The American Political Tradition - Religion

The American Political Tradition - continued

by Wesley A. Riddle, U.S. Army Lt. Col. (Ret.)

Generically, religion and politics interact in a number of ways. Religious values influence voters and politicians directly. Indirectly, religious affiliation is one of the more important markers of national identity. Religious values help legitimate a country’s political arrangements and institutions. It is not remarkable to assert that the homogeneous, primarily Dissenter-Protestant, character of the United States up to the nineteenth century had quite a lot to do with the political disputes leading up to the American Revolution and with the setting up of a new political order. ¹

On September 16, 1775, a detached command of more than one thousand volunteers from Continental Army units arrived in Newburyport, Massachusetts. On September 19 they sailed for the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, from which they would march overland to attack Quebec. Before leaving Newburyport, the troops paraded in general review for the citizens on Sunday, September 17. One soldier said, “We passed the review with much honor to ourselves. We manifested great zeal and animation in the cause of liberty and went through with the manual exercise with much alacrity. The spectators, who were very numerous, appeared much affected.” That same day the soldiers worshipped in the First Presbyterian Church on King Street, later renamed Federal Street. Citizens filled the galleries. The soldiers marched into the church with colors flying and drums beating. They formed two lines and presented arms. As the drums rolled, Chaplain Samuel Spring walked between the lines to the pulpit. The men stacked their arms in the aisles, and Spring preached extemporaneously on the words of Moses to the Lord, “If thy spirit go not with us, carry us not up hence.”

Beneath them as they worshiped lay the tomb of George Whitefield, who had been the voice of the Great Awakening. More than any other man, Whitefield, with his preaching, had introduced Americans to the joys of a communal revival of piety and a sharing of the conversion experience on a continental scale. After Spring’s sermon, some of the officers gathered around him, and they decided to visit Whitefield’s tomb. They found the sexton and went down to the coffin. The officers got the sexton to take off the lid. After five years the body had decayed, but some of the clothes remained. The officers took Whitefield’s collar and wristbands, cut them in little pieces, divided the pieces, and carried them away.

In the following weeks, the expedition withstood the hardest march of the war—350 miles of wilderness in forty-five days. Some starved to death along the route; three companies turned back; but six hundred men made it. Despite the defeat and disease they suffered before Quebec, they earned great praise for themselves and their commander, Colonel Benedict Arnold. ²

This and many other prominent examples of religious zeal, rhetoric and ritual during the Revolution suggest that, on one level, the war the Americans were waging may have been a holy war.³ We know that for 50 years prior to the Revolution, the colonies underwent a series of interdenominational revivals known as the Great Awakening. It was the first significant experience in common that served to knit the colonies. Unlike the Enlightenment, there was no counterpart to the Great Awakening in the Old World. Recall that the Liberty Bell was chosen to ring out a warning and to ring in good news, because it had inscribed upon it the scripture from Leviticus 25:10, “... proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof...” Likewise, the American cause became the subject of many patriotic songs. “Let Tyrants Shake” (known also as “Chester”) followed soldiers to camp and was a favorite of the fife and drum corps. Its author William Billings was a composer of hymns. Some of the lines stand out about the people’s religious convictions in connection with their revolutionary and martial enterprise: “... [W]e trust in God, New England’s God forever reigns” in the first stanza; “... God inspired us for the fight” in the second. The last stanza reads:

What grateful offering shall we bring,
What shall we render to the Lord?
Loud Hallelujahs let us sing,
And praise His name on every chord.⁴

The point of these examples is that Americans associated their cause of liberty with the Lord. The American Revolution was the “Glorious cause” of a people, who recognized themselves as “set apart from others by Providence”—their hopes were millennial, their conception of the world religious in origin. ⁵

In fact, it is an entirely modern idea that faith and freedom are somehow antagonistic, or that Enlightenment ideas, as conceived in America, envisioned a strict “wall of separation” between public display and expression of religion and the secular state. It is pure fabrication by historians, those who assert religion has had little or no role in the political affairs of the nation or that this country was not culturally conceived as a Christian republic.⁶ Moreover, the arrival after 1820 of large numbers of Catholic and Jewish immigrants altered the Protestant consensus but reinforced a Judeo-Christian ethics, militant secularization of society and judicial activism started to change that in the 1920s. Today, the United States is still considered one of the most religious of western democratic countries, which gives us some indication as to the sad state of religion at the end of this most irreligious of centuries. Notwithstanding, since the 1970s there has been some resurgence of religious fundamentalism worldwide. In this country it has taken the form of an ecumenical revivalism and, politically, of much more cooperation between evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics and orthodox Jews. Indeed, I submit to you that at least the Third Great Awakening is already under way. Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal confirms, “We are undergoing what the Founding Fathers would recognize as a Great Awakening.” Robert Bork agrees that “we are witnessing a religious revival, another awakening.” According to Hilton Kramer, “a serious religious revival is under way in this country.” And from Charles Murray: “In the society at large, something resembling the great religious awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries seems to be under way.” ⁷

The perennial problem, one borne out in the ghastly example of the Holocaust, is that totalitarian movements thrive in populations lacking interior guidelines. People who lack moral scruples, whose conduct is not governed more or less by the internal moral gyroscopes conscientiously constructed and reinforced by the culture around them, will look to the state to provide them with criteria for living. The state will provide the exterior guidelines that come to substitute for religious values, and then men are apt to behave like robots. Modern secular humanism is just one such variety of external diktat, imposed as social policy by the government, which wrests control of people literally from the Lord, so to speak, by destroying public and institutional supports of religion and by moving the loci of control outside of persons. Pop culture displaces moral sensibilities and self-discipline to the extent that anything does. Hence the clearly evident pattern in society today: the ever burgeoning power of government, coincidental with the abatement of religious conviction and the rise in social pathologies.

