August 9, 2015 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

In September, the Oxford University Press will release “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783,” by Mark A. Noll (University of Notre Dame). The publisher’s description follows:

In the beginning of American history, the Word was in Spanish, Latin, and native languages like Nahuatal. But while Spanish and Catholic Christianity reached the New World in 1492, it was only with settlements in the seventeenth century that English-language Bibles and Protestant Christendom arrived. The Puritans brought with them intense devotion to Scripture, as well as their ideal of Christendom — a civilization characterized by a thorough intermingling of the Bible with everything else. That ideal began this country’s journey from the Puritan’s City on a Hill to the Bible-quoting country the U.S. is today. In the Beginning Was the Word shows how important the Bible remained, even as that Puritan ideal changed considerably through the early stages of American history.

Author Mark Noll shows how seventeenth-century Americans received conflicting models of scriptural authority from Europe: the Bible under Christendom (high Anglicanism), the Bible over Christendom (moderate Puritanism), and the Bible against Christendom (Anabaptists, enthusiasts, Quakers). In the eighteenth century, the colonists turned increasingly to the Bible against Christendom, a stance that fueled the Revolution against Anglican Britain and prepared the way for a new country founded on the separation of church and state.

One of the foremost scholars of American Christianity, Mark Noll brings a wealth of research and wisdom to In the Beginning Was the Word, providing a sweeping, engaging, and insightful survey of the relationship between the Bible and public issues from the beginning of European settlement. A seminal new work from a world-class scholar, this book offers a fresh account of the contested, sometimes ambiguous, but definite biblical roots of American history.

Here’s an insightful post by Paul Horwitz on the Garnett, Inazu, McConnell essay that I commented on a few days ago. Paul introduces his post with a discussion about contemporary attitudes toward government’s “insist[ence] that private organizations comply with its own sense of the good,” and he claims that though many people continue to believe that such insistence is illegitimate, “the momentum” within the elite classes (or call them how you will) “is on the other side.” I am always pleased when Paul shares at least some of my sensibilities.

One more thought connected to Paul’s comment on these interesting matters. Tax exemption for private nonprofit organizations made a certain amount of sense when two conditions obtained: (1) the size of government, and the scope of its role in American social life, was a good deal smaller than it is today, thereby both necessitating and making space for the involvement of private nonprofit institutions for the support of civil society; and (2) the view that these private institutions could and should play an independent role in shaping civil society in accordance with their own senses of the political and moral good, senses that might diverge in important respects from the state’s.

The conditions are mutually reinforcing and mutually dependent. As government becomes larger, both the need and the space for private institutions shrinks as does the perception that private institutions might actually have something of value to say in the way civic formation that is very different from what the state says. The “need” question is complex, because the breakdown of condition #1 would not necessarily mean that we would see fewer private institutions performing the sort of work that they had performed in the past. Indeed, the increase in the size and scope of the government’s role might itself necessitate greater numbers of private institutions to help it fulfill its enlarged offices. But we should expect to see a sharp decline in private institutions engaged in civic formation whose values differed sharply from the government’s. Whatever public/private partnerships endured after the fall of condition #1 could not continue to operate under the premises of condition #2. One might say that this is to be expected–indeed, it might be said to validate a hoary separationist rallying cry: if private institutions want to be in the business of performing civic functions, they ought to expect pressure to conform to the government’s preferred views of the civic, political, and moral good (a footnote: I’m always struck by how decidedly Protestant the theology supporting these kinds of separationist arguments seems). All true, though one could offer in return that such increased pressure is not inevitable but the product of a historical contingency: the breakdown of the two conditions above.