Religion and the American Republic

When Constantine the Great was raised to the purple at York, England in the year 306 AD he was a pagan. His predecessors were also pagans and they persecuted the Christians and other nonbelievers. Diocletian in particular had a very cold place in his heart for Christians and persecuted them unmercifully. On his way to the crucial battle for the determination of the emperorship, Constantine saw, in the clouds, a vision of a fiery cross with the words "in hoc signo vinces," (by this sign you shall conquer). He won the battle and thereafter stopped the persecution of the Christians. Since it was presumed that Constantine had won his battle after receiving his message directly from God, it was further presumed that he was the beneficiary of God's grace. That is to say, it was presumed that his, authority to be emperor and head of the Roman Greek Church (orthodox) came directly from God.

Constantine was a little unsure as to how to treat his good fortune, but he did discover one thing about Christianity. If he got himself baptized right away it was possible to commit a mortal sin and go to hell, but if he delayed baptism until his death bed, he could avoid the problem, be forgiven for his sins and go to heaven. He had his son murdered, but was also consecrated a saint of the church.

Constantine then was the Roman emperor, the deified head of the pagan church, and the Vice Reagent of Christ on Earth. He embodied all the supreme authority that there was to have. He and he alone had the authority to make the appointments of governing officials of the empire, the pagan church, and the Christian church. He appointed the patriarchs of the Christian church including the, patriarch of Rome. As an ecological system, all the authority, both spiritual and temporal, flowed from the top—from the gods to Constantine, from God to Constantine, and from Constantine to the rest of the Roman world.

During the 8th century, there was great unrest in the west. The throne of the Frankish King Childeric III had been usurped by his master of the palace, Pepin III, the son of Charles Martel, the strong man of the west. Stephen II the Pope (patriarch and bishop of Rome) was having trouble with the Emperor Constantine V in Constantinople. Pepin inquired after the Pope, "Who should be king, the man with the throne or the man with the power?" The Pope agreed that Pepin should be king. Usually, only the emperor could name a king as had been the case in the line of kings Pepin had overthrown. Even Clovis, the beginning of the line, had been named king by the emperor Anasthasis. So how could the Pope name Pepin king? Well, for one thing, the emperor was in Constantinople and couldn't do anything about it The agents and armies the emperor had sent to discipline the Pope were defeated and the exarchate of Ravenna fell to the Lombards. When Pepin defeated the Lombards he emerged as the Pope's defender. The second thing was that the Pope found a piece of paper called the "Donation of Constantine" which purported to be a five hundred year old document. In it, the Emperor Constantine the Great made a grant of authority to the popes: The popes were given the authority to wear the purple, although other mortals could be executed for wearing purple. They also could use the titles of the emperor, particularly the title supreme pontiff (bridge to God) which the popes use to this day. But more to the point, a pope could exercise the authority of the emperor in the west, and that meant naming kings. It was under this authority that Pepin III was named King of the Franks. Pepin, in turn, gave the Pope the exarchate of Ravenna the lands he had conquered from the Lombards and which became the Papal States. These became the Donation of Pepin.

The Donation of Constantine was a forgery, but the popes used it until 1871 when their temporal authority was removed by the Lateran Treaty and the lands, except the Vatican, were incorporated into the new Italian state. Under this authority the popes named the kings of Europe and the Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. Pope Leo III surprised him with the coronation during the Christmas service. Charlemagne nearly threw the crown to the floor, but thought better of it when he realized he was standing before the tomb of St. Peter.

Having won independence from the emperor in Constantinople, the popes of Rome established themselves as the supreme authority in the west and by the coronation of Charlemagne usurped the authority to designate the uppermost temporal leader of the west. However, Charlemagne never used the title emperor. He knew who the emperor was and he was in Constantinople. Charlemagne used the titles, "King of the Franks, King of the Lombards, and Governor of the Romans."

The Roman Latin: Church (Catholic) finally broke with the Roman Greek Church (Orthodox) in the great schism of 1054, but the popes still claimed authority they purportedly got from the Emperor Constantine. With the fall of Constantinople, the Roman Latin Church became the ascendent church and continued to maintain its close relationship to the making of kings and dispensing temporal powers.

The Roman Latin Church was built on an imperial model with the pope replacing the emperor and the cardinals replacing the patriarchs. To this day, the terms once used for the governing apparatus of the Roman Empire are used for similar structures in the Roman Latin Church. The word "diocese" originally meant a geographical unit of the pagan Roman Empire and today means a geographical division of the Roman Latin Church.

When. Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York, threatened to pull the sword of excommunication from its scabbard, it was these ancient authorities to which he was appealing. He was very careful to say he wasn't excommunicating anybody: All he was doing was raising the possibility that certain politicians who were not acting according to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church might find themselves cast out of the community of the church. The Cardinal actually was criticizing those politicians who personally oppose abortion but who will not use their official position to further the church's teachings. This, of course, raises the question of the role of an imperial religion in a republic. In an imperial religion, the supreme authority is vested in the Pope as the Vicar of Christ on Earth. In a republic, the supreme authority is vested in the people and their elected representatives. Should the officials of a republic be responsible to the authority of the Pope in Rome or to the people of all religious persuasions who elected them? Is it a matter of personal conscience or is the official bound by the religious authority?

