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Capital Punishment

As with the issue of slavery, individuals who favor and disfavor governmental imposition of the death penalty both have favorite biblical proof tests.

Dan Van Ness, the former president of the Justice Fellowship, identifies and summarizes views of Scripture into three categories. The favorite text of those who believe that Scripture mandates capital punishment is Genesis 9:6, where, after destroying all but eight people in a flood, God provided that “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.” Moreover, because God gave this instruction prior to the Mosaic law, it “apparently had universal application” (Van Ness n.d.). As American Puritans observed in formulating their own laws, the Mosaic law provided for the offenses of “murder (not accidental killings), striking or cursing a parent, kidnapping, adultery, incest, bestiality, sodomy, rape of a betrothed virgin, witchcraft, incorrigible delinquency, breaking the Sabbath, blasphemy, sacrificing to false gods, oppressing the weak, and other transgression (See Exod. 21, 23, 35; Lev. 20 & 24; Deut. 21–24)” (Van Ness n.d.). While speaking more closely to permission, rather than to mandate, Romans 13:1–7 takes it for granted that government has the right to “bear the sword.”

Those believing that the weight of Scripture prohibits capital punishment distinguish the use of the penalty in a theocracy, like Israel, where people were collectively responsible for cleansing the land of slain blood, from others where God is not considered the direct ruler. They may further argue from Hebrews 9:14 that God has already vindicated the value of human life through Jesus’s death on the cross, or that the New Testament virtues of forgiveness and the “willingness to suffer evil rather than resist it by force” prevail over Old Testament practices (Van Ness n.d.).

Those who take the middle ground that the Bible permits capital punishment without requiring it can point to biblical limitations on the penalty, for individuals such as Cain, Moses, and David who were not punished for their murders, as well as to the previously cited passage from Romans 13 (Van Ness n.d.). One writer thus notes that modern readers must “distinguish between descriptive Bible content (that simply describes, in a historical sense, the state of things in Bible times, without necessarily requiring it of believers today) and prescriptive Bible content (that imparts an authoritative command or guidelines for Christians of all eras)” (Rau 2011).

Perhaps as important as whether the Bible mandates or permits capital punishment are the ways that Scripture limited such punishments through principles such as proportionality (Exodus 21:23–25), certainty of guilt (the two-witness rule delineated in Deuteronomy 17:6 and Numbers 35:30), intent (as evidenced by the creation of cities of refuge), due process requirements, and expressions—like that in Ezekiel 33:11—of God’s reluctance to punish (Van Ness n.d.).

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Historically, some of the leading exponents of opposition to capital punishment have been motivated by Christian principles. Dr. Benjamin Rush was among early Americans who sought to replace the death penalty, and especially public executions, with incarceration. He cited Matthew 16:26: “The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Vile 2019, 192). There was an anti-gallows movement that lasted from the writing of the Constitution to the Civil War, peaking in the 1840s, in which individuals citing such diverse sources as the Bible, the writings of the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), romanticism, Quaker thought, and utilitarian philosophers offered a variety of arguments opposing capital punishment. Although a few states actually eliminated the death penalty, it was more common for states to circumscribe the offenses for which it could be imposed and to limit its public displays (Davis 1957).

Debates over capital punishment were renewed in the twentieth century, in which courts restricted the punishment to cases of capital murder and insisted on greater procedural protections. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty, as it was then being imposed, violated the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the Eighth Amendment, which is applied to the states through the Fourteenth. A majority of states, however, responded by passing laws dividing capital trials into separate guilt and innocence and punishment stages, mandating consideration of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and providing automatic appeals. The court upheld such laws in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). Continuing points of dispute involve whether retribution is an appropriate approach to punishment, whether the penalty serves as a deterrent to other crimes, and whether the penalty can be administered in a nonracially discriminatory manner. One difficulty with the death penalty is that, once administered, it is irrevocable. Moreover, Christians believe that Jesus, an innocent man, was one of its victims (Osler 2009).

It has been argued that the standard for criminal punishments, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” was developed in part for Christian jurors who feared that if they inadvertently condemned an innocent person to death, they were committing a mortal crime (Whitman 2008).

Although lawyers have long cited biblical passages in attempting to persuade jurors either to inflict or to spare defendants, in People v. Harlan (2005), Colorado invalidated a death sentence when a juror brought a Bible into the jury room during deliberations, although appellate courts sometimes rule that judicial references to the Bible during sentencing have been harmless errors. A central concern has been that jurors are limited by rules of evidence to the evidence that is presented to them and the fear that jurors will be unduly swayed by references to holy writ (Hudson 2005). This would typically nor prevent a juror from verbally citing Scripture in support or opposition to inflicting the death penalty (Wojdacz n.d.; Sporn 2009).

Judge Tammy Kemp stirred criticism that she was engaged in proselytizing and crossing the line between church and state in October 2019 when she gave a Bible to police officer Amber Guyger, who had been convicted of killing a neighbor, Botham Jean, after walking into the wrong apartment that she thought was her own (Holcombe 2019).

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See also Criminal Law; Puritans; Quakers; Rush, Benjamin

For Reference and Further Reading

Davis, David Brion. 1957. “The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787–1861.” American Historical Review 63 (October): 23–46.

Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

Gregg v. Georgia, 428 .S. 153 (1976).

Hudson, David L., Jr. 2005. “The Bible Tells Them So.” ABA Journal. July 28. www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_bible_tells_them_so.

Holcombe, Madeline. 2019. “Judge Who Gave Convicted Murderer Amber Guyger a Bible Is Accused of Bridging the Church-State Divide.” CNN. October 4. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/us/guyger-judge-freedom-religion/index.html.

Osler, Mark. 2009. Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment. Nashville, TN: Abington Press.

People v. Harlan, 209 P.3d616 (2005).

Rau, Andy. 2011. “What Does the Bible Say about Capital Punishment?” Bible Gateway Blog. September 27. https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2011/09/what-does-the-bible-say-about-capital-punishment/.

Sporn, Jeremy B. 2009. “Legal Injection? The Constitutionality of the Bible in Capital Sentencing Deliberations.” Tulane Law Review 83: 813–51.

Van Ness, Dan. n.d. “A Biblical Perspective on the Death Penalty.” Prison Fellowship. https://www.prisonfellowship.org/resources/advocacy/sentencing/the-death-penalty/.

Vile, John R. 2019. A Constellation of Great Men: Exploring the Character Sketches of Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Clark, NJ: Talbot.

Whitman, James Q. 2008. The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wojdacz, Mariah. n.d. “Should Bibles Be Present in a Jury Deliberation Room?” LegalZoom. https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/should-bibles-be-present-in-a-jury- deliberation-room.

Carey, Matthew

Matthew Carey (1760–1839) was an Irish-born publisher who, after being persecuted for his anti-British sentiments, fled first to France, where he struck up a friendship with Benjamin Franklin, and then to Philadelphia, where the Marquis de Lafayette gave him money to set up his business. He began publishing the Pennsylvania Herald in 1785 and subsequently published the Columbian Magazine and the American Museum as well as a variety of books. He is best known for publishing the Douai (Roman Catholic version translated from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate) Bible in 1790, which was largely sold by subscription. This volume had first been translated by Gregory Martin at the University of Douai at Rheims in 1582 (New Testament) and 1609 (the entire Bible), but Carey patterned his Bible after the second edition that Richard Challoner had published in England in 1764.

Although he appears to have published no more than five hundred volumes (Daniell 2003, 625), the interest that his Bible generated suggests that Protestants mistook the Roman Catholic mistrust of the King James Version of the Bible with a more general distrust of Holy Writ itself (Carter 2007, 448).

Prior to the American Revolution, Britain held a monopoly on the printing of English Bibles for America, and Carey’s was only the second such Bible printed 84in America—the first having been the so-called Aitken Bible. To encourage sales, Carey appealed to Catholics by suggesting that such purchases would “evince their determination to shew their reverence for the Holy Scriptures—and to prove the futility of the charge, that they are forbidden the use of the sacred volume” (quoted in Carter 2007, 459). While advertising that the Douai Bible was superior to the King James Version, in an address “To the Protestants of the United States,” he also suggested that “liberal-minded protestants who glory in the influence of the benign sun of toleration will probably be happy in an opportunity of uniting their names of the Roman catholics who have supported this work, and thus evincing, that they are superior to that wretched—that contemptible prejudice, which confines its benevolence within the narrow pale of one religious denomination, as is the case of bigots of every persuasion” (quoted in Carter 2007, 459–60).

Although he retained his own Roman Catholic faith, Carey went on to print numerous editions of the King James Bible, often containing detailed commentary and semi-salacious prints (Daniell 2003, 629). Among his salesmen was Parson Mason Weems (1759–1825), who later wrote a biography of George Washington that included the legend of refusing to lie about chopping down a cherry tree in his youth.

Carey served as the secretary of the society for establishing Sunday Schools and was an advocate of religious pluralism (Carter 2007, 465). He thought that knowledge of religion was a way of promoting citizen virtue.

See also Aitken Bible; Roman Catholics

For Reference and Further Reading

Carter, Michael S. 2007. “‘Under the Benign Sun of Toleration’: Matthew Carey, the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789–1791.” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Fall): 437–69.

Daniell, David. 2003. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Falls, Thomas B. 1942. “The Carey Bible.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 53 (June): 111–15.

Carson, Ben

Dr. Ben Carson (b. 1951) is a former pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University who serves as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Trump. Carson, who is African American and a Seventh-Day Adventist, grew up in a rough neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, but succeeded, largely with his single mother’s inspiration, in achieving academically and graduating from Yale University and the University of Michigan Medical School.

Carson vied unsuccessfully for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Known as a conservative who attends a weekly Bible study and proudly displays his faith, he spoke both at the 1997 and the 2013 National Prayer Breakfasts. Carson’s middle name is Solomon, and he appears to quote more frequently from the book of Proverbs, which is attributed to Solomon, than from any other book. In his second speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, three of his four texts were from Proverbs (11:9; 11:12; and 11:25), and the last was 2 Chronicles 7:14: “Then 85if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land” (cited in Carson 2014, ix). Carson’s favorite verse, from Proverbs 22:4, says that “by humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, and honour, and life” (Winder 2019, 25).

In a book that he wrote prior to his 2016 campaign, Carson highlighted each chapter with a passage from Proverbs. Although he continually lauded the value of education in combatting ignorance, in his book, Carson presented his own political stances simply as common sense, which he often contrasted to what he referred to as the views of “the secular progressive movement,” which he portrayed as attempting to expunge all biblical references and teachings from the public square (Carson 2014, 41). He opposed Obamacare as giving important health-care decisions to the government rather than to private individuals, advocated a simple flat tax based on the principle of biblical tithing, opposed welfare for able-bodied individuals who could provide for themselves, and generally argued for moderation and civil discourse. Carson believes that individuals should care for themselves and their families rather than over-relying on the government to do so.

Carson generally takes a fairly literal view of the Bible and bemoans what he believes is the nation’s departure from this belief. He noted, “For years, most Americans have turned to a belief in God and the Bible for answers. From the Creation story to the Ten Commandments to the Gospels to the Epistles, the Bible provided an explanation for the meaning of life and instructed us in moral principles. We held to a Judeo-Christian standard while respecting the beliefs of those who didn’t share them” (Carson 2014, 192). By contrast, he observed that “today, fewer people believe in the Bible, or even in absolute truth, and our rejection of an objective moral standard has thrown our society into disarray. If in fact we do really believe in God and His Word, many of the moral ‘gray’ issues of today become black and white” (Carson 2014, 193). Citing the prohibition in Exodus against murder and the admonition in Matthew 22:39 to “love your neighbor as yourself,” Carson indicated that “abortion is rarely a moral option” (Carson 2014, 193). Similarly, he opposed homosexual conduct, expressed his belief in creationism without taking a position on the age of the earth, and argued that “many of our laws are based on the Ten Commandments” (Carson 2014, 200).

Carson is often known for making provocative off-the-cuff remarks, sometimes involving matters of religion and morality (Gass 2015). Critics like Bible scholar Pete Enns, while lauding Carson as a good man, charge that he often simplifies or misapplies biblical truths, as when Carson tweeted, “It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.” Enns also questions whether one can apply the principle of the biblical tithe to contemporary society.

See also Abortion; Creationism and Evolution; Ten Commandments

For Reference and Further Reading

Carson, Ben, with Candy Carson. 2014. One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future. New York: Sentinel.

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Devi, Gayatri. 2014. “Candidates Use the Bible to Justify Their Views. We Must Respond with Reason.” The Guardian. November 5. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/05/candidates-bible-views-noahs-ark-donald-trump-ben-carson. Accessed May 29, 2019.

Enns, Pete. “Ben Carson and the Bible: Maybe He Should Get a Second Opinion.” https://peteenns.com/ben-carson-and-the-bible-maybe-he-should-get-a-second-opinion/.

Gass, Nick. 2015. “Ben Carson’s 15 Most Controversial Quotes.” Politico. October 9. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/ben-carson-controversial-quotes-214614. Accessed May 29, 2019.

Winder, Mike. 2019. Favorite Scriptures of 100 American Leaders. Springville, UT: Plain Sight.

Carter, Jimmy

Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), who served a term as president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, was a long-time Southern Baptist. He came into office as a professed evangelical Christian but found that after a single presidential term, he was outflanked by Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric and policies (especially on issues like abortion, prayer in schools, and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment) had greater appeal to the evangelical right and to such organizations as the National Christian Action Coalition, the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, and Christian Voice (Smith 2006, 318; also see Freedman 2005).

Raised in a small town in Georgia, Carter had a conversion experience at a revival meeting as an eleven-year-old and was baptized. He was accepted into the Naval Academy where he taught Sunday school, a practice that he has continued through most of his life (Holmes 2012, 148–49). After serving in the Georgia state legislature, Carter was devastated when he was defeated by segregationist Lester Maddox in a race for governor, but he engaged in mission work and resumed Bible reading after being challenged by his sister who was an evangelist, and by a sermon that asked “If You Were Arrested for Being a Christian, Would There Be Any Evidence to Convict You?” (Holmes 2012, 152).

