How "Israelism" Has Replaced Christianity as the American Civic Religion

Christian Russia and Christian America

Last week I published a long article comparing our society with that of the USSR, our great Cold War adversary.

I noted the disturbing recent trends that have gradually shifted our country towards certain Soviet practices that we had once so sharply condemned, and I drew some uncomfortable conclusions from this.

At one point, I briefly sketched out a few of the strange recent ironies: The Israel Lobby and U... Walt, Stephen M. Check Amazon for Pricing.

During the long Cold War that dominated much of the twentieth century, the USA and the USSR stood as the great rival superpowers, champions of radically different ideological systems.

Today, America and Russia are still major global rivals, but during the 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union their ideological trajectories have moved in unexpected directions.

Although it has a significant Muslim minority, Russia is an unabashed Christian nation, with President Vladimir Putin and other political leaders publicly embracing that traditional Russian religion.

But although a much larger percentage of America’s population has Christian roots, that religion plays no official role whatsoever in our government or our society. Indeed, many recent government policies are absolutely antithetical to those religious traditions. This unusual situation is extremely uncommon outside the West and seems oddly reminiscent of how Russian society had fared during its many decades under the Communist yoke.

So in that matter at least, the USA and the USSR have strangely shifted their ideological positions over time, somehow even passing each other while moving in opposite directions.

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Soviet Communism endured for fewer than seventy-five years, less than the lifetime of many who experienced it. Indeed, one of its foremost foes was the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn who was born just a few weeks after the Bolshevik coup and died in 2008 at the age of 89, long outliving the system he had so strongly opposed. Late in his life, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for having restored Christian Russia and saved his country from collapse. Putin was one of the mourners at Solzhenitsyn’s funeral and then directed that The Gulag Archipelago be added to the standard curriculum of all Russian schools.

As someone who came of age during the late Cold War, I had regularly seen “Communist Russia” used in my media outlets and textbooks, almost interchangeably with “the USSR” or “the Soviet Union.” Conservatives often favored that former term because it carried a much sharper ideological edge, helping to explain and justify the great geopolitical struggle we were waging against that rival superpower.

But although Christian Russia became a reality decades ago, replacing the Communist Russia we had long denounced, I’ve almost never seen that contrasting phrase used anywhere in American society or our media outlets. Perhaps it might raise disturbing questions about the underlying sources of our intense hostility toward that large geopolitical rival. So much of the flag-waving FoxNews audience skews elderly that many of those individuals may vaguely assume that Putin’s Russia is still Communist, and disabusing them of that notion might seriously undercut their support for our renewed Cold War.

One reason that the Bolshevik Revolution came as such a huge shock to the Westerners of 1917 was that for well over a century Russia had been the world’s largest Christian nation, and its people who followed the Eastern Orthodox Church were widely regarded as among the most deeply religious.

In that year, the Christian population of the Russian Empire probably numbered over 120 million, substantially greater than the number of Christians in the United States, which ranked second in size. So Christianity had been overthrown in its leading country and Christians throughout Europe and across the world recoiled in horror.

The Bolsheviks who seized power in a coup were militant atheists, who despised Christianity and all other religions. During the bitter civil war that followed, religious Russian Christians and their clergy were often strongly aligned with the White armies on the other side, so it was hardly surprising that the Bolsheviks employed very brutal tactics to suppress them. Estimates vary, but perhaps as many as 300,000 Orthodox priests, monks, and nuns were executed during the first quarter-century of Bolshevik rule.

Prior to the 1917 October Revolution, the Russian Empire had boasted more than 77,000 churches, but nearly all of these were destroyed or permanently closed by the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Regime they established, so by 1939 only a few hundred remained open for active worship. In the immediate aftermath of Germany’s 1941 Barbarossa invasion, Stalin desperately reversed this policy, relaxing the campaign against Christianity as a wartime measure. But Christianity remained stigmatized and partially suppressed down to the 1991 fall of Communism.

