Month: February 2025

Religion, Politics and the Curvature of History

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I often sit down and read short sections of the Bible. A friend of mine, who became a pastor, once told me that the Bible was God’s authorized word; and written by those under God’s direction. I never thought much one way or another about who wrote the Bible. I’ll even go so far as to accept that those who wrote the Bible were listening to God as they inked the pages and bound them together. But now that I think about it, it is not who wrote the Bible but who and how it has been interpreted through the ages, particularly the New Testament.

The same is partially true for our Constitution, our legal Bible so to speak. We know who wrote the Constitution, and we know that before the ink had dried the framers were already debating various interpretations. Particularly differing views from Hamiltonian Federalists and banking and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans in foreign land purchases.

Early Christians/Jews could not agree on a lot of things from Mosaic law in keeping the sabbath holy to allow believing Gentiles to convert to Christianity. They debated the existence of Jesus as a man of virgin birth; or was he pure spirit; to some was he the Messiah; and then what was his relationship to God. These early Christian churches from Carthage in Africa and the Coptic church in Egypt to Roman Catholic churches in Europe to Eastern Orthodox churches of Byzantine and Antioch in Asia Minor all had differing opinions on Jesus and other conflicting dogmatic matters. It is interesting to note that Christianity is not the major religion in most of these geographical locations today.

Unlike some scientific laws, like Newton’s Laws of Motion or Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, religious and political laws always seem to be up for debate. Debates that in most cases end up having somebody losing a head. As Pontius Pilate said to Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar: And what is ‘truth’? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?

Much like the early Christians, Americans tripped over some of the same truths. For instance, for many the Constitution was nothing without a Bill of Rights. Since the first Ten Amendments the Constitution has been amended 17 times. But like early 1st Century Christians who were debating who could be a Christian, 18th Century Americans within ten years after becoming a nation were arguing the same point: who could be a citizen, who could vote and who was only a partial person.

Congress, in 1798, passed a series of laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Naturalization Act, included in the Alien and Sedition Acts, upped residency requirements. To become a citizen, a person had to reside in America for 14 years, up from five years. It seems most arriving immigrants sided with Jefferson and his Republicans. Voting immigrants caused some electoral distress among Federalists.

In addition there was the Alien Friends Act. According to History.com, this “Act allowed the president to deport any non-citizen suspected of plotting against the government, even in peacetime.” It is a good thing the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6 were citizens open to pardons instead of deportations.

But the Act that probably had the most sting was the Sedition Act. This Act, “took direct aim at those who spoke out against the president (at the time, the thinned-skinned John Adams) or the Federalist-dominated government.” History.com says, “Altogether, the federal government tried and convicted ten people under the Sedition Act, including four top Jeffersonian-Republican newspaper editors. Although the Federalists won convictions, they lost politically by creating martyrs and giving defendants a platform to defend freedom of speech and the press.”

 Ironically the Sedition Act, like one of Kepler’s planets, reappeared in 1918. According to the National Constitution Center the 1918 Sedition Act “imposed harsh penalties for a wide range of dissenting speech, including speech abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution, and the military. These laws were directed at socialists, pacifists, and other anti-war activists.” This is sort of an American Casablanca moment when Captain Renault orders: Round up the usual suspects.

The rounding up the usual suspects could be said of Christianity’s interesting interpretations of Christianity. The Romans had no trouble making sport of Christians in the Colosseum. Christians of later years learned from the Romans. Christians had no problem slaughtering and burning each other at the stake for heresy. Inquisitions were a common occurance well up into the 1970s in Ireland. Being saved was open for debate.

It took more about 300 years from Jesus’s death for churches to start singing from the same hymnal. Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the Roman Empire with he Edict of Milan 313 A.D. Before that, the official Roman view of Christianity was religio prava: an evil or depraved religion. It gives new meaning to putting Christ back in Christmas and Nativities down at City Hall.

I am not trying to be sacrilegious but just because Christianity or the Catholic Church was street legal in Rome did not mean the various churches agreed on a lot of issues. Again, it took the Roman Emperor, Constantine, to knock heads together and get bishops in a room at the First Council of Nicea in 325 to hammer out their differences. He basically said your not finished until you come out with some sort of consensus. Hence, we got the Apostles Creed.

There were six more councils with the last or the Second Council of Nicea in 787 dealing with with icons and relics. Some religious scholars of the time, iconoclasts, believed praying to icons was parting from the Second Commandment–worshiping idols, a no-no that got the Jews in trouble with the Golden Calf while waiting for Moses to lead them into the promised land. Iconophiles, on the other hand, where a little more lenient in their views saying God told the Jews to put two Cherubims on the Ark of the Covenant. And, that icons were real proof that Jesus was a real person.

