The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny

by Orestes Augustus Brownson

The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new religion nor to found a new church. All real religion is catholic, and is neither new nor old, but is always and everywhere true. Even our Lord came neither to found a new church nor to create a new religion, but to do the things which had been foretold, and to fulfil in time what had been determined in eternity. God has himself founded the church on catholic principles, or principles always and everywhere real principles. His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on catholic dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are universal and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in the Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces and sustains all things. Founded on universal and immutable principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of men. Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, for they are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, over him, and independent of him. Religion is above and independent of the state, and the state has nothing to do with the church or her dogmas, but to accept and conform to them as it does to any of the facts or principles of science, to a mathematical truth, or to a physical law.

But while the church, with her essential constitution, and her dogmas are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and unalterable, the relations between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities may be changed or modified by the changes of time and place. These relations have not been always the same, but have differed in different ages and countries. During the first three centuries of our era the church had no legal status, and was either connived at or persecuted by the state. Under the Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and ecclesiastical questions, and were made, in some sense, civil magistrates, and paid as such by the empire. Under feudalism, the prelates received investiture as princes and barons, and formed alone, or in connection with the temporal lords, an estate in the kingdom. The Pope became a temporal prince and suzerain, at one time, of a large part of Europe, and exercised the arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects. Since the downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern centralized monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater part of her temporal possessions, and deprived, in most countries, of all civil functions, and treated by the state either as an enemy or as a slave.

In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the national church is held in strict subjection to the civil authority, as in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of the state; in the other states of Europe, as France, Austria, Spain, and Italy, she is treated with distrust by the civil government, and allowed hardly a shadow of freedom and independence. In France, which has the proud title of eldest daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not freer than they are in Turkey. All religious are said to be free, and all are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen. The emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to concede the church just as much and just as little freedom in the empire as he judges expedient for his own secular interests. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South American states, the policy of the civil authorities is the same, or worse. It may be safely asserted that, except in the United States, the church is either held by the civil power in subjection, or treated as an enemy. The relation is not that of union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave detriment of both religion and civilization.

It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the mixture of civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in the Middle Ages; and a total separation of church and state, even as corporations, would, in the present state of men's minds in Europe, be construed, if approved by the church, into a sanction by her of political atheism, or the right of the civil power to govern according to its own will and pleasure in utter disregard of the law of God, the moral order, or the immutable distinctions between right and wrong. It could only favor the absolutism of the state, and put the temporal in the place of the spiritual. Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the entire separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864. Neither the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United States, can understand practically such separation in any other sense than the complete emancipation of our entire secular life from the law of God, or the Divine order, which is the real order. It is not the union of church and state—that is, the union, or identity rather, of religious and political principles—that it is desirable to get rid of, but the disunion or antagonism of church and state. But this is nowhere possible out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state organized on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting from its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church, or the religious order really existing, in relation to which all things are created and governed. Nowhere else is it practicable, at present, to maintain between the two powers their normal relations.

But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly practicable in the New. The state here being organized in accordance with catholic principles, there can be no antagonism between it and the church. Though operating in different spheres, both are, in their respective spheres, developing and applying to practical life the one and the same Divine Idea. The church can trust the state, and the state can trust the church. Both act from the same principle to one and the same end. Each by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the other. It is true the church is not formally established as the civil law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; because there is nothing in the state that conflicts with her freedom and independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable canons. The need of establishing the church by law, and protecting her by legal pains and penalties, as is still done in most countries, can exist only in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state of society, where the state is not organized on catholic principles, or the civilization is based on false principles, and in its development tends not to the real or Divine order of things. When the state is constituted in harmony with that order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, or what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a superfluity. The true religion is in the heart of the state, as its informing principle and real interior life. The external establishment, by legal enactment of the church, would afford her no additional protection, add nothing to her power and efficacy, and effect nothing for faith or piety—neither of which can be forced, because both must, from their nature, be free-will offerings to God.

In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the true religion; but all false religions being one-sided, sophistical, and uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the state, which tend, by their silent but effective workings, to eliminate them. The American state recognizes only the catholic religion. It eschews all sectarianism, and none of the sects have been able to get their peculiarities incorporated into its constitution or its laws. The state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion; and what ever is not catholic it leaves, as outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent vitality or want of vitality. The state conscience is catholic, not sectarian; hence it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all religions, the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic in its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true. The church being free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, in the freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the security it can ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of the case receive from external institutions, or from social and political organizations.

