Is this new? Have we always blurred politics and faith?

Cold in Laramie asked a good question in the comments of my "bad days happen post. He wonders if our recent mingling of religion and politics is new, but then notes that the Manifest Destiny fervor had religious overtones of justifying American expansion as a divine, well, destiny. When gold was discovered in 1848, New England ministers speculated that God had kept the Spanish from discovering the Gold--and were waiting for good Protestant Americans to be enriched. Of course, in the gold rush, as I have mentioned here, California Indians dropped in population from 150,000 to 30,000 in 12 years. Hard to connect that to God's favor.

Politicians, as CIL notes, did not used to insert their faith so readily into the campaign and political dialogue. This manifest destiny stuff was more in the order of what historians call a "secular religion" where people confuse or conflate their political and religious institutions into one big amalgam. We see that pretty early on in the new Republic and it continues.

This most recent version, I think, is in fact the latest of that. That is the part that christian conservatives really need to examine. The problem with it is, as Kevin notes, that political patriotism is tantamount to idolotry. When people lose track of the distinction between their political and religious identity, then you get an easy move to religiously justified military aggression. After all, if God is on our side, he isn't with our enemies, right? I don't think that is compatible with the Bible, but that language is all over our recent invasion of Iraq. There are legitimate reasons to support the war (not enough, in my estimation), but us being on God's side and this being a spiritual war is not one of them. That is how crusades happen and pograms and purges and ethnic cleansing and genocide and... and.. When your enemy is evil and the enemy of God, then you have to wipe them out, right? Girl Grace just left a great comment quoting Lincoln on how both sides in the Civil War thought that God was on their side. Lincoln was smart enough to realize that neither side was divinely justified.

And even if the stakes are not a holy war, they show up in our political dialogue in the ways we have been talking about now for the last few years. The recent attack on the judiciary reminds me of this. Attacking the very framework of the independent judiciary has real consequences and has the future potential of undermining what Conservative Christians want now. But listening to Mohler, Dobson and Kennedy, one cannot avoid the sense of divine arrogance. They are right, because they are on God's side.

I am now not sure if I answered CIL's question. That won't shock him. I suspect that our religious/political merging is new and old. New in that we have politicians using faith and religious people to get elected. Old in that the blending of "patriotism" and faith is as old as our republic.