Scott Horton on America as a Christian Nation

But is America a “Christian nation?” It is certainly possible for someone to hear that question and understand it in several different ways—for instance, a nation, a majority of whose people are Christian? Or a nation with an established church which is Christian? Or a nation without an established church, but still with a system of essential values based in Christianity?

This text, from Polybius, a Greek historian who was enamored of the Romans, is a significant contribution towards the resolution of this question. As Polybius catalogues the attributes of the Romans which make them great (and, in Polybius’s mind, destined to govern the Mediterranean world), he places a high value on the fact that Rome had and maintained a state religion. The text is susceptible of being read different ways, but I understand it this way: religion can provide part of the core myth of the state and can serve to enshrine and protect its institutions. It therefore serves an essential political function. For this to work properly, religious authority needs to be linked closely to political authority. There may be a detached priesthood, of course, but political leaders should hold and exercise religious office. The Roman political élite may not really believe the religion that they espouse (they may consider it little more than superstition), but they will never betray these prejudices to the public because they value the political utility of religion. It can be used to insulate political decisions (a decision to go to war, for instance) from scrutiny or challenge. For Polybius, the Greeks have grown intellectually arrogant and openly contemptuous of their religion, and that is very foolish. The Romans may be no less cynical than the Greeks, but they understand that religion has a political value in dealing with the less intellectually gifted classes for which political oratory and other political tricks provide no real substitute.

This passage of Polybius was a favorite of Leo Strauss, the man often called the father of the American Neoconservative movement, but in fact it belonged to the standard repertoire of a school of political philosophy which was commonplace in Middle Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called Caesarism. The Caesarists took the political ideas of the end phase of the Roman Republic and the launch of the Empire as a model. They advocated a strong central government with a single, charismatic leader at its heart vested with political, military and religious authority. Strauss as a young doctoral student focused his work on the famous Spinozastreit, a critical event in the history of the Middle European Enlightenment involving Lessing, Mendelssohn, Jacobi and a number of lesser figures. Shortly before his death, Lessing was supposed to have turned against the idea of a state religion and, under the influence of his reading of Baruch Spinoza, adopted ideas that seem suspiciously pantheistic. The extent to which Lessing in fact embraced pantheism is not clear, but it is clear that, drawing on reports from his friend Georg Forster about the new secular state then arising across the Atlantic in America, Lessing found it inspirational and a compelling new basis for Western society (ideas which emerge in his Masonic Dialogues). But for Strauss, Polybius was right: the notion of a state stripped of its core religious element was an unforgiveable error. Strauss was a Jew, though perhaps not a terribly observant one. But in his view, the question was not Judaism, Christianity, Islam or any particular religion, but rather the necessity that a religion with the power to credibly influence the common people be installed to insure stability to the political structure.

Much of what has transpired over the last eight years in America, in which the religious right was mobilized as a political force supporting the political aspirations of a small group of political actors who themselves had doubtful ties to religion, could be understood as a revival of a Caesarist tactic, or at least it would explain the movement from a Straussian perspective. Was it successful for a while or a failure almost from the beginning? We’re still too close to these events to finally assess that question. But one thing’s certain: if that was the scheme, Polybius would have approved.