As an evangelical Christian, Carter considered politics to be a vocation, or form of ministry, and believed faith to be “not just a noun but also a verb” (Berggren 2005, 44–45). He further identified his role as president as that of being “First Servant” (Berggren 2005, 46). Perhaps because, as a Baptist, Carter put strong emphasis on the separation of church and state, he did not use religious rhetoric as frequently as such successors as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. He did, however, invite Martin Luther King Sr. to preach at a People’s Prayer Service that he held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (Holmes 2012, 154–55). In his presidential inaugural address, he opened the Bible on which he took his oath to Micah 6:8: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God” and cited this passage in his address. Carter faithfully attended church throughout his presidency.

Identified by Berggren as one who preferred the role of a prophet to that of a priest or pastor, Carter is particularly known for advocating energy independence at a time when the nation was more preoccupied with high inflation, unemployment, and interest rates, and for identifying a “crisis of confidence” in 87the American people, which he thought came in part from forsaking traditional values. Although he stressed humility, he sometimes came across as someone who was holier than thou, especially in his relations with Congress, whose members he thought were too focused on the personal interests of their states and districts.

Carter often rested on universalistic themes of equality and liberty, which he found in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, but he believed these were firmly grounded in Scripture. In a speech to the World Jewish Congress, in 1977, Carter thus said,

In large measure, the beginnings of the modern concept of human rights go back to the laws and the prophets of the Judeo-Christian traditions. I’ve been steeped in the Bible since early childhood, and I believe that anyone who reads the ancient words of the Old Testament with both sensitivity and care will find there the idea of government as something based on a voluntary covenant rather than force—the idea of equality before the law and the supremacy of law over the whims of any ruler; the idea of the dignity of the individual human being and also of the individual conscience; the idea of service to the poor and to the oppressed; the ideas of self-government and tolerance and of nations living together in peace, despite differences of belief. (Flowers 1983, 128)

Although he enjoyed reading Reinhold Niebuhr, who was known for his political realism, Carter believed that the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule provided guidance on matters of foreign policy, which his critics believed to be naïve. Carter put the advancement of human rights at the top of his foreign policy agenda but combined this emphasis with the biblical maxim from Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Berggren 2005, 56). Carter negotiated a treaty returning control of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama, largely because he thought it was the right thing to do, and extended amnesty to nonviolent individuals who had fled the country rather than be drafted to serve in the war in Vietnam. Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two Americans hostage during the last two years of Carter’s administration, and a mission that he sent to free them resulted in American casualties.

Carter spent almost two weeks negotiating directly with the leaders of Israel and Egypt in order to secure peace in the Middle East. In his book The Blood of Abraham, Carter, explained, “For me there is no way to approach or enter Israel without thinking first about the Bible and the history of the land and its people. The names and images have long been an integral part of my life as a Christian”; he further observed that “the power of faith is a unifying bond between Christian and Jew and between the heroes of ancient Israel and those of New Testament times” (quoted in Berggren 2005, 57). Citing the story of Cain killing his brother Abel in Genesis 4, Carter observed, “The blood of Abraham, God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace” (quoted in Berggren 2005, 59). During his negotiations with the leaders of Egypt and Israel, Carter quoted the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” (Holmes 2012, 160).

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Carter is often cited as one of America’s best ex-presidents, engaging with Habitat for Humanity and launching projects through the Carter Center to monitor elections and improve international well-being, perhaps most notably in its attempt to eliminate the parasitic Guinea worm. He received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, primarily for his work as president in promoting Middle East peace. In his acceptance speech, Carter observed,

I worship Jesus Christ, whom we Christians consider to be the Prince of Peace. As a Jew, he taught us to cross religious boundaries, in service and in love. He repeatedly reached out and embraced Roman conquerors, other Gentiles, and even the more despised Samaritans.

Despite theological differences, all great religions share common commitments that define our ideal secular relationships. I am convinced that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others can embrace each other in a common effort to alleviate human suffering and to espouse peace. (quoted in Holmes 2012, 172)

Before, during, and after he became president, Carter led Sunday school classes. Meir Soloveichik (2018) believed that some of Carter’s lessons, especially during his presidency, suggested that he thought that his knowledge of the Bible was more important than political skill or diplomacy and that some of his interpretations, especially of the death of Jesus, were culturally insensitive.

Carter continued teaching Sunday school at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, where he also served as a handyman. He has drawn his lessons from both the Old and New Testaments. His classes have become a major tourist attraction in his hometown. The church where he has taught has since left the Southern Baptist Convention for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Allowing for the ordination of women and the separation of church and state, this group distances itself from the view that the Bible is “inerrant” or without error, albeit on what it believes to be biblical grounds: “The Bible neither claims nor reveals inerrancy as a Christian teaching. Bible claims must be based on the Bible, not on human interpretations of the Bible” (quoted in Holmes 2012, 169).

Among the latest individuals to attend this class was Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, whom Carter called upon to read Scripture (Reeves 2019).

See also Buttigieg, Pete; Evangelicals; Niebuhr, Reinhold; Zionism

For Reference and Further Reading

Banks, John. 2019. “Visiting Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School Class Has Become an American Pilgrimage.” Dallas News. February 17. https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/02/17/visiting-jimmy-carters-sunday-school-class-become-american-pilgrimage. Accessed May 6, 2019.

Berggren, D. Jason. 2005. “‘I Had a Different Way of Governing’: The Living Faith of President Carter.” Journal of Church and State 47 (Winter): 43–61.

Carter, Jimmy. 1996. Living Faith. New York: Random House.

Flippin, J. Brooks. 2011. Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Flowers, Ronald B. 1983. “President Jimmy Carter, Evangelicalism, Church-State Relations, and Civil Religion.” Journal of Church and State 25 (Winter): 113–32.

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Freedman, Robert. 2005. “The Religious Right and the Carter Administration.” The Historical Journal 48 (March): 231–60.

Holmes, David L. 2012. The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Reeves, Jay. 2019. “Buttigieg, Husband Attend Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School Class.” ABC News. May 5. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/buttigieg-husband- attend-jimmy-carters-sunday-school-class-62836105.

Smith, Gary Scott. 2006. Faith and the Presidency. New York: Oxford University Press.

Soloveichik, Meir Y. 2018. “Jimmy Carter: The Sunday-School Years.” JewishPress.com. October 28. https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinion/jimmy-carter-the-sunday-school-years/2018/10/28/.

Cartoons

One indication of the continuing influence of the Bible on American understandings may be found in the number of cartoons that reference biblical themes or figures.

Many recent cartoons, which can be accessed at PoliticalCartoons.com, center on President Trump. A cartoon by Dave Granlund published on January 11, 2017, shows Trump about to take an oath on his book The Art of the Deal. A second by J. D. Crowe dated March 9, 2019, shows him labeling commandments against adultery, theft, and false witness as “Fake News.” Another by John Darkow published on March 11, 2019, shows Trump signing a Bible while one woman comments that he is using the same pen that he used to sign hush money payments to porn stars. Pat Bagley has another cartoon in which Rudolph Giuliani warns, “It’s a trap,” as Trump is asked to swear (presumably as part of the Mueller investigation) on the Bible.

There were a number of cartoons that pictured Barack Obama standing by Abraham Lincoln as Obama took the oath on Lincoln’s Bible. Another by Yaakov Kirschen, which seems equally applicable to Trump, and perhaps to presidents in general, has Obama telling the chief justice as he takes his oath that the Bible is specifically about him.

Some highlight the practice of using proof texting to justify immigration or other policies. A number cite former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s attempt to use the Bible to justify separating families at the border, with some focusing specifically on Jesus’s being taken by government officials from his manger.

A cartoon by Pat Bagley from June 4, 2015, indicates that Bible marriage often involved plural marriages or concubines. Another, also by Bagley, observes that Jesus spoke as often about the sin of homosexuality as he did about homosexuality, namely, not at all.

Some cartoons reference foreign policy. A cartoon by Dario Castillejos labeled “Israel Proportional Response” shows an Israeli Goliath swinging a huge slingshot to overwhelm a small Palestinian.

A number of cartoons observe what industrialization and pollution have done to the environment.

A study of sixty-five thousand syndicated cartoons that appeared in the Los Angeles Times from mid-1979 through mid-1987 found that 7.1 percent of religious cartoons made “humorous use of Biblical stories, characters and 90sayings” (Lindsey and Heeren 1992, 75). The authors of the study noted, “The most common and repeatedly used Biblical narratives that become objects for cartoonists’ pens are the accounts of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah and the flood, and Moses in his role as recipient of the Ten Commandments. In addition to these contexts a variety of other less frequently used stories include Jonah, David and Goliath, the Last Supper and the Sermon on the Mount” (75). The authors observed that “the Bible provides a background of knowledge, a resource, against which cartoonists can communicate their humor to readers” (75). They further observed that “placing moderns in Biblical situations facilitates commentary on current events, as well as on our distinctly modern consciousness” (75).

In 2014, Robert M. Price published The Politically Correct Bible, with a cover picturing Jesus as an African American with women, a Native American Indian Chief, a Muslim woman, and others celebrating the Last Supper.

See also Obama, Barack; Sessions, Jeff; Ten Commandments; Trump, Donald

For Reference and Further Reading

Lindsey, Donald B ., and John Heeren. 1992. “Where the Sacred Meets the Profane: Religion in the Comic Pages.” Review of Religious Research 34 (September): 63–77.

PoliticalCartoons.com. https://politicalcartoons.com/?s=bible. Accessed May 24, 2019.

Price, Robert M. 2014. The Politically Correct Bible. eBookIt.com.

Chavez, Cesar

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) is the best-known Hispanic American activist and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Born in Yuma, Arizona, to a middle-class family that fell on hard times, Chavez spent most of his teen years as a migrant laborer where he was deeply affected by “Abulita Theology,” that is, teachings of the Catholic Church that his grandmother, Mama Tella, who had been raised in a convent where she learned theology, had passed down to him (Romero 2017, 27). After serving in the military, Chavez returned to California, where he became a community organizer and was instructed in Catholic social thought by a white Catholic clergyman, Father Donald McDonnell.

In 1962, Chavez began organizing farm workers, in time leading a successful five-year strike against grape growers and helping to organize the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. Chavez’s faith played a major role. Chavez drew from Roman Catholic social teachings, including nonviolence and God’s concern for the poor and lowly; incorporated elements of Catholic ritual into his protests; and drew from Scriptures for inspiration.

Chavez patterned some of his protests around the “peregrinacion,” or penitential march, which was led by a Catholic priest, begun with prayer, accompanied by a banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and concluded with the celebration of a Catholic mass. He fasted after the movement turned violent in order to bring his followers back to their commitment to nonviolence.

Chavez’s grandmother had taught him to follow Jesus’s admonition in the Sermon on the Mount to turn the other cheek and to find alternate methods 91of resolving disputes (Romero 2017, 34). Speaking to the National Catholic Reporter, Chavez described the influence of the Beatitudes about which Jesus spoke in this sermon as follows:

The Beatitudes make natural good sense to the poor. We, of course, do not analyze the words and the meanings in the way scholars do. Jesus’ words fit his life and therefore the meaning of his words appear to be obvious to us. He spent his life with the poor, the sick, the outcasts, the powerless people. He attacked the wealthy and the powerful. He is with us. We feel he is our friend, our advocate, our leader. (Piar 1996, 117)

Like Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez stressed the importance of nonviolence. Describing important influences on his approach to nonviolence, Chavez said, “Moses is about the best example, and the first one. Christ is also a beautiful example, as is the way Christians overcame tyranny. They needed over three hundred years, but they did it” (quoted in Romero, 2017, 34).

Chavez justified his belief that God was especially interested in farm workers by citing James 5:4–6: “Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you” (35).

Beginning with the defeat of a California referendum Proposition 14, which would have strengthened the role of union organizers among farm workers, the United Farm Workers declined, and Chavez tried to build a religious order around himself and Synanon, which was associated with New Age religion (37). Chavez’s associates also accused him of becoming autocratic and unwilling to listen to others. His most successful efforts at labor organizing, however, had a distinctly Christian, and biblical, cast.

See also Civil Disobedience; Moses as Political Archetype; Roman Catholics

For Reference and Further Reading

Piar, Carlos R. 1996. “Cesar Chavez and La Causa: Toward a Hispanic Christian Social Ethic.” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics. 16: 103–20.

Romero, Robert Chao. 2017. “The Spiritual Praxis of Cesar Chavez.” Perspectivas 14 (Spring): 24–39.

Cherokee Removal

One of the causes that motivated a number of nineteenth-century American Protestants was that of the forced removal of Native American Cherokee Indians from Georgia to modern-day Oklahoma. American missionaries to the Cherokees did their best to protest against this removal that resulted in many deaths and that remains one of the most tragic chapters in American history, but President Andrew Jackson cooperated with authorities in Georgia to effect this action, which the U.S. Supreme Court was helpless to prevent.

One of the most vocal opponents of this action was Jeremiah Evarts (1791–1831), a Vermont-born lawyer and missionary who served as an officer for the 92American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He wrote a series of essays under the name of William Penn explaining its injustices. Although a great number of the essays were devoted to explicating Cherokee rights under treaties and international law, he made a number of arguments from Scripture.

Indeed, in the first of his essays, he likened the attempt to remove the Cherokees to the story of Ahab’s seizure of Naboth’s vineyard (aided by his wife Jezebel) as described in 1 Kings 21:1–16 (Evarts 1829, 5). Evarts further tied injustice to God’s judgment. After noting that America would suffer in the eyes of other nations if it acted unjustly, he further observed,

There is a higher consideration still. The Great Arbiter of Nations never fails to take cognizance of national delinquencies. No sophistry can elude his scrutiny; no array of plausible arguments, or of smooth but hollow professions, can bias his judgment; and he has at his disposal most abundant means of executing his decisions. In many forms, and with awful solemnity, he has declared his abhorrence of oppression in every shape; and especially of injustice perpetrated against the weak by the strong, when strength is in fact made the only rule of action. (Evarts 1829, 5–6)

He further cited the words of Micah 6:8 in reference to the obligation “to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God” (Evarts 1829, 6).