This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all nations may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority. The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as they are, not as they are not. To deal with a child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only acting a lie. The church cannot treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped. She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and culture of individuals, and to the greater or less progress of nations in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline with the variations of time and place. Many of her canons, very proper and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World. Under the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and trust them as freemen, because free men they are. The freeman asks, why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be secured. The simple reason that the church commands will rarely satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that. The full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be expected of the people reared under the American system, not because they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the understanding, not of the will or the affections alone. They are trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to distinguish between the law and the person of the magistrate. They can obey God, but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason in the Divine order, or the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they will not yield it a full, entire, and hearty obedience. The reason that suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized men, or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their civilization does not suffice for them in its maturity. The appeal to external authority was much less frequent under the Roman Empire than in the barbarous ages that followed its downfall, when the church became mixed up with the state.

This trait of the American character is not uncatholic. An intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal conviction, after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its logic in the Divine order—the obedience of a free man, not of a slave—is far more consonant to the spirit of the church, and far more acceptable to God, than simple, blind obedience; and a people capable of yielding it stand far higher in the scale of civilization than the people that must be governed as children or barbarians. It is possible that the people of the Old World are not prepared for the regimen of freedom in religion any more than they are prepared for freedom in politics; for they have been trained only to obey external authority, and are not accustomed to look on religion as having its reason in the real order, or in the reason of things. They understand no reason for obedience beyond the external command, and do not believe it possible to give or to understand the reason why the command itself is given. They regard the authority of the church as a thing apart, and see no way by which faith and reason can be harmonized. They look upon them as antagonistic forces rather than as integral elements of one and the same whole. Concede them the regimen of freedom, and their religion has no support but in their good-will, their affections, their associations, their habits, and their prejudices. It has no root in their rational convictions, and when they begin to reason they begin to doubt. This is not the state of things that is desirable, but it cannot be remedied under the political regime established elsewhere than in the United States. In every state in the world, except the American, the civil constitution is sophistical, and violates, more or less, the logic of things; and, therefore, in no one of them can the people receive a thoroughly dialectic training, or an education in strict conformity to the real order. Hence, in them all, the church is more or less obstructed in her operations, and prevented from carrying out in its fulness her own Divine Idea. She does the best she can in the circumstances and with the materials with which she is supplied, and exerts herself continually to bring individuals and nations into harmony with her Divine law: but still her life in the midst of the nations is a struggle, a warfare.

The United States being dialectically constituted, and founded on real catholic, not sectarian or sophistical principles, presents none of these obstacles, and must, in their progressive development or realization of their political idea, put an end to this warfare, in so far as a warfare between church and state, and leave the church in her normal position in society, in which she can, without let or hindrance, exert her free spirit, and teach and govern men by the Divine law as free men. She may encounter unbelief, misbelief, ignorance, and indifference in few, or in many; but these, deriving no support from the state, which tends constantly to eliminate them, must gradually give way before her invincible logic, her divine charity, the truth and reality of things, and the intelligence, activity, and zeal of her ministers. The American people are, on the surface, sectarians or indifferentists; but they are, in reality, less uncatholic than the people of any other country because they are, in their intellectual and moral development, nearer to the real order, or, in the higher and broader sense of the word more truly civilized. The multitude of sects that obtain may excite religious compassion for those who are carried away by them, for men can be saved or attain to their eternal destiny only by truth, or conformity to Him who said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life;" but in relation to the national destiny they need excite no alarm, no uneasiness, for underlying them all is more or less of catholic truth, and the vital forces of the national life repel them, in so far as they are sectarian and not catholic, as substances that cannot be assimilated to the national life. The American state being catholic in its organic principles, as is all real religion, and the church being free, whatever is anticatholic, or uncatholic, is without any support in either, and having none, either in reality or in itself, it must necessarily fall and gradually disappear.

The sects themselves have a half unavowed conviction that they cannot subsist forever as sects, if unsupported by the civil authority. They are free, but do not feel safe in the United States. They know the real church is catholic, and that they themselves are none of them catholic. The most daring among them even pretends to be no more than a "branch" of the catholic church. They know that only the catholic church can withstand the pressure of events and survive the shocks of time, and hence everywhere their movements to get rid of their sectarianism and to gain a catholic character. They hold conventions of delegates from the whole sectarian world, form "unions," "alliances," and "associations;" but, unhappily for their success, the catholic church does not originate in convention, but is founded by the Word made flesh, and sustained by the indwelling Holy Ghost. The most they can do, even with the best dispositions in the world, is to create a confederation, and confederated sects are something very different from a church inherently one and catholic. It is no more the catholic church than the late Southern Confederacy was the American state. The sectarian combinations may do some harm, may injure many souls, and retard, for a time, the progress of civilization; but in a state organized in accordance with catholic principles, and left to themselves, they are powerless against the national destiny, and must soon wither and die as branches severed from the vine.