2013-05-21T18:08:31-04:00 Marilyn Mellowes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=marilyn-mellowes Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Marilyn Mellowes Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.756010 2010-10-12T21:27:04-04:00 2011-05-25T18:00:30-04:00

Marilyn Mellowes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marilyn-mellowes/ God in America, I became intrigued by this question: What happens when people of faith become engaged in politics? What is gained, what is lost? Politics inevitably involves negotiation, compromise, power and dealing with people whose values diverge from your own. Yet, if you are a person of faith living in the modern world, chances are that you feel a duty to put your religious principles into practice. For many Americans, those principles include the injunction to be "my brother's keeper," to try to right social wrongs, to work to make the world a better place. So political engagement seems like a necessary step. But is there a price to pay?

Night Three of God in America explores the relationship of faith and politics through the lives of three men who dominated the political and religious landscape of the 20th century: Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jerry Falwell. Each of these men became preachers whose words swayed millions; each addressed the themes of salvation, prophecy and deliverance; each had a vision of what America was -- and what America ought to be. In their speeches and sermons, they all spoke to that amorphous but pervasive notion that America is a providential nation favored by God.

Catapulted to fame by his 1949 Los Angeles crusade, Graham has preached his message of sin and salvation to more people on this planet than anyone in human history. During the Cold War, his call was coupled with the war against "godless Communism." In the presidential campaign of 1960, Graham promised Democratic candidate John Kennedy that he would not bring the religion question into the contest, yet he shared a widespread concern that a Catholic president would receive instructions from the Vatican. Graham worked quietly behind the scenes to defeat Kennedy and elect the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. Yet he never played his political hand in public, appearing to remain above the fray. Once Kennedy was elected, Graham moved quickly to befriend him; the two played golf even before Kennedy took the oath of office. And in the following years, Graham kept public company with a series of American presidents, both Republicans and Democrats.

By contrast, consider Martin Luther King. As a graduate student, he had studied scripture, the work of Gandhi (who had studied Thoreau) and the thinking of leading theologians. King knew his Bible, including the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures that contain the voices of the prophets of ancient Israel --
Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah and Isaiah. These prophets believed that the Israelites had violated the Covenant that bound them to their God. They forgot the moral precepts set forth in the Ten Commandments, they permitted gross social inequalities and gaping disparities between the rich and the poor, they worshipped false gods and they committed apostasy. The prophets denounced the Israelites for these sins and predicted divine punishment. But their predictions were moderated by calls for repentance and chance for renewal.

In his speeches and sermons, King resonated with these prophetic voices. On August 28, 1963, he spoke at the March on Washington, where thousands of civil rights workers gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. In a voice suffused with the rhythm and cadence of scripture, King admonished the country for failing to abide by its founding principles of equality and justice. Quoting the prophet Amos -- "let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" -- he linked biblical precepts with the principles of the founding fathers. The moral urgency of the moment propelled President John Kennedy to introduce the civil rights bill. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson pushed for its passage. Invited by the White House to the signing ceremony, King was euphoric.

King broke with Johnson over the Vietnam War. Johnson was furious. But King did not back down. He drew a line. Abiding by his principles was more important to him then access to power. King seemed to understand that you can be a prophet, or you can be an advisor to people in power. You have to choose. By the time he was assassinated at age 39, King had assumed the mantle of an American Moses.

In the 1970s, Jerry Falwell also issued a prophetic call, but from a rather different place on the political spectrum. He denounced America, warning that the nation had lost its moral compass and was sinking into a morass of relativism where "anything goes." He, too, appealed to the nation to return to the Christian values he believed were present at the founding. Both King and Falwell admonished America for its social sins and both called the nation back to its roots -- although they had very different ideas about the nature of those roots. For King, the foundation was about social justice; for Falwell, it was about Christian morality.

