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Religious Allegiance

Patriotism and Dissent in American Religion and Politics

By Josh WhiteheadPublished 6 years ago 8 min read
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The relationship between American patriotism and dissent has a significant history of both overlapping coexistence and frank opposition, revealing a semi-consistent series of debates on the grounds of religion and politics that began during the American independence movement and continue to be debated to this day. The presidency of George W. Bush reestablished a sense of patriotism in American politics through religious foundational ideas after the 9/11 bombings, causing a reasonable amount of dissent among the non-Christian American population. Court cases calling to question the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, such as Everson v. New Jersey Board of Education, have a history of creating conflict between state governments and religious organizations.

In order to effectively discuss the nature of the relationship between patriotism and dissent, as they relate to religion and politics, one must first define patriotism. The Oxford English Dictionary defines patriotism as a love or devotion to one’s country, but there is much more to this definition that is based on individual experience. Members of modern American society are taught from a young age to treat patriotism as an almost religious tradition. Emile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, spent a portion of his life in Australia, observing the Aboriginal tribes in daily activities and rituals. He noticed that tribes held particular animals or plants to be sacred totems that represented the village, while others appeared to be profane to acknowledge. This ideology by Durkheim was a means of defining a society that modern civilization evolved from, therefore it can also be loosely applied to current societal totems such as the American flag.

In many ways the American flag is a symbol of patriotism and national identity, but it is also treated as what Durkheim would call a “totem.” The flag reminds people of a sort of devotion to the nation and its code of conduct, particularly the United States Constitution, which in the minds of most American citizens is practically deemed a sacred text. The American flag is also commonly used as a crucial component in American churches, religious institutions and traditions. One could argue that the flag constitutes a religious ideal that corresponds directly with patriotism, in the same way that the American Constitution sets a judicial precedent while simultaneously being used as a sacred moral code. This is particularly ironic in that the First Amendment of the Constitution establishes that the government should have no interaction with religious organizations. Others might say that the nature of patriotism is simply to love your own country without any particular regard for the institutions within that country, so as to remain impartial to the socio-political sphere of American culture. This argument, much like that of Rawls, is ideal in theory but lacks possible outcome due to the inability for humans to see past irrational, personal and subjective beliefs.

Though the majority of American presidents throughout history were Christian in religious tradition and often included sayings such as “God bless these United States of America,” the presidency of George W. Bush established a different kind of religious openness in the office of the president. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, President Bush came forward in his public address at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, saying:

“God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that His purposes are not always our own, yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral, are known and heard and understood. There are prayers that help us last through the say and endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey, and there are prayers that yield our will to a Will greater than our own. This world He created is of a moral design...Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called, ‘the warm courage of national unity.’” (BKH, p.100)

This quote presents several indications of Christian identity intertwined with American identity. He mentions that in the midst of tragedy, the people of America gather together under one flag and one God in order to pray for the lives that were lost. While it is true that the American non-Christian community did not immediately show contempt for this speech out of reverence for the tragedy, there were later outcries against the president for his bias towards a Christian ideal, and even more disturbingly his implied association between said Christian beliefs and American patriotism. Seeing a passionately Christian American leader led other citizens to become equally impassioned in a public manner.

The defenders of Bush’s speech, mostly right-wing conservative Christians, began to argue such things as “America is a Christian nation, founded on Christian ideals.” Arguments of this nature, while common before the speech by Bush, became far more openly expressed and debated by American citizens. One could counter the argument by saying that though America has a Christian majority religion, there is not a national religion according to the First Amendment of the Constitution, nor was America directly founded on Christian ideals. If the majority were given priority as the primary religion of the national government, it is likely that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment would be violated on a great variety of levels, leading to public “religious toleration” as opposed to “religious freedom.” As recognized by David Holmes in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, the distinction between religious toleration and religious freedom is crucial to the development of an equal and just society. Holmes discusses the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, which gave all Christian religions to practice freely in the state of Maryland, but the state government reserved the right to limit or withdraw that permission at any time. (BKH, p.14) This act was later nullified, preventing anyone outside of a Trinitarian Christian set of beliefs from practicing religious traditions in the state of Maryland under threat of execution or forfeit of land ownership. For such a governmental policy as this example to be allowed in America today would be an outrageous overstep of state power, clearly breaking the foundation of the Establishment Clause.

