What Do You Think?

Religious Influence on Civil Rights

By Ellen Moyer D id religion drive women’s move for civil rights and the right to vote? After all, religion—the great binder of society—has shaped social relationships and change for centuries. “Henry the Eighth I am” was hardly the

character of the cockney song that rocked the world in 1910 and again in 1965. He challenged the power of the Catholic Church in 1534 when the Church refused to allow him to divorce Catherine of Aragon because she did not produce a son, only a daughter. Besides, Henry wanted power and the wealth of the Church’s land holdings. And so, the Church of England, which he ruled, was founded. His action set in motion great societal changes against the Catholic Church and the heads of clergy.

One hundred years later, Oliver Cromwell, the most controversial of British leaders, led civil unrest against “the divine right of kings” and succeeded in cutting off the head of King Charles I. After his death, he also lost his skeletal head to an angry populous tired of the mores of the Puritan Moses when the monarchy under King Charles II was restored.

However, the Puritan effort against sin—which included sex and frivolity such as singing, dancing, playing cards, and gambling on horse racing—found its way across the Atlantic to the new Colonies of America. The Witch Trials in New England were abhorrent enough to shift the morality of Americans.

It was called the Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival led by Baptists and Methodists from the mid-1700s to mid-1800s. Enthusiastic revival meetings challenged people to join together, to remedy the evils of society before the Second Coming of Jesus.

The predestination theology of the Presbyterians and Martin Luther’s principles of 1517 were in part rejected and replaced with a call to do good works. Among those good works were respect for human liberties and an attack on slavery.

Founded by William Penn, the Quakers already held equality of the sexes in their doctrine and were the first religious group to call for the abolition of slavery. And so, it was women, commanded to silence in society but not with Quakers, that stepped forward publicly to denounce slavery as evil and to be abolished. Quakers, the Gremke sisters (who also preached that the Bible claims God created woman and man as equals and that man had usurped God’s authority), and Lucretia Mott became great orators on the abolition of slavery. Their actions opened doors for other women to speak out and the Civil Rights movement for women was born.

Founded in the 1500s in Poland, the Unitarian Church was a reaction to the burning of “heretics” andadvocated the inherent goodness of people. This was a religion quite opposite of Cromwell’s Puritan beliefs born in the English Reformation, and in Martin Luther’s and Presbyterian covenants, as well as the desire to purify the church and its inherently sinful people of sins.

While smaller in numbers within Christian Protestant churches, Quaker beliefs in equality, Unitarian beliefs in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and the drive of Baptists and Methodists to be active and do

good works to tackle society evils contra civil rights and respect for mankind, shaped a new nation. The actions and beliefs of the 1500s over concerns of morality set in motion by Martin Luther and Henry the Eighth, and contemplated by philosopher John Locke (a hero of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington), are found in the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and little-by-little in the laws of the land.

The influence of various Christian Protestant religions and moralities dedicated to human enhancement and goodness seem to be a binding constitution and societal force.

Today, some charge that America’s cold “civil war” we are experiencing is also shaped by religion gone awry. Chaos and confusion result when “fairness and justice and peace (and goodness in Americans, as recognized by Tocqueville) cease to shine.”

What do you think and why?