‘False Certitude’ Defines Our Religion, and Our Politics Pondering the Fate of the American Experiment

As the commentariat has relentlessly noted, political divisions in the United States have become deeper and more threatening to the stability of our representative democracy. 

We’ve seen it in the politics that have stirred up and befuddled voters in Kansas City and throughout the Midwest. In fact, Yvette Walker, the opinion editor of The Kansas City Star, and I now are giving a series of talks to area churches on what we can do to rescue our democracy. 

The religion-politics connection is important, as I’ll explain. 

What we don’t know yet in the aftermath of the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is whether this most recent political shock will end either in some relatively peaceful resolution or in the collapse of the American experiment. 

But we do know that institutional religion has set a pattern for the sad reality of political divisions among our citizens. Yes, it has produced an often-healthy diversity of theological approaches. But it’s also brought something destructive — false certitude about what we can know about the cosmos and the divine. 

It’s that certitude that seems to have drifted from our religions to our politics and often made it difficult, if not impossible, to understand each other or even respect our differences.  

From our nation’s beginning, this destructive certainty, rooted in religious divisions, has led to countless errors of judgment, including those having to do with social and governmental structures and policies. 

In many ways, all this began with the detestable “Doctrine of Discovery,” promulgated by the Vatican in 1493. That document gave white European invaders theological cover to commit cultural and physical genocide against the Indigenous inhabitants of this land. 

That permission then played itself out in a willfully arrogant idea called “Manifest Destiny,” which blessed the theft of land and the crushing of Indigenous people from coast to coast here in what our ancestors ignorantly and pridefully called the “New World.” 

From there it was a small step to using scripture to justify chattel slavery and to institutionalize white and male supremacy in our governmental structures. 

Our nation’s founders used aspirational words like “all men are created equal” and “we the people,” but it took generations for those words to begin to be realized in law, constitutional amendments and social change. And it was institutional religion that became an indispensable model for all this division and the certainty of leaders that they are getting everything right. 

Such divisions began early, no doubt long before the First Century. But if you look at Israel at the time of Jesus, you discover not one Judaism but several Judaisms. The Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and other subsets set a divisional pattern that began to appear in Christianity soon after its reluctant parting from Judaism. 

Christians split into competing teams that, in broad sweep, today include Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Pentecostals. But drill down within each larger group and you find division after division with claims of divine affirmation of each one’s particular take on theology. 

This sad history at least has led to some decent humor, such as the joke about a man who washed up on a deserted island only to find another man already living there. But there were two structures on the tiny island, so the visitor asked what each one was and was told this: “Oh, this one is my church. That other one is the church I used to attend.” 

And the various approaches to vexing theological questions are so widespread that one way to take it all in is to make fun of it, as did a cartoon I once saw. It showed a man talking on the phone to his pastor, to whom he says this: “My wife has just left me, one of my kids is on drugs and I just lost my job. So please explain to me again the differences among A-, Pre- and Post-millennialism.” 

You can see these religious divisions even in the structures that dot the Kansas City region and in the regular changes that occur in that landscape as faith groups move, die or grow. It’s a dynamic process that helps to shape who we are as metro area residents. And although this diversity can be generative, it’s often rooted in conflict, as evidenced by the current schism in the United Methodist Church. 

From the beginning of the American experiment, politics have been influenced and deeply shaped by countless pockets of theological immodesty. They include groups or denominations that express dead certainty that some people are destined for heaven and some for hell. They also include professional theologians who argue with equal certainty that hell doesn’t even exist but is an idea anathema to a loving God. 

Our founders were wise to embed religious liberty in our Constitution and for our government eventually to create a case-law barrier (rather porous at times) between church and state. But that hasn’t kept our politics free of the kind of painful divisions common in the field of religion. 

Perhaps the miracle (another overused theological word) is that for most of American history, only two political parties have dominated our politics. 

Yes, lots of minor parties have popped up and, in some cases, have made important contributions to our life together. But none has ever seriously challenged the long run of the Republicans and Democrats as dominant — even though the parties themselves sometimes have changed internally so much as to be almost unrecognizable when compared with their historical ancestors. That seems to be true today of the Republican party, now dominated by the Trumpians and their desire to return the country to some imagined time when all was great, a past that never existed. 

Religions in Europe and elsewhere in the past used to go to war with some regularity — real war with dead bodies and blood. Those days aren’t exactly over, as we saw in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which my own nephew was murdered. But these days theological differences now don’t often lead to one blood-stained religious war after another. 

False certitude in religious ideas, however, has been an important precedent for the false certitude we see in our national and local politics. And as a people supposedly dedicated to the ideas of equality and democratic principles, we’re much the worse for it and should be working to undo it. 

Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website, book reviews for The National Catholic Reporter and for The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is “Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.” Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com.