relationship also matters a great deal (Ibid.):

The form and methods of government is conditioned in many ways by the spiritual and moral condition of society. Aware of this, the Church accepts the people’s choice or does not resist it at least.

Under the Judges’ rule, the public system described in the Book of Judges, power acted not through coercion, but authority, which was sanctioned by God. For this authority to be effective, the faith in society should be very strong. Under monarchy, power remains God-given, but for its exercise it uses not so much spiritual authority as coercion. The shift from the judges’ rule to monarchy indicated the weakening faith — the fact that caused the need to replace the King Invisible by the king visible. Contemporary democracies, including those monarchic in form, do not seek the divine sanction of power. They represent the form of government in secular society that presupposes the right of every able-bodied citizen to express his will through elections.

Some recent Orthodox Church Fathers have further fleshed out this idea, giving stark warnings about the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of governments ‘by the people.’  St. Theophan the Recluse is one of them, writing,

The Tsar’s authority, having in its hands the means of restraining the movements of the people and relying on Christian principles itself, does not allow the people to fall away from them, but will restrain it. And since the main work of the Antichrist will be to turn everyone away from Christ, he will not appear as long as the Tsar is in power. The latter’s authority will not let him show himself, but will prevent him from acting in his own spirit. That is what “he that restraineth” is [2 Thes. 2:7]. When the Tsar’s authority falls, and the peoples everywhere acquire self-government (republics, democracies), then the Antichrist will have room to maneuver. It will not be difficult for Satan to train voices urging apostasy from Christ, as experience showed in the time of the French Revolution. Nobody will give a powerful ‘veto’ to this. A humble declaration of faith will not be tolerated. And so, when these arrangements have been made everywhere, arrangements which are favourable to the exposure of antichristian aims, then the Antichrist will also appear. Until that time he waits, and is restrained.

Clearly, the way forward for the 50 States and other Western European peoples is not ‘more democracy’ nor ‘more religious freedom.’  In this case, paradoxically, ‘progress’ will be achieved by looking backward, by returning to healthy institutions and practices of the past that were beneficial for them.

For the United States in particular we would propose something like the following, which is based on the system the States were under when they were colonies of Great Britain, a time for the most part of harmony for all those involved, until the revolutionary contagion began to spread:

1 Separate the States into the dominant cultural regions (New England, West Coast, Great Plains, Dixie, Mormon country, etc.).

2 Place a king over the States belonging to each region, who would appoint a royal governor over each State; the governors in their turn would appoint the upper chamber of the legislature in their respective States as well as judges.

3 The lower chamber of each State legislature as well as local offices (sheriff, mayor, etc.) would be elected by the citizens.

4 Establish in the fundamental laws of each of the regions a religion that would serve as the end goal of all the work of the government and the people, their reason for being, their telos, and that would serve as the measuring rod for the propriety of all subsequent laws, decisions, and rulings by the various officers of the government.  Orthodoxy would be best, as we have explained above, but a tradition-minded Roman Catholic or Protestant establishment would be better than the current secular nightmare (William Federer, with whom we have profound disagreements about the nature of the American project, nevertheless has helpfully compiled the establishment clauses of the various colonial/State constitutions that once existed).

In the end, we cannot agree with Mr. McCarthy’s claims that the pax Americana/Europa has been good for Christian evangelism.  The Western countries have actually done quite a lot to discredit and stifle authentic Christianity at home and abroad by the ideological systems created by them, described above, as well as their oft-mentioned prideful, conquering, colonialist attitudes and actions – all of which are the results of their deformations and abandonment of Orthodox teachings.  But he is also right in a sense:  The West is a battleground for the future of Christianity.  If the West returns to Orthodoxy, the Christian cradle in which she was actually born, the future of Christianity will be bright, for Orthodoxy is the fountain of virtue, deification, etc.  A powerful and wealthy West, fully united to Christ, pulsing again with the uncreated deifying energies of the All-Holy Trinity, could do a great amount of good in the world for the Church.  If she continues to meander down the paths of schism and separation, down deeper into the darkness of her narcissistic ‘West is best,’ Protestant anarchy, absolute Papal monarchy, Lockean secularist delusions, then the Orthodox and the more traditional branches of the Western denominations wherever they are in the world will suffer (not to mention other conservative peoples), as they become targets of the liberal/progressive crusaders and their intelligence, propaganda, financial, and military machinery, bent on converting their ‘erring brethren’ to a Christianity that approves and exalts all lifestyle choices, abortion, and even Christ-hating Marxists/communists.

–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland.  His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.