Lessons from the Religious Wars: Postscript

Remembering the historical timeline

Yesterday, while pondering the ideological factions that now divide American society and politics, I began reflecting on the great religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. I believe the authors of the U.S. Constitution in the 18th century had this conflict and its attendant persecutions in mind when they set about their work.

At the time I wrote my post, I was thinking about this historical timeline and the underlying consciousness of history that informed the authors of the document. They were keen to preserve the freedom of conscience in order to prevent persecution of ANYONE (Protestant or Catholic) for his religious beliefs.

The great ideological conflicts of the 20th Century were, it seems to me, a manifestation of the same spirit that animated the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries—namely, the doctrinaire insistence: “Our understanding of God and man is right, yours is wrong, and if you don’t agree and comply with our view, we will kill you.” As the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov put it:

There is for man no preoccupation more constant or more nagging than, while in a condition of freedom, quickly to find someone to bow down before. But man seeks to bow down before that which is already beyond dispute, so far beyond dispute that all human beings will instantly agree to a universal bowing-down before it. For the preoccupation of these miserable creatures consists not only in finding that before which I or another may bow down, but in finding something that everyone can come to believe in and bow down before, and that it should indeed be everyone, and that they should do it all together. It is this need for a community of bowing-down that has been the principal torment of each individual person and of mankind as a whole since the earliest ages. For the sake of a universal bowing-down they have destroyed one another with the sword. They have created gods and challenged one another: 'Give up your gods and come and worship ours or else death to you and to your gods!' And so it will be until the world's end, when even gods will vanish from the world: whatever happens, they will fall down before idols.

The great project of the U.S. Constitution in the late 18th century was to move beyond this “preoccupation.” It seems to me that the rationale for this project has been forgotten, and now the project itself is being dismantled at our extreme peril.