I wonder what these bejeweled bishops would have thought of Rastafari. According to Britannica. com, Rastafari “is a monotheistic religion that originated in Jamaica in the 1930s. It is centered on Africa and is based on the interpretation of the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Rastafarians believe in a single God, Jah, and that Haile Selassie I, the former Emperor of Ethiopia, is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.” Can you imagine them imparting their religious views on ganja as the sacrament. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper could have been the first pot party.

When it comes to religion and politics we rarely end up agreeing on one or two things. In most cases, we agree upon nothing most of the time. Eventually the bickering come to an end and people part ways. In 1054 the churches chucked the common hymnal. The Roman (Latin) Catholic Church split with the Eastern (Greek) Orthodox church. It had as much to do with religious dogma as shifting political winds on who would rule portions of the now defunct Roman Empire. The Roman Empire in Europe was a pile of dust that brought life to a new Holy Roman Empire with Papal powers. Also large swaths of Christian Africa and the Middle East left the church for Islam. There was a Muslim Caliphate in Egypt. In-between these two sat an Eastern Greek Orthodox,the Byzantine Empire. Religious clashes now included diametrically opposing views of God’s intentions more often than not settled with the sword.

But one good schism deserves another and the Catholic Church was not through with the splitting process. In the late 1500s the Protestant Reformation spun of all sorts of new religions into orbit. In many ways this reformation was as much a political revolution as it was an attempt at reforming religious thought. The reformation was also causing inner strife within ruling kingdoms of the time–aka Henry the VIII and his wedding/divorce woes. If you don’t like the divorce court’s rulings, start your own religion. And, oh by the way, make yourself the head of the religion.

Eventually some of those religions managed to land upon the Eastern shores of this country bringing their religious strife to the New World. Fortunately for us, political heads prevailed over fundamentalist religious preachers of the time. However, there was one Old World concept that still resonated within the New World: slavery, our original sin so to speak. Much like the Catholic Church during the Reformation, America eventually had s schism in the way it viewed the Constitution

Throughout our history we have had various and changing sects (political parties) and their absolute interpretations of the Constitution. Take the slavery issue and the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision Taney ruled that basically African Americans (free or otherwise) had no rights under the Constitution. Sticking to the prevailing thought at the time, Taney believed that slaves were property, and hence had no rights he or anybody else needed to respect. The only real reference to African Americans in the United States legally was that they were three-fifths of a person, an economic/political concept that worked for almost 100 years. The Civil War forced a major shift in dealing with more than four-hundred million freed African Americans. They went from property to voting citizens within a decade.

The aftermath of the American Civil War completely altered the way we would look at the law and the Constitution. It was Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity for social sciences. According to howstuffworks.com Einstein’s theory “remains an important and essential discovery because it permanently altered how we look at the universe. Einstein’s major breakthrough was to say that space and time are not absolutes.” The Civil War changed the way America would look at human rights. It threw America’s absolute views into a world of uncertainty.

How was America to view the recently freed slaves? It is sort of like Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. According to scienceexchange.caltech.edu “the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa. Post Civil War politics never nailed down African Americans positions in a freed society. The speed of this transition however, was known. It was slow and backwards to those halcyonic antebellum times.

In order to rectify the concept that slaves were property, the Constitution had to be amended. It had to upgrade the African American population to citizenship 3.0. They had to be set free from serving the peculiar institution they were forever indentured to. They had to be made citizens. And, they had to be given the right to vote. Most middle school civics class students would know that this is the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, amendments needed to make Roger B. Taney’s decision null and void.

In a weird twist of property rights and logic the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case in 2010 ruled that money was free speech. Interesting because money is also property. And corporations are loaded up with money. These monied interests are now granted Second Amendment rights under the law of the land. They can spend their money on elections like a kid at the county fair. Can you imagine after seeing the Israelites dancing around the Golden Calf Moses decided to amend the Second Commandment. What absolute will dissolve away next? With Artificial Intelligence right around the corner, Citizens United may have pushed the concept that if money is property will my laptop eventually get the right to vote. I am just wondering.

I am going to go off on the deep end. I think history is a lot like curved space time, not linear. History events are like Halley’s Comet. History is a giant mass. And it is not so much that history repeats itself, it is that certain fundamental so-called absolutes, human issues, rights, whatever keeping coming back around in time. These issues are caught in history’s gravitational pull spiraling in on us. Until we sort these issues out, nail down their position and velocity, they basically will keep coming back around and around until they crash in on us, whether they are religious or political.

