PATRIOTISM AND THE DECLINE OF A CHRISTIAN NATION - PART I

It happened several years ago. It was one of those "aha" experiences in my life. On a beautiful summer morning we were visiting Delphi, Greece, which is about two hours north, northwest of Athens. Yes, the famous Delphi, one of the oldest religious sanctuaries in the world. Since at least 400 B.C., worshipers had come from all over the world to perform drama, participate in Olympic style games, and to offer sacrifice--all done in honor of the gods.

However, the chief attraction was the world-famous Oracle of Delphi. Kings and leaders would make pilgrimages to Delphi, offering vast treasure for the divine counsel of the oracle. The Oracle worked liked this. Inside the Temple of Apollo, toward the front, the priest would sit around a large hole in the stone floor. Below the hole was a priestess, or Pythia, who drank waters from the sacred spring, chewed on laurel leaves and breathed in vapors from the volcanic fissure beneath the hole. In time, she was, in effect, "high" in a drug-like trance.

The king would then approach the priests with a question which the priests conveyed down the hole to the priestess. "Shall I go to war?" asked the king. The priestess, "stoned" on the vapors, babbled incoherently, something like, as one comedian said, some political pundits do today. The priests would interpret the babbling ambiguously and say, "the most valiant and worthy king will win." Egotistically, the king confidently went to war believing he was the most valiant and worthy. For example, King Croesus of Lydia, during his war with Cyrus of Persia, was advised by the Oracle: "If Croesus crosses the river Aly, he will destroy a great kingdom." He did, but not that of Cyrus, but his own.

So, Delphi was an "aha" experience. But what happened next was even more significant. In front of the ruins of the Temple of Apollo was a large, rectangular stone altar, standing about four feet high. It was donated by the citizens of the island of Chios and is thus dubbed the Chian Altar. Our group was standing around the altar listening to the excellent guide. She said, in dramatic understatement, "for over four hundred years people around the Mediterranean world offered animal sacrifice on this altar." I was leaning on the altar at the time and began to imagine the rivers of animal blood flowing over the sides. I stepped back!

"And then," said our guide in subdued but dramatic voice, "those sacrifices stopped abruptly in 395 A.D. when the Christian Emperor, Theodosius I, forbade pagan sacrifices throughout the Empire." My study of history and my personal presence at the Altar of the Chians in Delphi converged in an overwhelming experience. Here I was at the very place where the emerging power of a Christian Empire flexed its muscle to suppress other religions in the name of Christ.

Theodosius was continuing what the Emperor, Constantine, began in 313 A.D. with the Edict of Milan. Earlier, at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had a vision of the cross, or chi rho, the first two letters of Christ in Greek. In his vision he was told, "in this sign conquer." Placing the chi rho (accounts vary) on his army's shields and helmets, Constantine went on the win the crucial battle over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D.

Subsequently Constantine declared Christianity to be a legal religion. (It had heretofore been an illegal religion in the Empire.) And he began the long process culminating in Christianity becoming the state religion. He restored confiscated church properties, guaranteed property rights to churches, eased tax burdens, made donations to clergy, moved towards officially recognizing Sunday as a holy day, and convened the famous Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. which produced one of the most famous creeds of Christianity, the Nicene. Christianity was on its way to becoming the official religion of the empire.

Historians, theologians and philosophers have debated ever since whether that was a good or bad thing. Good or bad, it happened and influenced greatly the development of church-state relations in the western world for centuries. Next time we will continue to explore the effect on American church-state relations.