First Amendment Idolatry?

Recently an Iowa pastor denounced the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as idolatrous, exciting support from professing Christian nationalists who want a confessional state.

That pastor declared:

What is the faulty crumbling foundation that Christians need to remove before we can rebuild our civilization? What are the old ruins that need to be swept away before we can rebuild? It is the First Amendment to the Constitution.

His church belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which, according to Wikipedia, is small denomination of 130 congregations globally. Its doctrine is Reformed/Calvinist, and it is laissez-faire on infant baptism. Nearly all American Protestants advocating for a Christian confessional state are Reformed/Calvinist. Of course, the vast majority of Reformed/Calvinist Christians in America reject this concept. But the idea of a Christian government that restricts non-Christian religion is gaining traction among some “postliberal” Christians who cite magisterial Protestant teaching in the 1500s and 1600s.

The pastor’s defenders insisted he was not entirely renouncing the First Amendment but only later court interpretations that precluded blasphemy laws and church establishment.

In an earlier sermon, the pastor had declared:

Christians have idolatrously put the Bill of Rights before the Bible. We even say things like, I might not agree with your faith, but I’ll fight to support your right to practice it. And in the name of religious freedom, we have opened up this land to be a place where any and all gods can be worshipped. And so, we have given ourselves to be oppressed by Demons! And our tolerance of false religion, and our tolerance of immorality, has led to Christians becoming oppressed in our land by those very same people we tolerated.

The pastor cited the Satanic statue erected during a multifaith holiday display in the Iowa state capitol, which one legislator, who’s also a pastor, defended as an unfortunate necessity preferable to state control of speech. “Jesus and Satan are the same to our Christian government officials,” the troubled pastor alleged in response.

This religious neutrality was not the intent of America’s founders and the Constitution, the pastor preached. The First Amendment only intended to prohibit national churches, but not state churches. Oddly, he noted Virginia once established Anglicanism, which in fact was disestablished before the Constitution, in the Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom, foreshadowing the First Amendment, and crafted by James Madison, often deemed the “father” of the Constitution.

Irate over the satanic statue, this pastor in his sermon recalled personally confronting the Iowa legislator/pastor who had defended religious neutrality, who supposedly “doesn’t believe Jesus is the Lord NOW, only someday in the future, and so he rejects the notion of God’s laws reigning supreme over the government now.” The pastor called the legislator “gnostic” and warned:

By embracing secular neutrality, he avoids acknowledging Jesus Christ as the risen and reigning Lord of all, but he does not see that this reluctance to Crown Him Lord of All [and] emboldens the state to continue to promote more anti-Christian laws and practices.

In his sermon the pastor implored: “If only the state would be explicitly Christian again and uphold blasphemy laws that made it illegal to slander the Lord Jesus Christ and to promote anti-Christian beliefs and practices.” And he said that “traditional Protestant” teaching expects the government to “maintain true religion.” He noted that the American revised version of the Westminster Confession in 1788, which guides Presbyterians and other Reformed/Calvinists, ordains civil magistrates for the “encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evildoers.” He omitted that the American version deleted the original language of 1647 calling for false teaching to be suppressed by the “power of the civil magistrate.”

Accordingly, the pastor regretted that the “foundations of our once great republic and even more our once glorious Protestant and Reformed Church, have been rotting away because Christian ministers and magistrates believe that “the First Amendment has more authority than the First Commandment.” So “there are certainly some idols that need to be toppled and cleared away first.”

The pastor saluted the aspiring Alabama politician who toppled the Satan statue in Iowa, provoking a publicized arrest. And the pastor concluded his sermon: “There is no place where Christ’s Lordship is checked at the door. There is no place for neutrality.”   

So obviously the First Amendment, from this perspective, has got to go. Neither it nor the rest of the Constitution mentions Christ or God, except with the dating “in the Year of our Lord.” So perhaps the entire Constitution should go?

It’s an odd and sclerotic, even pharisaical, confessionalism that claims Christ’s lordship must always be specifically stipulated, in civil statute, and perhaps in every arena of human life, even coercively, and implicitly interpreted by a select few. The Founders were overwhelmingly churchmen and yet omitted God from the Constitution, unlike in the Declaration of Independence, presumably because the Constitution was and is binding law. If the government professes a particular religion, it then gets to define that religion. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln had this concern when, in 1864, he considered but ultimately declined to support a proposal to add God and Jesus to the Constitution’s preamble. The Constitution’s ban on religious establishment and religious tests for office are safeguards for religious freedom.

For the Iowa pastor, this religious freedom means being “oppressed by demons.” He wants an explicitly Christian government that punishes blasphemy. Who would define it? The Westminster Confession of 1647 the pastor cited, a foundational statement for Presbyterians and other Reformed/Calvinists, calls the Catholic mass “most abominably injurious to Christ’s one only sacrifice.” Britain at that time criminalized Roman Catholicism. Would the pastor support the same now? If not, why not? There are over 70 million Catholics in America. There are perhaps, broadly defined, a few million Presbyterians in America. Advocates for establishing religion like to picture themselves in control, even when they are a small minority.

In a very different vein, the Catholic philosopher and co-founder of my own Institute on Religion and Democracy, Michael Novak, in his The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, noted that by intention a pluralistic society at its “spiritual core” has an “empty shrine.” This shrine is empty “in the knowledge that no one word, image or symbol is worthy of what all seek there.”  From this perspective, “individuals are instructed thereby that the common good transcends their own vision of the good, however passionately held.” The domain of the “transcendent, of course, is mediated by literature, religion, family, and fellows. But it is finally centered in the silence in each person.”

This vision lacks the command-and-control clarity offered by a traditional or a socialist society, Novak noted. A democratic capitalist system cannot be a “confessional system” nor even suffused by “obligatory” Christian values. Instead, Christian individuals and institutions “work through democratic means to shape the will of the majority,” while observing the rights and respecting the consciences of others, which itself is a profoundly Christian concept.

Intending for religion to influence and even lead society through mediating institutions instead of through statute and coercion aligns with the Founders’ perspective. It also still reflects at least the intuitions of the vast majority of American Christians, few of whom want government to enforce religious dogma.

As institutional religion recedes in America, as much of secularism is more aggressive, and as the occasional Satanic statue rears its horned head, more Christians are tempted by dreams of a confessional state. It’s a distracting fantasy, at odds with founding American principles, at variance with the example of Jesus, goes against the trajectory of Christian teaching, and is not supported by any major Christian denomination. But amid the tides of polarization and extremism, with religious individualism displacing institutions, its devotees likely will grow.