Freedom of Religion came into the political lexicon because religious organizations of all kinds, believing they were the chosen with complete and final authority, persecuted nonbelievers. The numbers of people who have been killed because they did or did not believe some particular way is monstrous. (It has to be a basic failing of humans that they kill for the most trivial differences between themselves and do it in the name of Deity.) In a republic, should people have the right to profess whatever religion they desire? Certainly. Should people be permitted to coerce others into their religion? No! Not in a republic! (Of course, it is impossible to coerce someone into particular beliefs, only the pretense of espousal can be coerced.)

Henry VIII of England could not get a papal dispensation to divorce his wife so he removed England from the Roman Latin Church and set up the Church of England with himself as the head (This is the same role that Elizabeth II plays today, and the same relationship between church and state exists today as in the time of the Roman Empire.) In Henry VIII's time, the Roman church lands were confiscated and many people were killed. Later, when Mary became Queen, she restored the country to the Roman Latin Church, the church lands were reclaimed, and many more people got killed, many of them burned at the stake in order to "purify" them of their sins (so they said).

Millions of Jews have been killed in all of history simply because they were Jews. Columbus sailed the' ocean blue in 1492, the same year Isabella and Ferdinand expelled the Jews from Spain.

The simple fact is that the Golden Rule is the mostly widely ignored teaching of Christianity, or of any religion for that matter. The Quakers know it and preach the Golden Rule, and have from the very beginning. Because of them we have a strong sense of religious toleration in the United States. Universalism, a religion born in the United States, shares this belief as do the Unitarians. The Unitarians owe their existence to the Ottoman Sultans who had a policy of freedom of religion in the lands they occupied and it is in their lands where the Unitarians started. Not much can be said for the rest.

Most religions are strictly male dominated, authoritarian systems that require absolute obedience. The consequence of disobedience depends upon the real power of the religion. When a religion has the power of life and death, its leaders often do not hesitate to use it to produce conformance of action, and teaching that will influence thought.

The United States is fortunate indeed that George Mason of Virginia championed the First Amendment. He supported the Virginia Resolutions that also contain these same freedoms: separation of church and state, freedom of worship, etc. As a nation we have become very strong intellectually because we can accommodate a great variety of religious belief, a possibility that arises since the religions themselves cannot police thought and demand conformance. However, we have suffered in recent years with popular presidents who have chosen to use the "bully pulpit" to espouse sectarian issues like school prayer and abortion. These have been departures from keeping the presidency neutral on such issues and have done great injustice to the majority of Americans who consider religion a matter of privacy, not of public policy. Jesse Helms, Senator from North Carolina, stimulated a major religious attack on the Federal funding for the arts with his attack on the National Endowment for the Arts because it had funded art of which he did not approve. This inspired many religious groups to mount attacks against "obscenity" saying, "The artists can do anything they want to, just do not use my tax dollars." It's an interesting argument and many people have tried to carry out such notions with their tax returns, i.e., withholding the amount that would go for defense. The IRS got them and got their money. Since the IRS can sell your house or your car to get its money, it is no problem for the agency.

Most religions in the United States are tolerant because they do have competition. For instance, excommunicated Catholics would find many friends and fellow excommunicates in Universalist/Unitarian churches. Ditto for excommunicated Lutherans. For many people, when religion becomes oppressive they simply do not attend any church. This happens everywhere there is freedom of religion.

Cardinal O'Connor's thinly veiled threat does a great disservice to the concept of freedom of religion in the United States. Pope John Paul II has already ordered clerics of his church who held elective office to resign those offices. Some good people were lost to the system when that happened and some resigned their vows in order to continue their work. If the Roman Latin Church is so interested in affecting the way public servants act they should have permitted their own clerics to serve in public office. If religious vows and public office don't mix, then Cardinal O'Connor should take note of that and keep his peace. At least he should not make his threat public. If the Cardinal is really worried about Mario Cuomo's soul and not his vote, he should have instructed Mr. Cuomo's parish priest to have a word with him in the confessional, not put his thoughts on the front page of the New York Times. Our nation is blessed with freedom and liberty. The slightest infringement of those freedoms and liberties for the least powerful among us diminishes the freedoms and liberty of all us and degrades us as human beings and as a nation. Religion is not a matter of majority vote. Nor is it a matter of fashion or political power. It goes without saying that the more political power any religion has the more corrupt it is, following Lord Acton's dictum. Religion is a matter of conscience. In a republic it is a matter of the unalienable right to Constitutional guarantees, as well as a matter between the adherents and their God.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility