Religion And Politics

This is not a Hub about the influence of Christianity on American political decision-making. I know there's a lot of debate about that, and I know a lot of folks, including the founding fathers, nursed a fond belief that a government could and should govern without messing in the religious faith of its citizens. And I know it seems a mite upsetting that religion and politics keep climbing into bed together. But take heart - in a historical context, this is not an unusual situation.

Going back to the dawn of time, the span of control of an individual deity was usually just one tribe. The shaman held a lot of power, because the mysteries of life, death, illness, and ecstatic experiences were the most important issues being debated around the campfires. That, and recounting ad nauseum the one hunt in the past year and a half where a sizable animal actually got speared.

Seriously, birth, illness and death inspire awe and fear, and wenever we humans feel awe and fear, we imediately seek control. Anyone climing to control these things, or at least intervene on our behalf, can command our loyalty, the pick of the cute virgins, and the prime cuts from the one speared animal when it's roasted.

Scroll forward in time, to when settled agriculture was allowing large city-states to arise. At some point, around the vicinity of a river and seven hills, with or without the involvement of a she-wolf who suckled orphan twins (histories conflict on this point), a city-state called Rome came into existence.

Rome really had the hang of the whole relligion and politics gig from the get-go.

The Romans were really relaxed about Gods. "Well, hey, you have a different deity from us? No problem, bring it on down here, let's take a look at it, hmmm, female, has to do with fighting, sounds familiar let me think, ah, I've got it! There's your problem! You've been calling her Sulis, and that's fine, we're open-minded about these things, you go right on ahead calling her that, but just so's you know, her real name is Minerva. We might call her Sulis-Minerva for a while, just so nobody gets confused, OK? Great."

It's called syncretism, and that particular bit of it happened around the British city of Bath during the Roman occupation in the first few centuries AD.

Minerva herself had already been syncretised with the Greek Goddess Artemis long before, and many other local warrior Goddesses were subsumed into her over-arching mantle.

The beauty of syncretisation was that it complately took the wind out of hte sails of any local religious-based resistance movement.

The Romans provided food, entertainment, and supported the local religions, so what was there for anyone to rebel against?

Well, there was taxes, of course. But it's hard to mobilise the mass of poverty-stricken peasantry to rise up with pitchforks over taxes.

It was a highly successful policy of Rome's, and the policy did not slow down one iota when Rome became Christianised.

A big challenge to the newly-Christianised Rome was how to maintain the entertainment levels after having adopted a fairly Spartan creed. The Puritans, with their horror of adornment and frivolity of any kind, epitomise the desert-bred asceticism of the ancestral Christian forefathers.

Rome, on the other hand, oversaw a population of millions who were accustomed to a wild festival known as the Saturnalia at midwinter, and something akin to a masked ball and orgy at midsummer. Dilemma ...

Casting about in the Christian traditions for something to celebrate, some bright spark suggested the birth of Christ might be a good reason to have a midwinter party.

"Wasn't he born at census time?" said a nay-sayer. "We don't conduct census at midwinter."

"Shhhhhhh!' said everyone else, and midwinter it was.

Later on, when the Germanic and Nordic countries converted to Christianity, the pagan Yule log elements of midwinter festivals were gaffer-taped on to the dislocated birthday party.

Easter, named after the Germanic Goddess Eastre (Goddess of spring and fertility, hence the bunnies and the chickens), was an adaptation of a pagan festival (or a range of pagan festivals) which involved practices frowned upon by the sexually conservative Christian faith - like the ritual fertilisation of the fields by public intercourse between a male representing the Horned God and a female representing Mother Earth.

Toned down dramatically by its combination with the Jewish Passover, with its periods of fasting and solemnity, Easter became the perfect time to commemorate the death and rebirth of Jesus, since there was all that rebirth symbolism in place in the pagan traditions anyway. Was he actually crucified in Spring?

Shhhhhhh ...

No, actually, there was mention of Passover in the dealings with Pontius Pilate prior to the crucifixion, so assuming we can trust the historical accuracy of those texts (hmmm, leaving that issue aside) it was not too far off the mark, probably.

