Finnish With Style

Like many of you, I've spent the past few weeks watching the Winter Olympics.  Although I don't get quite as much into the Winter games as I do the Summer games, I appreciate not only what the athletes are able to do in the snow and ice (and this year, perhaps my indifference has more to do with how much snow and ice we've had here in Indiana) but also the fact the winter games never seem to drag like the summer ones do (perhaps because there aren't nearly as many events).  That being said, and though I do miss, when it comes to ice skating, the old national judging system, it has been great to see such outstanding competition (even if the USA didn't always win).

This year's Winter Games are being held in Sochi, Russia. And like anytime the games aren't in the US (or at least so it seems) the media has paying a good deal of attention to the host country.  Some of that attention has been favorable, some of it has been perhaps overblown (it is not as if Sochi was the first games were there were cost overruns, the politicians in power gave contracts to their friends, and not everything was finished when people started arriving), and some of that attention has not been all that it should have been (glossing over the atrocities of the Soviet era for example).

While much of the attention before the games was on the Putin government's policies to gays and lesbians, in the last week, the world has been reminded that Putin has also been working towards recreating the lost Soviet Union (or at the old Russian Empire).  And to a degree that has gotten me thinking about matters of faith.  Oh sure, there are from time to time mentions of God or religion in reports from the games themselves (either from the athletes or from American reporters discovering the Orthodox Church), but for me the image of faith and the games comes not from Sochi, but rather from the Ukraine:




The image above, and others like, made the rounds on the Web this week, as priests from the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine stood between protestors and security forces (who backed the now deposed Russian supported prime minister).  For a few moments at least, the fighting stopped.  Perhaps we will one day look back and see it as the moment the opposition needed, the moment the government's forces began to question what it was they were doing.  Perhaps. Much is likely yet to play out over Ukraine's future, and who knows what might happen once the world's attention is drawn away from Eastern Europe.

But that image also got me thinking about conditions in the US.  We have entered, in the past year or so, a great debate over religious liberty in America, as well as a related one on the proper demarcation line between Church and State.  Readers of this blog (as well as of The Mainline) know that it is an issue I've touched on before.  And it is one that was raised last month, when a friend from Finland posted an article on Church and State in his country.  My friend and I corresponded a bit more on the topic, with his thought below:

"Paradoxically, Christianity plays a lot larger role in US politics compared to over here, state church or not. Presidential candidates are asked maybe once an election cycle about their views on religion, and a round-edged answer of maybe appreciating everyone minding their own spiritual business and Christmas church being a nice tradition is the correct and proper one. A politician openly demanding policy based on Bible or even Christian morals (as opposed to just, you know, what's moral) is considered to be fringe and eyes are rolled. I'd say the separation of C'n'S is more ingrained in the individual citizen, if you will, around here."

While American priests, ministers, and pastors are quite active in battling over social issues (where their is much disagreement between both Americans in and out of the pews on a host of topics ranging from abortion to gay marriage), one wonders if any of them would be willing to stand between warring factions and literally remind people on both sides that it was time to stop killing.  One wonders if people on either side would listen.  Are we different than Finland in that respect?  Are we different than the Ukraine?  Let us pray that we need not ever have to find out. 

Religious liberty is not something to be taken lightly, nor are infringements upon it trivial (even if they don't amount to persecution).  But part of this discussion over the proper role of Church and State is also about religious symbolism, and how politicians employ it.  Perhaps it would be a good thing, if like in the Ukraine, the Church in America invoked its own symbols (and talked openly about doctrine) as much as those seeking votes from people in the pews.

State and Church

It was in a political science class at Indiana University where I first read St. Augustine.  Now, I knew who he was before I went to college, but I had never read him.  The book for that course was his City of God (before I graduated I had also read his Confessions) and as I recall the point of our reading it was to outline the notion of a separation of Church (heavenly city) and State (earthly city) in terms of functions and interactions (the point that St. Augustine was making in the opening chapters of the book amounted to a defense of Christianity against pagan charges that it was the abandonment of the traditional Roman gods that had led to the sack of Rome itself) and what that meant both to a Roman world teetering on the brink of collapse and to later Western political thinkers.

