Syllabus of Errors or project 2025: Giving to Caesar what belongs to God

 THE PAPAL SYLLABUS OF ERRORS. A.D. 1864 

 This document, though issued by the sole authority of Pope Plus IX., Dec. 8, 1864, must be regarded now as infallible and irreformable, even without the formal sanction of the Vatican Council. It is purely negative, but Indirectly it teaches and enjoins the very opposite of what it condemns as error. (Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes: The Greek and Latin Creeds, with Translations, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), 213)

 What authority attaches to this document? Cardinal Newman, in his defense of the Syllabus against Gladstone’s attack, virtually denied its dogmatic force, saying (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, p. 108),

 “We can no more accept the Syllabus as de fide, as a dogmatic document, than any other index or table of contents.”

 But the Syllabus is more than a mere index, and contains as many definitions and judgments as titles. Moreover, the papal infallibility decree of 1870 makes all ex cathedra or official utterances of the pope on matters of faith and discipline infallible. The Syllabus is an official document, addressed to all the bishops of the Roman Catholic world, and sent to them with a papal encyclical. Its infallibility was at once asserted by Cardinal Hergenröther (cf. J. J. I. von Döllinger, Das Papstthum, ed. J. Friedrich, p. 281, Munich, 1892). The quotations made from it by Leo XIII. and in 1907 by Pius X. in his encyclical Pascendi gregis seem to confirm its infallible authority. 

 Among the errors condemned are the principles of civil and religious liberty, and the separation of Church and State. The Syllabus impliedly asserts the infallibility of the pope, the exclusive right of Romanism to recognition by the civil government, the unlawfulness of all religions other than the Roman Catholic, the complete independence of the papal hierarchy, the power of the Roman Church to coerce and enforce, and its supreme control over public education, science, and literature. It reasserts all the extravagant claims of the medieval papacy, and is a declaration of war against modern civilization and progress.

 Even in the United States, the Syllabus comes into crisp conflict with the functions of government as recognized by the statutes of the land. The State claims and exercises the right and duty of educating the people for intelligent and useful citizenship; while the Syllabus condemns all public education which is not controlled by the teaching of the Roman Church, and stimulates the efforts of the priesthood to Romanize or to break up the public schools, or, where neither can be done from want of power, to neutralize them by parochial schools in which the doctrines and principles of Trent and the Vatican are inculcated upon the rising generation. (Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–1914), 198–199.)

“Our laws have applied the only antidote to [religious intolerance], protecting our religious, as they do our civil, rights by putting all on equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.

 Public opinion erects itself into an inquisition, and exercises its office with as much fanaticism as fans the flames of an Auto-da-fé.” —  the ceremony for pronouncing judgment by the Inquisition which was followed by the execution of sentence by secular authorities broadly : the burning of a heretic.  

The auto de fé was also a form of penitence for the public viewers, because they too were engaging in a process of reconciliation and by being involved were given the chance to confront their sins and be forgiven by the Church.  

“In the Papal System, Government and Religion are in a manner consolidated, & that is found to be the worst of Govts. In most of the Govts. of the old world, the legal establishment of a particular religion and without or with very little toleration of others makes a part of the Political and Civil organization and there are few of the most enlightened judges who will maintain that the system has been favorable either to Religion or to Govt.”

In politics, integralism, integrationism or integrism (French: intégrisme) is an interpretation of Catholic social teaching that argues the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible.

 Integralism is anti-pluralist, seeking the Catholic faith to be dominant in civil and religious matters

The “pro-family” platform is not a liberal platform. For the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right, there is only one version of the good life and only one path to religious and political salvation. Therefore, the role of government is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations.

At the heart of the Catholic New Right project and of Project 2025 lies a desire to harness the coercive capacity of the state to impose a conservative Christian vision of the good not only on government but on all of society. Revisiting the history of the New Right helps us to understand that this is a radical project, but it is not a new one. 

