Chaconne D. Buxtehude (1637-1707) [ORGAN]
Order of Chivalry: Courtesy & the Horse’s Bridle W. Zeitler
It has been observed that The Church has gone through a major upheaval every 500 years or so. The Reformation — around 1500 — was one of these upheavals. I thought gentle readers might enjoy a brief examination of the other two upheavals. So this week we’ll consider the first and next week the second…
The Roman Empire was hostile to Christianity for the first few centuries. Generally Christianity was frowned upon in a big way — really bad for your career, for example, and from time to time this hostility rose to the level of literally feeding Christians to the lions. But by about 300 AD the Empire wasn’t doing so well, and Roman Emperor Constantine (272-337) was looking for ways to stabilize things. By then Christianity had become a major movement, so seeing a potential ally, Constantine legalized Christianity in 313. And for Christianity to be politically useful, Constantine felt it was important that there was One Unified Church (‘Catholic’ means ‘Universal’), with all Christians on the same theological page and dutifully obedient to One Unified Church Leadership. So Constantine convened Christian leaders from around the Empire at the Council of Nicea (325) to settle and formalize the fundamental tenets of what we now call Christianity. After considerable debate, they codified Christianity in the ‘Nicene Creed’ (lightly revised in 381). The Nicene Creed remains a founding document of most of Christianity — Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Church of the East, and much of Protestantism including Presbyterians — you’ll find the Nicene Creed on page 34 in our hymnal!
And then, in 380 Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, and authorized the persecution of non-Catholics. And so, the Church — hand in hand with the Empire (it’s not called the ‘Roman Catholic Church’ for nothing!) — started persecuting ‘heretics’ with increasing forcefulness as time went on. And thus began the unholy marriage of Church and State which has characterized Western Christianity up until recent times.
This unholy marriage of Church and State wasn’t unique to the Catholic Church at all — Protestants carried on the tradition. Protestants burned heretics at the stake just like Catholics. Many of the initial colonies here in America were theocracies (that is, the Church and the State are essentially one and the same) — for example the Plymouth Colony, established by pilgrims on the Mayflower. Eight of the thirteen colonies had official ‘established’ churches, and attendance on Sunday morning was often required by law. Indeed, between 1659 and 1661, the Massachusetts Bay’s Puritan magistrates hung four Quaker missionaries.
But in 1682, English Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which ended corporal punishment of dissenters in New England, and gave colonists the right to build churches and conduct public worship. And as the colonies grew and increasingly interacted, toleration became more and more a practical necessity. It could be argued that the American Revolution itself required the colonists to set aside their religious differences to fight their common enemy, and that the Constitution uniting the colonies would not have been possible without taking Religion entirely off the table of the government. And so we have as our very First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”
The marriage of Church and State certainly isn’t confined to Christianity. It’s likely the norm in human history, so we Americans are engaged in a rather novel and grand experiment: whether the separation of Church and State can work in the long run. Colonial voters enacted the Constitution and the First Amendment — modern voters could vote them out. Time will tell!