Political Fundamentalism is the New Religion

The problem is no longer just one of churches and gods. It’s crusades over moral belief, of which churches and gods are just one manifestation.

America is arguably the first nation in history to get the difficult balance between religion and a free society right.

Religious belief is among the most powerful forces in human society. It can transform people into zealous hurricanes ripping over nations, creating behind them thunders of reform. At the same time, religious belief is dangerous. When perverted by idiocy or wicked hands, the moral certainty of moral ideology can unleash wars, terrors, and oppressions instead of moral improvements or reform. Instead of convincing people to build a kinder, more compassionate, or more just society, belief can provide the moral license to commit atrocities.

Across history, religious belief has been fire—sometimes bringing the warmth of the hearth, and at others an inferno that turns empires into ash.

America somehow has always managed to balance these contrasting sides of moral belief. America is a secular republic built around Enlightenment reason committed to individual religious freedom. America is also a deeply religious nation with a long history of passionate moral campaigns striking down wrongs, stupidities, and injustices. America’s political alchemy was to harness the hearth’s warmth while containing the inferno.

Now this careful balance is fraying, and our problem is no longer simply one of churches and gods. Our ideas of religious freedom derive from the Enlightenment, which shaped America’s Founding. The Enlightenment believed religion was a unique aspect of human nature requiring special rules, when it turns out it may be simply one manifestation of a greater human impulse—moral ideological belief. Our failure to appreciate this is why new moral belief systems—which we might call political fundamentalism—now storm over America risking the inferno.

THE HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS REFORM IN AMERICA

From the start, America’s genius was balancing moral belief with secular religious freedom.

We all know America’s Founders were, for the most part, secular and rationalist Enlightenment philosophers. They waged a revolution in the name of reason, including individual freedom of religion. Among their revolution’s ranks, however, were preachers fueled by a passionate brand of religion—in the style of the emotional religious revival of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield—thundering against the perfidies of Great Britain. Their theology challenged religious authority, and thus the crown, and when the time for revolution came, many foot soldiers carried this zeal with them onto the battlefield.

We discovered the path to harnessing the morality of religious belief in the service of a rational democratic republic.

It has always been this way in America. Our republic is carefully structured to ensure the power of religious belief is always employed but restrained. Perhaps no example shines brighter than the battle to abolish slavery, fueled by zealous preachers from America’s then-religious-heartland of formerly Puritan New England and connected to the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening. This movement of enthusiastic tent rivals rolled through remote homesteads inspiring personal redemption and national improvement to transform America into God’s Kingdom. It pioneered groundbreaking reforms like temperance from alcohol and women’s suffrage, but it’s greatest cause was abolishing the evil scourge of slavery. The heat of this revival turned this issue America had long sought to shirk into an urgent crusade that must be won now at any cost, including violence.

Preachers like Henry Ward Beecher railed against slavery from pulpits, as they raised funds for rifles settlers moving into the bloodshed of Bleeding Kansas could use to fight pro-slavery Border Ruffians. John Brown preached of God as he raided Harper’s Ferry. The Civil War’s anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, sings “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” and “His Truth is Marching on.”

Even America’s most famous movement for national reform—the historical Progressive Movement—was fueled in part by impassioned religious belief. We remember the middle-class movement focused on the plight of the working poor, new immigrants, and those suffering social injustice, fighting to end child labor, eliminate 14-hour workdays, create public schools, and eliminate corruption. We often forget its close and overlapping association with the Social Gospel movement, preaching Christians had a moral duty to socially reform America. Progressive mainstays like Hull House and the Salvation Army were intricately tied to the Social Gospel, just as were reformers like Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.

America is a secular republic in which every individual is free to live their conscience. Nobody gets to tell you what to believe or what is moral. Nobody can make you participate in their moral rituals to prove you’re a respectable member of society. At the same time, the American republic has always harnessed and channeled passionate moral and religious belief for social improvement and reform. America survived, thrived, and prospered—even through the unsteady heat of a moral civil war—because it harnessed moral belief for good, while stopping it short of causing harm.

Our republic could accomplish this staggering feat of magic because it was built around the hard-earned wisdom of the Enlightenment.

WHERE FREEDOM OF RELIGION COMES FROM

Freedom of religion as an idea rose to prominence during in Enlightenment because of two great historical tragedies—the Black Death and the wars of religion.

In the middle of the 1300s, the Black Death killed between a third and half of Europe’s entire population. This broke the feudal system and the authority of the Church. Europe back then still ran on feudalism, the codification of warlordism that replaced the machinery of a fallen Roman Empire. Where Roman administration had once controlled vast territories through systems of officials, the warlord-kings who overran its collapsing empire lacked the capacity to govern so much territory directly. They therefore granted most of their land to trusted associates to rule as vassals in exchange for taxes and levies during war. Since these grants were hereditary, these associates became Europe’s noble houses. The rest of society became the commoners and serfs. This system required some basis for legitimacy beyond violence, so the warlord-kings made a pact with religion, allowing the Church to operate its own system of authority in exchange for it blessing the system of counts and dukes and kings as ordained by God.

After the Black Death killed half of Europe’s population, there were no longer enough workers to run the lands of these aristocrats. This provided commoners new leverage and, with positions vacant everywhere, new opportunities. A new class of wealthy merchants emerged, who with time became educated and powerful. They resented their arbitrary social position, and therefore wanted to break the feudal system, which required breaking the authority of the Church.

