A society needs more than sensible men and women if it is to prosper: It needs the energies of the creative imagination as expressed in religion and the arts. It is crucial to the lives of all of our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense. Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.9
We may be approaching what is, for our nation, unexplored and perhaps perilous social territory. Europe is now experiencing a widespread waning of the religious impulse, and the results are not attractive. It seems that when a majority of people internalize the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe and ask, “Is that all there is?,” when they decide that the universe is merely the result of a cosmic sneeze with no transcendent meaning, when they conclude that therefore life should be filled to overflowing with distractions and comforts and entertainments to assuage boredom, then they may become susceptible to the excitements of politics that promise ersatz meaning and spurious salvation from the human condition without the comfort of belief in transcendence.
We know from the bitter experience of twentieth-century fanaticisms the political consequences of felt meaninglessness. Human nature abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum of meaning has been filled by secular fighting faiths, such as fascism and communism. Fascism gave its adherents a meaningful life of racial destiny. Communism taught its adherents to derive meaning from their participation in the eschatological drama of History’s unfolding destiny. The excruciating political paradox of modernity is that secularism advanced in part as revulsion against the bloody history of religious strife, but there is no precedent for bloodshed on the scale produced in the twentieth century by secular political faiths. In this regard, America has been exceptional—exceptionally fortunate. It has, however, not simply been lucky. Luck, a wise man once said, is the residue of design. Regarding religion, America’s luck has been the residue of philosophy, including political philosophy.
Two hundred fifty years ago, Americans were a religious people. The Founders were markedly less so.
The Massachusetts constitution, whose principal drafter was John Adams, was completed in 1780. It declared that “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of GOD, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality.” Therefore, the people “have a right to invest their legislature with the power to authorize and require” provision for “the public worship of GOD, and for the support and maintenance of public protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” And the legislature may require “attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers.” The Massachusetts constitution added that “no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.”10 Unless, of course, the sect or denomination was other than a Protestant variant of Christianity. The sharpest religious conflict in the pre-Revolutionary and Founding eras was between Christian factions—especially between Protestants and Catholics—and was colored by political considerations important to a new and understandably insecure republic. The Puritans and other early immigrants to America brought with them memories of European religious strife, particularly that which had roiled England since the Reformation. “Prior to the Revolutionary War,” writes Edward J. Larson, “Catholics were persecuted in every colony.”11 Nowhere could they vote or hold public office, not even in Maryland, which was founded to be welcoming to Catholics. Not even in Rhode Island, whose famous tolerance extended to atheists but not to Catholics. Massachusetts made it a capital offense for a priest to proselytize or say Mass.
The Founders, however, were not like this. As a group they did not seethe with strong feelings about religious differences, other than the feeling that differences must be accommodated. The fact that two American colonies, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, were conceived as experiments in religious liberty is perhaps more important than that eleven colonies were not. The eleven eventually took up the challenge of reaching conformity with the two. The two were founded, more or less explicitly, on the principle of religious freedom—the toleration of what the First Amendment came to call the “free exercise” of religion.
America’s political arrangements are affirmations of the political thinking that aimed at the subordination of religion to the political order, which meant, in the American context, the primacy of democracy. The Founders, like Locke before them, wished to tame and domesticate religious passions of the sort that had convulsed Europe. The Founders aimed to do so not by establishing religion but by establishing a commercial republic. They aimed to submerge people’s turbulent energies in self-interested pursuit of material goals. Hence religion was to be perfectly free as long as it was perfectly private—mere belief. It must, however, bend to the political will (law) as regards conduct. Thus Jefferson held that “operations of the mind” are not subject to legal coercion, but that “acts of the body” are.12 It matters not, said Jefferson, if one’s neighbor believes in one god or twenty gods or no god; the believing neither picks one’s pockets nor breaks one’s legs.
Jefferson’s distinction rests on Locke’s principle—Jefferson considered Locke one of the three greatest men who had ever lived—that religion can be useful or can be disruptive, but its truth cannot be established by reason. Hence Americans would not “establish” religion. Rather, by guaranteeing free exercise of religions, they would make religions private. The Framers of the Constitution included in it “a guarantee to every state” of a republican form of government (Article IV, Section 4) because they considered that the truth about the best form of government was known. This was a closed question for proponents of an open society. But the First Congress, which included the most important Framer, Madison, quickly added the First Amendment to forbid the “establishment of religion” because he and Congress thought that religious truth was unknowable and so must forever remain an open question.