Halloween (All Hallows Eve) was a valiant attempt to claw back the Day of The Dead (November 1st) from pagan deities.

Rather than tackle the day directly, since they didn't really want to assoicate with death deities, the Christians thought they would make the night before a big party, and maybe their followers would be too hung over to worship the pagan death gods the next day.

You'd have to chalk that one up as a win for the death Gods, I'd say, given what Halloween is today.

Score - Christians 2, Pagans 1.

Although the stamping out of midsummer Bacchanalia probably counts as a victory for the Christians.

A few thousand twee tykes in folk dress dancing around Maypoles to celebrate Summer is a far cry from anything Bacchus would have deigned to attend.

Mind you, there is a case to make that "Schoolies Week" on the Australian Gold Coast is the new home of the Bacchanalia ...

Moving right along, though, the Holy Roman Empire was well and truly a political animal.

After the fall of Rome in 476AD, the Eastern part of the Roman Empire became Byzantium, a powerful nation for a thousand years.

The Western part, battered by barbarian hordes, took a while to recover its political strength, but recover it did.

Throughout the Dark Ages, the Holy Roman Empire grew in wealth and power - at one point, controlling a third of all the land in Europe.

Popes fielded armies, went to war, and suffered from an almost constant series of succession battles - inevitable, really, when you have to pretend you were celibate and can't just pass rulership to a son or grandson.

(Celibacy for priests was mandated around 600 AD by Pope Gregory I - a bit of a bugger, really, for those who came after him and had to follow his edicts.)

Celibacy (or ostensible celibacy) ensured that property would remain in the Church and not pass to wives or daughters, and thus to other political figures via marriage. Again, a political motivation for a religious edict.

At one point, in 827, there were three Popes, each with their own group of followers, waging war to determine who was going to be "THE" Pope.

Popes annulled royal marriages on request (until one of them got sick of Henry VIII's constant requests for annulments, triggering the exit of England from the Holy Roman Empire and the Establishment of the Church of England in 1534).

Henry VIII's older daughter, Mary, remained a Catholic, and married the Catholic Philip of Spain. After Henry died, the British nobility feared that her children may make England a part of Spain, so she was deposed, and her sister, Elizabeth I, a staunch Anglican, took the throne.

Those were dark years in England, as Catholics, then Anglicans, then Catholics again were imprisoned, tortured, and executed for their beliefs. In the end, however, England sallied forth a sovereign nation, and in fact absorbed Scotland through Elizabeth's successor, James I of England, who was James IV of Scotland.

You see, therefore, that not just religion, but marriage, too, was a highly politically-charged affair.

The Church held the power to sanction and annul marriages (and the Anglican Church also had the power to allow a *gasp* divorce!). The Church also held great wealth in land and had the ability to raise money.

But times were changing.

Gustav Vasa of Sweden, who had courted Elizabeth I (unsuccessfully), pulled out of the Holy Roman Empire, and Martin Luther nailing his protests to the door of a Church rewrote not only religious thinking, but the shape of the map of Europe.

The Thirty Years War, initially between Protestants and Catholics in Germany, but eventually involving all the major powers in Europe, wrought great devastation and shifted the balance of power.

The Papal States, the seat of the Pope's military power, shrank steadily though the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by 1870 had been completely absorbed into secular Italy.

In 1929, the Lateran Treaty created the Vatican City State, population approximately 800, which is the last vestige of the once-mighty Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, and the Papal States.

These days, the Pope can say things, and the leaders of nations can ignore him. He won't turn up with a Crusading army behind him and lay waste to their palaces these days.

But the subtle power of the Holy Roman Empire cannot be denied. Even without armies, millions still devoutly follow the Pope's edicts on a daily basis.

And US politicians devoutly follow the devout followers, hoping to woo their votes.

Is it any wonder that we have such trouble today keeping politics and religion apart, when they have been not-so-strange bedfellows since the dawn of time?