In the political and social history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the term integralism was often applied to traditionalist conservatism and similar political movements on the right wing of a political spectrum, but it was also adopted by various centrist movements as a tool of political, national and cultural integration.  

 During the 1970s and 1980s, the historic tensions between Evangelical Protestants and Catholics in the United States began to fade. In politics, conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants joined forces with the Republican Party and formed the Christian right in order to advocate conservative positions on social and cultural issues, such as opposition to gay marriage and abortion. In 2000, almost half of the members of the Republican coalition were Catholic and a large majority of the Republican coalition's non-Catholic members were White Evangelicals. 

Bob Jones senior called them ‘fudgymentalists’ for fudging the scriptural command to keep oneself separate: Scripture clearly enjoins two sorts of separation …; (1) the ecclesiastical separation, which the ‘fudgymentalists’ ignore; and (2) personal separation from sin and the world, which they usually profess to follow. (Jones 1978)

Both are enjoined by Scripture, and no man has a right to profess to obey one but to ignore the other. 

Bob Jones III labelled Jerry Falwell’s movement the Moral Majority ‘neo-fundamentalist’, meaning that it was a new and deviant form of fundamentalism that dirtied its hands by joining with ‘Catholics, Jews, Protestants of every stripe, Mormons, etc., in a common religious cause’ (Jones III 1980: 1). 

 Old-style fundamentalists withdraw from political life out of the conviction that the Christian’s duty is to save individual souls from sin, and that conversion of individuals is the remedy for an immoral society. Moreover, most separatist fundamentalists hold premillennialist convictions which de-motivate them politically.

 They expect the world to become a worse and worse place until Christ returns, and regard the immorality of the nation as a sign of the times. Politicized fundamentalists, by contrast, treat Scripture as a source-book for political action. They seek to restructure society according to biblical principles. Pat Robertson, who superseded Falwell in Christian Right politics and founded the Christian Coalition, wrote in the early 1980s:

Once we perceive this secret [that the Bible is the Word of God], we realize anew that the Bible is not an impractical book of theology, but rather a practical book of life containing a system of thought and conduct that will guarantee success. And it will be true success, true happiness, true prosperity, not the fleeting, flash, inconsistent success the world usually settles for.

The Bible, quite bluntly, is a workable guidebook for politics, government, business, families, and all the affairs of mankind. (Robertson 1983: 44)...It is therefore not surprising to find fundamentalists also looking to Scripture for guidance on how to run a country.(Harriet A. Harris, “Fundamentalism(s),” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. J. W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 825–826.)

 Both Christian right and secular polling organizations sometimes conduct polls to determine which presidential candidates will receive the support of Christian right constituents. One such poll is taken at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit. George W. Bush's electoral success owed much to his overwhelming support from white evangelical voters, who comprise 23% of the vote. In 2000 he received 68% of the white evangelical vote; in 2004 that percentage rose to 78%. In 2016, Donald Trump received 81% of the white evangelical vote.

Pro-family politics was, and continues to be, the central vehicle for organizing US politics on the principle of Christian supremacism. 

This was the central project of the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it is the central aim of Project 2025.

  In the forward to the most recent Mandate for Leadership, Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts neatly summarizes the “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.” First and foremost among them is a commitment to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. We have come full circle with “pro-family” politics. 

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), Eckstein’s 26-year-old organization, is proficient at raising funds from Christians via direct mail and the Internet. Last year, the organization raised about $88 million, making it one of the largest, most successful religious charities in America.

 Eckstein recounts for the crowd a litany of sacrificial gifts evangelicals have made to ensure poor Jews get the help they need: there is the woman who gives from her meager Social Security check; another who switched from lattes to “coffees of the day” on her daily coffee runs and donates the difference; and the family that forgoes Christmas gifts to feed Israeli kids. Over the years, Christians have donated half a billion dollars to an organization founded by the Orthodox rabbi.

