America – Heretic Nation
Heresy is an American virtue. Heretics used to be burned at the stake. Today, they have a stake in building a better America.
Etymology will get you into much good trouble. The etymology of the word “heresy” frees it of its shameful bondage and frees it back to its liberating roots. As with so many words that come to us today, it comes from a Latin origin with Greek roots and out of Eastern Mediterranean soil. A great example of this is how the first phonetic alphabet arose out of adaptions of the Egyptian “alphabet.” These changes were made by migratory Semitic workers from Canaan – where Israel is today – over 3000 years ago. Sir William Flanders Petrie found these symbols between 1904-05 in the Sinai Peninsula. Our letter “A,” or alpha, was originally a bull’s head, but now it is upside-down. The legs of the “A” are the horns of the bull.
Both our modern alphabets and the origins of many of words come to us from the Eastern Mediterranean and have proto-Indo-European roots. Since then, they grew, aged, and changed as they moved from language to language while they crossed to the Northwest of Europe (England), eventually ending in our modern Anglish/English language. Likewise, our attraction to bulls charged all the way to the US stock market, as there is a large Exodus-esque bull standing in front of this great US institution and its Greek-temple-looking façade.
Etymonline.com says heresy comes from the “Latin word” for heresy which comes “from Greek hairesis “a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice, a means of taking: a deliberate plan, purpose”… from haireisthai “take, seize”… middle voice of hairein “to choose.”” Yes, that is just part of the tangled mess that etymology is at its best. This word passed from old French and into Samuel Johnson’s 1755 English dictionary but with its current negative connotation of being in opposition of something that is correct or acceptable. Please be forewarned that etymology is often fraught with dead ends, speculations, and roads with many forks. All of that aside, heresy’s root meaning is “to choose and to have choice.” This sentiment is a root idea of democracy. It is a foundational pillar of American democracy.
Heretics like Jan Hus, Marguerite Porete, and Joan of Arc became the iconic faces of our modern understanding of this term. The flaming stake was burnt into its meaning. A crash course of review of heresy’s history starts with the Edict of Milan, which gave Christianity the freedom to be observed in 313 CE, alongside all of the other historic Roman religions. In less than a century (380), the Edict of Thessalonica made all non-Nicene Creed Christianity illegal. Only one type of Christianity was legal. Wikipedia’s page on heresy states it well when it says that non-Nicene Christianity would be seen “as heresies of madmen, and [it] authorized their persecution.” Though some “other” religions, including Christianity, had faced persecution throughout the history of the Roman Empire, the first so accused heretic killed under this new heresy prohibition would be Priscillian of Avila, Hispaniola/Spain in 385. The label heresy enveloped religious freedom in an ever-diminishing domain. Choice was no more.
To reverse this process, George Mason’s “Virginia Declaration of Rights” (June 12, 1776) put religious liberty on a list of protected freedoms -- last place on that list in section 16. Mason’s protégé Thomas Jefferson called for a list of rights for America. This list became our “Bill of Rights” and it was penned by James Madison – where religious freedom slowly snuck to the top of the list. The literal US “Bill of Rights” was proposed on September 25, 1789 with religious freedom in “Article the third.” When the amendments were stitched into the constitution quilt in 1791, religious freedoms made it to the top of Amendment 1 as “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” This was followed by the more widely known and recited “…, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…” [Its first couplet.] Probably the most used and misunderstood of the amendments, its commencement seems to have been ghosted out of existence. Creating a quick reference, Americans shorthanded the first third of the First Amendment into a mere paraphrase “freedom of religion.” That is probably a fair characterization of second phrase of this first couplet of three couplets in the First Amendment. But just as the Edicts of Milan and Thessalonica first brought Christianity “in” before it pushed other religions and heretical-Christianties “out,” the First Amendment started with liberating people from having to choose any federally-state-sanctioned religion before it freed them to choose the religion they wished.
Just as etymology is not simple and clean, this query into religious freedom is mudded by the fact that the new 13 states were not restricted from requiring compliance to their individual state-sanctioned religions. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 extended the prohibition of state-sanctioned religions to the individual US states. Heresy was now legal within all of America’s religious pursuits, just as choice and freedom had reigned in many other matters of this country.
The confusions within the etymology of the word heresy mirror the confusions within America’s pursuits of freedoms for blacks, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. In the most general use of the word freedom, heresy arises like a phoenix -- very gradually throughout its long many-forked history -- to represent the great value of choice.
France had a national one-minute moment of silence in solemn honor of the teacher Samuel Paty killed on October 16, 2020 for teaching about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and killings. Since it passed secular education laws in 1882 and 1886, France only allows “moral and civic instruction.” These laws put an end to state-sanctioned religion in France.
In both France and America today, a neutral and “secular” state protects and defends the heretical religious freedoms of their citizens. Neither country pushed these freedoms forward in a bullrush. Yet, always hanging over their heads was much pressure to honor the spirit and literal meanings in their charter freedom documents. All citizens in these revolutionary countries enjoy greater prosperity and freedom (for more happiness) because heresy reins as a top virtue. Modeled off Virginia’s statements of rights, France’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” beat America to the choice of promoting religious freedom/liberty and it did so in its tenth article and by two years in 1789, or maybe it is fairer to say that it tied the original American “Bill of Rights” in that same year. The United Nations spread this heresy worldwide in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” article 18.
All bull aside, the US and especially the Supreme Court, in cases like Lynch v. Donnelly, have created a niche space for “ceremonial deism” and “civic religion.”
Today, heretics can unite in the freedom of choice. Heresy is a state of and a statement of protected freedoms, rights, and values of the first order. Everyone holds the bright torch that keeps a light on and over this cornerstone of American democracy. E Pluribus Unum – the “many have become one” American heretic nation.