For evangelicals like Falwell who stepped into the political arena, the tension between moral conviction and the enticement of power played out with particular force. Their support helped sweep into office two Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Yet neither president delivered on the evangelical agenda. After 30 years of political engagement, some religious conservatives wondered if it was worth it. Ed Dobson, former associate pastor of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., said in hour five of the series, "Soul of a Nation": "There's a huge danger in getting too involved in the political process. You can either be a prophet who stands on the outside of culture and argues against the injustices, or you can be the king, and I don't think you can be both."

So perhaps there is an inherent dilemma here. Political engagement carries a price. But so does lack of engagement. And the prophetic voice has its own limits. It has the power to highlight moral problems often ignored by powerful elites, but does not have the actual authority to solve them. That is a matter for political institutions. As political scientist John C. Green has pointed out, the prophetic voice gives way to the "priestly" voice -- the voice that in ancient times advised the royal court and today advises the governing class. But religion can quickly find itself on a slippery slope, seduced by power or condoning the actions of those it previously criticized. As Green suggests, the prophetic voice of King was essential to ending segregation, but the process required powerful political institutions. King's successors became political operatives.

The series God in America explores the historical dynamic between religion and public life in this nation for more than four centuries. But it does not presume to answer the question, how should faith and politics engage each other? President Barack Obama offered his answer in his 2006 Call to Renewal speech. We hope that the series will encourage viewers to explore this question and that the programs and the web site will give Americans of all faiths and no faith the common ground of shared history as a place to start this conversation.

WATCH:

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.756006 2010-10-11T20:23:42-04:00 2011-05-25T18:00:30-04:00

Marilyn Mellowes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marilyn-mellowes/ God in America explores these divisions and the impact that they continue to have in our own time.

What is modernity? The term is elastic and expansive, freighted with multiple meanings. In this context, we use it to denote a broad cultural phenomenon that included three key developments: Darwinian theory, biblical criticism and awareness of religions outside the Christian tradition.

Americans were too preoccupied with the Civil War to pay much attention to a book by the English naturalist Charles Darwin, first published in 1859. But by the 1880s, The Origin of Species had created a sensation, first in England and then in America. Darwin's theory directly challenged the biblical account of creation: the world was not made in six days, but evolved over millennia. Human beings were not created from Adam's rib, but evolved from lower life forms. The forebears of the human race were not the residents of the Garden of Eden, but earlier primates. At a deeper and more unsettling level, Darwin challenged the familiar story of human kind's history and the traditional biblical narrative of the relation between man and God. Human life was no longer the glory of divine creation, but the product of accidents and incidents, chance and circumstance.

In America, Darwin's theories created confusion, anger and disarray within the Protestant establishment. But something else was driving fissures within the Protestant tradition: biblical criticism. Originating in German academic circles, higher criticism did not approach the Bible as revered Scripture, but as literature to be analyzed. Applying the tools of literary analysis, scholars examined texts to determine the times, places and cultures in which they were composed. They also evaluated the theological agendas of the different authors of these texts, and concluded that the Bible did not contain a unified divine message. Their findings shattered familiar assumptions and advanced new hypotheses: Moses had not written the first five books of the Bible; the book of Genesis contained two different accounts of creation and was likely composed by two different authors; David did not write all the psalms attributed to him. Higher critics examined the New Testament as well as the Hebrew Scriptures. Searching for the so-called "historical Jesus," they discovered that the man from Nazareth differed significantly from Jesus the Christ presented by the authors of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many of the assumptions, values and beliefs in the Bible, higher critics concluded, had gradually become outmoded.

By the 1870s, the battle over modernism reached a fever pitch. When I was developing God in America, this conflict intrigued and puzzled me. What was the real difference between liberal and conservative Protestants? Eric Baldwin, a very talented young scholar who worked as the sernior researcher on the series, explains it this way: At the core of the conflict was the nature of the Bible, the idea of God and concepts of the truth. Conservative Protestants imagined that God is outside of human history and the natural world, distinct and transcendent, although God does intervene in human history and communicate with human beings. For liberals, God is present in and through the natural world and human history; history represents the working out of God's purpose. For conservatives, the Bible is the direct, immediate revelation of God; it is what God said to and through human beings. For liberals, the books of the Bible record a progressive evolution of the human religious sensibility over time. These differences spill over into competing ideas about the truth. For conservatives, truth is fixed, immutable and eternal. For liberals, truth evolves and changes as history unfolds.