In his 2001 book, The Journey Home, Eckstein wrote, “I still don’t believe in Jesus as the Christ … I view him instead as a Jew who brought salvation to the Gentiles. In some respects, that is exactly what I have become: a Jew for Jesus.” John W. Kennedy, “The Ultimate Kibitzer: Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein Wants Jews to Trust Evangelicals, and Evangelicals to Love Israel,” Christianity Today (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today International, 2009), 32,34

a single basic argument unites almost all of them: 

“A group of religious Utopians, with the sympathy and support of tens of millions of Americans, are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism”

 (Chris Hedges, American Fascists). “Religious fanatics who run the country … are close to realizing their vision of heaven on earth: an American theocracy” (Robin Meyers, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong). “We must resist before the fundamentalists do what they have promised [and] turn the world’s oldest democracy into a theocracy ruled entirely by ‘righteous men’ ” (Mel White, Religion Gone Bad).

The Constitution is a secular document for a secular government.

The Framers of our Constitution incorporated the two pillars of American democracy—religious freedom and church-state separation—into our founding documents, building what Thomas Jefferson revered as a “wall of separation between Church & State.” The Founders got a lot wrong, but church-state separation and religious freedom they got right.

The U.S. Constitution was the first government document in history to declare that power comes from people, not gods. Our Constitution was the first not to mention a god or deity. Our Constitution was the first to ban religious tests for public office. In fact, religion is mentioned only twice: in the First Amendment, which bars laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and in Article VI, which prohibits “religious tests” for public office. 

James Madison is known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his role in drafting and promoting the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Madison was a staunch advocate of church-state separation and an important figure in securing religious freedom in Virginia. Jefferson’s writings and correspondence reveal the depth to which he believed a church-state separation was vital to the health of both government and religion.

“[T]he number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, & the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.”

“Ye States of America, which retain in your Constitution or Codes, any aberration from the sacred principle of religious liberty, by giving to Caesar what belongs to God, or joining together what God has put asunder, hasten to revise & purify your systems, and make the example of your Country as pure & complete, in what relates to the freedom of the mind and its allegiance to its maker, as in what belongs to the legitimate objects of political & civil institutions. Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt. in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies, may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history.” 

“We are teaching the world the great truth that Govts. do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Govt.”

Yes, Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli is considered evidence that the United States government was not founded on Christianity and was separate from religion: Article 11 The article states that the US government is not based on Christianity, and that the US has no hostility towards the laws, tranquility, or religion of Muslims. 

Significance

Article 11 has been a key part of debates over the separation of church and state. It's often cited as evidence that the US government was aware of its non-religious nature and wasn't afraid to state it publicly

Article 11 reads:

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen (Muslims); and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan (Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. 

Christians need to abandon talk about “redeeming the culture,” “advancing the kingdom,” and “changing the world.” Such talk carries too much weight, implying conquest and domination. If there is a possibility for human flourishing in our world, it does not begin when we win the culture wars but when God’s word of love becomes flesh in us, reaching every sphere of social life.

 When faithful presence existed in church history, it manifested itself in the creation of hospitals and the flourishing of art, the best scholarship, the most profound and world-changing kind of service and care—again, not only for the household of faith but for everyone. Faithful presence isn’t new; it’s just something we need to recover.(James Davison Hunter, “Review of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by Christopher Benson,” Christianity Today (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today International, 2010), 36.)

 This side of eternity there will be no “revolution” that can change the human condition. The world will remain full of hope and sin, success and failure. We will win a few political debates and lose a few. Perhaps one day we’ll lose many, and faithful people will be dragged to their deaths, as they are now around the world.

With time, evangelicals will grow wiser about the political arena just as parents do—through lived, practical experience.

 That experience will deliver a dose of reality about what politics can and cannot accomplish.

