Because the Bible Tells Me So

I was born in the wagon of a travelling show

My mama used to dance for the money they’d throw

Papa would do whatever he could

Preach a little gospel

Sell a couple bottles of Doctor Good

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves (1971)

A lot of my European friends - mostly from the UK and Germany - have cornered me at get togethers down the years and asked “What is this thing with America and religion? Why are so many people in a modern, highly-developed country still so “God this” and “Jesus that”?

In other words, the majority of Europeans consider themselves a post-Enlightenment society, where a combination of high literacy rates and almost universal access to third level education has created a population able to weigh the religion-based certitudes of the past against widely available evidence which contradicts those traditional certitudes.

After years of reading, discussion, and pondering, I arrived at my own <hyper-distilled> answer to my friends’ questions...

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All three major Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have traditionally had theologians who read, studied, and interpreted the religious writings which are the foundation and accompaniment to their faith.

Jews have their “Bible” or “Tanakh” (Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim), and the accompanying Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash - which are basically a gathering together of centuries of commentary, debate, and interpretation of Jewish religious law and ethics.

Muslims have the Quran, along with many writings shared with the Hebrew Torah and Christian New Testament, as well as a large body of Hadith - deeds and sayings attributed to their main prophet, Muhammad.

Christians have their “Old Testament”, which is basically a variation on the Jewish Bible, with an additional body of writings called the “New Testament”, which was written by both Jewish and non-Jewish followers of an apocalyptic cult begun by quasi-historical figures such as John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth roughly 2,000 years ago.

Because the early Christian Church was adopted into the structures of the Roman Empire, it became a very “top-down” hierarchical institution.

This meant that Christians (from the early Middle Ages through to the Early Modern Period) didn’t share or have access to a body of writings explaining the theological or philosophical debates behind Christian scripture, doctrine or canon law.

Doctrine and canon law was debated behind closed doors, and then fed down through the hierarchical channels - Pope to archbishop to bishop to priest.

This paternalistic and untransparent way of interpreting Christian writings and formulating religious “law” (and rampant corruption) eventually led to the Protestant break with the Catholic Church during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in Europe.

Because a shared, common religion is one of the cornerstones which help monarchs and leaders to maintain social order and cohesion, the Protestant Reformation led to the Wars of Religion during the 1500s and 1600s - some of the bloodiest and most brutal conflicts ever seen on European soil.

And when the killing starts anywhere, people become even more deeply entrenched in their sense of righteousness.

Henry VIII of England used Protestant/Catholic divisions as an excuse to override Catholic Papist power, and to confiscate millions of crowns of wealth and property from the Catholic Church - making himself head of the church in England.

Many extreme Protestants saw through Henry’s opportunistic Protestantism, and tried to force the new “Protestant-lite” Anglican Church to become more hard-core anti-Catholic.

During and after the reigns of Henry VIII, his daughter Elizabeth I, James the VI/I, and Charles I, many of the most extreme Protestants (Puritans and Separatists) decided to try their luck on foreign shores, in The Netherlands, and later in North America.

Long story short, the English colonies in North America were first settled by a number of elites (loyal to the establishment and its Anglican Church), along with a very noisy bunch of Protestant extremists, underclass indentured servants, and involuntary transportees (war prisoners, political prisoners, convicts, beggars, vagrants, criminals, prostitutes, etc).

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While many Europeans were undergoing a gradual social revolution (leading to universal suffrage and wider access to higher education for its lower classes during the 1700s and 1800s), many Americans were quite literally preoccupied with land-grabbing and violent ethnic cleansing.

Religion in colonial America was seen as the baseline division between “God’s people” and those placed outside His covenant.

Puritan writers and ministers characterized Indian resistance to settler-colonialism in Biblical terms, with the English framed as latter-day Israelites, beset on all sides by “savages” similar to the Biblical Philistines.

