From my perch, America at 250 seems not to be in a particularly celebratory mood, and it’s more than just being stuck in the middle of an unpopular and embarrassing war. Perhaps one reason for such meager enthusiasm on an otherwise auspicious anniversary is because many of our people have become spiritually tired and morally feeble. In his first inaugural address President George Washington stated, “there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble bond between virtue and happiness.” Novelist Michael D. O’Brien asks, “Does the erosion begin when we decide that God is there first and foremost to serve our will, and to aid our lives on our terms? Are we evangelizing or are we being anti-evangelized? To what degree have we mistaken the assimilation by paganism for legitimate inculturation, that is, the adaptation of Christian culture to the ‘language’ of the surrounding non-Christian culture?”

The very essence of liberty is religious freedom, that is, the freedom of the children of God without which political rights mean very little. St. Peter exhorts, “Be free, yet without using freedom as a pretext for evil, but as slaves of God.” (1 Pt. 2:16) So many Americans it would now seem have adopted a quite distorted sense of religious liberty as being the supremacy of individual conscience, an attitude which when widely diffused produces subjectivism, moral relativism, and ultimately religious and social anarchy. Imagine what President Washington would have thought of ‘abortion rights,’ ‘gay marriage,’ or ‘transgenderism.’ I daresay that he would never have considered such abuses as legitimate fruits of freedom.

Freedom is somewhat like a loaded gun with no safety. One needs to aim carefully and sparingly and to select targets prudently lest disaster ensues. Similarly, what passes for freedom today more closely resembles diabolical disorientation ~ men passing as women and vice versa, marriage and family redefined, surrogacy and IVF lauded even as epic scourges of drug and pornography addiction abound, child trafficking and blatant war crimes committed with impunity using our tax dollars. Our elected authorities become silent as the grave on such matters of grave importance because they hold a false notion of freedom un-tethered from responsibility. The false assumption that humans are capable of unilaterally deciding what is good and what is evil began when the ‘rights of man’ were allowed to eclipse the ‘rights of God.’ But it is the role and sacred duty of Religion to defend first the rights of God. This is where the modern concept of religious liberty is failing.

St. Paul importuned, “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. (Gal. 5:1) Religious liberty in its original sense means to be freed from slavery to sin. In the political realm it refers to the liberty of the Church to be free from state interference. As regards individuals, religious liberty means that no person should be ‘coerced’ into religious participation as in past ages when refusing to burn a ‘pinch of incense’ to the emperor’s gods might result in martyrdom. Thus the Second Vatican Council rightly notes that, “the Church claims freedom for herself in human society and before every public authority… For the Catholic Church is by the will of Christ the teacher of truth. It is her duty to proclaim and teach with authority the truth which is Christ and, at the same time, to declare and confirm by her authority the principles of the moral order which spring from human nature itself.” (Dignitatis Humanae 13,14)

The author of true religion is God himself. It is not, as some modern anthropologists would have us believe, a purely human construct meant to fill some deep emotional need for connection. Such misunderstanding has engendered what we too often see today, namely that ‘freedom of religion’ which is either misconstrued as ‘freedom from religion’ or else the right to believe and propagate whatever notions one may fancy. True religion is founded upon what God has revealed to mankind through His Church, not on human opinions or ideas. Faith is a gift freely offered which must be freely received in conscience by the person. But just as true religion does not compel any individual to believe, at the same time religious liberty is not a license to invent, teach, or promote false or errant doctrines.

Historically it is a fact that religion and the civil order have close connections, a kind of interdependence. Religion forms man’s ‘inner framework,’ that is his soul and conscience, and so prepares him for active civic participation. That is why religion was always a key ingredient in forming successful societies. In fact the notion of a completely secularized state is a very recent departure from the historical norm. That any society can succeed for long based on such a model is a thesis which has yet to be proven. So far history seems to indicate that some sort of confessional state is what produces long running and successful civilizations.