Evarts’s second essay combined biblical and natural rights principles. He thus observed, “The Cherokees are human beings, endowed by their Creator with the same natural rights as other men” (Evarts 1829, 7). He noted that they had adopted an agricultural lifestyle and established schools, and that many had become Christians.

Meticulously defending the rights of the Cherokees under treaties and both national and international law, Evarts once again called upon God:

If this case should unhappily be decided against the Cherokees, (which may Heaven avert!) it will be necessary that foreign nations should be well aware, that the People of the United States are ready to take the ground of fulfilling their contracts so long only, as they can be overawed by physical force; that we as a nation, are ready to avow, that we can be restrained from injustice by fear alone; not the fear of God, which is a most ennobling and purifying principle; not the fear of sacrificing national character, in the estimation of good and wise men in every country, and through all future time; not the fear of present shame and public scorn; but simply, and only, the fear of bayonets and cannon. (Evarts 1829, 46)

Further summarizing the view of the Cherokees in his fifteenth essay, Evarts observed,

We do not profess to be learned in the law of nations; but we read the Bible, and have learned there some plain principles of right and wrong. The Governor of the world gave us this country. We are in peaceable possession. We have never acknowledged any earthly lord, or sovereign. If our Creator has taken away our land and given it to you, we should like to see some proof of it, beside your own assertion. We have read in the book, which we understand you to acknowledge as the word of God, that “to oppress a stranger wrongfully” [Ezekiel 22:29] is a mark of great national wickedness. (Evarts 1829, 55)

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In what should have appealed to a largely Protestant audience, in his sixteenth essay, Evarts observed that Queen Elizabeth was imitating the pope when she tried to claim North America, just as the pope had sought to divide South America between Spain and Portugal (58). In a later essay, Evarts linked the whites’ desire for Cherokee lands to the biblical sin of covetousness, which is delineated in the Ten Commandments (88).

In his twenty-third essay, Evarts argued that Christianity is both “the basis of the present law of nations” and “a part of the common law.” He, in turn, linked both to the Golden Rule of treating others as one desired to be treated (95).

Almost as if imitating his namesake, the prophet Jeremiah, Evarts observed that “the memory of these transactions will not be forgotten. A bitter roll will be unfolded, on which Mourning, Lamentation, and Woe to the People of the United States will be seen written in characters, which no eye can refuse to see” (100). He then quoted from Deuteronomy 27:17–19: “Cursed be he, that removeth his neighbor’s landmark: and all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he, that maketh the blind to wander out of the way: and all the people shall say, Amen. Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow: and all the people shall say, Amen” (Evarts 1829, 100–1).

After again suggesting that God would judge the nation if it went forward with this plan, Evarts proceeded to elaborate with an apparent reference to Deuteronomy 19:14, which warned against removing boundary stones:

It is now proposed to remove the landmarks, in every sense;—to disregard territorial boundaries, definitely fixed, and for many years respected;—to disregard a most obvious principle of natural justice, in accordance with which the possessor of property is to hold it, till some one claims it, who has a better right;—to forget the doctrine of the law of nations, that engagements with dependent allies are as rigidly to be observed, as stipulations between communities of equal power and sovereignty;—to shut our ears to the voice of our own sages of the law, who say that Indians have a right to retain possession of their land and to use it according to their discretion, antecedently to any positive compacts; and, finally, to dishonor Washington, the Father of his country,—to stultify the Senate of the United States during a period of thirty-seven years,—to burn 150 documents, as yet preserved in the archives of State, under the denomination of treaties with Indians, and to tear out sheets from every volume of our national statute-book and scatter them to the winds. (Evarts 1829, 101)

Evarts ended by quoting Thomas Hooker to indicate that the seat of law is found in “the bosom of God” and that it is “the mother of their peace and joy” (101).

See also Common Law; Jezebel as Political Archetype; Judgment; Native American Indians

For Reference and Further Reading

Andrew, John A. 1992. From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

[ Evarts, Jeremiah]. 1829. Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians: First Published in the National Intelligencer, under the Signature of William Penn. Boston: Perkins & Marvin.

West, John G., Jr. 1996. The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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Chosen People

See America as New Israel

Christian Amendment

The Ten Commandments resemble a treaty between God and his people, and their introduction, as recorded in Exodus 20, begins with God saying, “I am the LORD thy God.” Although some defenders of the idea that America was a Christian nation found meaning in the fact that the attestation clause of the U.S. Constitution referred to “the year of our LORD,” some religious groups thought the nation could never secure God’s blessings without more explicitly mentioning Him. The Reformed Presbyterian Church, with roots in the Scottish Covenant tradition, launched an initiative to see that the U.S. Constitution specifically acknowledged God. John Alexander, a layman, proposed to a convention of the National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution (later called the National Reform Association) meeting in Zenia, Ohio, in February 1863 that such an amendment acknowledge “the rulership of Jesus Christ and the supremacy of the divine” (Borden 1979, 159).

Particularly prominent during the 1870s, this movement presented a petition of more than thirty-five thousand signatures to Congress but met with increasing concerns that the proposed amendment, especially as worded to recognize Jesus Christ, might violate the separation of church and state. Such proposals continued, however, with support from the National Association of Evangelicals and other groups. In 2000, the platform of a group calling itself the Constitution Party observed as follows:

The U.S. Constitution established a Republic under God, rather than democracy; our Republic is a nation governed by a Constitution that is rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens; [and] in a Republic governed by Constitutional law rooted in Biblical law, all Life, Liberty and Property are protected because law rules. (Vile 2015, I: 72)

See also Findley/Wylie Debate over “The Two Sons of Oil”; Ten Commandments; U.S. Constitution

For Reference and Further Reading

Borden, Morton. 1979. “The Christian Amendment.” Civil War History 25 (June): 156–67.

Jacoby, Stewart O. 1984. “The Religious Amendment Movement: God, People and Nation in the Gilded Age.” 2 vols. PhD diss., University of Michigan.

Kabala, James S. 2013 .Church-State Relations in the Early American Republic, 1787–1846. Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto.

Vile, John R. 2015. Encyclopedia of Constitutional Amendments, Proposed Amendments, and Amending Issues, 1789–2015. 2 vols., 4th ed. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Christian Reconstructionism

Throughout Christian history, theologians and political leaders have sought to ascertain the degree to which biblical laws and admonitions should be enacted 95into laws and the degree to which they should apply to non-Christians. American Puritans probably came as close as any group to using biblical laws as the basis of colonial laws. They further limited voting rights to those who were church members.

Rousas John Rushdoony (1917–2001) has laid the philosophical foundation for reinstituting such a polity within the United States in what is generally recalled Christian Reconstructionism, or Theonomy. The son of an Armenian immigrant, Rushdoony was educated at the Westminster Theological Seminary (a breakaway from Princeton Theological Seminary) and served as founder and president of the Chalcedon Foundation, which was named after an early creed that reiterated that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. Influenced by the idea of presuppositionalism, which he learned from Professor Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) at Westminster Seminary, Rushdoony argued that believers, who followed the Bible, had little in common with those who did not. It became the responsibility of the former to exercise dominion over all creation in accord with the mandate that God gave to Adam in Genesis 1:28 and reaffirmed in the covenant with Noah in Genesis 9:1–3, and in Psalm 8:6–8. Rushdoony was a prolific writer whose most important work, The Institutes of Biblical Law, first published in 1973 and patterned on John Calvin’s classic Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), describes in detail how each of the commandments would be applied.

Many Reconstructionists believe that America is a Christian nation and that states and localities are responsible for enforcing the Ten Commandments, including capital punishment (stoning) not only for offenses like murder but also for blasphemy and disrespect for parents. Molly Worthen has summarized the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism as follows:

A Calvinistic notion of regeneration, or salvation by God-given grace; a postmillennial eschatology predicting that Jesus Christ’s second coming will occur after a thousand-year reign of the saints, thus requiring Christians to act now to bring about that reign; presuppositional apologetics; an anti-statist worldview requiring “decentralized social order where civil government is only one legitimate government among many”; and finally, “continuing validity and applicability of the whole law of God” (Worthen 2008, 401)

Worthen further observes that the rule of God’s law would include not only the Ten Commandments but also some six hundred other rules that accompanied them (401).

Frederick Clarkson observes that there are both “hard and soft Dominionists,” but that they are bound together by three views:

1 Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.

2 Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.

3 Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, insofar as they believed that the Ten Commandments, or “biblical law,” should be the foundation of 96American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing biblical principles. (Clarkson 2011)

Rushdoony was a particular foe of public education, which he associated with secular humanism, and he helped lay the groundwork for the Protestant Christian homeschool movement. Believing that the purpose of government was to establish justice rather than to embody love, he further argued that law should focus on punishment rather than on rehabilitation. Rushdoony, who opposed racial desegregation, believed that the purpose of law was not to equalize individuals but to form a “separate” people in a covenantal relationship with God (Worthen 2008, 419). As in Puritan thought, Rushdoony had little respect for diversity, viewing law itself as what he described as “a state of war; it is the organization of the powers of civil government to bring the enemies of the law-order to justice” (Worthen 2008, 421).

Rushdoony’s thought has been proponed by a number of followers, including his son-in-law Gary North, an economist with whom he was estranged. Reconstructionism has had the greatest influence on the Christian right, influencing such individuals as Herb Titus, who helped found the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University; Gary DeMar, who heads American Vision; Roy Moore, the Alabama judge best known for installing a large monument to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court; Randall Terry, who headed Operation Rescue in opposing abortion; Texas senator Ted Cruz; former Kansas senator Sam Brownback; former televangelist D. James Kennedy; and others (Sugg 2005; Clarkson 2011).

Bill Strittmatter, the pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ in Lakemore, Ohio, published a pamphlet, probably in the early 1970s, entitled “A Christian Constitution and Civil Law for the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth,” in which he attempted to base a proposed national constitution on the Ten Commandments. It was based on the idea that the United States was a Christian nation (Vile 2014, 122).

See also Capital Punishment; Covenants, Compacts, Contracts, and Constitutions; Moore, Roy; Puritanism; Ten Commandments

For Reference and Further Reading

Clarkson, Frederick. 2011. “The Rise of Dominionism—Remaking America as a Christian Nation.” Public Eye Magazine. April 12. www.spaulforrest.com/2011/04/rise-of-dominionism-remaking-america-as.html.

Sugg, John. December 2005. “A Nation under God.” Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/12/nation-under-god/.

Vile, John R. 2014. Re-Framers: 170 Eccentric, Visionary, and Patriotic Proposals to Rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Worthen, Molly. 2008. “The Chalcedon Problem: Rousas John Rushdoony and the Origins of Christian Reconstructionism.” Church History 77 (June): 399–437.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormons or the LDS, is an indigenous American religion that grew out of 97visions of Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York. By his testimony, an angel named Moroni appeared to him and revealed the presence of golden plates that, with the help of the Urim and Thummin, parts of the priestly vestments mentioned in the Old Testament, he was able to translate as the Book of Mormon, which was first published in 1830.

This book, which has since been recognized as an additional Scripture by the LDS, described how a Hebrew prophet named Lehi, with the help of his sons Laman and Nephi, fled before King Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem in 586 BC and sailed to America. Nephi’s sons remained godly whereas the sons of Laman were unrighteous and were cursed by God with darker skin (Wood 2000, 170–71). After Jesus was crucified, he came to America to preach to both peoples and initiated a period of peace that lasted until the Lamanites finally wiped out the Nephites in the fifth century AD, leaving Moroni to write their history, which Smith later recovered.

Like other Restorationist movements of his day, Smith sought to restore religious practice to that of the Old Testament and the early church. The church puts great emphasis on its temples, where couples can be married for eternity. To this day, the church has a hierarchical arrangement that allows, like the Book of Mormon, for continuing revelation. According to Timothy Wood, Smith had a looser conception of monotheism that essentially regarded the differences between God and man more as what Wood describes as “differences in degree, not of essence” (Wood 2000, 173). In time, believers could progress into godhead; unions that were blessed in the temple would be united forever in heaven. LDS members are to refrain from tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol.

The LDS Church regards the translations and writings of Joseph Smith as revelations that supplement the Bible, which they also revere, but the translation of which they believe has been corrupted over time. In addition to translating the Book of Mormon, Smith also wrote the Doctrine and Covenants, The Pearl of Great Price, and his own emendations of the King James Bible (Joseph Smith Translation, or JST). One scholar observes that this retranslation “was not a traditional rendering of the text. The project bore a certain resemblance to targumic translation, a tradition of expansive interpretation that often meant the pursuit not just of what the Bible had originally said, but of what the Bible should have said” (Holland 2017, 617). He further observed that “Smith’s translation of the Bible not only altered certain phrases and reworked particular passages; it created entire new chapters. Engagement with the text became the setting for both exegesis and ongoing revelation. Most of the textual changes that emerged from his translation drew more heavily from Smith’s sense of inspiration than his philology” (617). Two scholars who have studied the subject observe, “While expressing a strong and basic general belief in the Bible, early Mormon leaders limited the authority of the Bible by (1) promulgating an extra-Biblical canon, (2) placing primacy on living prophets over received Scriptures, (3) representing Scripture as but one source of truth among others, (4) stressing the corruptions in the received text of the Bible, and (5) dismissing portions of it as uninspired” (Mauss and Barlow 1991, 406). As the LDS Church has become more conservative in recent years, it has joined fundamentalist Protestant churches in recognizing the King James Version of the Bible as the most accurate (Mauss and Barlow 1991).

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The LDS Church encountered significant resistance in its early years, both from those who believed that the existing Bible was complete and from those who were concerned that the tight-knit communities, often composed of a high number of immigrants, formed in a tight hierarchy threatened traditional republican ideals of government. In 1838, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs ordered the Church to leave the state or be met with force. Church members then moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built another temple. It was there that Joseph Smith launched a bid for the presidency before being assassinated by a local mob.

In time, the LDS Church moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where it established its national headquarters and build its most impressive temple. It was there that Brigham Young, who had succeeded Smith as the head of the Church, announced that the LDS had embraced polygamy, a practice that, although not uncommon in the lives of some Old Testament patriarchs, many Americans associated with slavery and with uncivilized nations. Although the United States had to this point left matters of family law to the states, it adopted the Morrill Act and others that sought to limit such practice in Utah and other areas that remained territories and arrested many members for violating the law. In Reynolds v. United States (1879), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law against charges that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment by arguing that while leaving individual beliefs intact, the amendment did not prohibit the regulation of conduct. Perhaps because of this and similar decisions, the nation did not adopt a constitutional amendment prohibiting the practice.