I have been thinking about St. Augustine's two cities of late because I have been thinking about State Churches.  It is something that is foreign to those of us living in the United States.  During America's colonial phase (and in the years after the Revolution) when there were "established" churches (think of Puritan Massachusetts or Anglican Virginia), no sooner had there been such an establishment it seems than there were dissenters and competition from other denominations on the scene as well.  While I talk about this in The Mainline, there is a part of me that wonders if, as Americans, we make more out of disestablishment than perhaps we should.  While it truly impacted those denominations that were established, there were other factors at play that both promoted religious liberty and made disestablishment likely, even without say the intervention of Thomas Jefferson.  Maybe the real story, or at least one that we should be focusing in on (and this perhaps fits into the democratization thesis) is that the United States never had an official church to begin with.

There are good reasons to ponder this development, beside the forthcoming Independence Day celebrations.  The young United States was making a break with the past in multiple ways following the Revolution, creating a novus ordo seclorum.  There was to be no king in America but there also was to be no state church.  Both are clear breaks not only with the immediate past, but also with what virtually every state then in existence (or to whom the Founders harkened back to, including St. Augustine's Rome) knew.  To have neither a king nor an official church was revolutionary, and both decisions deserve more discussion than they have gotten.  And it should be noted that both decisions it seems were firmly made in the minds of that Founding generation prior to the writing and ratification (and all the debates it has prompted ever since) of the Constitution.

What has prompted me to think about the issue anew is recent discussion about the fate of Christianity in Europe (for some examples of what I've been reading you can look  here and here and here).  It has long been common knowledge both inside and outside the world of academia that when it comes to religious attendance amongst Christians, the percentages of Europeans in the pews is significantly lower to that of Americans on any given Sunday.  There have also been arguments made that with the influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe (coupled with higher immigrant birthrates) that Europe has a religious demographic issue looming on its horizon (which has caused worry in some circles, comparisons in others, and shoulder shrugs amongst many as well).  I'll not wade into those waters today, but I do wonder what these factors mean for the future of State Churches.

When I spoke in Boston last October, one of the questions that I was asked by a member of the United Church of Christ, was if what was happening in Europe was going to happen here.  I noted in my response that the history State Churches (here and there) was important to how the history of religion has unfolded in both places.  But as I think about it more, I begin to wonder not only what it meant to Americans at the founding to reject the notion of even attempting to have a national church (and if we make more than we should out of the debates over religious liberty at the state level on that national decision -- are we projecting in other words), but also what it would mean for Europeans today in places like Germany or England or Russia if disestablishment were to occur.   What would the public reaction be to "end" of the Church of England (assuming such a thing were to happen)?  What would become of those grand cathedrals (which in some locations are more tourist attraction than houses of worship)?  What of the smaller parishes?  It is one thing to see such a tradition rejected (as in the case of the young United States), another to have it dwindle (as has been happening in much of Europe), and another thing entirely for it to be taken away all together.

Of course, some might say that now is the time for missionary activity in Europe (and American and African Christians are attempting that right now), and that there is always hope for a revival of the faith.  There is also something to be said for that question that was asked of me in Boston, but perhaps not in the way that I first answered it.  Are there parallels (or at least comparisons) that might be drawn between the State Churches of Europe and the Mainline decline of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism?  And that is a question that may be worth some investigation by scholars.  In the meantime, perhaps we'd also do well to remember that when St. Augustine first postulated his notion of two cities, the Christian Europe of the Roman world was about to come to an end.  That the Church endured and prospered (both with and without the benefit of the State) after the initial shock what we might call "the barbarian disestablishment" is something to remember as well.