From Gilded Age to Golden Age

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contemplative images flickr.com

In President Trump’s Inaugural Address he boldly stated, “The golden age of America begins right now.” It has a nice ring to it but when you think about it, America’s last attempt at a golden age was called the Gilded Age.

Our Gilded Age was a time that was between the Civil War and the and turn of the 20th Century. It was a time when America was unfolding itself from sea to shining sea. History.com describes it as an era where “America became more prosperous and saw unprecedented growth in industry and technology.” But it was also an era as History.com says, that “had a more sinister side: It was a period where greedy, corrupt industrialists, bankers and politicians enjoyed extraordinary wealth and opulence at the expense of the working class. In fact, it was wealthy tycoons, not politicians, who inconspicuously held the most political power during the Gilded Age.”

For a Golden Age to be golden it needs to fit the following criteria:

  • The age must have stable economic growth, trade and the creation of wealth;
  • The age must have significant advancements in the arts, literature and science that contributes to the advancement of civilization;
  • The age must be one of discovery and innovation where progress pushes the envelope of what is possible;
  • Finally, it must be an age where there are peaceful relations among citizens and other countries.

Granted very few eras in history have hit all of the above criteria in full. It could be argued that for most of the United States history the US has come close to meeting most of the criteria to some degree some of the time; and at other times completely disregarded others. But even the Gilded Age with its moments of great wealth had its moments of economic panics, followed once again with the creation of great wealth. It was a time when the captains of industry controlled entire industries creating monopolies and trusts. and full employment. But it was a time where workers barley made $500 a year.

 Like today, New York City was the center of the financial system. Between 1863 and 1913, eight banking panics occurred in the money center of Manhattan. The panics in 1884, 1890, 1899, 1901, and 1908 were confined to New York and nearby cities and states. The panics in 1873, 1893, and 1907 spread throughout the nation.–federalreservehistory.org

According to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, “In 1879, he made an incandescent bulb that burned long enough to be practical, long enough to light a home for many hours.” Within 60 years there would be night baseball.

Louis Bachrach Studios Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

It was a period of peace and innovation. Inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell pushed the boundaries of science. Their inventions had a great impact on raising America’s standard of living and helped push the world into an electronic age of light and communication.

Alexander Bell places the first long-distance call from New York to Chicago in 1892. There were no free minutes at that time or unlimited texting.

Gilbert H. Grosvenor Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

With the influx of immigrants, a segregated population became more segregated with laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It was a law that restricted Chinese laborers from entering the country, among other restrictions. It also affected Chinese immigrants already in the country by making them permanent aliens. It was an act of denying them citizenship. It was also a time where women, citizens, were denied the right to vote.

And it was a time of full employment fueled by immigrants, where workers barley made $500 a year. It was also a time dangerous working and conditions for labor. One slip or injury could cause economic devastation for a family. Unions fought for survival. However most were crushed from the weight of business interests working in conjunction with the government.

  • There was the Haymarket Riot of 1886 where workers were rallying for an 8 hour day. A bomb exploded killing workers and seven policemen.
  • There was the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 where workers battled Pinkerton Detectives brought in by Andrew Carnegie’s chief executive Henry Clay Frick to break the strike. Eventually the Pennsylvania Militia was called out and the union organization was crushed.
  • And two years later there was the Pullman Strike. Pullman manufactured railroad cars. In 1893 George Pullman laid off seventy-five percent of the work force and reduced wages for those still working. The the American Railway Union called for a nationwide strike shutting down rail travel in 27 states. Eventually, President Grover Cleveland sent in 10,000 troops to quash the strike.

The annual income of an American worker in 1890, at the height of the Gilded Age. Adjusted for inflation, that’s just under $1,500 in today’s dollars.–Investopedia

Sticking with the railroad motif, Louisiana in 1890 passed The Separate Car Act. Railroads were required to provide “equal but separate accommodations for white and African American passengers.” Additionally, according to Britannica.com, the law prohibited passengers from entering accommodations other than those to which they had been assigned on the basis of their race.

The argument necessarily assumes … that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals. (From Brown’s majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson. In other words, don’t trip over the color line on the way out.

Original published in The American Magazine in 1905 Frances Benjamin Johnston

It is amazing how educated legal minds can interpret the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. When this law was challenged in court it made its way to the Supreme Court. In Plessy v Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that separate accommodations did not violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority. He “argued, because the amendment was intended to secure only the legal equality of African Americans and whites, not their social equality. Legal equality was adequately respected in the act because the accommodations provided for each race.” The lone dissenting vote came from John Marshall Harlan who fundamentally objected to the statute because “it interferes with the personal freedom of citizens.” The ruling gave us the concept of “separate but equal.” A dogmatic principle that hung around for another 50 plus years.