In 1890, the Church announced an official end to polygamy, and in 1891, it dissolved its People’s Party. In 1896, Utah was admitted into the Union as the forty-fifth state. Even in 1902, however, the U.S. Senate questioned whether Reed Smoot, who was one of the LDS apostles, should be permitted to sit in this body. Although the Senate ultimately ruled in his favor, Mormon candidates for nationwide office have faced concerns, similar to those once expressed about Roman Catholics, about their independence from the Church.

In recent years, the LDS Church has become increasingly identified with the Republican Party and with conservative ideology. Its members have taken strong stands against same-sex marriage and abortion. In 2008, Mitt Romney, a member, won the Republican nomination for president.

See also Alternate Scriptures; Polygamy; Roman Catholics; Romney, Mitt; Smith, Joseph

For Reference and Further Reading

Campbell, David E ., and J. Quin Monson. “Dry Kindling: A Political Profile of American Mormons.” From Pews to Polling Places: Faith and Politics in the American Religious Mosaic, ed. J. Matthew Wilson. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 105–29.

Cannon, Mark W. 1961. “The Crusades against the Masons, Catholics, and Mormons: Separate Waves of a Common Current.” Brigham Young University Studies 3 (Winter): 23–49.

Dias, Elizabeth. 2019. “‘Mormon’ No More: Faithful Reflect on Church’s Move to Scrap a Moniker.” New York Times. June 29.

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Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 2002. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Holland, David. 2017. “The Bible and Mormonism.” The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, ed. Paul C. Gutjahr. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 611–26.

Mauss, Armand L ., and Philip L. Barlow. 1991. “Church, Sect, and Scripture: The Protestant Bible and Mormon Sectarian Retrenchment.” Sociological Analysis 52 (Winter): 397–414.

Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879).

Talbot, Christine. 2013. A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852–1890. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Turner, John G. 2012. Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wood, Timothy L. 2000. “The Prophet and the Presidency: Mormonism and Politics in Joseph Smith’s 1844 Presidential Campaign.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 93 (Summer): 167–93.

Cincinnati Bible War of 1869

Although the U.S. Supreme Court did not outlaw devotional Bible reading in public schools until its decision in Abington v. Schempp in 1963, the issue had flared in a number of cities during the nineteenth century including Philadelphia, New York, and Cincinnati. The latter controversy generated an opinion by the Ohio Supreme Court upholding a decision by the Cincinnati Board of Education to discontinue the use of the King James Bible and other devotional exercises in the public schools.

In the years leading up to this decision, public schools had opened the school day with readings from the King James Bible (KJV). They considered such teaching important to socializing immigrant children, especially those from Roman Catholic countries. Although it exempted students whose parents objected to the KJV, they did not permit them to bring the Catholic Douay Bible because it contained commentary that school officials believed was sectarian in nature. Most Protestants considered the KJV to be nonsectarian because it was acceptable to most Protestant denominations. Catholics generally opposed it because they did not think it was a good translation, because it left out some books that Catholics accepted, and because they thought it should be accompanied by Catholic commentary.

Cincinnati Catholics led by Archbishop John B. Purcell (1800–1883) had developed their own school system but at one point offered to merge the two systems if the Bible were removed from both. Although this plan fell through, in part because Catholics did not think that education should be divorced from religious training, the school board adopted two resolutions:

Resolved, That religious instruction and the reading of religious books, including the Holy Bible, are prohibited in the common schools of Cincinnati, it being the true object and intent of this rule to allow the children of the parents of all sects and opinions, in matters of faith and worship, to enjoy alike the benefits of the common-school fund.

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Resolved, That so much of the regulations on the course of study and the text-books in the intermediate and district schools as reads as follows, “The opening exercises in every department shall commence by reading a portion of the Bible by or under the direction of the teacher, and appropriate singing by the pupils,” be repealed. (Board of Education of Cincinnati v. Minor 1872, 211)

This stirred considerable anger, especially among members of the Protestant clergy, who viewed America as a Christian nation and continued to view any Catholic efforts to defend their own view points as being directed by the pope. Opponents to the resolutions were able to win a two-to-one victory in the Hamilton County Superior Court.

When the case reached the Ohio Supreme Court, future U.S. Supreme Court justice Thomas Stanley Matthews, a Presbyterian elder, was among those who argued for reversing its decision, which is what that court did. Although much of the argument centered on whether curricular decisions were best vested in the school board or in the court, the decision hinged in large part on a provision of the Ohio Constitution, similar to that in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, that, after providing that “all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own conscience,” went on to provide that “religion, morality, and knowledge, however, being essential to good government, it shall be the duty of the general assembly to pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, and to encourage schools and the means of instruction” (Board v. Minor 1872, 241). Supporters of religious exercises believed this provision was a positive injunction requiring the teaching of the Bible.

Justice John Welch, who wrote the decision on behalf of the Ohio Supreme Court, disagreed. Recognizing the state’s mandate to promote “religion, morality, and knowledge,” he pointed out, “There is no direction given as to what system of general knowledge, or of religion or morals, shall be taught; nor as to what particular branches of such system or systems shall be introduced into the ‘schools’; nor is any direction given as to what other ‘means of instruction’ shall be employed” (Board v. Minor 1872, 244). Whether consciously or unconsciously echoing Pilate’s rhetorical question to Jesus as recorded in John 18:38, Welch continued, “To enjoy ‘instructions’ in ‘knowledge,’ the knowledge of truth in all its branches—religious, moral, or otherwise—is one thing; and to declare what is truth—truth in any one, or in all departments of human knowledge—and to enjoin the teaching of that, as truth, is quite another thing” (Board v. Minor 1872, 244).

Welch was quite cognizant that it was difficult to separate religious prejudices and convictions from public policies. He observed, however, that it was possible to distinguish the constitution’s regard for the value of religion in general from that of the Christian religion in particular. Pointing to both state and national constitutions, he observed that “neither the word ‘Christianity,’ ‘Christian,’ nor ‘Bible,’ is to be found in either. When they speak of ‘religion,’ they must mean the religion of man, and not the religion of any class of men. When they speak of ‘all men’ having certain rights, they cannot mean merely ‘all Christian men.’ 101Some of the very men who helped to frame these constitutions were themselves not Christian men” (Board v. Minor 1872, 246).

Countering the argument that the constitution must mean Christianity because it is part of the common law, Welch observed, “If Christianity is a law of the state, like every other law, it much have a sanction” (247). Because the nation consists of a largely Christian people, however, it is especially offensive to try to enforce Christianity on others. Paraphrasing Jesus’s words as recorded in Matthew 26:52, Welch observed, “True Christianity asks no aid from the sword of civil authority. It began without the sword, and wherever it has taken the sword it has perished by the sword” (247). Almost as though he were summarizing a long-standing Protestant critique of Catholicism, Welch observed that “legal Christianity is a solecism, a contradiction of terms” (248). In his view, “Religion is the parent, and not the offspring, of good government”; likely paraphrasing Jesus’s words in Matthew 6:33, Welch added, “Its Kingdom is to be first sought, and good government is one of those things which will be added thereto” (249). If the public schools were to teach Christianity as the true religion, all teachers would have to be Christians, and the very act of teaching their own religion would be to violate the Golden Rule of treating others with respect.

Countering arguments that omitting the teaching of the Bible would give control of the schools to “infidel sects,” Welch observed, “The only fair and impartial method, where serious objection is made, is to let each sect give its own instructions, elsewhere than in the state schools, where of necessity all are to meet; and to put disputed doctrines of religion among other subjects of instruction, for there are many others, which can more conveniently, satisfactorily, and safely be taught elsewhere” (253). He further cited James Madison as one of the founders who supported this position.

Controversy continued even after this decision when the city attempted to tax the property of parochial schools, only to be overturned by a court decision in Purcell v. Gerke (1874).

See also Abington v. Schempp; King James Bible; Philadelphia Bible Wars

For Reference and Further Reading

Board of Education of Cincinnati v. Minor, 23 Ohio St. 211 (1872).

DePalma, Margaret. 2003. “Religion in the Classroom: The Great Bible Wars in Nineteenth Century Cincinnati.” Ohio Valley History 3 (Fall): 17–36.

Mach, Andrew. 2015. “‘The Name of Freeman Is Better than Jesuit’: Anti-Catholicism, Republican Ideology, and Cincinnati Political Culture, 1853–1854.” Ohio Valley History 15 (Winter): 3–21.

Moore, R. Laurence. 2000. “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education.” Journal of American History 86 (March): 1581–99.

Newsome, Michael Dehaven. 2002. “Common School Religion: Judicial Narratives in a Protestant Empire.” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 11: 219–337.

Purcell v. Gerke, 25 Ohio St. 229 (1874).

Throckmorton, Warren. 2011. “The Cincinnati Bible Wars: When the KJV Was Removed from Public Schools.” The Christian Post. May 4. https://www.christianpost.com/news/the-cincinnati-bible-wars-when-the-kjv-was-removed-from-public-schools.html.

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Citizenship

One of the arguable defects of the original U.S. Constitution is that although it indicated a difference between a “natural-born” citizen and those who were naturalized, it did not provide a definition of which groups qualified for either (Vile 2016). Nor did it indicate whether it was possible for an individual to be a citizen or a resident of a state without thereby also being a citizen or resident of the United States. In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided that blacks were not and could not be citizens of the United States (and thus part of “We the People”). After the Civil War, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) subsequently overturned this decision and declared that all persons born or naturalized within the United States were citizens thereof.

Although English law had suggested that subjects born within the realm were forever subjects thereof, America necessarily adopted a more flexible approach, which permitted individuals who immigrated to the United States to become citizens and those who chose to leave to become citizens elsewhere. Michael Walzer has observed that biblical covenants were sometimes associated with descendants of a particular person, such as Abraham, and at other times extended to a “mixed multitude” (Walzer 2012, 2), such as those who accompanied Moses out of Israel. This led to two different models of citizenship: “There is a permanent, built-in tension between the birth model and the adherence model. The first favors a politics of nativism and exclusion (as in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah), the second a politics of openness and welcome, proselytism and expansion (and even forced conversion), as in the stories of Ruth” (Walzer 2012, 3) and, he might have added, Rahab.

In examining the controversies over citizenship that led up to the Civil War, Carrie Hyde believes that Philippians 3:20 may have played a part in American understandings. Although the King James Version read that “our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ,” in the early part of the nineteenth century, the word “conversation”—which had ceased to mean who a person was rather than what they said, which came from the Greek word politeuma, the origins of the word “politics”—was increasingly translated as, and understood to mean, “citizenship.” It was thus so translated in the Bible published in 1808 by Charles Thomson, the former secretary of the Continental Congress (Hyde 2018, 55, 58).

This new understanding had two consequences that Hyde traces through such works of literature as David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dred (1856). One was to suggest worldly disengagement emphasizing the world to come, and perhaps even justifying earthly injustices like those perpetrated by the institution of slavery as a way to prepare one for a better life to come. The other, however, was to pose a more perfect heavenly citizenship against a deficient idea of citizenship such as that perpetuated under slavery. In Hyde’s words, “the value of theological models of citizenship . . . is that they provided a clear alternative to the convention-bound structure of positive law” (2018, 61). For those who recognized that the kingdom of heaven would consist of members of all races, it seemed only logical that they should also be included as citizens 103in an ideal republic. Moreover, to the extent that the American polity extended protections to all, it could further be identified with the heavenly city or New Jerusalem to come.

See also Slavery; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Thomson, Charles; Walker, David

For Reference and Further Reading

Hyde, Carrie. 2018. Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vile, John R., ed. 2016. American Immigration and Citizenship: A Documentary History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Walzer, Michael. 2012. In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

City upon a Hill

Few, if any, metaphors have better encapsulated the thought of American Pilgrims than an image from John Winthrop’s Scripture-laden essay (usually described as a sermon) from 1630, delivered aboard the ship Arbella or possibly simply circulated in written form (Rodgers 2018, 27–28), entitled “A Model of Christian Charity.”

Winthrop’s speech reflected the fact that Puritans considered themselves, like ancient Israelites, to be in a special agreement, or covenant, with God: “Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work, we have taken out a commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles we have professed to enterprise these actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing” (Vile 2015, 20). Like covenants within the Old Testament, such a covenant required the Pilgrims to keep their side of the agreement lest “the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, be revenged of such a perjured people, and make us known the price of the breach of such a covenant” (Vile 2015, 20).

Although he did not cite chapter and verse, Winthrop quoted from Micah 6:8 about the responsibility of the people “to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God” (Vile 2015, 20). As he ended his speech, Winthrop exhorted his fellow passengers with a phrase that he borrowed from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:14. After he said that his followers should be “the light of the world,” Winthrop observed that

we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of the people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake, we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going. (Vile 2015, 21)

Winthrop drew from Moses’s words to Israel in Deuteronomy 30:15–16 when he observed, “Beloved there is now set before us life and good, death and evil, in 104that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His ordinance, and His laws, and the article of our covenant with Him that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in this land whither we go to possess it” (Vile 2015, 21). Winthrop thus further identified New England as a type of New Israel with the trip from the Netherlands to the United States being likened to that of Moses and his people crossing the Red Sea.

Although this speech is sometimes interpreted as the beginning of American exceptionalism that portrays the nation as uniquely ordained and blessed by God, Winthrop clearly suggested that if the colony were to remain in God’s graces, it would need to be faithful to Him. Being an exceptional settlement could easily bring about curses as well as blessings if the Pilgrims do not keep up their side of the covenant.

As a native of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy was particularly fond of the city-on-the-hill analogy and used it in a speech that he gave to his constituents before leaving for Washington, DC. Citing Winthrop’s reference to this city, Kennedy observed, “Today the eyes of all the people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state, and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited of men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.” Like the Pilgrim settlers, Kennedy said it was important for modern leaders to be men of courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication (Kennedy 1961).