The devastation of the Black Death also inspired a new love affair the classical world of Greeks and Romans, which looked brighter than bleak medieval reality. People wanted to understand how society had seemingly gone backwards, and perhaps restore what they had lost.¹ As they immersed themselves in classical antiquity, Europe flowered with neoclassical art, architecture, and philosophy. This created the Renaissance of rich merchant families, Greco-Roman statues, powerful merchant republics like Florence and Venice, and new ideas. The revival of classical antiquity, however, raised an uncomfortable problem: the people whose wisdom and ideas they wanted to revive were, according to their religion, filthy pagans. This called the Church’s authority further into question.

Then add the Protestant Reformation, and its wars over religion.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door launching the Protestant Reformation. As new forms of Christianity spread, kings and princes across Europe converted. This caused terrifying outbreaks of official terror and oppression. When kings and princes converted to new forms of Christianity, they demanded their subjects follow. Those who resisted were often violently oppressed because established churches weren’t just about one’s soul, but also mechanisms for national cohesion and control. This would already be intolerable if it only happened once per nation, but with hereditary inheritances it wasn’t uncommon for successions of rulers to switch back and forth from one form of Christianity to another. When Henry the VIII converted to Anglicanism, he suppressed Catholics. When his Catholic daughter Mary inherited, she began oppressing Protestants. When she died and Henry’s Protestant daughter Elizabeth took over, she once again began oppressing Catholics. The situation in Germany under the decentralized Holy Roman Empire was particularly unstable, with each local prince autonomous enough to impose his own religion, creating a religious patchwork of an empire. The whipsawing meant no one was ever safe.

Then rival kings began to go to war. Not only were there civil wars, as in France, but also between kingdoms. It culminated in the horrific Thirty Years War, which wasn’t really one war but a thirty-year period of warfare in which shifting alliances of Catholic and Protestant monarchs came and went in a seemingly never-ending conflict. For over a century, Europeans lived in the middle of unpredictable minefield of oppression, destruction, and death, over different official brands of religion. Life for the ordinary European was increasingly intolerable.

In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica officially starting the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a movement to cast off traditional authority for reason that sparked ideas like democracy, the scientific method, free markets, and most relevant here freedom of religion. It found support among the sort of rising educated thinkers and merchants who wanted to stop the violent seesaw of oppression and reduce the authority of a Church holding up an outdated, irrational, and unjust feudal system, so people of merit, like them, could rise. Europe was no longer a collection of loose kingdoms among the collapse of imperial rule, and so it was time for something more rational, competent, enlightened, and glorious.

When Enlightenment thinkers considered the dangers of religion, they had in mind these troubles of late-feudal Renaissance Europe. They wanted to rid the world of state-established Christian churches because they seemed a unique source of human oppression. The question is whether their concerns were really ever about religion.

MORAL IDEOLOGY IN THE MODERN WORLD

In the early twentieth century, religion itself appeared mostly tamed in America. At the same time, the world saw the outbreak of new moral philosophies we might call “isms.” First there were fascism and communism—resulting in death, oppression, and ultimately a world war against Enlightenment democracies. When that hot war ended and fascism collapsed, communism and democracy began a cold one lasting the remainder of the century. Then more “isms” burrowed into the West. There was socialism, liberalism, conservatism, environmentalism, feminism, capitalism, and progressivism. There were new uprisings of nationalism, and resurgent religious beliefs like Islamism. Each of this steady parade of “isms” advanced a moral belief system and made claims to public power, seeking to impose order and control around its sense of morality.

I don’t see how these “isms” are functionally different from the religion they replaced. Each makes moral claims about the world. Each seeks to impose order through the use of power. Each is enforced by systems of authority. Each seeks to convert and enlist people in a crusade to make a better world. Each uses the same tactics, with the same tendencies, as the religion that put Enlightenment thinkers on guard. We’re used to treating religion as something uniquely dangerous subject to different rules. Isn’t it simply one item in a category—ideological moralism? Does it matter if the beliefs are pronounced by gods and worshiped in the halls of churches, or pronounced by parties and worshiped in the halls of state, or pronounced by philosophers and worshiped in social media communities and the halls of academia? In any case, someone is telling you what to believe and giving out a moral license to impose it at all costs in a crusade to save the world.

This is political fundamentalism, and it’s everywhere. The same dangers that caused Enlightenment scholars to treat religion as unique are back. Among us are people who believe they have a monopoly on morality and moral permission to enforce it at any cost. We live again in an age of moral turmoil, with secular gods and earthly crusades for redemption. How do we harness the good in these belief systems while maintaining a free and prosperous society? How do we continue to nurture the hearth without lighting the inferno?

This political fundamentalism is the new religion in America. It’s fire that we can harness to push us to be better, but also, if uncontrolled, capable of burning everything we love to ash. Until we come to terms with this new form of religion, these same hurricanes will keep ripping through humanity just like they did Europe during the Renaissance. We must find a way to extend America’s alchemical magic to harness these new forms of moral belief the same way we harnessed religion, capturing the light it brings while keeping its flames contained within the structures of our republic. That’s how we’ll have yet another great American century.

What do you think about political fundamentalism? Join the conversation in the comments.

1. It’s the current trend among historians to claim the medieval era was no Dark Age, but rather a steady progression from the classical world. Even if you accept that, the people living back then didn’t see it that way.