Letter to the Editor,
During my mother’s final year of life, I watched all six seasons and three Downton Abbey movies, repeatedly. She loved the series. Spending time in the fictionalized, Edwardian, British manor house and village was her comfort zone.
One of the themes that I recall from the series was that the gentry family cared and engaged regularly both with their servants and the villagers. They would set out on foot to walk to their tenants’ farm houses and the village. They would take the stairs down to the kitchen, or up to the servants’ quarters. They funded the church (Anglican). They funded the school and encouraged their servants to pursue additional trades education, even when that resulted in the servants leaving for greener pastures. They believed that their community required engagement.
I recall that a few of my friends criticized the series for romanticizing how much the family interacted with those from different classes. Certainly, they fulfilled their duty to fund certain services to the villagers, but most gentry would not soil themselves with direct engagement. Those of a different class served their purpose, but otherwise should remain in the shadows of the manor house.
In the American colonies, these traditions played their course too. Most of the Founding Fathers, who deliberated and penned our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, were of the gentry class (or lawyers who supported them). They wrote laws to keep slaves enslaved, and keep indentured servants in line, often extending their period of service for violation of this or that law.
Much of their benevolence was provided by the Anglican church. To fund this, everyone paid a tithe of 10 percent of their earnings to the church. From this endowment school, hospitals, and poor houses were built and run. Colonial governments, and later our fledgling states, stayed out of what we now call our social network. (Full disclosure, we were married in the Old Narragansett Church of 1706 in Wickford, RI, one of the oldest Anglican churches in New England).
Meanwhile, the Congregational churches in Boston wanted a slice of the action. The Congregational churches wanted to allow their members to pay the tithe to them, rather than to the Anglican churches. Then the Baptist churches in the frontier lands of Virginia said, “Hey, wait a minute…”. James Madison wanted to settle the debate by including a clause in the Constitution that would prevent establishing a national religion, but that became so contentious that he opted to put that in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights instead.
We have been debating what the “separation between church and state” has meant ever since.
At the same time, we have been seeking different means of funding the inevitable social network of how to pay for our children’s education, health care, housing, etc. Tithing became a voluntary exercise, as did church attendance. Religious schools were opened. Religiously affiliated hospitals were opened (when I began applying for employment as an occupational therapist in NYC in 1987, I had options like, St. Vincent’s Hospital, Presbyterian Hospital, Mt. Sinai Hospital…). Shelters and transitional living facilities for unhoused people, domestic violence survivors, marginally employed people opened. Forward thinking men, such as Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson taught Sunday school to slaves, and Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee College for emancipated black people, recognizing that education would be key to their survival and success in a changing economic model for the USA before and after the Civil War.
Over the past hundred years, starting about the time Downton Abbey is staged, more and more of these services became secular and government run. Yet, churches continued to be engaged in providing parallel services. Today, we are still unsettled on public funding of parochial schools, summer time public school food programs, state and county shelter and addiction services, food and clothes pantries scattered throughout communities.
Are faith communities in a position to take over many of these social services? Do those congregations benefit from more direct engagement with this type of work?
We will have to linger on those questions, before returning to the root of Jesus Followers, The Way, the Epistle of James, and a church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome 2000 years ago. But, that is another letter.
Oscar Larson
Baker, WV