President Ronald Reagan was especially enamored with the central metaphor in Winthrop’s speech, which Reagan typically stated as “a shining city upon a hill.” As he employed the phrase, however, the image became transformed from what Daniel Rodgers describes as a “fragile possibility to an enduring fact” (2018, 244–45).

This was probably most evident in a speech that Reagan gave to celebrate the centennial of the Statue of Liberty on July 23, 1986. Calling the ship from which Winthrop delivered the speech as the Arabella rather than the Arbella, and at one point incorrectly identifying the Puritans as Quakers, Reagan explained, “A little group of Puritans huddled on the deck. And then John Winthrop, who would later become the first governor of Massachusetts, reminded his fellow Puritans there on that tiny deck that they must keep faith with their God, that the eyes of all the world were upon them, and that they must not forsake the mission that God had sent them on, and they must be a light unto the nations of all the world—a shining city upon a hill” (speech in Balmer 2008, 213). Further elaborating his belief in American exceptionalism, Reagan intoned, “Call it mysticism if you will, I have always believed there was some divine providence that placed this great land here between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world, who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope” (Balmer 2008, 213)

In associating the city-on-the-hill analogy with American exceptionalism, Professor Patrick Deneen has delineated four types of vision. He describes the vision of John Winthrop, like Nathaniel Nile’s sermon, as “Two Discourses on 105Liberty,” and some Anti-Federalist writings as examples of what he calls communal perfectionism. He believes that George Washington’s Farewell Address and John Quincy Adams’s speech on July 4, 1821, were what he describes as liberal isolationism, which focused chiefly on America’s role as an example to other nations. Deneen believes, however, that there was a fine line between liberal isolationism and liberal expansionism, both at home (as in manifest destiny) and abroad, as in the American acquisition of colonies after the Spanish-American War and in Ronald Reagan’s own vision of the shining city on a hill. Finally, Deneen identifies a category that he calls global communalism, which looks forward to expanded internationalism. Deneen posits that all four forms of American exceptionalism depart from the Augustinian distinction between the city of God, which consists of members of the church, and the city of man, or earthy kingdoms, none of which Augustine thought could claim a heavenly mission (Deneen 2012, 49).

See also American Exceptionalism; Covenants, Compacts, Contracts, and Constitutions; Kennedy, John F.; Model of Christian Charity; Moses; Pilgrims; Reagan, Ronald (Evil Empire Speech)

For Reference and Further Reading

Balmer, Randall. 2008. God in the White House: A History; How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. New York: HarperOne.

Deneen, Patrick K. 2012. “Cities of Man on a Hill.” American Political Thought 2 (Spring): 29–52.

Dunn, Richard S. 1987. “An Odd Couple: John Winthrop and William Penn.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Society, Third Series 99: 1–24.

Holland, Matthew S. 2007. Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America—Winthrop, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Johnson, Paul. 1995. “God and the Americans: The City upon a Hill.” Commentary 99 (January): 25–32.

Kennedy, John F. 1961. “The City upon a Hill Speech.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. January 9. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/the-city-upon-a-hill-speech.

Morgan, Edmund S. 1958. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown.

Noll, Mark A. 2012. “’We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill’: John Winthrop’s Non-American Exceptionalism.” Review of Faith & International Affairs 10 (May 24): 5–11.

Rodgers, Daniel T. 2018. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schweitzer, Ivy. 2005. “John Winthrop’s ‘Model’ of American Affiliation.” Early American Literature 40(3): 441–69.

Vile, John R., ed. 2015. Founding Documents of America: Documents Decoded. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Civil Disobedience

Christian leaders throughout history have generally advocated obedience to laws, especially those that were legally enacted for the common good. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39). In Matthew 22:21, Jesus urged followers to “render to Caesar the things that are 106Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s,” and, in the opening verses of Romans 13, Paul urged Christians to submit to governing authorities.

There are occasions in both the Old and New Testaments, however, that also praise those who have stood up to injustice and disobeyed unjust laws. Exodus praised midwives who refused to carry out orders to slay newborn Hebrew boys. The book of Daniel recorded that his three friends were willing to be cast into a fiery furnace rather than bow down to an idol. King Saul’s own bodyguards refused to carry out his order to kill priests who had fed David, while Hebrew kings were instructed to write out passages from the law to which they were bound to adhere (Waskow n.d.).

In the New Testament, after religious leaders cautioned early Christians against preaching the gospel, Peter responded in Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men” (Blankley 2012). Historically, Christians have suffered martyrdom rather than surrendered their faith.

Many individuals fled to the United States for refuge after being persecuted for their beliefs. Quakers had been harassed for their refusal to duff their hats to rulers, while Puritans hoped to found a purer church than they had left in England.

Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” better known today as “Civil Disobedience,” which was published in 1849, is one of the more articulate defenses of civil disobedience. In Thoreau’s case, he had refused to pay a poll tax during the Mexican-American War, which he considered to be an attempt at expanding American slave power (Perry 2013, 94–125). Although his perspective was largely that of libertarian individualism, numerous Christians expressed their unwillingness in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War to help enforce fugitive slave laws. One pastor, J. C. W. Pennington, likened such participation to Judas’s decision to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (Perry 2013, 111). In so doing, opponents of the laws that required the return of escaped slaves appealed to a higher moral law, much as they believed American revolutionaries had done in an earlier generation.

In the years leading up to the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, American suffragists practiced civil disobedience in order to highlight the cause of women’s voting.

During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. combined the idea of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. He eloquently defended his views in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote in response to a number of pastors and religious leaders who had accused him of being an outsider who was stirring up violence, after he was imprisoned for failing to get a permit to demonstrate.

Justifying his action in part on the basis of his presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King cited a number of biblical precedents: “Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown” (King 1963).

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Responding to those who urged him to “wait,” he cited the aphorism that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” He further sought to tie civil disobedience to the principles embodied both in the Declaration of Independence and in Scripture. With St. Augustine, King observed that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, King said that human laws that were not rooted “in eternal and natural law” called for disobedience (King 1963). Drawing from the biblical book of Daniel, he further cited “the refusal of Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved,” as well as “early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire” (King 1963).

King believed that laws mandating segregation were wrong and represented the unjust will of the majority forcing themselves on a racial minority. Rejecting the accusation that he was an extremist, King contrasted his own nonviolent approach, which he grounded on the New Testament and on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, with the militant national of Elijah Muhammad and his movement:

Was not Jesus an extremist in love?—“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice?—“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream” [Amos 5:24]. Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ?—“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” [Galatians 6:17]. Was not Martin Luther an extremist?—“Here I stand; I can do not other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist?—“I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience.” Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist?—“This nation cannot survive half-slave and half free.” Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist?—“We hold these truths to be self-evidence, that all men are created equal.” (King 1963)

In the 1960s, a number of individuals who opposed being drafted into the armed forces did so on the basis that because the war was unjust, it would be immoral for them to serve. Many received inspiration from William Sloane Coffin Jr. (1924–2006), who was the chaplain at Yale University and who was himself brought to trial for encouraging draft resistance (Goldstein 2004, 183–224). Coffin especially liked to quote Amos 5:24, indicating that it was the “preacher’s job to call for justice to roll down like mighty waters. The politician’s job was to work out the irrigation system” (Goldstein 2004, 222).

See also King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Natural Law; Puritans; Quakers

For Reference and Further Reading

Allen, Barbara. 2000. “Martin Luther King’s Civil Disobedience and the American Covenant tradition.” Publius 30 (Autumn): 71–113.

Areshinze, Giorgi. 2016. Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama: Faith and the Civil Life of Democracy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Blankley, Bethany. 2012. “The Biblical Civil Disobedience Mandate.” HuffPost. February 6 [updated April 7, 2012]. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biblical-civil-disobedience-mandate_b_1249785.

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Goldstein, Warren. 2004. William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. August 1963. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf.

Perry, Lewis. 2013. Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Waskow, Arthur O. n.d. “Civil Disobedience in the Bible.” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/civil-disobedience-in-the-bible/.

Clark, Champ

Champ Clark (1850–1921) was a member of the House of Representatives from Missouri who served from 1897 to 1921 and was Speaker of the House from 1911 to 1919. Born in Kentucky, Clark earned his undergraduate degree from Bethany College, which had been founded by Alexander Campbell, who founded the Disciples of Christ, which Clark joined. Clark studied law at the University of Cincinnati. He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1912 but lost to Woodrow Wilson and later opposed Wilson’s call for U.S. entry into World War I.

Clark was widely known for his oratory, and for many years held the record for the longest speech ever given before Congress. Umphrey Lee observed that Clark “was proud of the statement that he quoted the Bible oftener and more accurately than any other man in Congress” (1935, 19). Similarly, Clark’s biographer observes that “Champ Clark is the most competent and thorough Bible student in public life to-day. His speeches, orations, and lectures are replete with accurate and apropos bible quotations” (Webb 1912, 22).

Champ told his biographer that his father wanted him to read the Bible, but that when Champ refused, he bought him a “vest-pocket volume” with the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and Washington’s Farewell Address, and said, “My son, as you will not read your Bible, here is the next best book; study it” (Webb 1912, 23). Later refusing to give in to his son’s desire to read novels, but indulging his interest in histories and biographies, his father provided him with a copy of William Wirt’s Life of Patrick Henry. Enamored with Henry’s speech at St. John’s Church, Clark was especially mesmerized by the words, “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong [Ecclesiastes 9:11].” Telling his father how enamored he was with these words, Clark said that his father responded, “My son, King Solomon, and not Patrick Henry, wrote that sentence that you admire so much. Read your Bible as eagerly as you do your histories and biographies, and you will find hundreds of others fully as magnificent” (Webb 1912, 24). Clark reported that “I took him at his word, and have been reading the Bible ever since, which constantly increasing profit and delight. To say nothing of its religious value, it is the best book in the world to quote from. Whatever knowledge I have of it dates from the day that my father placed William Wirt’s ‘Life of Patrick Henry’ in my hands” (Webb 1912, 24–25).

See also Henry, Patrick; Wilson, Woodrow

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For Reference and Further Reading

Lee, Umphrey. 1935. “The English Bible and American Public Men.” Christian Education 19 (October): 18–21.

Webb, W. L. 1912. Champ Clark. New York: Neale Publishing Company.

Climate Change

There is a rising scientific consensus that the earth is warming as a result of the increased burning of fossil fuels, which is increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is further widespread scientific agreement that this gas traps radiation in the atmosphere, creating global warming; that such warming is having serious negative environmental consequences; and that steps need to be taken to combat them. Scientists believe that global warming is exaggerating existing weather patterns, resulting in greater flooding, especially in low-lying areas, more intense fires and storms, and the like. The dangers of global warming are often presented in apocalyptic language that resembles the biblical terminology that evangelists once used to describe the end of the world (Lilly 2016).

A fair number of people, typically political conservatives who are generally wary of increased governmental initiatives, however, have rejected such claims outright. Others have argued that they are exaggerated, have suggested that they might be the result of unknown phenomena that are not so directly connected to human actions, or have argued either that combatting global warming might have adverse economic consequences or that funds spent to reduce global warming could better be spent in other ways (Alumkal 2017).

Support for this position might be fueled in part by conservative interpreters of the Bible who believe that Genesis teaches a literal six-day creation and who therefore suspect that scientists might have a hidden agenda in advancing theories of global warming just as they believe they did in advancing the theory that humans evolved from other forms of animal life. Critics are particularly suspicious of individuals who in their judgment seek to deify the earth or nature in an attempt to elevate attention to the environment. Some may, indeed, believe that Christ’s second coming might be so imminent as to think that it is pointless to worry about such long-run dangers (Delgado 2017, 17). Others believe that advocates of global warming are showing a lack of faith in the resilience of God’s creation as evidenced in Psalm 19:1–6 and its own self-correcting mechanisms. Moreover, some have argued that God’s promise to Noah in Genesis 9:11–12, 15–16 that he will never again cover the earth with water would preclude the kind of flood levels that some scientists have predicted (argument cited in Alumkal 2017, 165).

The Bible contains many accounts of natural disasters. While some, like the flood from which Noah and his family escaped on an ark, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, were attributed to God’s wrath against man’s sins, they were initiated by God rather than through direct human causes. One scholar has thus noted that “the biblical apocalypse posits humanity at the center of the universe and upholds the notion of a Creator who intervenes in history on behalf of humans. This God bends nature to his service, causing both hellscape and 110New Jerusalem to emerge in the story of humankind. In contrast, Enlightenment science’s appeal to apocalyptic language has no subject and no body. It tells no history, elicits no desire, and offers no catharsis. Its crisis is measured in meters, not monsters” (Lilly 2016, 368–69).

Much of the biblical arguments relative to global warming have centered on two passages, both of which come from the creation accounts (McCammack 2007, 648). Genesis 1:28 gives humans dominion over the environment: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Genesis 2:15, however, indicates that human beings serve as stewards of creation: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”

One perceived threat of global warming is that its negative consequences will fall both on the most vulnerable nations of the world and on the most vulnerable individuals within such nations. This seems to be a major theme in a report by the Evangelical Climate Initiative entitled “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action,” which ties concern for climate change both with biblically based concerns for the poor and with the Christian call to love one’s neighbors. Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe (2019) cites 2 Timothy 1:7 in an attempt to persuade theological evangelicals thinking about climate change that Christians should have a spirit of love and power rather than one of fear.

See also Judgment; Natural Disasters

For Reference and Further Reading

Alumkal, Anthony. 2017. Paranoid Science: The Christian Right’s War on Reality. New York: New York University Press.

Delgado, Sharon. 2017. Love in a Time of Climate Change. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress.

Evangelical Climate Initiative. n.d. “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.” https://www.npr.org/documents/2006/feb/evangelical/calltoaction.pdf.

Hayhoe, Katharine. 2019. “Caring about Climate Change Is the Christian Thing to Do.” New York Times. October 31.

Lilly, Ingrid Esther. 2016. “The Planet’s Apocalypse: The Rhetoric of Climate Change.” Apocalypses in Context: Apocalyptic Currents through History, ed. Kelly J. Murphy and Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, pp. 359–79.

McCammack, Brian. 2007. “Hot Damned America: Evangelicalism and the Climate Change Policy Debate.” American Quarterly 49 (September): 545–668.