The error that links freedom’s origin to secular tradition is common and very often related to a pervasive misinterpretation about the nature of the Middle Ages. Further, the erroneous interpretation colors much else, since it produces the impression that freedom at its origin was antagonistic to religion rather than the outgrowth of it. Contrary to the “consensus” record in most textbooks, Lord Acton tells us the Middle Ages were characterized by almost universal representative government, unknown to the ancients. The principle that taxation was inseparable from representation was also recognized. Under some circumstances, the right of insurrection was considered to be a duty sanctioned by religion. Constitutionalism was indeed the foremost political concept of the Middle Ages. After all, the Magna Carta is a medieval document, achieved by the exertions of the clergy along with feudal barons. The document embodied the idea of limits to power central to the development of libertarian practice. Indeed, Magna Carta embodies “Medieval theory,” according to Otto von Gierke, in that, the power of the state or sovereign may not exceed the bonds of Natural Law.

All of which does not deny important contributions to the republican form and theory of government from other than religious sources or from various other epochs. The distinctions so far are nevertheless important. We commonly think of England as the home of representative government. We mostly fail to reflect, however, that England enjoyed the free institutions she transferred to her colonies, because they had been retained from the previous era. English constitutional theory that “the king is under God—and under the law” was the essence of Christian teaching about the state, which became the guiding precept in English common law. Moreover, the religious-political quarrels that would destroy the supremacy of the Stuarts resuscitated medieval theory and caused the great migration to the New World of Puritans—Christian partisans who planted that view of limited, constitutional government, which happened also to best facilitate covenant theology and to sustain an unabashedly religious worldview.

The Glorious Revolution was also called the Protestant Wind in England, and there were a number of counterparts to it in the colonies against colonial governors and councils. But whereas English Whig-Protestants moved over time towards the attribution of all power to Parliament, American Whig-Dissenters never did. Stanley Katz has written that colonists emphasized the common law tradition as a way to stem command authority assumed by Parliament from Cromwell’s reign. Americans also refused to add precedent upon precedent to the common law, if such ascribed illegitimate power to any agent. Americans remained true to their medieval heritage by delineating bounds to the exercise of power, beyond which the king or even Parliament could not reach. Britain’s adoption of Imperial Reorganization policy following the French and Indian War led directly to conflict with the colonists. The policy attempted to impose internal taxes and to maintain a standing army for the collection of those taxes, as well as to restrict westward migration and settlement. All this was in the name of virtual representation by a Parliament that recognized no theoretical limits to its power. It was the logical policy outgrowth of British political philosophy that had diverged sharply from the medieval tradition in intervening years. In this context, the American Revolution was quintessentially conservative.

The real “Enlightenment” revolution was not the American but the French Revolution. Instead of being led by Christians, it was led by atheists intent on having an atheist society. Instead of being based on moral absolutes and unalienable rights endowed by the Creator, the French Revolution declared rights of man and based them on moral relativism and then left them to the determination and protection of man alone. The river of blood that flowed from the guillotine did not stain American soil. No tyrant rose to quell ensuing chaos on American shores. Instead, Americans fulfilled the promise of their Revolution with the Constitution, its written form intended to enshrine the absolute moral values held by the people based upon their religion, as well as to prevent the gradual accretion of power by any agency or any level of government through the application of common law precedent alone.⁸ John Locke’s social contract theory was important, certainly upon the elite in America. It also represented an innovation over medieval contract theory, but it also dovetailed neatly into the preexisting and popular understanding of contracts between the people and their government, based upon agreement and concession in the medieval tradition. Somewhat ironically in America, Enlightenment ideas actually helped spark evangelical revivalism, in part because Americans rejected the more radical intonations from European philosophes and strove to canalize Enlightenment ideas in their religious tradition. Hence the Great Awakening, which preceded the American Revolution and which had no counterpart outside of the New World. In a similar vein, while the founding of educational institutions is considered indicative of the Enlightenment influence of reason and science, the great Ivy League schools founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America began as religious institutions to spread learning and the gospel.

Locke himself was also steeped in Christian tradition, considered himself a Christian, and wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures in 1695. In that work, there is clear resemblance in his method to certain theological views that gained wide acceptance in America, even among fundamentalist and evangelical sects.⁹ Most Americans had no more difficulty equating the New Testament God of Love with the Author of Reason, than with the Author of Liberty. Daniel Boorstin has a chapter entitled “The Mingling of Political and Religious Thought” in his book The Genius of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1953). In it he makes this point: Americans, unlike Europeans, mostly agreed on the social ends they should accept, but politics was almost never the realm of those ends. The ends were spiritual, but society would and should evolve voluntarily, without direction from the state. It may very well be that the transmutation of politics into an arena for the determination of society’s ends—whether it was accomplished by democracy or by capitalism, by Freud, Darwin, Marx or the New Deal--is exactly what produces the current disintegration of American society. To the extent that it is true, it is likewise the case that Americans have removed themselves very far from the Constitutional framework understood and originally established by the Founding Fathers.