“On Faith and the Founding” is a tricky chapter to deconstruct in Liberty and Tyranny. Without an understanding of Christian faith one is likely to be overwhelmed by Levin’s rhetoric in support of religious liberty. Christianity marks a dramatic turning point in monotheism. Before Christ, God had a chosen people based on culture and lineage. The abundance of “God Bless America” signs suggest that many Christians still feel this way, but nothing could be further from the truth. Paul made a dramatic proclamation that we were all one under Christ, lineage or country did not matter.
Prehistoric people were noted for their egalitarianism within their culture, but could be as “racist” towards other cultures as many people are in modern civilization. Paul’s proclamation was perhaps the most broadly egalitarian statement made up until that time. Our relationship to God depended on no cultural heritage or paternal order. Instead, it went through a very personal relationship with Christ with no other discrimination or allegiance involved.
This led to early Christians, the Early Church, being decentralized. They were very much a bottoms-up, grassroots movement of independent fellowships. In this manner Christianity was a faith that maximized autonomous freedom, a point that Levin himself makes. The only constraints to that freedom were the constraints from belonging to Christ. This gets us back to the previous entry on moral absolutes. A person devoted to the Christ experience, whether as Savior or even as just a historical figure of great importance, would be a person who understood and sought to display the natural moral/altruistic attributes of humility, faith, courage and love.
This changed dramatically when Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official top-down, paternal religion. It became a religion dependent on scholars, rather than ordinary folks, to divine moral absolutes and “Natural Law.” Protestantism was supposed to be a revolt against this, with the philosophy that we could all divine the truth for ourselves from the Bible. However, most Protestant denominations amount to the same thing as interest groups transcending communities, rather than a recapitulation of the communal Early Churches. Furthermore, the books of the Bible where the truth was to be divined had been selected by paternal Roman Catholic bishops and could be either a link or a barrier to directly experiencing Christ.
The autonomous, grassroots essence of early Christianity must be understood to fully appreciate the misinformation embedded in Mark Levin’s thesis. Levin uses “On Faith and the Founding” to reinforce a common theme for him, faulting the New Deal and, specifically in this chapter, the Supreme Court that sprang from the New Deal. In particular he points to the one Supreme Court case of Everson v. Board of Education (1947) to show how we have turned our back on the Founding’s allegiance to Natural Law, faith and morality. He criticizes the “wall of separation” between Church and State that was made in that case. He belittles the criticism of tax dollars being used in support of faith-based activities, claiming “So What?” and further commenting that there are lots of things we complain about using our tax dollars for, that does not mean we should not do them.
Levin insists Everson refutes the intent of the Founding Fathers. I’m not so sure about that, but I’ll let that pass for now. Levin insists that Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist had a better pulse on original intent for religious liberty than Justice Black. I’m not so sure about that either, but I’ll let that pass as well. My primary objection to Levin’s objection to a “wall of separation” comes as a Christian, one whose relationship with Christ was forged directly from experiences born out of wilderness backpacking, not from fixed beliefs promoted by paternal gatekeepers of the faith. As a devoted Christian I find Levin’s thesis to be offensively paternalistic, running against the grain of decentralized independence that was the foundation of the Early Church, even as he is touting liberty and freedom. More on that next.
Here is previous background material.
An overview of misinformation principles
A basic understanding of free markets