A Golden Age is a term used to describe a period in history where a culture, society, or nation experiences a period of prosperity, peace, and advancements. This era is characterized by significant achievements, significant contributions, and a collective sense of prosperity and unity. Golden ages are often marked by major advances in science, technology, art, and literature.–California Learning Resource Network

Before declaring a golden age Trump and company should look at what they are up against. They may have a hard time competing with the likes of ancient Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty. We might be going back more than 4500 years but in its golden age these pharaohs put up some impressive feats, like building pyramids. According to Pharaoh.se “the pharaohs of this dynasty only ruled for a little more than a century (and we think eight years is a long time), and yet they managed to have the three pyramids of Giza built in that time.” The pharaoh Sneferu started construction of the first pyramid and built three more, (no doubt letting the Nubians to pay for last two).

The Pyramids of Giza
Ricardo Liberato, Wikimedia Commons

His son Khufu continually improved upon his dad’s work. No pressure on Don Junior. In Trump’s first term he could not complete a wall along the Southern Border. (It was foiled when Mexico reneged on its fiduciary participation.) However Trump is proposing the Stargate Initiative. According to Forbes, this is “a $500 billion private sector deal to expand U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. Spearheaded by tech giants OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, Stargate represents the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” Move over pyramids because the Yanks are coming! The sky’s the limit when billionaires get together. (At least three have skirted outer space.)

And then there is the Golden Age of Ukraine. If Trump plans to end Russia’s conquest of Ukraine he might want to bone up on Vladimir I or just Vladimir the Great. And no, this is not Putin but the “founding father” of Kievan Rus’. Putin might be using history to repeat Vladimir I’s medieval accomplishments. We have to harken back the 10th and 11th Century when Kievan Rus’ was Europe’s most powerful European state. A state without nuclear weapons. Vladimir I is credited with expanding Christianity to that region. Originally a pagan, much like Saul of Tarsus, he saw the light. When he converted to Christianity he oversaw the conversion of Kyiv and Novgorod to Christianity as well. For kicks he had all pagan idols thrown into the Dnieper River.

And lest not forget what was once “The Red Menace” from the East, China. Any golden age today has to take into account one of the oldest cultures in human civilization. Just look to the Tang Dynasty. Its first emperor was Gaozu (also Kao-tsu, formerly Li Yuan,-tsu (618-626 C.E.). According to ushistory.org, Gaozu “granted equal amounts of land to each adult male in return for taxes and continued the trend of local government rule…he also created a monetary system of copper coins.” Maybe Trump and Friends are onto something with Bitcoin. And he wrote a set of laws that were revised every two decades that lasted into the 14th century and the Ming dynasty. Sounds a bit like our Presidential Executive Orders, subject change but more frequently.

Emperor Gaozu was a Sui military commander who led a rebellion against his former masters, seized control of the state, and founded the Tang Dynasty
Public Domain

There is a cautionary tale here: “One of Gaozu son’s, General Li Shih-min, succeeded in eliminating all political rivals of the Tang and established firm control of the Tang dynasty over the newly reunified China. He then proceeded to murder his brothers, and forced his father (Gaozu) to abdicate the throne to him. Preferring his temple name, Tai-tsung took the throne in 626 C.E. The Golden Age of China had begun.” Nothing like a little fratricide and shoving the old man off the throne to get a golden age kicked off.

And if Trump wants to purse a Mideast policy he might want to look into the Islamic Golden Age. According Islamic History this golden age “is traditionally dated from the mid-7th century to the mid-13th century during which Muslim rulers established one of the largest empires in history.” It was period when artists, engineers, scholars, poets, philosophers, traders contributed “to agriculture, the arts, economics” mathematics and science. This was a time before OPEC, BP, Mobile, Exxon and Chevron–and Israel.

A little closer to our time the Elizabethan Age between 1558 and 1603 is referred to as a Golden Age of England. “According to Britannica, “it was a span of time characterized by relative peace and prosperity and by a flowering of artistic, literary and intellectual culture.” It was a time of Shakespeare.

With America’s stable economy and government, great universities and innovative thinkers, Trump has a lot to work with in getting a golden age cranked up. A lot of the elements needed to create a golden age are already present. They just need to be combined and conducted into a fine symphony. However, it is going to take more than handing out fries under the Golden Arches to create an age greatness.