World War I exacerbated these theological divisions. As the war dragged on, the carnage, killing and wanton loss of life created a crisis for liberals who embraced modernism. For them, the progress of Christianity and the progress of culture were intimately bound. But, as historian George Marsden has pointed out, the war challenged "faith in the progress of culture and kingdom." Liberal optimism about the perfectibility of man and progress toward the Kingdom of God crumbled in the face of war's relentless savagery.

Religious conservatives were also transformed by the war. For 50 years, the trend in culture and society had been the exaltation of man, not God. Darwinism epitomized this trend. It was not simply a biological theory, but a theory that could be exploited to explain, justify and exalt the triumph of the fittest of the human race. In Germany, the 'might is right' theories of Darwin coupled with the philosophy of Nietzsche to create a malignant offspring: German militarism. American society was vulnerable, conservatives believed, to a similar fate. Anti-German patriotic rhetoric, evolution and modernism thus became joined together and understood not simply as a religious threat, but one that endangered American culture and the future welfare of the country.

Theological debate, Germany's superman philosophy and the perceived cultural crisis all combined to coalesce the once loose coalition of religious conservatives and forge them into a movement with a clear target: Darwinism. The fight to remove the teaching of Darwinism from the public schools became their holy grail. As anti-evolutionism swept into the South and rural areas, fundamentalists acquired a militancy that set them apart from their evangelical brethren. As George Marsden has famously observed, "A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something."

The conflict between conservative and liberal Protestants came to a head in the Scopes trial of 1925, a face-off between self-proclaimed agnostic Clarence Darrow and progressive politician and fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won the legal battle (although the decision was later reversed on a technicality) but lost in the court of public opinion. The big-city press portrayed Bryan as a fool. The critic H.L Mencken called him an "old buzzard" and a "tinpot pope," and labeled his followers "yokels," "morons," "hillbillies" and "gaping primates of the upland valleys." When Bryan died just days after the trial, Mencken crowed, "We killed the son of a bitch."

In the aftermath of the trial, the popular understanding of fundamentalism changed. As historian George Marsden points out, it had been predominately an urban movement, with its strength in the northern and eastern sections of the country. But now "fundamentalism" became applied "to almost every aspect of America rural or small-town Protestantism." To their critics, their decline seemed inevitable. The Christian Century, a liberal magazine, stated with satisfaction: "Anybody should be able to see [that] the whole fundamentalist movement was hollow and artificial ... it is henceforth to be a disappearing quantity in American religious life, while our churches go on to larger issues."

Time would prove the critics wrong.

WATCH the trailer for Part 2 of "God in America" below:

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.756002 2010-10-10T21:18:30-04:00 2011-05-25T18:00:30-04:00

Marilyn Mellowes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marilyn-mellowes/
Thus began the tangled embrace between religion and politics in the New World, a story of conquest and conversion, faith and power, repentance and renewal that has continued for more than 500 years. The dynamic intersection of religion and political life in America is the subject of the forthcoming six-hour series God in America that premiers on Columbus Day, October 11 at 9:00 PM on PBS stations across the country. Night One of the series explores how religion imprinted America with a distinctive Protestant stamp and how religious liberty proved noble in principle but messy in practice.

In the New World, Spain coupled religious orthodoxy with political conquest. Pushing into the American Southwest, Franciscan friars, militant in their piety and zealous in their faith, accompanied settlers eager for land and conquistadors searching for gold. In present-day New Mexico, the friars encountered an indigenous people they called Pueblos. The religion of these native people was deeply embedded in their culture and their way of life. For them, all living things possessed a spiritual dimension. As the Spanish set about establishing a network of missions, two ways of the sacred, two cultures, collided. Pueblo educator and historian Joseph Suina observes, "The Catholic Church was saying, 'One true God and no others.'" The Pueblos were baptized by the thousands but continued to observe their native rituals.

