In broad brushes I agree with Daniel Larison:
One of the things that always bothered me about George Bush’s revolutionary rhetoric was how he identified the expansion of political freedom with God’s design for man, which makes God’s plan one of narrow political deliverance rather than deliverance from death. These claims that representative government and separation of powers have some grounding in Christianity bother me in a different way. Probably the most thoroughly Christianized state in the medieval world was Byzantium, but it retained a late Roman autocratic system of government for its entire existence, so what is the connection between political structures and Christianity? Because the experience of most of Christian history in most parts of the world does not fit this picture of Christianity as the foundation of modern constitutional government, these claims have to privilege the Christianity of certain parts of western Europe and North America as the norm when it was clearly the exception. Furthermore, the reason for privileging Christianity from these parts of the world becomes an expressly political one. In other words, the quality or acceptability of one’s Christianity becomes dependent on the extent to which it complements the political values of modern Western states. Tying the importance of Christianity to the instrumental claim that Christianity is necessary because it created or undergirded our political culture takes us closer to defending Christianity in terms of little more than “Christian-flavored civic religion.” Even if it were true, I’m not sure that Christians should want to make that argument.
The American Radical Reformation tradition of evangelical Protestant Christianity is particularly prone to making really extreme conflations between Christianity and a specific concrete temporal order (or, at the other extreme reject the temporal order altogether as illegitimate) . I think it has to do with the sectarian and often parochial nature of American evangelical pastors, as opposed to more internationalist Roman Catholic clerics. This tendency is not necessarily good, or bad, as such. But it does lead to strange assertions of necessary entailments from Christian religious affiliation which would render most pre-modern Christians imperfectly Christian, and many non-Western Christians imperfectly Christian today (the attempts by American Protestants to convert Oriental Orthodox Christians in the Near East, traditions with a 2,000 year history, is a practical outcome of this mode of thinking). The Mormon church explicitly interjects Americocentrism into their religious system, taking these tendencies to their logical extreme, and arguably out of mainstream Christianity.
Interestingly, this way of thinking is not limited to Christians. I have observed American Muslims state that the United States is the most Islamic nation, the nation where Islam is practiced most freely and in its truest, pure, form. There were similar strands in 19th century Reform Judaism, which saw in America a nation where the Jewish religion could flourish without the impediments and historical baggage which had characterized Judaism in Europe, and so ushering in the Messianic era.
The common thread then is Americanism, not any particular religion.
Seems to me this is spot on. Historically, hasn’t there been, over and over, a unity of faith and patriotism? Most ironically it has occurred in times and places where the two sides of a war were praying to the same deity. Something like this even occurs in football. I remember one time seeing Peyton Manning with his head bowed at an Indianapolis Colts game. He later explained to a reporter that he had been preying to God that God would give the Colts the win. Somehow I have to believe that somewhere a fan for the other team was likewise petitioning the Almighty.
I take all this as, well, probably inevitable. That is, religious belief seems to be a nearly universal feature of human culture. Not any one religion, of course, but religion per se. What’s more, I have always accepted de Tocqueville’s analysis on the infant U.S. that a free republic requires widespread religious faith to remain free. This says nothing about the truth of religion, but a great deal about its utility.
I also agree. Christianity was started in large part by Greek speaking Jews across the Roman Empire. Modern Christianity owes a lot to Athens.
True, about the Byzaninte Empire, granted it did retain a lot of Roman government structure but Justinian led to the development of the medieval Byzantine Empire but changing some of the government structure that Constantine had and by Hercultus the Theme government unit structure replaced the old roman system. And since a lot of Justinian’s older laws were in Latin rather than Greek like the newer Laws, a lot of the Justinian Law code wasn’t applied during the Byzantine Empire, greek law traditions which sometimes differ from the Justinian code were applied. See James Evans, a historian who has written a lot on Justinian, Justinian was the first that thought really in terms of the Empire being Christian and ban pagans from high office with the possible exception of Tribonius.
I mean by changing some of the government structure that Constantine had
I think it is pretty cool that a secular religion, Americanism, can absorb and make believers of supernatural religions as tools for its spread.
That these believers in supernatural religions do not even know that they are also believers in a secular religion makes the success of Americanism all that more amazing.
But is Americanism stable? I suspect not.