It’s remarkable how frequently non-Christians or Christian modernists undertake to expound what traditional Christians “really” believe, generally along the lines of, Those guys may pretend to be reasonable and harmless, but if you dig
Today’s exhibit is a column distributed by the University of Wyoming Religious Studies Program under the title, “The First Commandment vs. the First Amendment”. Its news hook is the forthcoming Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings, but its central argument is less transient: that the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion is directly opposed to the First Commandment’s “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
The Puritans were perhaps the pivotal religious group in America’s founding. They championed religious freedom, by which they meant that they themselves should be a community that was free to worship according to their beliefs. They believed that they were a new “Israel” and that therefore Scripture and the Ten Commandments applied to them. As a community, they enforced its legal requirements.
The First Commandment took on special meaning. “You shall have no other gods before me” meant: You shall not follow beliefs or practices about God different from those of the community. Freedom of worship was thus freedom to do as the community of believers determined, with scriptural and divine guidance, but not as individuals believed, whatever scriptural or divine guidance they received. The Puritans thus created a restrictive society, like the one they had fled.
People who went against the dictates of the Puritan community were expelled, as were fervent Christians such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Both fled to Rhode Island, where Williams founded America’s first Baptist congregation. Rhode Island became a center for religious difference. Not only did several different types of Christianity flourish there, but so did the Touro Synagogue, one of America’s first Jewish congregations.
Williams’ ideas later became fixed in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment, which provides the foundation for the exclusion of government from involvement in religiousmatters. . . . This religious freedom comes from the First Amendment's denial of the First Commandment.
The message is clear: Belief in the First Commandment leads to religious persecution. The United States would have evolved into an oppressive Puritan theocracy, with only “freedom to do as the community of believers determined,” had not the founders of Rhode Island boldly denied the validity of the First Commandment, a denial that “became fixed in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment”. To readers unacquainted with Christian history and doctrine, the exegesis of the commandment as “You shall not follow beliefs or practices about God different from those of the community” may sound plausible enough, but it has been invented by the columnist out of thin air.
That princes could and should establish a particular faith as the official religion, supported by the state and granted privileges of varying degree, was taken for granted well before any large part of the world was influenced by the words of Yahweh. The Athenian Assembly that condemned Socrates and the Roman Emperors who persecuted the early Church did not need a Mosaic injunction to inspire them. When Christian-ruled states emerged, they, too, regarded religion as a proper object of legal regulation. If any Church Father invoked the First Commandment in support of that practice, he merely added a superfluous buttress to an uncontroversial practice; all of the debate was over which creed should be established.
While Puritan Massachusetts was no exemplar of what we would today call religious freedom, attributing its intolerance of heterodoxy to intense devotion to the First Commandment is far-fetched. The colony’s founders had gone to a great deal of trouble to find an out-of-the-way location for what was intended to be a homogenous community of the Elect. The limitation of full citizenship to members of the official church was intended to prevent that goal from being thwarted. It did not rest on a doctrine that God commanded state-enforced uniformity.
And what of Roger Williams, who supposedly pioneered the anti-First Commandment views? The folk of Massachusetts Bay with whom he quarreled did not accuse him of repudiating the Ten Commandments. Indeed, at the time of his expulsion he was pastor of one of the settlement’s leading churches, and his adherence to Puritan theology was unblemished. His troubles with the authorities stemmed from political rather than religious disagreement, particularly over relations with the Indians and the validity of royal land grants.
That Christian governments have engaged in persecution is not a source of pride, nor is it a corollary of the fundamentals of the faith. Rather, it is a consequence of the adaptation of the faith to the world, a process in which worldliness too often infects faith. Those who constantly urge the Church to “keep up with the times” and “get rid of outmoded dogmas” may wish to reflect on whether being in step with the zeitgeist and downplaying dogmas that the age finds unattractive have served Christianity well in the past.
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