In 1680, simmering tensions erupted in the Pueblo revolt. Led by a man named Po'pay, the Pueblos killed settlers and friars, smashed crucifixes and sent the Spanish fleeing down the Rio Grande. The Pueblos returned to their ancient ways. Old World orthodoxy had proved fatal. But it was persistent.

Protestants had their own version of orthodoxy. On the coast of New England, Protestant reformers known as Puritans imagined themselves as a people chosen by God to build a model Christian commonwealth. Destiny demanded conformity. But Anne Hutchinson -- daughter of a minister, fiercely intelligent, and schooled in scripture -- challenged the religious and political authorities of the colony. White-hot in her righteousness, she attacked ministers, polarized the community and nearly tore it apart. Brought to trial, she was banished and excommunicated. The establishment won. Orthodoxy held. Then came George Whitefield.

An Anglican priest, Whitefield ignored parish boundaries, denominational lines and local customs. Preaching in town commons and rural fields and farms, he called upon people to open themselves up to spiritual rebirth, to make their own immediate connection to God. Whitefield challenged the authority of established ministers, snug in their social status and accustomed to due deference. But under Whitefield's influence, ordinary people -- housewives, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers -- felt empowered to make their own religious choices, to claim their own religious experience. Established ministers were horrified. But, as historian Harry Stout has observed, "Whitefield smelled the disintegration of the old aristocratic order." As farmers put down plows and picked up guns, the sense of individual empowerment set loose by religious revival spilled into the political sphere, fueling the rebellion against Great Britain and endowing it with divine purpose.

The rebels won. Tattered but victorious, the fledgling nation forged its political and religious identity side by side. Religion was becoming more and more diversified -- Anglicans, Catholics, Mennonites and Quakers all vied for followers, while the numbers of Baptists and Methodists surged past traditional denominations. The Second Great Awakening drew tens of thousands of Americans into the evangelical fold and spurred a movement for social reform. The guarantee of religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment encouraged competition in the religious marketplace. By the 1830s, America had built a solidly Protestant identity -- a New Eden -- proud of its traditions of opportunity and religious liberty.

In the 1830s, the Protestant establishment in New York City was challenged by Catholic immigrants from Ireland. Virulent anti-Catholicism had festered since colonial times. As Professor John McGreevy has observed, "Many Americans associated Protestantism not just with liberty but with progress, part of the progress of the modern world." Catholics seemed to threaten progress. Professor Steve Marini adds that it seemed that "Satan himself had invaded the Garden of Eden." Riots broke out in Philadelphia and New York. In Boston, factory workers burned a convent.

Into the fray stepped John Hughes, a self-educated Irish immigrant who rose through the ranks to become Archbishop of New York City. Like the parents of Irish schoolchildren, Hughes thought Protestantism pervaded the public schools: many teachers were former ministers; textbooks contained virulently anti-Catholic claims and the Bible read at the start of the school day was the King James Version -- a Protestant Bible. Catholics had their own Bible, one approved by the Vatican and richly annotated. The radical notion at the heart of Protestantism, that any person could read and interpret the Bible for himself, was anathema.

Hughes vowed, "I was bound to see that the religious rights of my flock should not be filched away from them, under the pretext of education." He took the fight over public schools into the hurly-burly arena of New York politics. In the end, New York voted to end religious instruction in its public schools. Hughes went on to build a system of parochial schools where Catholics could be educated according to the tenets of their faith.

The story of Hughes and the conflict over the public schools is one story in a continuing narrative about religious liberty in America and the ongoing struggle to define it. In the past, religious minorities -- Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews and Atheists -- fought for their rights. Today the conflict over the establishment of an Islamic center near Ground Zero is part of this historical pattern. It is also a vivid reminder that liberty does not operate in a vacuum but in a cultural context. As legal scholar Sarah Barringer Gordon has observed, around the question swirl memory, fidelity, sacrifice and patriotism.

WATCH the trailer for God in America below:

]]>