(RNS) If a latter-day Rip Van Winkle woke up this week from a 50-year nap in Alabama, he’d figure not much had changed when he learned that Roy Moore had won a runoff election and was poised to become the state’s next U.S. senator.
An Alabama politician who makes his name by refusing to obey federal court orders? Same-old, same-old.
Well, not quite.
Most white Alabamans aren’t yellow-dog Democrats anymore but yellow-dog Republicans. And where George Wallace’s raison d’être was racial segregation, Moore’s is Christian nationalism.
The former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court had a stone monument carved with the Ten Commandments and various patriotic Scriptures placed in the state judicial building. And he told probate judges not to give out marriage licenses because same-sex marriage violates the Christian God’s law.
In the service of his ideology, Moore carries around a laminated copy of Joseph Story’s 1833 “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” which says about the First Amendment: “It was the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America that Christianity ought to be favored by the State.”
Moore loves to quote that line, which in recent years has become a favorite of the David Barton wing of the religious right. And given that Story served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1811 to 1845, and that his magnum opus is still considered an authoritative source on the meaning of the Constitution, it’s a line to be reckoned with.
So here’s where Story was coming from, and what he was talking about.
Story was a dyed-in-the-wool Massachusetts Unitarian, writing at a time when Massachusetts was the last state in the young nation retaining its religious establishment. Indeed, in the 1820s that establishment, known as the “Standing Order,” became Unitarian, thanks to a series of decisions by the (largely Unitarian) Massachusetts judiciary. As a result, Trinitarian Congregationalists were forced to establish their own churches, without material support from the Commonwealth.
Article 2 of the Constitution of the American Unitarian Association, founded in 1825, declared: “The objects of this association shall be to diffuse the knowledge of pure Christianity throughout our country.” This was in line with the famous 1819 discourse of Story’s Harvard classmate, William Ellery Channing, titled “Unitarian Christianity.”
With his co-religionists, Story denied the divinity of Jesus. According to his son’s biography, no man
was ever more free from a spirit of bigotry and proselytism. He gladly allowed every one freedom of belief, and claimed only that it should be a genuine conviction and not a mere theologic opinion, considering the true faith of every man to be the necessary exponent of his nature, and honoring a religious life more than a formal creed. He admitted within the pale of salvation Mahommedan and Christian, Catholic and Infidel. He believed that whatever is sincere and honest is recognized of God; — that as the views of any sect are but human opinion, susceptible of error on every side, it behooves all men to be on their guard against arrogance of belief; — and that in the sight of God it is not the truth or falsity of our views, but the spirit in which we believe, which alone is of vital consequence.
Story believed the “real object” of the First Amendment was to “exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment.” But the Christianity he thought the Constitution favored was so generalized as to include those who, like himself, believed that Jesus was merely a human being and saw salvation as available to good people everywhere. Such a view is not recognized as Christianity by even the liberal National Council of Churches today.
Story’s constitutional interpretation did, however, help foster the pan-Protestantism that lay behind the often virulent anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism of 19th-century America. Looking closely, our latter-day Rip would see Roy Moore as a throwback to the time of his grandparents.