Clinton, Bill (New Covenant)

On July 17, 1992, William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton (b. 1946), a former governor of Arkansas, accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for president. He had emerged from a large field of Democrats and went on to win against President George H. W. Bush, who, while having successfully repelled the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, was not perceived as having done as good a job with the domestic economy.

Both Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore Jr., were raised as Southern Baptists. According to 1 Corinthians 13:13, the three great Christian virtues 111are faith, hope, and charity (love). Just as Barack Obama would later write a book called The Audacity of Hope, so too Clinton capitalized on this virtue by referencing the name of the town of Hope where he grew up. As a candidate with a better common touch than his Republican rival, Clinton was able to identify with small-town America, observing in his acceptance speech that he learned “more about equality in the eyes of the Lord than all my professors at Georgetown; more about the intrinsic worth of every individual than all the philosophers at Oxford [Clinton had been a Rhodes Scholar], more about the need for equal justice under the law than all the jurists at Yale Law School.” Clinton observed, “For too long, those who play by the rules and keep the faith have gotten the shaft. And those who cut corners and cut deals have been rewarded.”

Pointing to his own successes with the economy in Arkansas, Clinton called for “a new approach to government.” Whereas previous presidents had talked about a New Deal (Franklin D. Roosevelt), a New Frontier (John F. Kennedy), or a Great Society (Lyndon B. Johnson), Clinton called his own approach “a New Covenant, a solemn agreement between the people and their government, based not simply on what each of us can take, but what all of us must give to the nation.” Although the covenant Clinton described was thus between the people and their government rather than between the people and God, it nonetheless reached back not only to social contract philosophers like John Locke but also to America’s Pilgrim fathers, who patterned their own government on the laws of Israel that they traced back to the covenant they had made with God at Sinai. Christians divide their Scriptures into the Old and New Testaments, which are also often referred to as the Old and New Covenants.

President Bush was known for having difficulty with what he sometimes called “the vision thing.” Clinton gamely capitalized on this by quoting “Scripture,” without mentioning the chapter and verse of the biblical maxim in Proverbs 29:18, that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” He cited this phrase three times within as many paragraphs.

Most of the rest of Clinton’s speech focused on outlining this New Covenant, which was based on balancing rights with responsibilities in fields as diverse as college opportunity, health care, taxation, welfare, defense, and the like. Rather than dividing the nation into “us” versus “them,” Clinton further associated his new covenant with the words of the Pledge of Allegiance to “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.” Somewhat paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 2:9, Clinton observed, “As the Scripture says, our eyes have not yet seen, nor our ears heard nor our minds imagined what we can build.” Envisioning such a better future, Clinton said that “every one of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so.” He ended his speech with another mention of the “New Covenant,” and, just before “God bless you, and God bless America,” with “I still believe in a place called Hope.”

Although Clinton’s two terms were a time of relative prosperity, he became entangled in a sexual scandal with a White House intern that led to his eventual impeachment, albeit not his removal from office. He used one of his appearances at a National Prayer Breakfast to express contrition and seek forgiveness for this behavior (Ofulue 2002).

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After extensive analysis of Clinton’s policies and rhetoric, Robert Durant has concluded that his New Covenant lent a philosophical consistency to Clinton’s vision that observers often missed. He believes this occurred largely because, while Clinton used such individual terms as opportunity, responsibility, and community, he often failed to link them together in his rhetoric or to tie them specifically to his vision of the New Covenant (Durant 2006).

Analyzing Clinton’s rhetoric as president, Robert Linder concluded that he appeared as president to be the pastor not only of the nation but also of the world. Linder noted that in his first inaugural address, Clinton referred to the Scripture, found in Galatians 6:9, “let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season, we shall reap if we faint not” (1996, 743). In a speech at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, on March 5, 1996, for victims of a terrorist bombing in Israel, Clinton argued that “the fundamental differences are no longer between Jews and Arabs, or Protestants and Catholics, or Muslims and Serbs and Croats” but “between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it; those who look to a future of hope and those who are trapped in a past of hatred; those who open their arms and those who insist on clenching their fists” (Linder 1996, 747).

See also Clinton, Bill (Speech of Contrition at National Prayer Breakfast); Contract, Covenant, and Constitution

For Reference and Further Reading

Clinton, Bill. 1992. “In Their Own Words: Transcript of Speech by Clinton Accepting Democratic Nomination.” New York Times. July 17. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/17/their-own-words-transcript-speech-clinton-accepting-democratic-nomination.html. Accessed March 31, 2019.

Durant, Robert F. 2006. “A ‘New Covenant’ Kept: Core Values, Presidential Communications, and the Paradox of the Clinton Presidency.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36 (September): 345–72.

Linder, Robert D. 1996. “Universal Pastor: President Bill Clinton’s Civil Religion.” Journal of Church and State 38 (Autumn): 733–49.

Ofulue, Nneka Ifeoma. 2002. “President Clinton and the White House Prayer Breakfast.” Journal of Communication and Religion 25(1): 49–63.

Clinton, Bill (Speech of Contrition at National Prayer Breakfast)

When he accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency in 1992, William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton indicated that he intended to establish a “new covenant” between the American people and their government that would be based on both rights and responsibilities. In time, however, Clinton became caught up in a sexual scandal with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, which he had vigorously denied but which was revealed in excruciating detail by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, whose initial charge had been to investigate a land deal in which Clinton had participated.

The same day that Congress released this report, Clinton used the annual prayer breakfast at the White House to give a twelve-minute speech in which he admitted to the affair, expressed contrition for his actions, and pledged to continue his work as president in what was probably the most Scripture-saturated speech of his two-term presidency.

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Saying that he had been up late at night “thinking about and praying about what I should say today,” Clinton indicated that he had been on “quite a journey” to get “to the rock bottom truth of where I am and where we all are.” Acknowledging that he had not previously been “contrite enough,” he followed with “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.” Clinton seemed to be following David’s confession of sin with Bathsheba (and his subsequent complicity in the death of her husband, Uriah) in Psalm 51, where, in verse 1, he had called upon God to “blot out my transgressions,” and, in verse 2, to “cleanse me from my sin.” Clinton continued: “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine: first and most important, my family; also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people. I have asked all for their forgiveness.”

Although Clinton did not mention God as among those against whom he had sinned (by contrast, in addressing God in Psalm 51:4, King David had said “against thee, and thee only have I sinned”), Clinton indicated that he needed “God’s help to be the person that I want to be.” In addition to his sorrow, he indicated that, if he were to be forgiven, he needed, “genuine repentance—a determination to change and to repair breaches of my own making,” and “what my bible calls a ‘broken spirit,’” a theme evident in many biblical passages including Psalm 51:57, which refers to “a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart.” Somewhat later, however, after indicating that while admitting wrong, he was still instructing his lawyers to “mount a vigorous defense,” Clinton expressed the hope “that with a broken spirit and a still strong heart I can be used for greater good.”

As the speech continued, Clinton indicated that he was seeking pastoral support and prayers and hoped that the nation’s children could learn “that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong.” He further quoted from the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In concluding his speech, Clinton referenced without citing chapter and verse Psalm 139:23–24 in saying, “I ask you to share my prayer that God will search me and know my heart, try me and know my anxious thought, see if there is any hurtfulness in me, and lead me toward the life everlasting.” He also reflected the words of Psalm 51:10 in asking for “a clean heart,” and 2 Corinthians 5:7 in saying, “let me walk by faith and not sight.”

Reflecting Jesus’s summary of the Ten Commandments, the words of St. Francis, and Psalm 19:14 and Psalm 139:1, 23–24, Clinton ended the text of his formal speech by saying, “I ask once again to be able to love my neighbor—all my neighbors—as my self, to be an instrument of God’s peace; to let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart and, in the end, the work of my hands, be pleasing. This is what I wanted to say to you today. Thank you. God bless you.”

Reactions to the speech varied. Susanne Scholze, from Wooster University, thus cited Clinton’s use of Scripture as an example of “hermeneutic abuse,” noting that “to use the Bible for such political ends is an abuse of the Bible” (quoted by Herlinger 1998). Members of the National Association of Evangelicals and of the Southern Baptist Convention had refused to attend. By contrast, 114Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said that “I think he was repentant this morning. And for me, that’s more important than being sorry” (quoted by Bennet 1998).

At least two articles have explored the parallels between Clinton and the biblical king David (see Vile [1998] and Ofulue 2002). In 1995, Mother Teresa has used her speech before the National Prayer Breakfast to speak out against abortion, during which President Clinton was reported to have “quietly listened” (Winston 2017).

See also Clinton, Bill (New Covenant)

For Reference and Further Reading

Bennet, James. 1998. “Testing of a President: The President; Tearful Clinton Tells Group of Clerics, ‘I Have Sinned.’” New York Times. September 12. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/12/us/testing-president-president-tearful-clinton-tells-group-clerics-have-sinned.html.

Clinton, Bill. 1998. “I Have Sinned.” The History Place Great Speeches Collection. September 11. http ://www.historyplace.com/speeches/clinton-sin.htm.

Herlinger, Chris. 1998. “Clinton Tells Religious Leaders: ‘I Have Sinned.’” The Layman. September 18. https://layman.org/news61c4/.

Ofulue, Nneka Ifeoma. 2002. “President Clinton and the White House Prayer Breakfast.” Journal of Communication and Religion 25:1: 49–63.

Vile, John R. [1998]. “David and Ahab, Clinton and Nixon: Contemporary Lessons from Two Biblical Stories.” www.leaderu.com/socialsciences/david-ahab.html.

Winston, Diane. 2017. “The History of the National Prayer Breakfast.” Smithsonian Magazine. February 2. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/national-prayer-breakfast-what-does-its-history-reveal-180962017/.

Colonization

Americans like to glorify those, particularly the Pilgrims, who settled in the new land, which many regarded variously as a wilderness or as a new Eden or Canaan. Given the near decimation of the Native American Indian population, it is increasingly difficult fully to credit the biblical rationales that settlers gave for coming to America, but contemporary understandings can equally go awry if they fail to consider biblical motives for such efforts.

In his study of the English Bible in America, David Daniell observed that “the conversion of the pagan inhabitants to Christianity” was “high on the list” of reasons that early explorers gave for coming to America (2003, 392). He cited Dionyse Settle’s book of 1577 entitled A True Reporte of the Laste Voyage made into the West and Northwest Regions, &c. 1577: Worthily atchieued by Capteine Frosbisher as observing “that by our Christian studie and endeuour, those barbarous, people, people trained up in Paganisme, and infidelitie might be reduced to the knowledge of true religion, and the hope of salvation in Christ our Redeemer” (392). Moreover, a subsequent book, A report of the voyage and successe thereof, attempted in the yeere of our Lord 1583 by sir Humprey knight, intended to discover and to plant Christian inhabitants in place convenient . . . written by M. Edward Haies, Gentleman, specifically cited the need to sow the 115seeds of the gospel among the pagans and cited the call (Matthew 24:14) to preach the gospel through the entire earth, as well as numerous references to the biblical books of Joshua and Judges (419).

That same year, Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting cited the call for the preaching of the gospel in Romans 10 and the call to seek the kingdom of God in Matthew 6:33 as reasons for colonization (Daniell 2003, 417). The Massachusetts Bay Company’s Seal portrayed a Native American uttering the plea of the Macedonian to Paul in Acts 16:9 to “come over and help us” (417).

Although such motives are often attributed chiefly to New England settlers, Daniell observes that they also served as justification for Jamestown and other settlements to the South. Captain John Smith observed that although “religion” was “their colour,” the primary aim of those who colonized was “nothing but present profit” (400), but even Smith interpreted the survival of the settlement, much as New Englanders would interpret they own survival, as providential. Moreover, some took solace in Jeremiah 5:14–18, which suggested that the Bible had predicted both “hardships and disasters” for such pilgrims (403). Daniell further notes that the settlers in both the North and the South likely carried Bibles with them, that biblical images of Eden and of a new heaven and a new earth inspired them, and that they looked upon the New World as an opportunity “to remake Christ’s church,” which many believed had been corrupted both by the papacy and the Church of England (405).

In 1622, the English poet John Donne, who was dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, assured stockholders of the Virginia Company: “You shall have made this Island, which is but as the Suburbs of the old world, a Bridge, a Gallery to the new; to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the Kingdom of Heaven. You shall add persons to this Kingdom, and to the Kingdom of heaven, and add names to the Books of our Chronicles, and to the Book of Life” (Daniell 2003, 417). One of Christopher Columbus’s motives for seeking gold in South America was to finance an expedition to free Jerusalem from the Turks and hasten the second coming of Christ. Noting that Spanish and Portuguese explorations were also accompanied by priests, Daniell observed a contrast between what he thought were primarily the “Church-based” efforts of Roman Catholic explorers from the “Bible-based” motives of the English (419).

Daniell is quick to acknowledge that motives were quite mixed, and not always transparent, but cites Professor Perry Miller’s assessment that “in their own conception of themselves,” planters and their promoters were “first and foremost Christians, and above all militant Protestants” (420). As later critics such as William Apess would point out, this latter aspect could become particularly disturbing when settlers cited passages from the biblical conquest of Canaan to justify almost unspeakable atrocities during Indian wars. These were often linked to ideas that Native American Indians were both pagan and sexually immoral (Stevens 1993).

Daniell observes that in his history Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford quoted extensively from, without citing, Psalm 107, which, in applying its description of God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, became known as “the settlers’ psalm” (Daniell 2003, 432).

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Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans continued to use the concept of manifest destiny to justify their expanse across the continent and their dispossession of Native Americans from their path. At the end of the Spanish-American War, which was supported by many advocates of the social gospel, President William McKinley further used the desire to convert Philippine natives as a justification for American occupation of those islands.

See also America as New Israel; City upon a Hill; Apess, William; Columbus, Christopher; McKinley, William; Manifest Destiny; Native American Indians; Puritans; Social Gospel

For Reference and Further Reading

Daniell, David. 2003. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Stevens, Paul. 1993. “‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism.” Criticism 35 (Summer): 441–61.

