This Sunday, I sat in Saint Brigid’s Church in Amherst Center for Mass, contemplating the nature of God and Man. It was a humbling sight, indeed – the morning sunlight dancing through the stained-glass windows made for a visage that could only be described as florid, with the multitude of Latin inscriptions on the walls invoking the ancient history and ecumenical scope of the Church.
Though I am more often than not less than consistent in my attendance of Mass and not particularly extroverted about any piety that I do possess; there is something that is comfortingly grandiose, and even hauntingly beautiful, about the entire affair. It is impossible to say whether the time-honored rituals of the Church are intrinsically captivating, or whether I have come to believe so after decades of ingratiation, repetition, ambivalence, inquiry, skepticism, and finally, acceptance. My individual piety is irrelevant in this matter, however. Any meditation on religion cannot merely be restricted to the Catholic Church, because organized religion has been and is still an agent of immeasurable power and unquantifiable influence in our lives.
In our contemporary world, there is relatively little thought given to the myriad monuments to the influence of religion that lie all around us. As the world has become more industrialized, globalized, and commercialized over the past two centuries, religion as an institution has not merely been decried as oppressive, but, more dangerously, altogether neglected. Especially amongst the college-aged, religion is seen either as the exclusive province of the superstitious, or as an institution devoted to the outright oppression of the masses. Especially amongst our generation, religion, to the empirical observer, seems to be regarded with equal parts contumely and hostility. Religion has been deposed from its own altar in the dominion of modern thought. More people than ever now subscribe to the notion that religion is merely a popular opiate.
To view religion as a mere tool of oppression or as an archaic coping mechanism of epochs past is, however, simultaneously fustian and fatuous. Organized religion, for all of its structural ills and human frailties, has and continues to provide a solid bedrock upon which the prosperity, continuity, and, indeed, very stability of the world is established.
As it is now, it has been since the darkest days of yore.
Niccolo Machiavelli, no fan of the corruption endemic in the Renaissance-era Roman Catholic Church, wrote of the Romans that, “It was religion that facilitated whatever enterprise the Senate and the great men of Rome designed to undertake.” In the same paragraph, he chronicles a trend that has evinced the transcendental value of religion throughout time: any observer of Ancient Rome, he notes, “…will see that its citizens were more afraid of breaking an oath than of breaking the law, since they held in higher esteem the power of God than the power of man.” What the Florentine was saying was, as it is now, absolutely revolutionary: that religion, far from being a pestilence loosed on the state and its ability to function, is a partner to government, spoken or unspoken. Religion is government by alternative means.
Though this is a concept that would not only shock the multitude, but throw into a furor those purists who favor a complete, absolute and rigid “separation” of “church” and “state,” a note must be made of the inability to separate culture, and therefore religion, from government.
Culture, much like government, serves as not only a reminder of the achievements and failings of past generations, but also as a reminder of their struggles, their trials and their tribulations – of methods of social organization that are tried and true, but also those that were also tried and failed. One cannot appreciate where they are if they cannot appreciate from whence they came.
Religion, much like government, is an exercise in continuity, stability, and happiness. William F. Buckley, Jr. said as much with his typical mordancy and insight when he asserted that, “Failure to mention religion [at an event] where other cultural inheritances are mentioned is unexplainable.”
There is even a legal dimension to this glorious partnership between the governments of man and the Kingdom of God.
As government bestows laws, so too does religion bestow morality, and what is morality if not the timeless, unwritten acceptance of certain extralegal precepts? Indeed, it is the promotion of a moral order devoted to stability, tranquility and harmony that we can look to as a monument to the timeless value of religion. The duty of the state to not root out religion for the sake of promoting putative “fairness” and “equality,” but to allow for accepted morality to augment enumerated laws. Orestes Brownson, in his magisterial analytic work The American Republic, elucidated upon this fact more eloquently than this columnist ever could: “The religious destiny [of the United States] is to render practicable and to realize the normal relations between church and state…as consecrated in the life of the nation.”
It is self-evident that in any society that respects balance, harmony and fairness, it is unpalatable for the government to be turned into a seminary, and its servants made to aspire to the pulpit. However, though government may make laws, it is the morality bequeathed by theology that provides the necessary impetus for their maintenance and enforcement. When Presidents are sworn in upon a Bible, it is not for mere quaintness; it is a recognition of the joint trusteeship over society by law and morality.
Dan Stratford is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
Pastor Steven Wilco • Oct 18, 2011 at 3:03 pm
Dan Stratford rightly highlights the importance of religion in our history and current culture. As much as I support separation of church and state in the legal sense, I also think that faith has a profound impact on our social and political views individually and collectively. Despite some popular opinions about the church’s oppression or irrelevance (which in some times and places it has been!), the church is alive and thriving in positive ways.
Stratford starts from exactly the right place – experiencing the worship traditions in a local congregation. It is the worship of our faith communities that shapes and forms its participants’ understanding of the world, perhaps in ways that might surprise you.
I would add one thing to Stratford’s column – an encouragement to check it out yourself. See what local congregations are doing in the community as a great way to explore the ways that religion shapes and is shaped by the community.
Pastor Steven Wilco
Immanuel Lutheran Church, Amherst
Dan • Oct 18, 2011 at 10:21 am
I’m not sure whether Dan Stratford’s opinion piece on the role of religion in society is more aggravating on a stylistic or substantive level. To get the first out of the way: please, for the benefit of all us readers, drop the sub-William F. Buckley verbiage. I’m pretty sure that there are, in fact, other ways to describe a stained glass window than “florid;” similarly, the circular prose of “I am more often that not less than consistent” is a waste of column space that could have been put to better use developing arguments.
Which need developing. Trying to extrapolate the cultural importance of religion- which is huge- into an argument for its role in law is to ignore the empirical reality of this country’s founding. Historically, the assertion that the governing principles of the United States were founded on organized religion is false. While many of the founding fathers were Christian, the Constitution is a secular document based explicitly on Enlightenment rationalism, not the Church. Further, several of the most influential founders- including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison- were deeply skeptical of organized religion at the time of the revolution. Finally, the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed by John Adams in 1797, stated that the US “is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Stratford’s argument is not supported by the facts.
The basic problem with the piece is a larger one, however. Stratford believes that organized religion is valuable because it provides a “timeless” bedrock of morality. Rather, the only reason religion is palatable today is because it has changed so much. 1900 years ago, Judeo-Christian morality condoned slavery and treated women as the property of their husbands; in the middle ages, the persecution of non-believers was a matter of dogma for the Church. As recently as the 1960’s, there was conflict between churches which supported the civil rights movement and those which justified segregation; today, there are churches on opposite sides of gay rights as a moral issue. Further, I suspect that when Stratford writes “organized religion” he means “organized religions I support,” as I doubt he has as much to praise about the doctrines of, say, Wahabbist Islam. The whole argument is disingenuous; if religious morality hadn’t radically changed over the course of history, it would be irrelevant. That’s the truth, no matter how many times you alliterate “fustian” and “fatuous.”