 Political action will not deliver utopia, conquer sin, or change human nature. But it can make a difference between rampant crime and safe neighborhoods, between hungry families and economic security, between victory and defeat in war. And only those who have never been mugged, never been hungry, or never been at war will think these differences trivial. Paul Marshall, “The Problem: In Their Zeal for Social Change, Some Evangelical Activists Stand on Shaky Biblical Ground,” Christianity Today (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today International, 2006), 94.) 

How is it that American public life is so profoundly secular when 85 percent of the population professes to be Christian? If a culture were simply the sum total of beliefs, values, and ideas that ordinary individuals hold, then the United States would be a far more religious society.

 Looking at our entertainment, politics, economics, media, and education, we are forced to conclude that the cultural influence of Christians is negligible. By contrast, Jews, who compose 3 percent of the population, exert significant cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers, notably in literature, art, science, medicine, and technology.(James Davison Hunter, “Review of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by Christopher Benson,” Christianity Today (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today International, 2010), 34,36.)

Recent polls show that many self-described evangelicals march in moral lockstep with mainstream American culture in practices of divorce, spousal abuse, extramarital sex, pornography consumption, materialism, and racism, just to name a few. 

While we tip our cap to the importance of holiness, many in our culture don’t view us as morally different in any meaningful way—except to see us as hypocrites.

To be sure, biblical terms translated “holy” or “holiness” (qadosh, hagios) carry a strong secondary connotation of moral purity. But moral purity is not, first and foremost, what Scripture is talking about. Instead, the most basic meaning of the words is to be “set apart” or “dedicated” to God—to belong to God. “I will be your God, and you will be my people,” says Yahweh (Lev. 26:12; Heb. 8:10). 

Thus, prior to any consideration of morality, biblical holiness describes a unique relationship that God has established and desires with his people. This relationship has moral ramifications, but it precedes moral behavior. Before we are ever called to be good, we are called to be holy. Unless we rightly understand and affirm the primacy of this relationship, we fall into the inevitable trap of reducing holiness to mere morality.(Joel Scandrett, “Holy to the Core: We’re Tempted by Moralism Because We’ve Forgotten What God Wants at the Center,” Christianity Today (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today International, 2007), 39.)

 For many American evangelicals, “holiness” conjures up musty images of revival meetings, gospel trios, and old-time religion—along with stern prohibitions against drinking, dancing, and playing cards. And many are happy to leave these notions of holiness in the past. Yet even in our era of techno-savvy megachurches and postmodern emerging churches, holiness (when it is discussed at all) is often associated with moral behavior such as sexual purity, financial honesty, and commitment to private prayer.

While we’ve cast off old, legalistic notions of holiness, we’ve merely replaced them with private, moralistic notions. We act as if holiness were either outdated or something that characterizes only a small (if important) part of our lives.

This is partly due to our quest for cultural relevance, which is defended in the name of winning others to Christ. If we talk about holiness with unbelievers, won’t that present just another hurdle for them to overcome on their way to Christ? For this and other reasons, we are rapidly forsaking our historic commitment to holiness.(Joel Scandrett, “Holy to the Core: We’re Tempted by Moralism Because We’ve Forgotten What God Wants at the Center,” Christianity Today (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today International, 2007), 39.) 

 Weary with the conflicts of the world, one goes into the Church to seek refreshment for the soul. And what does one find? Alas, too often, one finds only the turmoil of the world. The preacher comes forward, not out of a secret place of meditation and power, not with the authority of God’s Word permeating his message, not with human wisdom pushed far into the background by the glory of the Cross, but with human opinions about the social problems of the hour or easy solutions of the vast problem of sin. 

Such is the sermon. And then perhaps the service is closed by one of those hymns breathing out the angry passions of 1861, which are to be found in the back part of the hymnals. Thus the warfare of the world has entered even into the house of God. And sad indeed is the heart of the man who has come seeking peace.

Is there no refuge from strife? Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life? Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus’ name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passions of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross? If there be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven.

 And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive the weary world.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, New Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 151–152.