Colson, Chuck

Chares (Chuck) Colson (1931–2012) transitioned from serving as White House counsel and being one of President Richard Nixon’s “hatchet men” (the first to be imprisoned) to being a prominent evangelical leader and head of the Prison Fellowship, which had sought to provide spiritual help to individuals who are incarcerated.

Born in Massachusetts and educated at Brown University and George Washington University, where he received his law degree, he served in the Marine Corps, served in a number of governmental positions, and founded a law firm before joining the Nixon administration.

Perhaps best known in the White House for compiling the president’s so-called enemies list, Colson pled guilty for having arranged the raid of the psychiatrist office of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, and served a prison term.

Raised as an Episcopalian and married to a Roman Catholic, God was not a major part of his life until he read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and became convinced that, if the testimony of the Bible were true, then Jesus was either the Son of God or a lunatic. Relying upon John 10:30 and convinced that Jesus was the former, Colson recorded that he had a conversion experience, which he recounted in his best-selling book (Colson 1976, 125–30). One lesson that Colson said he had learned from the Watergate experience was that “a lie cannot live for long” (Hyer 1983).

In addition to providing him with increased skepticism about human nature and the dangers of human power and pride, Colson’s conversion appeared to have reinforced many of his conservative views opposing abortion on demand and same-sex marriage, and his fear that the culture was in moral decline. He took, however, a more liberal stance on matters of criminal justice. As Tanya Erzen has observed, “He opposes mandatory minimum sentencing laws that send people to prison for first-time drug offenses and is an advocate of better work-release and after-care programs for prisoners. Colson promotes rehabilitation, restorative 117justice, and the improvement of living conditions in prisons as long as the rehabilitation entails a conversion to evangelical Christianity” (2007, 1003).

Colson has founded Prison Fellowship Ministries and the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, which are designed to provide rehabilitation for prisoners based on conversion experiences and Bible studies (Sullivan 2009, 66).

Colson authored and coauthored numerous books about developing a Christian worldview that could be applied to the whole of life, often citing numerous philosophers to buttress his defenses of Christianity (Colson and Pearcey 1999; Colson and Vaughn 1992). In an essay in which Colson began by saying that “I believe in biblical inerrancy, the sufficiency of scripture, and the doctrine the Reformers called Sola Scriptura,” he proceeded to say that “while we have to be immersed in scripture and understand it fully, we also have to know when and how to use it in public discourse” (Colson 2011). Pointing out that C. K. Chesterton when asked what book he would most like to have if he were shipwrecked on a desert island responded with Thomas’s Guide to Practical Shipbuilding rather than, as expected, the Bible, Colson argued that starting a conversation with “the Bible says” may cause people to stop listening. He observed that in giving his speech at Mars Hills in Athens, which is recorded in Acts 17:16–34, the apostle Paul quoted Greek poets and used what “the Reformers called common grace, or what historically has been called natural law” rather than simply quoting from Scriptures (Colson 2011).

Colson was one of the authors of the Manhattan Declaration of 2009 in which evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox Christians joined in support of “the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage and religious freedom” (Brant n.d.). He was the recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1993.

See also Evangelicals; Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience; Natural Law

For Reference and Further Reading

Brant, Ginny Dent. n.d. “Lessons from Chuck Colson: A Heaven-Bent Transformer of This World.” CBN.com. https://www1.cbn.com/spirituallife/lessons-from-chuck-colson.

Chua-Eoan, Howard. 2012. “The Watergate Dirty Trickster Who Found God: Charles Colson (1931–2012).” Time. April 21.

Colson, Charles W. 1976. Born Again. Old Tappan, NJ: Chosen Books (Distributed by Fleming H. Revell).

Colson, Chuck. 2011. “Making the Case: Don’t Quote the Bible?” Christian Headlines. April 27. https://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/breakpoint/making-the-case-don-t-quote-the-bible.html.

Colson, Charles, with Ellen Santilli Vaughn. 1992. The Body. Dallas, TX: Word Publishing.

Colson, Charles, and Nancy Pearcey. 1999. How Now Shall We Live? Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.

Erzen, Tanya. 2007. “Testimonial Politics: The Christian Right’s Faith-Based Approach to Marriage and Imprisonment.” American Quarterly 59 (September): 991–1015.

Hyer, Majorie. 1983. “Colson Preaches That Watergate Proves the Bible.” Washington Post. September 28.

Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. 2009. Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Columbus, Christopher

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) is credited with the European “discovery” of America, in the first of four trips that he made on behalf of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in 1492. Long lauded, especially by Americans of Italian descent, for this discovery, in more recent years, his legacy has been tarnished by the legacy of imperialism, racism, and genocide that his exploration and colonization left in its path.

The Italian-born explorer had actually been seeking to open up trade with China, which he thought that he could reach from Europe by sailing West. Although he does not appear to have been the only individual of his day who believed that the earth was round, he does appear to have thought that the Atlantic Ocean was much smaller and that it could become a highway to the Orient.

Although the remarkable legacy of Columbus has been shadowed by subsequent treatments of the natives in the Caribbean and in Latin America, his primary goal (even when seeking gold) appears to have been motivated by his desire to secure funding for another crusade to capture the Holy Land from the Muslims, convert its inhabitants, and rebuild the temple. All of this was to be done in preparation for the second coming of Christ, which he anticipated would occur in about 150 years.

Both his diary and a book, Libro de las profecias (Book of Prophecies), which was not translated into English until 1991, testify to his knowledge of Scripture, especially the book of Revelation (Delaney 2006, 262). His journey to America followed shortly after the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, and Columbus was highly influenced by the view of Joachim of Fiori (1135–1202) that the world was soon coming to a close. The first sentence of Columbus’s book describes its purpose: “Here begins the book, or handbook, of sources, statements, opinions and prophecies on the subject of the recovery of God’s Holy City and Mount Zion, and on the discovery and evangelization of the islands of the Indies and of all other peoples and nations” (Delaney 2006, 268). The book further indicates his familiarly both with the fourfold method of biblical interpretation (historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical) and “prefigurement,” which explains how Old Testament prophecies are fulfilled in the New (Delaney 2006, 268).

Columbus cited a number of prophecies from Isaiah (e.g., Isaiah 51:5b) that focused on the role of islands and often interpreted his discovery of the Americas as the “new heaven and earth” as portrayed in the book of Revelation (Delaney 2006, 269, 271–72). After citing his own knowledge of contemporary science, Columbus said that his primary inspiration and guide had been “the Holy Spirit who encouraged me with a radiance of marvelous illumination from the sacred Holy Scriptures” (Delaney 2006, quoting Columbus’s Libro, 272).

It is important to understand that Columbus’s journey preceded the Protestant Reformation and the resulting split in Christendom. Like Columbus, those (especially the Puritans) who later settled North America brought their own sense of mission and apocalyptic expectations with them (Delaney 2006, 287). They too believed that they came to the New World with a mission and that this mission 119justified their possession of the land from Native Americans, especially those who refused to convert to Christianity.

See also America as New Israel; Colonization; Puritans

For Reference and Further Reading

Delaney, Carol. 2006. “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (April): 260–92.

Phillips, William D., Jr. 1992. “Africa and the Atlantic Islands Meet the Garden of Eden: Christopher Columbus’s View of America.” Journal of World History 3 (Fall): 149–64.

Sha’ban, Fuad. 2005. For Zion’s Sake: The Judeo-Christian Tradition in American Culture. London: Pluto Press.

Common Sense (Thomas Paine)

Even after fighting erupted between American and British troops in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord, many Americans remained loyal to King George III, believing that their quarrel was with the British Parliament and its claims to exercise sovereignty over the colonies, which were not represented in that body. Statesmen like John Adams viewed the British monarchy as part of the “balanced government” consisting of the monarchy, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, each of which represented different class interests. On August 23, however, the king proclaimed the colonies to be in rebellion, and he followed up with speeches to Parliament supporting its position on October 27, 1775, and again on October 31, 1776 (Vile 2019, 107–10).

Between these two speeches, Thomas Paine (1737–1809), a recent immigrant from Britain, wrote a popular book entitled Common Sense, which was designed to question such balanced government in general and monarchy in particular. Although he would later become known as a skeptic for The Age of Reason, in Common Sense, Paine engaged in fairly extensive biblical exegesis to argue for what Nathan Perl-Rosenthal calls “Hebraic Republicanism” (2009), or the idea that the Old Testament preferred republican government over government by a king.

In Common Sense, Paine observed, “In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings, the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion” (1953, 10). He further observed that “government was first introduced into the world by the heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry” (10). Paine observed that both Gideon and Samuel had opposed the creation of kingship and that “monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them” (11). Citing Gideon’s refusal to rule as a king, which is recorded in Judges 8:23, Paine quoted his response to the plea to “Rule thou over us, thou and thy son, and thy son’s son,” with “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you. The Lord shall rule over you” (11). Similarly, he quoted from 1 Samuel 8, where God tells Samuel that “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” and where Samuel warns the people that a king will take their sons and daughters for his work and tax them heavily (12). Paine 120proceeded to make further arguments about hereditary succession and argued that America was ready for a continental union and had sufficient strength to succeed in a conflict with Great Britain.

Opposing the idea that Britain should be treated as a kind “mother” country, Paine played on Protestant prejudices by associating this term “with a low papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds” (21). In another analogy drawn from the biblical book of Exodus, he further compared George III to “the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England” (27).

In one of the most dramatic passages of his work, Paine imagined a nation ruled by law rather than by a king: “Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know that, so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king” (32). This is a scene reminiscent of Moses’s destruction of the golden calf in Exodus 32:20 (he had ground it up, sprinkled it in water, and made the people drink it); Paine suggested that “lest any ill use should afterward arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished and scattered among the people, whose right it is” (32). Paine further suggested that “nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration for independence” (43).

Perl-Rosenthal said that Paine’s arguments were similar to, and may have been at least partly drawn from, the writings of John Milton (1608–1674), Algernon Sidney (1622–1683), and others but that his Hebraic republicanism was a departure from many other civic republican writers who had accepted monarchy, at least as part of a balanced government. In his Two Treaties of Government, John Locke (1632–1704) had, of course, argued against the doctrine of the divine right of kings that Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) had advanced in his Patriarcha. Perl-Rosenthal further documents how Paine’s work prompted a number of published attacks and responses, which further served to focus on biblical arguments both for and against kingship (2009, 537).

In writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson directed his attacks on the British king rather than on Parliament, the authority of which the colonists had already previously rejected.

Later in life, Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, which, while affirming basic tenets of Deism, attacked orthodox religion and its biblical foundations. Many Americans, especially those who remembered Paine’s arguments from Scripture in Common Sense, were shocked by what they considered to be his infidelity. Elias Boudinot was among those who authored attacks on Paine’s reasoning.

See also Boudinot, Elias; Declaration of Independence; Gideon; Pharaoh; Political Hebraism

For Reference and Further Reading

Jordan, Winthrop D. 1973. “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776.” Journal of American History 60 (September): 294–308.

Paine, Thomas. [1776] 1953. Common Sense and Other Writings, ed. Nelson F. Adkins. New York: Liberal Arts Press.

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Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan R. 2009. “The ‘Divine Right of Republics’: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 66 (July): 535–64.

Vile, John R. 2019. The Declaration of Independence: America’s First Founding Document in U.S. History and Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Commonwealth v. Cooke (MA, 1859)

Ever since its decision in Abington v. Schempp (1963), the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated devotional Bible reading in public schools, but it was not always so. In 1859, the Police Court of Boston, Massachusetts, thus upheld the right of a teacher, McLaurin F. Cooke, to inflict corporal punishment on an eleven-year-old boy named Thomas J. Wall after Wall refused to repeat the Ten Commandments. Both his parish priest and his father, who did not accept the King James Version of the Bible from which the commandments were taken, had encouraged Wall to resist. Over the course of half an hour, Cooke had intermittently hit Wall’s hand with a rattan stick, approximately three feet in length and three-eighths of an inch think, until he finally compiled. Although his hands had swelled, a doctor believed the injury would not last beyond a day’s time.

Written at a time prior to the application of the Bill of Rights to state actions, the judge focused instead on the state laws and on its constitution. He noted that schools were established under authority of state laws, which prohibited the appropriation of state money “to any religious sect, for the maintenance, exclusively, of its own schools” (1859, 420). He further observed that state laws enjoined schools “to exert their best endeavors to impress on the minds of children and youth, committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry, and frugality, chastity, moderation, and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornaments of human society, and the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded” (420–21). A state law also provided that “the School Committee of each town and city in the Commonwealth, shall require the daily reading of some portion of the Bible in the common English version, and shall direct what other books shall be used in the public schools” (421).

The Boston school committee had specifically required that “the morning exercises of all the schools shall commence with reading a portion of the Scripture in each room by the teachers, and the Board recommend that the reading be followed with the Lord’s Prayer repeated by the teacher alone, or chanted by the teacher and the children in concert, and that afternoon session close with appropriate singing, and also that the pupils learn the Ten Commandments, and repeat them once a week” (421). These laws needed to be measured against the provision in the state constitution that provided:

That it is the right as well as the duty of all men in society publicly and at stated seasons to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and seasons most agreeably to the dictates of his own conscience, or for his religious professions or sentiments, 122provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship. (1859, 421)

Noting that “our schools are the granite foundation on which our republican form of government rests” (1859, 421), the court observed that, if children were to insist only upon reading a particular version of the Bible, this would be to take the decision over the choice of books “from the State government” and place it “in the hands of a few children” (422). If Roman Catholic children could make such a claim, so could Universalists, those who favor sprinkling instead of baptism by immersion, and even those who might think that the Bible points to three gods rather than one. Classifying such deference as “narrow and sectarian,” the judge concluded that the state constitution was designed “for the protection of all religions” (422) and “intended to prevent persecution by punishing religious opinions” (423).