The Catholic Confessional State hearkens back 17 centuries to the Emperor Constantine who recognized the Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Pagan Rome and its religion of emperor worship was a society built upon fear, blood lust, and ghastly cruelty which ultimately bred a kind of quiet despair among her pagan denizens. From that bleak culture of death Christianity offered the antidote of hope in the promise of eternal life. In his letter to the Romans St. Paul elucidates this hope. “I reckon that the suffering of this present time is not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us… because the creation itself shall be delivered from slavery to corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.” (Rom 8: 18;21) In granting formal recognition and liberty to a long persecuted Church Constantine, whose mother Helena was herself a Christian, simultaneously freed Rome from its centuries old bondage to demonic pagan deities. Henceforth the Church and temporal powers would partner in providing for the common good, both earthly and eternal, in a new arrangement known as Christendom.

The word religion comes from the Latin religare which means to bind together. Over the centuries it was the Catholic religion which bound the culturally diverse Christian peoples of Europe together. As the Roman empire dissolved into civil chaos the Church was busy baptizing the barbarian tribes even as they invaded. As the Western Empire became broken into countless local principalities and kingdoms these new states came to share in a common Catholic religious and moral unity ~ one religion binding many confessional states together. Today we are witnessing exactly the opposite, especially in America where the unitary state has become hopelessly divided into countless religious sects, estimated at some 40,000 or more in this country alone.

How did the old confessional model become so broken? The United States of America became the orphan progeny of an English confessional state that went off the rails during the 16th century and which resulted in a new kind of civic religion based on a kind of modified Deism or Indifferentism. We must go back a further 250 years from our country’s founding to that moment in 1526 when King Henry VIII cast lustful eyes on the youthful Anne Boleyn, an affair that would re-orient the entire trajectory of Western civilization. For it was England that turned the tide of the Protestant revolt, originating in the German states, from a localized crisis of religion into a full blown tidal wave which permanently altered the politics and religious landscape of the Continent ~ and therefore, by extension, the future American republic. British historian Hilaire Belloc forcefully argued, “But it is certain that if England had not left the unity of Christendom, that unity would be fully recovered today – and long before today.” (How the Reformation Happened, p.56)

History abounds in ironies and chief among these being that 1526 England was probably the least likely nation to break from the Catholic unity of Europe. When considering the complaints of Luther and others regarding the widespread abuses and corruption of many clerics and even popes, England was probably the country with the cleanest track record concerning morals and piety, certainly when compared with France or even the Papal States. The Crown and her nobles provided security and lawful order while the Church, both directly and through the monastic institutes, looked after the needs of the poor. An ideal example of a thriving confessional state, both the English Church and Kingdom were well aligned and cooperating to ensure the spiritual and temporal needs of their people.

That collaboration ended with the pillaging of the Church’s property in the wake of Henry’s schism with Rome. This abrupt break came to devastate the English commoner over time. In his classic 19th century tome on the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, William Cobbett avows, “England was, in Catholic times, a really wealthy country; that wealth was generally diffused; that every area of the country abounded in men of solid property; and that, of course, there were always great resources at hand in case of an emergency.” By Cobbett’s time in the early 19th century the England of middle class prosperity was a distant memory. The yeoman farmer had been pushed out by greedy land barons, once public common lands privatized through ‘enclosure’ laws, and the poorer classes utterly pauperized as reflected in Dickensian novels such as Oliver Twist.

in short, it was the suppression of over 900 English monasteries by Henry VIII in the late 1430s which not only impoverished the lower economic castes but which impelled the nobles and gentry, who ended up in possession of the stolen Church loot, to so vigorously embrace Protestantism. Henry himself was no Protestant, but by proclaiming himself to be the head of the Church in England he carelessly opened up that door. After his death the greedy hoard of opportunists who had partaken of the Church’s spoils, by some estimates anywhere from 20% to 25% of the entire wealth of the kingdom, were determined to keep their ill got gains. This provided a very strong incentive among the upper classes to resist any revival of the old religion, and resist they did through violent persecutions of Catholics over a 150 year period. In the end, Catholic England which should have been a bulwark against the Protestant fragmentation of Christendom instead became a primary catalyst in that dissolution.

In theory the Anglican Church founded by Henry was made the official State Church, “by law established.” But in reality once that religious Pandora’s Box was opened the nation’s former Catholic unity gave way to the multiplication of Protestant creeds: Calvinist Puritans, Moravians, Ana-Baptists, Lutherans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and more. The Anglican ‘confessional state’ existed in name only as religious pluralism became the actual norm in Britain, a fact which ultimately reduced the monarch’s power (also as titular head of a now discredited Church). Within a century of Henry VIII’s death the real executive power had been gradually drained from the king unto Parliament, attested by the tragic execution of the King Charles I, as the climax to a bloody civil war.

