When ‘pluribus’ versus ‘unum’

Bill Tammeus, Columnist for the Kansas City Star, interviews Forrest Church about his new book So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State.

In a little more than a year the 2008 election will be over. We’ll have a president-elect and new people headed to Congress and other offices.

So, at least for this election cycle, our time for deciding what role religion should play in politics is limited.

Do we want, at one end, a theocracy, in which every head bows and every knee bends before one particular version of God? Or, at the other end, do we want a nation that not only has no room for any deity but also, beyond that, encourages atheism?

Most of us want neither, of course. Rather, we prefer to struggle for balance between what author and New York City clergyman Forrest Church identifies as the tradition of “sacred liberty” on the one hand and the tradition of “divine order” on the other. He unpacks all this in his insightful new book, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State.

The sacred liberty tradition encourages an Enlightenment sort of deep respect for reason. It is repelled by faith communities or governments that demand unquestioning obedience. This is putting it too simplistically, but this tradition also honors individual freedom over the power of authority. It’s the “pluribus” part of the national phrase “E pluribus unum,” or “From many, one.”

By contrast the divine order tradition believes the nation operates under the guidance of God and places a high value on the benefits of order and of patriotic acquiescence to government policies. Even though not perfect itself, government is seen as a divinely appointed instrument to help control human sinfulness. It’s the “unum” part of the equation.
When I spoke with Church on his recent visit to Kansas City, he told me that his greatest fear is that we may end up with one political party that adopts a radically secular version of the liberty tradition and another that stands root and branch for the divine order tradition.

“That won’t serve the nation well,” he said.

Rather, as is clear in his book, these two strands — present in American politics from the beginning — must be kept in creative tension and represented in both major political parties.

Thus one of our tasks as voters is to assess where the candidates come down on the pluribus versus unum continuum and to decide whether that’s a healthy place to be for the good of the nation.

Religion itself is full of this kind of creative tension. For instance, in Christian theology one finds two broad theological strands in any healthy denomination, congregation or individual adherent.

One strand emphasizes the importance of individual responsibility, acknowledging that someday each of us will stand alone before God to answer for our lives. The other emphasizes the importance of being part of a community. In strictly Christian terms, the latter is called being part of the body of Christ in which each person plays a different but important role.

It’s not that one strand is right and the other wrong. It’s that both are important and must be kept in balance. Otherwise people and churches run amok.

Forrest Church is right that in the political sphere both the sacred liberty and the divine order traditions are to be honored. Together they have helped to create a nation that has not just survived but has, in many ways, been a model to the world for how people of different religious traditions can live in harmony.

When we try to rewrite American history to say it always has been a divine order country (read “Christian nation”), or that it always has been a sacred liberty country (read “rugged individualist” tradition), we not only distort the past but we block the road forward.
So let’s pay attention over the next year and encourage the candidates to work toward the healthy balance between those two traditions. Otherwise we’re just asking for trouble.