Apparently regarding the King James Version of the Bible as nonsectarian (the very point that the student was contesting), the court observed, “The Bible has long been in our common schools. It was placed there by our fathers, not for the purpose of teaching sectarian religion, but a knowledge of God and of his will, whose practice is religion” (423). Pointing out that the law did not require students “to believe it,” or “to receive it as the only true version of the laws of God,” the court further observed, “The teacher enters into no argument to prove its correctness, and gives no instructions in theology from it. To read the Bible in school for these and like purposes, or to require it to be read without sectarian explanations, is no interference with religious liberty” (423). Moreover, to accept a plea of conscience against reading a particular translation of the Bible would be to open the schools to Jewish requests to read the Bible from scrolls or the original Hebrew. It would be the equivalent to having courts allow oaths “by swearing the Protestant by the uplifted hand, the Roman Catholic upon the Evangelists, the Jew upon the Pentateuch, while facing the East, with his head covered, and refusing to admit the Infidel as a witness at all!” (423).

Answering the argument that the boy was following his father’s instructions, the court cited the biblical proverb that a house divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:25), to say that the teacher must govern the school just as a father governs the family (424). Were the school to allow students like Wall to use the Douay (Roman Catholic) version of the Bible, it would in fact be to violate the constitutional provision prohibiting tax money to be used for sectarian schools. Over time, an accumulation of such exemptions, like tiny threads woven into large cables to uphold a suspension bridge, would bind church and state together forever (425).

As to punishment, it is limited both at home and at school, but in this case Wall could have ended the punishment sooner by complying, and the punishment did not exceed the bounds “of sound discretion” (426).

The most fascinating aspect of the case is the way that the judge accepted the King James Version of the Bible as nonsectarian because it was used by multiple Protestant denominations, even though it was not accepted by the Catholic Church. It also seems odd that the court did not consider the possibility that Wall might simply have been permitted to remain silent or absent himself during the recitation of the Ten Commandments, which, while presenting its own 123problems, appears to have been the practice of some schools prior to the decision in Abington v. Schempp.

See also Abington v. Schempp (1963); King James Version of the Bible; Roman Catholics; Ten Commandments

For Reference and Further Reading

Cushman, Robert Fairchild. 1955. “Holy Bible and the Public Schools.” Cornell Law Review 40 (Spring): 475–99.

“In the Police Court of Boston, Massachusetts. April, 1859. Commonwealth, on Complaint of Wall vs. M’laurin F. Cooke.” American Law Register 7 (May): 417–26. Cited as Commonwealth v. Cooke, 7 Am. L. Reg. 417 (Police Court of Boston, MA, 1859).

Communism and Anti-Communism

One of America’s most widespread fears throughout the twentieth century was the fear of communism. Largely the brainchild of Karl Marx (1818–1893) and Frederick Engels (1820–1895), who authored The Communist Manifesto in 1848, communism advocates public, rather than private, ownership of the major means of production as in capitalist, or free enterprise, systems. Believing that economic matters were paramount, they believed that religion was simply a tool used by the ruling class to stifle dissent.

As an ideology, communism urged members of the working class (the proletariat) to revolt against those who owned property and create a dictatorship of the proletariat that would last until, in a kind of secular utopia, the state withered away. In practice, nations that have attempted to implement communism have concentrated power in a single leader or leaders often at a great cost to human life, liberty, and private property, most notably in the former Soviet Union and its one-time East European puppets, in the People’s Republic of China, in North Korea, and in other nations.

Communists seized power in Russia in 1917, causing a concomitant “Red Scare” in the United States during which civil liberties were repressed. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and the United States entered conflict under the auspices of the United Nations in a bloody war that eventually included China. That same decade, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led a series of congressional hearings in which he falsely accused many Americans of being communists. Richard Nixon won a Senate election on a strong anti-communist platform and led Senate investigations to uncover communists in government. One reason that Congress added the words “under God” to the pledge to the U.S. flag in 1954 was to highlight the differences between the United States and atheistic communist nations. The United States committed itself to contain communism, which led in part to its long participation in the war in Vietnam. With the fall of the so-called Iron Curtain separating the communist and non-communist European nations in 1989, fears of communism have somewhat abated, and yet North Korea and China still maintain elements of communist ideology that threaten U.S. values.

Although the Bible takes a clear stance against tyranny, or statism, there are passages that are sometimes cited to support communism. Exodus 16:16–18 124instructed the Israelites to take no more than was needed when they gathered daily manna. Once the Jews settled in Canaan, land was supposed to remain within tribes and families. Notably, this appears to have been a primary reason that Naboth had refused to sell his vineyard to King Ahab, whose wife had, in turn, arranged for Naboth’s death. Jesus often warned about those who stored up earthly treasures (as in Matthew 6:19–20 and Luke 6:24–25), and one of his most vivid stories, that of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19–31), describes a rich man suffering in the afterlife while a beggar at his gates lives in comfort. Acts 2:44–45 and Acts 4:33–37 describe how early Christians held property in common in order to take care of one another. Peter subsequently pronounced judgment on Ananias and Sapphira in a story recounted in Acts 5:1–11, but this appears based on their false claim to have sold all that they had for the common good rather than on any church-mandated obligation that they do so.

Although many fundamentalists largely withdrew from politics after the Scopes Trial in 1925, one exception was their unrelenting opposition to communism, which they associated with atheism and statism. One leader in this movement was Rev. Carl McIntire (1906–2002), who founded numerous organizations and had a program on more than six hundred radio stations. Although refusing to compromise his hard-shell fundamentalist convictions, McIntire was willing to ally with Catholics and others on this issue (Ruotsila 2012, 388). From the Protestant mainline church, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1888–1959) developed a strong anti-communist stance based largely on his belief that communism denied that human beings had been created in God’s image and deserved basic human rights.

Communism has not been popular in the United States, and throughout U.S. history, politicians have sought to label their opponents as communists, socialists, or fellow travelers. Southern supporters of segregation often denounced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders, in such terms. Ironically, King gave a sermon on the subject in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 9, 1953, in which he began with the statement that “communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible. One cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously” (King 1953). More specifically, King argued that because it left out God and Christ, communism was “avowedly secularistic and materialistic.” He further observed that the methods of communism “are diametrically opposed to Christianity.” Third, he pointed out that communists subordinated individuals to the state. He did, however, cite the observation of William Temple, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, who had identified communism as something of a “Christian heresy.” King thus noted that communists had a concern for social justice and emphasized the need for action. He observed that “we are challenged to dedicate and devote our lives to the cause of Christ as the Communist[s]‌ do to Communism” (King 1953).

See also Fundamentalism; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Property

For Reference and Further Reading

Cline, Austin. 2019. “What Does the Bible Say about Communism and Socialism?” Learn Religions. March 22. https://www.learnreligions.com/biblical-communism-250944.

Hart, David Bentley. 2017. “Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?” New York Times. November 4.

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King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1953. “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity.” Stanford University: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. August 9. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/communisms-challenge-christianity.

Mulder, John M. 1971. “The Moral World of John Foster Duller: A Presbyterian Layman and International Affairs.” Journal of Presbyterian History 49 (Summer): 157–82.

Ruotsila, Markku. 2012. “Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right.” Church History 81 (June): 378–407.

Wilcox, Clyde. 1987. “Popular Backing for the Old Christian Right: Explaining Support for the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.” Journal of Social History 21 (Autumn): 117–32.

Confederate States of America

Although Abraham Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address that Northerners and Southerners read the same Bible, their interpretations varied significantly on the issue of slavery. Northerners often emphasized the story of Moses and other liberation narratives in Scripture, while Southern slave apologists pointed to verses encouraging slaves to obey their masters. These differences were reflected into the division of major denominations into Northern and Southern wings.

The religious dimension of the Southern case was evident in the preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States which, while otherwise almost identical to its forbear, explicitly invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” (Vile 2018, 23). The Confederate States further adopted the motto Deo Vindice (“God will avenge”) and conceived of themselves, much as had the New England Puritans whom Southerners largely despised, as God’s chosen people (Stout n.d.). Drawing from biblical passages in Psalm 118:22 and Matthew 21:42, Alexander H. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, stated that the Confederate States repudiated the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and were instead built upon the “corner-stone” of human inequality (Stephens 1861).

Because most American Bibles had been printed in the North prior to the war, the Southern states faced a shortage both of Bibles and of prayer books (Brydon 1948). The Southwestern Publishing House in Nashville, Tennessee, which was owned by J. R. Graves, W. F. Marks and Company, published the first Bibles to be published in the Confederacy in 1861, but publication ceased when Union troops occupied the city in February 1862.

Perhaps seeking to alleviate this problem, the Confederate Congress enacted a law on October 13, 1862, which provided that “all money and other property bequeathed by any person within the Confederate States, or any State thereof, to the American Bible Society, and which may be liable to sequestration under the laws of the Confederate States, shall be paid and delivered to the Bible Society of the Confederate States of America, as if the same had been bequeathed to said Bible Society of the Confederate States, for the purposes of such bequest” (Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America 1862, 2:378). President Jefferson Davis vetoed this bill on October 26, 1862. He argued that the Congress had no power to bestow such money as a gift, or to divert it from 126its beneficiaries, and that it had no way of knowing what the purposes of the American Bible Society might have been (Davis 1862).

Most Southern efforts to import Bibles from England were frustrated by the Northern blockade of Southern ports. As the war increasingly turned against the South, chaplains reported increased revivals among the troops, many of whom developed what has been called “the religion of the ‘Lost Cause,’” in which they tried to interpret their suffering and defeat as the pursuit of a higher cause. Southern writers especially glorified General Stonewall Jackson and his Christian faith and used the date of his death by friendly fire (May 10) as the Confederate Memorial Day (Stout n.d.).

The Union victory was interpreted by many former slaves as a recapitulation of the biblical story of Exodus and lifted Southern rules that had made it a crime to teach them how to read and write. Prior to this, even African American preachers were often far more familiar with oral renditions of Scripture than with the written word.

See also American Bible Society; Declaration of Independence; Jackson, Thomas (Stonewall); Lincoln, Abraham (Second Inaugural Address); Slavery; Stephens, Alexander H. (Cornerstone Speech)

For Reference and Further Reading

Brydon, G. MacLaren. 1948. “The ‘Confederate Prayer Book,’” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 17 (December): 339–44.

Davis, Jefferson. 1862. “A Veto Message from Jeff. Davis.” New York Times Archives. October 26.

Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865 (vol. 2). Reprint by Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Rable, George C. 2010. God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Stephens, Alexander H. 1861. “Cornerstone Speech.” American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank. March 21. https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexanderstephenscornerstone.htm.

Stout, Harry S. n.d. “Religion in the Civil War: The Southern Perspective.” TeacherServe. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/cwsouth.htm. Accessed May 24, 2019.

Vile, John R., ed. 2018. The Civil War and Reconstruction Eras: Documents Decoded. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Congressional Oaths of Office

Although it is common for members of Congress, and other public offices, to take their oaths on the Bible, this is not required by the U.S. Constitution, which specifically prohibits religious tests for office, and individual members sometimes choose other documents.

This was particularly evident in the 116th congressional class that was inaugurated in 2019. Amanda Jackson reports, “More than a dozen documents and books—including the US Constitution, Eastern Orthodox Bible and Quran—were used to swear in officials of various ethnic and religious backgrounds” (2019).

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Two Muslim members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Ilham Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both swore on the Koran. The former used a Koran that belonged to her grandfather, and the latter used a translation from 1734 that Thomas Jefferson had owned.

Senator Martha McSally of Arizona, a former combat pilot in the Air Force, swore on a Bible recovered from a sailor who was aboard the USS Arizona when it was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona swore upon copies of the U.S. and Arizona Constitutions, and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah swore on a Bible that his father, a former Michigan governor, had used; he also followed his precedent of adding a special inscription (Schallhorn 2019).

Recent years have witnessed kerfuffles over whether the oath should be administered with or without the words “So help me God” (Edmondson 2019).

See also Bible Signings; Presidential Inaugural Bible Verses

For Reference and Further Reading

Edmondson, Catie. 2019. “‘So Help Me God’ No More: Democrats Give House Traditions a Makeover.” New York Times . May 11.

Jackson, Amanda. 2019. “Muslim and Jewish Holy Books among Many Used to Swear-in Congress.” CNN. January 3. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/03/us/congress-swear-in-religious-books-trnd/index.html.

Schallhorn, Kaitlyn. 2019. “New Lawmakers Used Historical Texts, Family Heirlooms during Swearing-In Ceremonies.” Fox News. January 4. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-lawmakers-used-historical-texts-family-heirlooms-during-swearing-in-ceremonies.

Congressional Resolution on the Ten Commandments (1997)

The Ten Commandments as recorded in Exodus 20 are among the most recognizable sets of ancient laws and are widely accepted as a solid basis for ethical behavior. According to biblical accounts, Moses received the commandments from God at Mount Sinai, and they subsequently became the basis whereby the Hebrew people established a covenant between themselves and God. Although the first part of the Commandments deals chiefly with human obligations to God, the second part deals primarily with relations among individuals. The Puritans who settled in America were especially interested in the Ten Commandments and attempted to model many of their laws on these commandments and their subsequent adumbrations.

Because the Commandments detail relationships to God that are beyond the scope of the government created under the U.S. Constitution (the First Amendment of which prohibits the “establishment” of religion), questions have arisen concerning their placement in governmental buildings. Some judicial decisions have permitted displays of the Commandments when surrounded by other documents, whereas others have generally ruled that standing alone, they give undue preference to Judeo-Christian understandings.

Judge Roy S. Moore of Alabama has been involved in a number of controversies over displays of the Ten Commandments, including a dispute in which an Alabama circuit judge ordered him to remove a copy from his courtroom. As the Alabama Supreme Court (on which he would later serve) issued a stay of this order, the U.S. Congress adopted a resolution supporting his display. Perhaps 128seeking to support the argument that such displays had a clear secular legislative purpose (one of the three prongs of the Lemon Test that the U.S. Supreme Court often employs to resolve such matters), Congress was intent on supporting arguments that the Ten Commandments were a major source of U.S. law.

In its resolution, Congress accordingly stated both that “the Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of the fundamental principles of Western Civilization” and that they “set forth a code of moral conduct, observance of which is universally acknowledged to promote respect for our system of laws and the good of society.” Having highlighted such influences, Congress further resolved that:

1 The Ten Commandments are a declaration of fundamental principles that are the cornerstones of a fair and just society; and

2 The public display, including display in government offices and courthouses, of the Ten Commandments should be permitted.