Will Republicans Plunge America into a New Dark Age?

The result was that science, culture, and human rights — and even the exploration of any religious doctrine not authorized by Church authorities — were frozen for a “dark” thousand years…

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Want a repeat of the Dark Ages? Just put religion in charge of government.

Donald Trump and JD Vance, who recently converted to Catholicism, are the political leaders of a movement to convert America’s form of governance from a secular democratic republic into a fundamentalist white Christian ethnostate. In this, they’re joined by the six Catholic Republican justices on the Supreme Court who’ve already imposed their church’s religious doctrine on the rest of us with their Dobbs decision.

Trump’s doing this to bring in the fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic vote; Vance is apparently a true believer. In both cases they threaten to throw America into a new Dark Age resembling, in a worst case scenario, the rule of the mullahs who replaced Iran’s secular democracy with a theocratic state.

It’s useful to look at what happened to Europe when, around the 6th century, the newly formed Catholic Church took over most of that continent and ruled it with an iron fist for at least nine centuries, an era we refer to as “the Dark Ages.”

Those who dared think for themselves were routinely murdered. All arts and literature were subject to scrutiny and censorship by religious authorities, as were both business and governmental actions along with marriage. The study of any science that didn’t specifically reinforce Church teachings was banned, as was average people reading the bible.

The result was that science, culture, and human rights — and even the exploration of any religious doctrine not authorized by Church authorities — were frozen for a “dark” thousand years.

Even the discussion or examination of religion — including Catholicism — was banned for everybody except those ordained by the Church.

As the Church Council of Toulouse ruled in their Canon 14, published in 1229 AD:

“We prohibit also that the laity should not be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books.”

The Council of Tarragona of 1234, in its 2nd canon, similarly ruled that:

“No one may possess the books of the Old and New Testaments, and if anyone possesses them he must turn them over to the local bishop within eight days, so that they may be burned…”

In 1380, John Wycliffe was the first to translate the New Testament into English. Two decades after his death the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, ordered Wycliffe’s bones exhumed and publicly burned because of that “sin”; his ashes were then cursed and thrown into the Swift river.

William Tyndale was the second man to try what Wycliffe had been condemned for; he was ordered strangled to death and his body burned in 1535 for the dual heresies of translating the Bible into English and supporting the Protestant Reformation, which Martin Luther had kicked off when he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517.

While some scholars put the end of the Dark Ages at the time of Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Americas, most others pinpoint Luther’s 1517 challenge to Church authority.

Regardless of the date, the point is that as the power of a single religious authority over the nations of Europe began to slip, that event ended roughly a thousand years of stagnation in the arts, sciences, literature, religious exploration, human rights, and philosophy.

Today’s Christian Nationalist movement wants to reverse more than a half-millennium of progress and reinvent America in the mold of Iran, with religious fanatics determining whose rights are protected, who can marry whom, who can have sex with whom and when and how, the role of women in society, and what “truths” are taught in public schools.

Our nation’s Founders would be apoplectic were they to see what the GOP is up to.

In 1765, a decade before the American Revolution, our second president, John Adams (who was himself an observant Christian), famously wrote an entire treatise on the oppression of the Church during the Dark Ages titled A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law. In it he was blunt:

“Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind.

“But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.”

Never one to shy away from controversy, Adams continued that the Church’s rule:

“…for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust which had dictated the canon law, was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. …

“In this manner the common people were held together in herds and clans in a state of servile dependence on their lords, bound, even by the tenure of their lands, to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms and the culture of their lands.”

Adams argued that the Dark Ages ended when Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses punctured the power of the Church:

“Thus, as long as this confederacy lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowledge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of darkness succeeded another, till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation.”

Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson agreed, noting in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

“Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. … Had not free enquiry been indulged, at the æra of the reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away.”

Calling the Church’s rule “ecclesiastical and civil tyranny,” John Adams noted:

“The people grew more and more sensible of the wrong that was done them by these systems, more and more impatient under it, and determined at all hazards to rid themselves of it; till at last, under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody.”

Thus, Adams wrote, the Europeans who peopled the North American continent had likewise rejected the power of organized religion, particularly that of the Catholic Church:

“It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed; but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy before described...”

The movement to impose religious authority on Americans has come from both Catholic and Protestant sources since the first European settlements in the 15th century.

George Washington refused to declare himself a Christian; Thomas Paine wrote an entire book embracing atheism; Ben Franklin famously fled Massachusetts as a teenager to escape the censorship and threats of imprisonment by religious leaders; and Thomas Jefferson noted:

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Today’s white Christian Nationalist movement, embraced by the MAGA GOP, is both ahistoric and anti-American.

This is not to say that one can’t be religious and a patriot who supports America. I’m a proud Christian, was invited by Pope John Paul II for a private audience because of a book I wrote about the religious experience, and took refuge from His Holiness the Dalai Lama who, in our conversations (as documented by Harrison Ford), acknowledged the positive aspects of Christian mysticism.

In fact, there is a substantial movement of genuinely religious Christians embracing the policies of the Democratic Party, which generally reflect — in a secular fashion — the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25.

But when people who claim religious authority also seek political power to put their religious doctrines into law, both American traditions and common sense require their rejection.

From the tens of millions of dollars the Catholic Church spends every year in America to influence legislation and policy, to the powerful political infrastructure Protestant groups amassed as they seized the GOP in the 1980s, America stands at a critical threshold.

Will we go down a nationalist religious road similar to that now being followed by Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel? Could we end up as bad as Iran, Afghanistan, or 17th century New England? Will Republicans trigger a new Dark Age?

Or will we re-embrace the Renaissance and Enlightenment values and ideals of the Founders of this nation and hold to a secular democratic republic?

At the moment, as long as we still have a vote, that decision is ours…