The Great Delusion: Li... Mearsheimer, John J. Best Price: $14.77 Buy New $16.42 (as of 05:07 UTC - Details) Measuring religious faith is obviously difficult in a country governed by a militantly anti-religious regime. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the number of Soviets with Christian roots was generally quite close to the figures for the United States, with all other nations in the world very far behind. So although neither I nor most others probably thought in such terms, the long Cold War was actually waged between the world’s two largest Christian countries, the key difference being that one of them was then under anti-Christian rule and the other was not.

Russia, the partial successor state to the dissolved USSR, today includes a smallish and well-integrated Muslim population that amounts to perhaps 10-12% of the total, along with mere slivers of various other non-Christian faiths. But a country in which at least 85% of the total population has a Christian background is obviously Christian, and calling it anything else is mere ideological foolishness. Moreover, Christianity enjoys a somewhat privileged status in that society, something that is only natural given its overwhelmingly dominant numerical position.

But it is quite enlightening to apply this same sort of analysis to our own country.

Over the years I have read many works published in America during the last couple of centuries, and the term “Christian America” has only very rarely been used to characterize our country.

Across our entire national history, our society has been so overwhelmingly, almost uniformly Christian that the use of such a term made little sense. For example, the population of Iran is around 99% Muslim by background while the figure for Pakistan is over 95%, so someone even slightly familiar with the region would only very rarely bother using the term “Muslim Iran” or “Muslim Pakistan.”

Although Americans were divided into many different sects and their degree of religiosity greatly varied, prior to the heavy influx of Eastern European Jews that began in the late nineteenth century, around 99% of our population had always had Christian roots. Even afterward the Christian percentage remained around 95%.

Calling America a Christian nation was so self-evidently true it was hardly necessary except occasionally as a form of moral commendation, and use of the term Christian America was quite uncommon.

But although the numbers and percentages remained the same, in the years leading up to World War II, such a Christian description became increasingly seen as harsh and exclusionary. Although the term “Judeo-Christian” had first appeared during the nineteenth century, it only gradually came into common American usage during the 1930s and then especially during the postwar era that followed. In actual fact, Judaism and Christianity are extremely different religions, and they have often been bitterly hostile throughout their shared 2,000 year history, but accuracy was sacrificed to political inclusivity.

And once this descriptive and ideological transformation took hold, any reference to Christian America was considered more and more problematical, almost suggesting anti-Semitism. During that same period, there were increasing legal and political efforts to expel all expressions of Christianity from the public space, with prayer banned in the public schools, creches removed from town squares, and even such innocuous non-religious elements as Christmas trees and Christmas carols sometimes denounced.

Yet despite all of this, the underlying population numbers in America have never really much changed. Since 1965, our country has received enormous waves of immigrants from all across the world, and our ethnic and racial diversity has greatly increased. But although Americans may or may not be religious, almost 95% of them still have Christian roots, making America nearly as Christian as Pakistan is Muslim.

Furthermore, America currently has by far the world’s largest Christian population, greatly exceeding the total for second-ranking Brazil, and far more than that of any European country, with Russia and Mexico probably vying for third place. The Ages of Globalizat... Sachs, Jeffrey D. Check Amazon for Pricing.

So we have something of a paradox. America is the world’s largest Christian country and 95% of our population has that background. By any reasonable standard, America is a Christian country, and indeed the clear world leader of Christianity. But almost no one in the respectable mainstream would ever publicly express such sentiments, and there are no indications that we see ourselves in that role, or act accordingly.

Meanwhile, our society and our political system have increasingly expunged all outward signs of that religion from our public life. After this decades-long social transformation, I think only the bravest or most foolhardy elected officials or celebrities would ever dare to publicly describe America as “a Christian country” let alone use some version of the phrase “Christian America” in a non-ironic sense.

In puzzling out this strange and contradictory situation, we should remember that by exactly that same standard of population size and religious background, the USSR remained the world’s leading Christian country throughout its entire existence.

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