Religious liberty in its Catholic sense had taken quite a turn in the 250 years between Henry VIII and the American Declaration of Independence. By the time of our founding father’s the notion of a confessional state, which since the time of Constantine had recognized the one true Catholic religion as a source of national unity, had morphed into a more generic idea of a Protestantized ‘Christian’ state which might tolerate Catholics, though generally with a great deal of suspicion. In fact it was religious intolerance among the Protestant factions which drove many colonial settlers out of Britain, itself a failed confessional state. Instead of the legacy of Constantine which successfully endured for over a thousand years, America was bequeathed the fractured British religious legacies of Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, a rather shaky basis for the ‘great republican experiment’ and ‘shining city on a hill.’

Religious diversification meant that there was no possibility of creating a truly confessional state in this new land and so the founding fathers did the next best thing as they saw it, creation of a civic religion. Religious liberty was loosely defined as every man able to choose his own beliefs, with only the tacit Deist’s reference to God. The disestablishment clause in the First Amendment was generally, though erroneously, interpreted as the absolute separation of Church and State. Consequently 250 years later anti-religion, atheism, secularism, and even Satanism all receive the same recognition as Christianity in this nation. Religious liberty, American style, has morphed into virtual ‘religious anarchy’ because in any such religious free-for-all indifferentism invariably triumphs. Religion in America, instead of being a binding force, has created alienation which we try to gloss over with a civic religion based on ‘patriotism and politics.’

So what are the limits on an individual’s religious liberty? After all, true freedom pre-supposes accountability to God, not merely to oneself. In the new “Credo” catechism, Bishop Athanasius Schneider states that, “no one has a universal, positive, and natural right to practice whatever he perceives as ‘religion.’ Civil laws promoting the liberty to offend God through the propagation of false religions cannot be a valid expression of or rooted in human nature.” (n. 748) The good bishop is merely echoing Pope Leo XIII who taught in his 1888 encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum, “While everyone has the natural right not to be coerced to practice a religion, no man has the right – even a merely civil right – to offend God by choosing a moral evil, or by practicing or promoting religious error.”

America has reason to celebrate the fact that our forefathers escaped the failed confessional state of Great Britain and had the wisdom to institute a new nation based on the principle of tolerance. But tolerance does not mean that error should be granted equal rights with true religion but only that we ought to exercise prudential judgment in order to avoid even greater evils. Pope Leo XIII explained it this way. “While not conceding any right to anything save what is true and honest, she (the Church) does not forbid public authority to tolerate what is at variance with truth and justice, for the sake of avoiding some greater evil, or of obtaining or preserving some greater good.” (Libertas n.33) Though a Catholic may need to engage in prudential tolerance in this culture, we must never endorse false religion or error, because the maxim always remains true that “error has no rights.”

America’s Achilles heel remains that peculiar doctrine which Pope Leo XIII described as a “fatal theory” which is the separation of Church and State. He reasoned, “Nature herself proclaims the necessity of the State providing means and opportunities whereby the community my be enabled to live properly, that is to say, according to the laws of God. For, since God is the source of all goodness and justice, it is absolutely ridiculous that the State should pay no attention to these laws or render them abortive by contrary enactments. Besides, those who are in authority owe it to the commonwealth not only to provide for its external well being and the conveniences of life, but still more to consult the welfare of men’s souls in the wisdom of their legislation.” (Libertas n.19)

True religion is a necessary ingredient in wisely governing any peoples, and without such wise governance freedom in any meaningful sense becomes a chimera. Perhaps Americans today sense this debilitating reality as we are increasingly surveilled and monitored even in our most mundane activities. We sense that we are being lied to incessantly by our own leaders, corporate and government. And the more that religious truths are decoupled from the public square and policy the more hollowed out their ‘freedoms’ feel to ordinary citizens. Religion and the moral framework it provides must be restored to its rightful position in our civic life if we are ever to recover the former American ideal of a truly free, meaning God fearing, society. The only question is whether we still have the moral strength and fiber to recover that true essence of liberty which comes not from a ballot box but from the revival of true religion in our land.

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.