I’ve been reading through Gordon Wood’s exemplary Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and noticed something interesting.

During the 1780s and 90s a political division grew between Federalists and anti-Federalists. The Federalist faction supported a strong central government that could act as a check on the democratic excesses of the state legislatures and proposed a standing army to defend that government from riots or revolution, a trenchant fear in the years after the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. The Federalists favored a Constitution that would delineate federal prerogatives.

The anti-Federalists adhered to a liberal tradition which pulled from 17th century Whig thought. These English Whigs believed that absolutist governments aggrandized themselves as the expense of the people. Thus the anti-Federalists feared a strong central government and initially opposed a Constitution that gave the federal government broadened powers.

What Wood does not emphasize, though, is another key difference between these two political factions. The anti-Federalists ascribed to a rosy understanding of human nature. As Wood notes (11-13), Read the rest of this entry »

Following up (sort of) on Lincoln’s post about the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero, check out Bruce Feiler’s commentary in today’s Huffington Post: “Obama a Muslim! Lincoln a Catholic! FDR a Jew! Why Americans Don’t Like Their President’s God.” Coming on the heels of a report from the Pew Forum that 1 in 5 Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, Feiler’s article points out that campaigns of religious intolerance have targeted U.S. presidents since the nation’s founding.

Here’s a taste:

Americans taking out their discrimination toward minority religions on the president of the United States is as American as apple pie; the custom has been going on as long as there has been a presidency. George Washington was the subject of widespread grumbling that he was a more loyal Mason than he was a Christian.

The entire debate about the “Ground Zero mosque” and the even-wider campaign against Islam in general that’s been waged across the United States this summer misses a larger point: These kinds of campaigns have been waged in the United States since our founding. . . .

But as reliably as Americans have adopted these views, they’ve also moved past them. In every case of religious discrimination in the United States, whether it was Methodists in the eighteenth century, Catholics in the nineteenth century, or Jews in the twentieth century, the once reviled and ostracized “outsider” religion in America eventually makes it into the inner circle.

And odds are the pattern will repeat itself with Muslims in the twenty-first century.

I find Feiler’s argument to be rather compelling, and his historical contextualization helpful. Thoughts and/or responses?

To read the entire article, click here.

HT: John Fea

For some time the news has been filled with debates over a proposed Islamic community center (not a mosque) to be built near Ground Zero in New York City. On the one hand, the usual suspects in the Republican Party and, more surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League, have opposed the center as an insult to the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks. On the other hand, American Muslims have defended the center as a perfectly legitimate outreach into the community, as the Islamic equivalent of the YMCA.

The debate, however, has taken a far nastier turn. Opponents of the community center have attempted to use the power of the state to prevent its construction. One attempt has tried to declare the existing building on the site a landmark, to prevent the property from being developed. Another, only slightly less invidious attempt, has offered state funding if the center would be built further from Ground Zero. (It is worth noting in passing the hypocrisy of politicians and voters who rail against state interference in the economy and society yet have no qualms about using state power to interfere in this case.)

The question at issue is not whether one would wish for an Islamic community center to be built at the proposed location. The question is this: Should the state have the power to prevent the free use of private property for a religious purpose?

The answer is no. If that answer is not obvious, then I recommend Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s August 3 speech and Melissa Rogers’s essay for the Washington Post. That answer is required by the basic principles of our republic and, I believe, by the implications of the gospel. To their shame, it is an answer too few Christians, and in particular too few evangelicals, have been willing to give.

Most historians of film remember organized religion as one of American cinema’s classical antagonists, especially in the early half of the twentieth century. They recall the vitriol leveled by conservative Protestant and Catholic groups against the “juggernaut of destruction” ((George Detweiler, “As to Moving Picture Shows,” Evangelical Visitor, February 5, 1912, p. 2.)) known as the motion picture. One writer summed up much of conservative Christianity’s sentiments quite succinctly: “Nothing has ever been introduced to the public, of such gigantic proportions, as a means of poisoning and debauching the mind and morals of the young, as the ‘moving picture show.” ((“Primary Causes,” Evangelical Visitor, August 7, 1911, p. 15.))

But not all conservative religious groups and leaders were utterly opposed to the new cultural phenomenon. As Terry Lindvall points out in his well-researched and cleverly written Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry, fundamentalist revivalist Billy Sunday was in fact a promoter of the early motion picture.

Lindvall recounts one of Sunday’s endorsements, this of the D.W. Griffith film The Two Orphans:

The power of the moving picture should be used to inculcate warnings and lessons that the world needs. . . . [The movie is a] sermon of the highest value. Would that every story carried on the screen might have a lesson as powerful, and as useful, a motive as praiseworthy. ((Quoted in Terry Lindvall, Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christ Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 107))

The idea that a movie could be used as a “sermon of the highest value” would not gain significant momentum within much of Evangelical Protestantism until the 1951 release of Mr. Texas, a fiction film produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as an evangelistic tool for use in churches, at Christian youth functions, and at Graham’s crusades.

But Sunday’s remarks suggest that, despite mainstream Protestant objections to film in the early decades of the twentieth century, church leaders were able to distinguish between the morally neutral technology of filmmaking and the often violent and sexualized imagery of Hollywood productions—a distinction some other conservative Protestant groups (like Mennonites, Brethren in Christ, and similar Anabaptists) could not draw.