In the first book of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Lilliput,” published in 1726, Jonathan Swift details the great controversy that agitated the peace and quiet of the inhabitants of that tiny land. The controverted issue is deeply important to the adherents of either side of the question. It involved the breaking of eggs. As Swift ways, “the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end.” Because of an accidental injury suffered by the current emperor’s grandfather as he broke his egg in that “primitive” way, that grandfather’s father, the then-emperor, issued a command for “all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.” The imperial edict led to resistance from the “Big-enders” so powerful that “there have been six rebellions raised on that account.” Serious rebellions indeed, since in their violence “one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.” Naturally the emperor of Blefuscu, Lilliput’s inveterate enemy, took advantage of the unrest. He received the Lilliputian exiles, using them to foment more unrest in Lilliput. The result? “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”
For folks with some sense of history it doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand what Swift was mocking with the Big-Endian controversy. For some two hundred and fifty years before the publication of Gulliver’s Travels Europe had been awash in blood as a result of questions not too distant from those that agitated the Lilliputians. During divine services, was the bread and wine transubstantiated into the actual flesh and blood of Christ, as Catholics and the Orthodox held? Or was there only a sort of spiritual shadow of flesh and blood, a consubstantiation of the bread and wine, as Martin Luther had it? Or were the Baptists right that there was no real or imagined magic involved at all, and the ceremony was simply a memorial of what the Gospels said happened way back when?
Alas the failure of historical memory is a well-known disease in America, where there’s no dismissal more trenchant that to say that something is history. In any case, there seem to be a number of Americans who are all for declaring the US a “Christian nation.” What they mean by that remains something of a mystery. What variety of “Christian” do they have in mind? I suspect that they haven’t given much thought to the confessional sense of “Christian.” I suspect they mean a nation where people, especially white heterosexual people, go around reading the Ten Commandments on every street corner, behave “modestly,” and scorn anyone who doesn’t adhere to “family values.” Even at that very basic level, however, there are confessional differences that they need to consider. Which version of the Ten Commandments should sprout on those street corners? Does “modestly” mean that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient? Do “family values” assign all power to men who command it over their chaste, silent, and obedient women? Is the condition of being born again the ultimate goal? Or are works as well as faith required? And how does one judge the spiritual condition of anyone?
Given the sorts of differences that “Christianity” as a plain vanilla term obscures, I think it might be very important for those “Christian” nationalists to pay attention to the history of explicitly “Christian” states. Even before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 Europe suffered from religious wars. Wikipedia lists forty-seven wars waged in the name of religion, from the Hussite Wars in Bohemia to the War in the Cevennes in France. I’m not counting the War of the Spanish Succession because, religious overtones though that war had, its major focus was dynastic. So too the French Revolution, whose anticlericalism was an important but subordinate aspect of the war.
The poor eleven thousand Lilliputians who died in the Big-Endian controversy are a pale shadow of the hecatombs of European dead in those wars. How many people died in them? The total is hard to figure, but again Wikipedia estimates anywhere from seven to eighteen million people over the two centuries or so centuries of “Christian” fervor.
The so-called “Puritans”—they were really separatists, not Puritans—who travelled to the New World to establish that much-celebrated city on the hill in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did so specifically to escape the deadly persecution of another “Christian” sect, the Anglicans. Of course, as soon as those “Puritans” became established over on the west side of the Atlantic, they returned the favor, fatally persecuting Quakers, for instance, as well as Baptists. There’s nothing quite like the assurance that God loves you and hates your neighbor to fuel persecution and slaughter.
A third of the way into the 18th century, and things had more or less quieted down when it came to wars motivated by religious differences. Clearly That’s not to say that toleration reigned supreme, but rather that the lines of religious division had merged with the political landscape of European nations. Denmark was Lutheran, France was Catholic. England was Anglican, Spain was Catholic. And there, in its mountain fastness, was good old Calvinist Switzerland, cheek by jowl with the various Catholic Italian states.
That did not mean that religious differences were tolerated within those countries. Certainly Swift knew very well that the Irish, among whom he resided, were screwed by their Protestant overlords. Indeed, English law prohibited Catholics from holding office well into the nineteenth century. To this day, English monarchs are prohibited from being or becoming Catholics. The same sorts of limitations applied in almost every nation state, varying only according to the official religion practiced in the region. It wasn’t active persecution, necessarily, but a constant infringement of people’s liberty and prerogatives much like what applied—applies, I should say, to people of color in the US.
I suspect that none of this is of interest to the “Christian nationalists” who plague the US at this point. Their interest is not religious but sociopolitical. They want to conquer, to reestablish the white supremacy that existed when “America was great,” back before all the progressive movements of the twentieth century took place. Perhaps a return to the ante-bellum condition of the first half of the nineteenth century would be even better.
It’s not Christianity that these folks want. It is dominion.