This pattern would continue. In 1763-64 in Pennsylvania, a Scottish immigrant and Presbyterian minister named John Elder would lead a gang of Scottish and Ulster men (who were illegally squatting on Indian land) to commit “pre-emptive” massacres on peaceful Indians they characterized as “Canaanites”.

In this overwhelmingly Protestant frontier environment with few schools, even fewer seminaries, and almost no institutes of higher learning, an educated clergy was scarce.

Many aspiring Protestant clergy were offered dispensations, i.e., they were allowed to become ordained “ministers of the Gospel” without having to attend a formal theological college or seminary.

And this, perhaps more than anything else, led to the distinctly American institutions of “camp meetings” and “revivals”, where razzamatazz, charisma, theatricality, and emotionality came to replace serious study and analysis of religious scripture.

Many frontier “preacher men” were in fact illiterate, having simply memorized enough Bible verses to be able to bluff their way into a respectable social position.

Is it any wonder, that in such an environment, churches sprang up and divided like bacteria in a Petri dish?

This is not some random, back of an envelope analysis, by the way.

This writer has chuckled over records showing one backwoods Wesleyan Methodist church in North Carolina having a “theological schism” over the question of snuff-dipping during sermons...

(see Henry Clay Sisk and the Wesleyan Missionary Church of the early 1900s. Reverend Sisk also seems to have had a nice little cash sideline in sacramental “healing oil”. Interestingly, Mr. Sisk was descended from the mixed-ethnic “Bean” family of frontier Appalachia, and “Loving” people who may have once been colonial Tidewater crypto-Jews named “Levine”.)

In a less humorous example, one mountain preacher even led his congregation to participate in human sacrifice...

(see the ritual murder of Lucinda Mills in 1933 in Martin County, Kentucky)

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Manifest Destiny - aka the seizing of America - was only completed in the 1890s, with the massacre of 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee, the later surrender of the Apache, and the annexation of Hawaii in 1893.

One might fairly suspect that a people’s theology tends to reflect the nature of its practitioners.

Almost all churches attended by “white” American Christian evangelicals today, whether mainline Protestant or Pentacostalist (Assemblies of God, Church of God of Prophecy, Disciples of Christ, et al), find their roots in 18th, 19th, and 20th century “do-it-yourself” religious movements founded by people barely touched by the arts of philosophy or academically rigorous language and divinity studies.

Such places of worship are a world away from the scholarship of theologians who study Catholic canon law, the Jewish Torah and Talmud, or the Islamic Quran and Hadith.

Such places of worship are a universe away from sciences like geology and biology, humanities subjects like Assyriology, or ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek language studies.

And of course MAGA will say that is the whole point - their personal relationship with their God and Jesus shouldn’t require an understanding of science, history, ancient languages, or philosophy.

For many evangelicals, knowledge is in fact the enemy of faith.

Frontier America sped past The Enlightenment, and came up smiling in early 1900s California.

Just in time for the new cult of wealth and shiny celebrity (which has meshed seamlessly with the cult of acquisition) to give us “prosperity Gospel” and megachurches.

So to my friends who wonder why USA politicians and celebrities are always thanking Jesus, or always asking God to “Bless America”, the answer is fairly simple.

American evangelicalism (and much of American religion in general), bears very little relation to actual religious teachings.

Religious practice in America has often been little more than a made-up faith system, divorced from its historical origins and tenets, interpreted and designed to justify or excuse whatever it is that certain Americans want to do or believe.

Justifying slavery and racism? Call dark skin the biblical Mark of Cain.

God bless America.

Bombing an elementary school full of girls in Minab, Iran?

God bless America.

Supplying endless bombs to crush the bodies of Gazan children under concrete rubble?

God bless America.

While much of the western world has become more secular in nature, the USA hasn’t.

Maybe the explanation goes beyond the USA’s peculiar history.

Maybe it’s because the USA still NEEDS its own customized belief system able to justify, sanctify, and excuse its actions.

[Image: River baptism, Benton County, Tennessee]