Believers, Save the Republic!

Christians should not view this as a foreign concept; a layered understanding of the Christian past suggests that believers should be open to principled compromise, for they have been making accommodations and living with ambiguity from the very first years of the faith. At what is known as the Council of Jerusalem, two camps -- one led by James, the other by Paul -- met to decide to what extent converts to belief in Jesus would be required to follow Mosaic law. They compromised, and Paul captured the dilemma mortals confront when he wrote that on earth we see "through a glass darkly, but then face to face." Only after death will all be revealed -- a realization that argues for more humility and less arrogance.

The battles of the moment are pitched and complicated but not insoluble if undertaken in a spirit of tolerance and forbearance. Many Roman Catholics and Protestant evangelicals believe, for instance, that destroying human embryos solely to harvest their stem cells is morally equivalent to murder. Many others, however, take another view, one also based on faith. Orthodox Jews hold that embryonic research, handled with proper care, fits within the tradition of using God-given intelligence to ameliorate life on earth. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention need not (and will not) fold their tents simply because fellow monotheists see the issue in a different light. If we want to be true to the American gospel, though, we should acknowledge that both sides have a legitimate point of view, and that our course should be democratically determined by the free exchange of ideas, not by turning cultural disagreements into total war.

In fact, neither side has as much to fear from the other as they think. For the religious, the acts of reading, of contemplation and discovery, of writing poems and finding cures, are acts of piety and thanksgiving, for all things are God's. For the secular, such inquiries may turn on the wonders of nature, or rationality, or logic. So be it. The point is that we are all on the same journey, if for different reasons.

Andrew Jackson refused to officially join the Presbyterian Church until he left the White House, saying that he did not want his opponents to claim he was using religion to get ahead in politics. Such a stance feels quaint now, but he was guided by the Founders' example and would have agreed with Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story's public reply to Ezra Ely's "Duty of Christian Freemen to Elect Christian Rulers" sermon. "If there is any right sacred beyond all others . . . it is the right to worship God according to the dictates of our consciences," Story said, adding: "Whoever attempts to narrow it down in any degree, to limit it to the creed of any sect, to bound the exercise of private judgment, or free inquiry . . . be he priest or layman, ruler or subject, dishonors so far the profession of Christianity and wounds it in its vital virtues."

In a voice from the past, a prayer for our own time.

Author's e-mail:

Jon.Meacham@newsweek.com

Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, is at work on a book about Andrew Jackson's presidency.