Some of the Founders read David Hume, a contemporary of theirs until his death in the eventful year 1776. Most of them would have subscribed to his belief that “Generally speaking, the errors of religion are dangerous; those of philosophy only ridiculous.”13 This is so because disputes about religious claims, especially claims derived from supposed revelations, cannot be settled by reason. Many of the Founders read John Locke, who addressed a problem that had begun to be understood as a problem seventeen centuries before he wrote. When Jesus enjoined his followers to “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” Western political thought began to develop the distinction between private and public spheres, and between private and public virtues, with the former given primacy.14 Although the separation of church and state was a long time coming, it was implicit in, and eventually understood to be entailed by, what Walter Berns called “Locke’s formula for unity.” This formula was that “religion would have no state, and the state would have no religion.” Confessional states, those concerned with controlling consciences, are gone from the West. Madison insisted that America has achieved “a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters.”15 A separation that is “perfect” means a perfectly—completely—secular state.
This was foreshadowed by the language of the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It says that Americans are a people entitled to independence by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is not altogether clear what was meant by “Nature’s God” but this is a reasonable surmise: What was not meant was the God of the Bible. “Nature’s God,” Berns noted, “issues no commandments, no one can fall from his grace, and, therefore, no one has reason to pray to him asking for his forgiveness; he make
s no promises.” He endows us with rights, including the right to worship other gods or no god, and then he absconds, never again to intervene in the human story. Domestic tranquility, so elusive in a Europe of confessional states, would be insured in America—or, at any rate, not threatened in America—by a secular regime. So, the Constitution, the Preamble of which enumerates domestic tranquility among the Constitution’s objectives, leaves religion “unendowed.” Again, Berns: “I mean by this that, whereas (for a telling example) it grants Congress the power ‘to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts,’ it nowhere gives it the power to promote religious belief.”16 State governments, from the outset and for a long time, promoted religion by mandating or tolerating public school curriculums permeated with it. The various twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions that ended this were intensely controversial, but clearly congruent with the Framers’ intentions.
Those intentions have been aggressively misconstrued in our times by people with religious axes to grind. Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early—very early—church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s most important Founders as devout Christians. The argument is that they were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals and that they founded a “Christian nation.” This thoroughly irritates Brooke Allen, an author and critic, who robustly argues that Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. This doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting; it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.
Eighteenth-century deists believed there was a God but, tellingly, they frequently preferred synonyms for him—“Almighty Being” or “Divine Author” (Washington) or “a superior agent” (Jefferson). If this agent merely set the universe in motion like a clockmaker, the agent is, as an eighteenth-century aphorist described him, the “God who winds our sundials.”17 But this God is not very interesting if all he ever does, or did, was wind up the universe and then turn his back on it. We can be grateful that he did the winding; we can wish that in the beginning, before disappearing, he had made provisions so that the passage of time would not include some of the things that have come to pass (e.g., World War I and pediatric oncology wards). But be that as it may, the Sundial Winder has no claim on our continuing interest because he has no continuing interest in us. Providence might reward and punish, perhaps in the hereafter, but does not intervene in human affairs. Deists rejected the incarnation, hence the divinity of Jesus. “Christian deist” is an oxymoron. It has been well said that the deist God is like a rich aunt in Australia—benevolent, distant, and infrequently heard from. Deism seeks to explain the existence and nature of the universe. But so does the big bang theory, which is not a religion. If a religion is supposed to console and enjoin as well as explain, deism hardly counts as a religion.
