Monotheism and the Culture of Absolutes

I have been reading James Joyce’s Ulysses with a small group of retired men in the small western town of Crestone, Colorado. Crestone used to be a mining town in the 19th Century. Today, it is the locus of spiritual retreats representing most of the world’s religions. Some of the men have connections with one or more spiritual organizations while others do not. The discussions have turned out to be one of the highlights of each week for all of us.
Because the novel follows loosely the story of ancient Ulysses (or Odysseus, if you use the Greek rather than Latin name) the notion that man, in ancient Greece, interacted with many gods and often found himself in conflict with them or having to please more than one made life more complex and confusing at times. Seldom did ancient man find himself serving or reacting to one god alone. He had to adapt to the demands of various gods as he encountered them. Man had to be flexible and inventive in order to survive his hostile world. His religion reflected that “reality.”
Today a large percentage of the world has concentrated the powers of the gods into a single entity, a single god. Although there are a variety of those single gods, for the most part the monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, for example) believe in a sole god. They believe their god is the only god, and that any others are either imposters or nonexistent. They may tolerate the existence of someone else’s god, but they do not believe in it.
What happens when you put all your spiritual “eggs in one basket “is you make yourself vulnerable to the concept of the Absolute. One way becomes the only way. Things become black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. Power gets concentrated into an absolute power. Once this concept of the absolute takes root, it is able to spread to all other spheres of thinking. An absolute religious god can give rise to an absolute economic or social one. The mind set can be transferable. This notion is the thesis of a great little classic by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer.
The founding fathers of America saw this problem of concentrated religious power. They saw that America was composed of all sorts of religious sects, many of them allegedly escaping persecuting regimes in Europe, but in reality they themselves were often so “pure” in their beliefs and practices that they had little tolerance for any other beliefs. Even Roger Williams’ colony of Providence Plantations which opened its doors to Jews as well as various Protestant sects would not admit Papists (Catholics). (Ironically, it turns out Catholicism is the major religion represented in Rhode Island today.)
Most of the founding fathers were, to one degree or another, Deists, a term which is foreign to most 21st Century Americans. Deists were not Christians. Deists believed that a supreme being created the universe but that by using reason and the observation of nature man could ascertain truth without the need of faith or organized religion. While the Deists were technically monotheists, they did not organize and codify around that concept to the extent that a hardened religious doctrine evolved from it, as has happened with orthodox aspects of monotheistic religions. In other words, it was a way of thinking about the world rather than a doctrine. Those founders who either claimed to be Deists or were influenced by Deism were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, possibly Alexander Hamilton as well as less famous figures like Cornelius Harnett, Gouvenor Morris, and Hugh Williamson.
In short, fundamentalist Protestant thinking did not play a major role in the construction of the U.S. Constitution. It was reason that dominated the discussion. The whole balance of powers and checks and balances that were woven into that document was intended to ensure that no concentration of power could take place in any branch of government. Absolute power of any kind was something to be avoided or held in check.
Today in America there are no dominant religious gods except perhaps in the Bible Belts of the South. As an example of how the South is different, the Texas state school board just recently decided to subtract Thomas Jefferson from the list of influential figures that inspired revolutions in the 18th and 19th Centuries because he introduced the phrase “separation of church and state.”
During the 19th and 20th Centuries the Protestant god dominated the country and was used to inspire such fervors as Manifest Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s and Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s Joseph McCarthy latched on to an issue which initially and fervently appealed to his fellow Roman Catholics: the communist witch hunt. That issue brought the 20 percent of Americans who were Roman Catholic into the mainstream of religiously inspired causes embraced by a large segment of the Protestant mainstream and paved the way for the country’s acceptance of its first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy in 1960.
However, although there are no nationally dominant gods, that does not prevent groups of Americans from promoting their gods as absolutes whenever possible. Whether it is the god of fundamentalist Christianity, the god of free enterprise, the god of government regulation, the god of anti-abortion, or the god of medical marijuana, America is full of folks who try to push their gods to dominance. Therefore, the founding fathers knew what they were about. Let us hope that this cauldron of vigorous monotheisms can still be transformed into a melting pot of ideas and a living, responsive but responsible set of laws rather than reducing itself to a one stock soup of narrow belief.