The other component of the argument for a Christian America is that the nation was founded on Christian ideals. This argument holds no merit to an educated scholar in religion and politics. The founding fathers of the United States Constitution, while majority Protestant and Deist, spent a large amount of time trying to find a way to create distinct boundaries between church and state for the very reason that there is not a labeled national religion. America was founded on the idea of escape from religious persecution, and though it is true that the early days of the American Constitutional Era were not particularly modeled on religious freedom, it was largely uncommon for anyone of a non-Christian background to practice religion in public. In this way, the religious persecution was most largely seen between Christian denominations. When the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, with the inclusion of the Establishment Clause, there was made a specific set of boundaries that applied to much more than just Christian denominations; it applied to every religious organization and every branch of American politics.

The 1947 case of Everson v. New Jersey Board of Education set a very specific judicial precedent about the method by which government has grounds to avoid showing bias towards religious organizations. The case is based on a series of complaints that the New Jersey state government was paying subsidies to the parents of parochial school students who rode public buses to school with public school students. The main argument being made against such action was that it favored youth participation in particular private religious school systems through public state means, therefore breaking the Establishment Clause. The defense of this argument was that the parents of these parochial school students were state taxpayers, just the same as the public school parents, and therefore their children deserved equal opportunities for public transport, despite the religious foundations of the schools that they were being taken to by the public transportation. The defense also argued that to take away the public busing for the parochial schools would be a hinderance to the practice of religious tradition, and therefore break the Fourteenth Amendment, which is that the government will protect the equal distribution of rights among all citizens. The ruling for this case was ultimately that the money from the taxpayers were going to the busing system and not to the schools the buses were going to. The Everson v. New Jersey Board of Education case proved a significant point about the method by which the Establishment clause could be rectified in certain civil cases: if there is an intermediate entity between government and religion, there is not a particular favoring or hinderance of a particular religious tradition on the part of the government.

This court case relates not so much to patriotic points of interest as much as the nature of dissent as it relates to politics and religion. The case offers a relatively hazy example of where the distinction is between favoring and hindering a religious practice. The ruling on the case, made final by Judge Hugo Black, proves as somewhat of an unfair way to escape governmental criticism. The state funds the public bus system, but the bus system can do whatever it wants, therefore the state is not funding the transportation of students to religious private schools. One could argue that in funding the buses, with public transportation being managed by the state, the government is also funding where the buses go. A defense for this argument, on the other hand, is that the buses were transporting private school and public school students equally, despite particular religious foundations, not to mention that the buses could have hypothetically transported students to any number of different parochial schools of various religious traditions, though this was very doubtfully the case in reality. In this way, the buses were capable of transporting multiple backgrounds of religious students to their respective religious parochial schools without bias, therefore the manner in which they were transported was not in any way affected by the schools with which they were affiliated.

Patriotism is seen in many different ways in the same way that religion is subjective to a particular individual. For a person to associate religious ideals with American patriotism on a personal level is entirely their own prerogative. However, when someone applies patriotism to all society in one specific subjective definition, such like President George W. Bush in his post-9/11 speech, that definition stirs dissent among the people and ultimately leads them to non-patriotic ends. The same could be said for when someone attempts to specifically define religious practice in a subjective manner.

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About the Creator

Josh Whitehead

I have a degree in Religious Studied from North Carolina State University. You will find that a lot of my work involves religion and analytical comparisons to popular culture, as these are my two favorite things. I hope you enjoy!

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