A legitimate ruler dictating the correct Christian orthodoxy and belief is how the core precepts of Christianity which Catholics, the Orthodox, most Protestants and varying numbers of Oriental Orthodox churches agree on came to be. For example the Trinity became a foundational pillar of Christian doctrine across many borders & creeds because Constantine the Great called the Council of Nicaea to debate it, then came down on the side of the Trinitarian faction. Every one of the other ecumenical councils considered legitimate & binding by the various Christian sects were called & their results enforced by the Emperors, who were regarded as the overall head of the Church between Constantine and Irene (when the Pope started going his own way while most of the other Pentarchs had fallen to the growing power of Islam).
Some level of state/worldly influence on the church is always inevitable, it comes with the territory of living in a fallen world & necessarily having to interact with secular society even if one becomes a monk (or a Protestant, Cromwell's Protectorate was hardly inclined toward religious freedom and the early US had established churches at the state level for decades - Massachusetts' lasted until 1833 for instance). The post-Constantine state church of the Roman Empire didn't do too badly (if anything it was probably the most trustworthy institution and the one most directly helpful to people at a time when the bureaucracy was rotten to the core, the army was made up increasingly of barbarians and the Senate couldn't make a single correct decision for an entire century) and the Byzantine theory of symphonia or state-church equality & complementarianism held up well when put into practice.
No, the real problem now is with the quality of the leaders. We have no Constantines today, only Caracallas and Honoriuses. And as can be seen here, we certainly have no Pope Urban II or Pius V but a Clement V, John XXII or Alexander VI come again.
America hasn't been a Protestant nation, or any sort of Christian nation, for a very long time. Doubtless a good deal longer than anyone on this board's been alive, myself certainly included. And in that extremely brief (by macrohistorical standards) window of time when it was, the fractious nature of Protestantism - with every different sect's religious worldview inevitably influencing their secular considerations - rendered full national unity inherently impossible in the long term. Yeah, it was fine for the first few decades when the Puritan-descended Yankees constituting the Federalist Party were just bickering about the viability of centrally-directed national development schemes with the Episcopalian, Cavalier-descended Democrat-Republicans, but obviously all that went tits up the instant the question of slavery ceased to be a merely academic discussion and one side started spawning William Garrisons & John Browns while the other pumped out John Calhouns & George Fitzhughs before the Founding Fathers were even all dead. (The decidedly non-Protestant Founding Father Charles Carroll, a slaveowner himself, lived long enough to witness Garrison's publishing of The Liberator for the first time.)
The attempt to found the nation on a marriage of multiple strands of Protestantism (Washington's Episcopalianism, Adams' Unitarian Congregationalism, etc.) with Enlightenment-era concepts of liberal individualism, minimal government & the promotion of free enterprise was worth the shot, but there's no denying that it comprehensively failed and the country they had in mind replaced with one more alien to their sensibilities than even Louis XIV's France would have been to an Egyptian farmer from Narmer's day within about 80-160 years. Depending on whether you consider the point where this Founders' vision was obliterated to be the Civil War, the ascent of the original Progressives and creation of the Federal Reserve, or the New Deal of course.
In the grand scheme of things, the Evangelical/Moral Majority attempt at a revival in the Reagan years was not some Great Awakening but a final frantic (and failed, very quickly at that) attempt at salvaging that which was already lost while the likes of Falwell and Robertson were still teenagers at their oldest. IIRC neither were even alive for the Modernist-Fundamentalist split in the 1920s, and then the poor bastards couldn't even overturn the ban on voluntary school prayer or reopen an opportunity to stave off baby-killing on a state level. When society crumbles and it's time to rebuild on the ashes, it's only natural to seek stronger materials for the foundation and structure - materials that have been proven to last millennia rather than less than two centuries - even if you intend to reuse as much of the old design as possible.
A legitimate ruler dictating the correct Christian orthodoxy and belief is how the core precepts of Christianity which Catholics, the Orthodox, most Protestants and varying numbers of Oriental Orthodox churches agree on came to be. For example the Trinity became a foundational pillar of Christian doctrine across many borders & creeds because Constantine the Great called the Council of Nicaea to debate it, then came down on the side of the Trinitarian faction. Every one of the other ecumenical councils considered legitimate & binding by the various Christian sects were called & their results enforced by the Emperors, who were regarded as the overall head of the Church between Constantine and Irene (when the Pope started going his own way while most of the other Pentarchs had fallen to the growing power of Islam).
Some level of state/worldly influence on the church is always inevitable, it comes with the territory of living in a fallen world & necessarily having to interact with secular society even if one becomes a monk (or a Protestant, Cromwell's Protectorate was hardly inclined toward religious freedom and the early US had established churches at the state level for decades - Massachusetts' lasted until 1833 for instance). The post-Constantine state church of the Roman Empire didn't do too badly (if anything it was probably the most trustworthy institution and the one most directly helpful to people at a time when the bureaucracy was rotten to the core, the army was made up increasingly of barbarians and the Senate couldn't make a single correct decision for an entire century) and the Byzantine theory of symphonia or state-church equality & complementarianism held up well when put into practice.
No, the real problem now is with the quality of the leaders. We have no Constantines today, only Caracallas and Honoriuses. And as can be seen here, we certainly have no Pope Urban II or Pius V but a Clement V, John XXII or Alexander VI come again.
Where the fuck are these wannabe theocrats crawling out from that don't even understand America is a protestant nation to begin with?
America hasn't been a Protestant nation, or any sort of Christian nation, for a very long time. Doubtless a good deal longer than anyone on this board's been alive, myself certainly included. And in that extremely brief (by macrohistorical standards) window of time when it was, the fractious nature of Protestantism - with every different sect's religious worldview inevitably influencing their secular considerations - rendered full national unity inherently impossible in the long term. Yeah, it was fine for the first few decades when the Puritan-descended Yankees constituting the Federalist Party were just bickering about the viability of centrally-directed national development schemes with the Episcopalian, Cavalier-descended Democrat-Republicans, but obviously all that went tits up the instant the question of slavery ceased to be a merely academic discussion and one side started spawning William Garrisons & John Browns while the other pumped out John Calhouns & George Fitzhughs before the Founding Fathers were even all dead. (The decidedly non-Protestant Founding Father Charles Carroll, a slaveowner himself, lived long enough to witness Garrison's publishing of The Liberator for the first time.)
The attempt to found the nation on a marriage of multiple strands of Protestantism (Washington's Episcopalianism, Adams' Unitarian Congregationalism, etc.) with Enlightenment-era concepts of liberal individualism, minimal government & the promotion of free enterprise was worth the shot, but there's no denying that it comprehensively failed and the country they had in mind replaced with one more alien to their sensibilities than even Louis XIV's France would have been to an Egyptian farmer from Narmer's day within about 80-160 years. Depending on whether you consider the point where this Founders' vision was obliterated to be the Civil War, the ascent of the original Progressives and creation of the Federal Reserve, or the New Deal of course.
In the grand scheme of things, the Evangelical/Moral Majority attempt at a revival in the Reagan years was not some Great Awakening but a final frantic (and failed, very quickly at that) attempt at salvaging that which was already lost while the likes of Falwell and Robertson were still teenagers at their oldest. IIRC neither were even alive for the Modernist-Fundamentalist split in the 1920s, and then the poor bastards couldn't even overturn the ban on voluntary school prayer or reopen an opportunity to stave off baby-killing on a state level. When society crumbles and it's time to rebuild on the ashes, it's only natural to seek stronger materials for the foundation and structure - materials that have been proven to last millennia rather than less than two centuries - even if you intend to reuse as much of the old design as possible.