Today
Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post has a piece written out of a poll about "Christian Nationalists," which asserts that those who believe that America ought to be guided by Christianity are also racists; D29 links to a similar
piece about an FBI analyst's
concern that Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass are 'white supremacists.'
It concerns me that our national elite has come around to the view that having traditional beliefs is itself evidence of both racism and also being an enemy of the American project as they conceive it. There are a number of reasons to prefer Latin that I can think of, not one of which is remotely connected to race.
More, the use of Latin explicitly removes the religious experience from the province of American or any other nationalism. While it was once the language of the Roman Empire, no nation now speaks it as a national tongue: one could even say that it has become in that sense a language of the Otherworld. My maternal grandfather once told me only to read a King James Bible because it was the only true word of God. Doubtless Jennifer Rubin would understand that as a racist claim, because the KJV is in English and an English that is tied to America's European (and explicitly British) heritage. Yet if you shift off of the KJV to the Sacra Vulgata, aren't you also rejecting the idea that English is the language of the word of God?
Rubin's decision that Evangelicals are racists mostly hangs on a single question from the poll, which asks if you believe that it is God's will that America sprang forth as a nation where European Christians would set an example for the world. She describes that as explicitly racist, although there was a time (not long ago) when "European" would have been seen
by racists as a term covering many
different races. More, though, the view the question is asking about is older than the nation itself: in 1630, John Winthrop gave a sermon about
a City on a Hill that held:
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 and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.
That sermon, once well-known to Americans from school, echoed through our national discourse as recently as
Ronald Reagan's presidency. The sentiment that the American project was a City on the Hill endorsed by God was probably a non-controversial view in the generation before mine; it is the sort of thing John Wayne might have said in a movie devoted to American patriotism. I imagine it was taught explicitly in schools; it was certainly
implied in school as late as my own early education. I can easily recall hearing versions of it from my elders when I was young; indeed, as an explanation from a religious elder that God had willed the South to lose the Civil War so that a unified America might be strong enough to stop Hitler and the Holocaust. (That it also happened to stop slavery did not come up, though that is at least as good a piece of natural theology.)
These were the people who fought Americas wars, who built and then served in her institutions, who made the nation whose elite now considers them enemies. They do so out of a conviction that their own understanding of these principles is the only right one; they do so without even troubling to understand what the people they are condemning understand these words to mean.
