Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · February 16, 1893

Are We “a Christian Nation?”

[This comment on the opinion from Justice Brewer that this is “a Christian Nation” is reprinted in the Weekly Review from the St. Louis Republic.

A CORRESPONDENT, commenting on the increasing tendency to make religious observance a matter of compulsion by the direct or indirect use of civil enactment, denies that the Supreme Court was sound either in the law or the evidence when it asserted this to be “a Christian Nation.”

This, of course, was the language of the demagogue, the hypocrite, the Pharisee. We are not yet free from those who devour the substance of widows and, for a pretense, make long prayers; and whether these are in or out of office, they are the ones who are most urgent for compulsion as the handmaid of religion. These are the ones who always stand ready to appeal to Caesar and to force him, even when he is unwilling, to crucify every Christ who is sent to them.

It was never intended that this should be “a Christian Nation.” It was intended that Christians, Jews, heathens, and infidels should live together here in full enjoyment of entire liberty of conscience. It was never intended that any Jew or any heathen should be compelled to ask any Christian or any number of Christians for toleration in America. It was asserted, on the contrary, that liberty of conscience is a matter of every man’s right, and not of the mere toleration of any government or any majority whatever.

To a certain class of persons it seems hopeless that the doctrines of Christianity should ever make their way by their own inherent force. Of these, the disciple who cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant and then thrice denied his own Master was the type. They are continually attempting to draw the sword of the State to strike some one whom they regard as an enemy of religion; to cut off the power of some class in the community that they regard as inimical to Christianity. To them there is no meaning in the command, “Put up thy sword into the sheath;” and they can understand nothing of that self-sacrifice which, with power to call “legions of angels,” yet relies solely on the power of truth—on the compulsion that sooner or later truth, if there be no violence to convert it to error, must exert over reason.

This is not “a Christian Nation,” and as long as Christianity is perverted into an excuse for using the force of the State it will be slow in becoming a Christian people.

The truest Christianity we have is religious liberty. If we maintain it we will finally work out the highest possible type of religion by reaching a clearer and fuller understanding of what Christianity really means. If we lose it we lose everything.