The Founders spoke of religion often, but usually in terms of temporal needs, individual or social, rather than timeless truths. Many thought that religion was necessary, regardless of its veracity: If churches are, on balance, useful, that is perhaps a sufficient reason for them. When Benjamin Franklin was given some books written to refute deism, the deists’ arguments “appeared to me much stronger than the refutations. In short I soon became a thorough Deist.” Revelation “had indeed no weight with me.” He believed in a creator and the immortality of the soul, but considered these “the essentials of every religion.”18 What Brooke Allen calls George Washington’s “famous gift of silence” was particularly employed regarding religion, but his behavior spoke. He would not kneel to pray, and when his pastor rebuked him for setting a bad example by leaving services before communion, Washington mended his ways in his austere manner: He stayed away from church on communion Sundays. He acknowledged Christianity’s “benign influence” on society, but no ministers were present and no prayers were uttered as he died a Stoic’s death.19
John Adams declared that “philosophy looks with an impartial eye on all terrestrial religions,” and told a correspondent that if they had been on Mount Sinai with Moses and had been told the doctrine of the Trinity, “we might not have had courage to deny it, but we could not have believed it.”20 As he said, the longer he lived, the shorter grew his creed, and in the end his creed was Unitarianism. Jefferson, writing as a laconic utilitarian, urged his nephew to inquire into the truthfulness of Christianity without fear of consequences: “If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comforts and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.”21
Madison, always commonsensical, briskly explained—essentially, explained away—religion as an innate appetite: “The mind prefers at once the idea of a self-existing cause to that of an infinite series of cause & effect.” When the First Congress hired a chaplain, Madison said that “it was not with my approbation.” When, during the War of 1812, congressmen urged President Madison to proclaim a day of fasting and prayer for the nation’s success, he refused, saying that people so inclined could and would pray. In 1781, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged “the Great Governor of the World,” but six years later the Constitution made no mention of God. When Hamilton was asked why, he supposedly quipped, “We forgot.” Ten years after the convention, the Senate unanimously ratified a treaty with Islamic Tripoli that declared the US government “is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”22 Regardless of the reasons why this stipulation was deemed expedient, the stipulation was and is accurate. The regime is founded on precepts, many of which are congruent with, or buttressed by, Christian doctrine, which taught the universal equality of individuals capable of moral choices informed by faith. “Critique of religion” Marx wrote, “is the prerequisite of every critique.”23 He believed this because religion was the bedrock impediment to the modern political project, as Marx understood it. This project is to rescue humanity from contradictions and imperfections that produce individual and societal failures. Religion, however, and especially Christianity, with its doctrine of original sin, teaches that inadequacy is an irremediable constant of the human condition.
As noted in Chapter 1, there is another argument, independent of this or that statement by this or that Founder, for why the United States is a thoroughly secular polity. The Constitution mandates the establishment of a political truth by guaranteeing each state the same form of government (“republican”). It does so because the Founders thought the most important political truths are knowable. But because they thought religious truths are unknowable, they proscribed the establishment of religion, while respecting religion’s instrumental value.
Two days after President Jefferson wrote his public letter endorsing a “wall of separation” between church and state, he attended, as he occasionally did, religious services in the House of Representatives, where the speaker’s chair served as a pulpit.24 During Jefferson’s administration, Sunday services were held every week in government buildings. Ministers included Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Swedenborgians, a Roman Catholic bishop, a Unitarian, and a female evangelist. Jefferson was an observant yet unbelieving Anglican/Episcopalian throughout his public life. This was a statesmanlike accommodation of the public’s strong preference, which then as now was for religion to have ample space in the public square.
Christianity, particularly its post-Reformation ferments, fostered attitudes and aptitudes associated with popular government. Protestantism’s emphasis on the individual’s direct, unmediated relationship with God, and the primacy of individual conscience and choice, subverted conventions of hierarchical societies in which deference was expected from the many toward the few. But beyond that, America’s Founding owes much more to John Locke than to Jesus. New Jersey’s Luther Martin said few of his fellow delegates to the Constitutional Convention were “so unfashionable as to [
think] that a belief in the existence of a Deity and of a state of future rewards and punishments would be some security for the good conduct of our leaders.”25 Heaven and Hell are all very well, but the convention was looking for auxiliary precautions. It found them in the Madisonian architecture of federal institutions, and in the multiplicity of factions produced by the sociology of “extensive Republics.”26
In 1786, the year before the convention constructed the regime, Jefferson, in the preamble to Virginia’s statute for religious freedom, proclaimed that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”27 Thomas Paine could be, simultaneously, the colonies’ most influential writer of political advocacy and also the author of this: “Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity.”28 Many of Paine’s readers could compartmentalize their assessment of him, relishing his political ideas while deploring his thoughts about “invented” religions. And others simply did not care that much about religion.
The Conservative Sensibility Page 54