Pastor's Corner: What does it really say?

This July Fourth, between good food and glittering fireworks, perhaps a lot of us thought about what we appreciate about our country. One answer came pretty quickly: I am grateful that we are a nation that allows for freedom of religion - not always perfectly, but we try.

To me, this freedom is more than just a synagogue sharing a city block with a church. It means that even fellow Christians cannot dictate to me how I am supposed to follow Christ. Given the many expressions of Christianity alive and well in our country, I am constantly grateful that I have the freedom to follow the Holy Spirit as I feel led instead of being constrained by how someone else interprets the movement of the Spirit. After all, it was following the nudging of that Spirit that brought my husband and me to Havre, and so far we've given nothing but thanks to God for that!

The root of this national freedom lies in the Constitution. Even before the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) was added, our founding document included the prohibition of religious tests for holding public office. At the time, 11 out of 13 states had religious qualifications for public officials, so the Constitution was pushing a well-established boundary. If there had been a religious test, we might not have gotten Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln as presidents, since neither of them belonged to a church as adults.

Fun fact: Thomas Jefferson used literal cut-and-paste to create his own version of the Bible: he cut out sections of the gospels and pasted them into another book. He wanted to create a text that was just the moral teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, without any mention of Christ's deity, miracles, or resurrection. Thankfully, it never caught on.

The Bill of Rights took this nascent idea of religious freedom even farther. Its very first line states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

This is parsed down into the "Establishment Clause" and the "Free Exercise Clause." The first means that, in the words of a scholar from my denomination, "the government cannot establish a state church or religion or endorse one church or religion over others." The second clause "means that the government cannot prohibit individuals from worshiping in the manner each sees fit, within certain limits."

Data from pollsters and sociologists consistently shows a growing population of people in our country whose beliefs attack these very freedoms that were enshrined in our Constitution more than 200 years ago. It goes by several names, but the one I've heard the most is "Christian nationalism," and it's defined as a conflating of American citizenship and Christian identity. Christian nationalism, in this sense, is the belief that to be truly an American, you must be Christian ... and preferably a certain kind of Christian.

What does the Constitution really say that might be relevant to this growing wave of Christian nationalism? From the get-go, the founders bucked tradition to say that our national leaders do not have to espouse any one religion. And plenty of patriots worked hard to include the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause in the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing that our government would not side with any one religion over another, nor would citizenship be bound up with religious identity.

This is good news. Christians throughout the centuries have believed that our ultimate allegiance is to Christ - not a nation or ethnic group - and our real citizenship lies in the Kingdom of Heaven. When Christians have attempted theocracy, it has been disastrous for everyone. Using the tools of the state to prescribe religious belief is a fool's errand. After all, Jesus was killed by the state because of the way he challenged the status quo of Roman civil religion!

I would be a Christian whether or not I lived in a country that allowed for freedom of religion. But this July Fourth, I was grateful for the way this freedom gives space for the gift of my faith to be nurtured by my relationship with God, by study of scripture and the great tradition, and by worshipping, serving, praying, and learning with members of my faith community. Thanks be to God!

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Pastor Megan Hoewisch

First Lutheran Church