The framers indulged experiment when building America because many were scientists, though they may not have identified themselves using that word. Franklin’s scientific chops are perhaps best known. He tamed electricity; he invented the lightning rod, the Franklin wood-burning stove, and bifocals—to name a few of his most popular innovations. He also mapped the Gulf Stream, designed swim fins, invented the glass armonica, and experimented with an early odometer as a colonial postmaster.12
Jefferson viewed all of Monticello as an experiment.13 He installed several of his architectural inventions, such as an improved dumbwaiter, a revolving clothes rack in his closet, and a ventilation system. Jefferson improved the plow with a lower-resistance moldboard, and he invented a wheel cipher, a swivel chair, and a spherical sundial.14 He also launched Lewis and Clark on what might have been America’s first expedition with scientific goals.
Washington kept meticulous agricultural logs and continually experimented with better planting methods, new crops, and different rotations.15 He invented a drill plow to help seed his fields along with a threshing barn, a sixteen-sided brick barn to help sift and sort grain.16 He also inoculated the Continental Army against smallpox (variolation, an earlier, less reliable inoculation method was used at the time). This was the first army-wide immunization in military history, and it dropped mortality rates in infected soldiers from more than 30 percent to below 1 percent.17
James Madison’s scientific curiosity led him to invent a walking stick with a microscope inside it to better view nature close up on his country strolls.18 He wanted a telescope walking stick too, and designed a chair with a writing desk attached to the arm, something seen for decades in schools.19
Alexander Hamilton created American credit in the global economy—we probably owe more to his inventive ideas than other founder. His reports, such as First Report on the Public Credit, Report on a National Bank, Report on Manufactures, and Report on the Establishment of a Mint, laid the foundation for American economic supremacy.20
Thomas Paine invented a smokeless candle, and designed an iron bridge that Jefferson was excited about because it “promises to be cheaper by a great deal than stone, and to admit of a much greater arch.”21
In 1780, John Adams founded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, along with John Hancock and a few other scientifically minded revolutionaries.22 Many founders—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Paine, and others—joined the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin founded in 1743 as America’s oldest scientific society.23
The founders even put science in the Constitution. The sole purpose behind patents and copyrights, which the Constitution protects, is to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”24
They may not have been scientists in the modern sense, but the founders deserve the title, and not just for their contributions to agriculture, architecture, physics, engineering, and other fields. To the founders, politics and government were sciences. When convincing Americans to ratify the new federal constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote about “the science of politics” and how it, in their age, “like most sciences has received great improvement.”25 James Madison read and studied “the most oracular Authors on the Science of Government,”26 as did his mentor and friend, Jefferson.27 For Adams, politics was not just science; it was the science—“the divine science of politics.”28 Why? Because “politics…is the science of human happiness.”29 Political science sought to make people happy, not to repress, terrorize, and misuse them. Its divinity was a product of this world and not in any way supernatural. Adams also penned the era’s most memorable line about the purpose of political science and nation-building:
The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.30
The founders were not supplicants seeking to interpret divine revelation; they were political scientists, using reason, experience, and history to build a nation. During the Constitutional Convention, they debated which theory of government would work best for the United States, and then put that theory to the test in the “American experiment,” as Madison dubbed it.31
That’s how scientists determine whether their ideas are correct: they experiment. They actively try to disprove their own hypotheses by testing them. In 1786, Benjamin Franklin was asked about America’s progress in improving its governments. He responded, “We are, I think, in the right Road of Improvement, for we are making Experiments. I do not oppose all that seems wrong, for the Multitude are more effectually set right by Experience, than kept from going wrong by Reasoning with them.”32 The Constitutional Convention met the next year and would be a tour de force of reasoning, political science, experience, and enlightened thought; all were debated and compromised. Religion was left out, both out of the convention—the delegates rejected a motion for daily prayers, finding them “unnecessary”33—and out of the Constitution, which mentioned religion only to prohibit religious tests for public office. (The First Amendment was added later and it too excludes religion, keeping religion out of government and vice versa; see pages 173–74).
Many founders shared Franklin’s view of the Constitution: it was an experiment. Adams regularly spoke of constitutions as experiments34 and wanted to see “rising in America an empire of liberty.”35 At least one of his correspondents thought it impossible. Adams retorted, “If I should agree with you in this, I would still say, let us try the experiment.”36 During his first inaugural, when Adams explained that though he “first saw the Constitution of the United States in a foreign country,” he had “read it with great satisfaction, as a result of good heads, prompted by good hearts; as an experiment better adapted to the genius, character, situation, and relations of this nation and country than any which had ever been proposed or suggested.”37
Jefferson, who was also abroad during the Constitutional Convention, echoed Adams’s sentiment in his own first inaugural: “Would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free?”38
Madison called the Constitution “the great political experiment in the hands of the American people.”39 The Federalist Papers, many of which he authored, talk of political “experiments” forty-five times, mostly to refer to testing theories of republican government.40 James Madison and George Mason each skillfully summarized the unique phenomenon of American minds crafting the American political experiment. Madison, perhaps the most brilliant political theorist at the Convention, said, “The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”41 Madison covered all the important bases: freedom, self-government, the genius of the people, and political experiments. Faith was absent.
George Mason wrote a letter to his son the first week the Constitutional Convention met. Quorum had been declared less than a week before and Edmund Randolph had introduced the Virginia Plan just three days prior. The letter shows Mason’s remarkable grasp of the magnitude of the framers’ task and, more importantly, of how it would be accomplished. The war for independence and drafting state constitutions “were nothing compared to the great business now before us; there was then a certain degree of enthusiasm, which inspired and supported the mind.”42 It was not difficult to drum up
popular support for a war; people need only be scared and roused. “But,” Mason continued, “to view, through the calm, sedate medium of reason the influence which the establishment now proposed may have upon the happiness or misery of millions yet unborn, is an object of such magnitude, as absorbs, and in a manner suspends the operations of the human understanding.”43 Nation-building must be done through calm, sedate reason. It absorbs the “operations of human understanding” while simultaneously filling one with awe. There is no place for faith in such an operation. Faith did not have a seat at the birth of our Constitution. Reason reigned.
12
A Monarchy and “the morrow” or a Republic and “our posterity”
“I will establish his kingdom forever if he continues resolute in keeping my commandments.”
— 1 Chronicles 28:7
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
— Benjamin Franklin, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, 17871
From George Mason’s letter to his son, we know that he and his fellow delegates were not creating a nation for the moment, but for posterity, for “the millions yet unborn” (see page 151). They were building a country for us. Had Mason’s letter not survived, the Constitution’s Preamble would still provide evidence of the framers’ goals. At least one of these purposes—“to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”—conflicts with the tenets of Judeo-Christianity. The Constitution is meant to build a better country for the future, ensuring prosperity and freedom for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren down through the generations. James Wilson wanted his fellow delegates at the Constitutional Convention to “consider that we are providing a Constitution for future generations and not merely for the circumstances of the moment.”2 They were “laying the foundation of a building, which is to last for ages, and in which millions are interested.”3 Madison wanted the nation to “last for ages” too—he said so twice.4 Fellow delegate John Rutledge echoed the sentiment: “As we are laying the foundation for a great empire, we ought to take a permanent view of the subject and not look at the present moment only.”5 Even the Declaration of Independence tells us that people who exercise their right to “throw off” despotic government have a responsibility to “provide new Guards for their future security.” The founders were building a government to help future generations secure liberty and happiness in this world.
Jesus’s biblical message is not about building a future in this world, and certainly not for future generations. Christianity is about ensuring one’s own place for eternity, others be damned—literally. Jesus demanded that his followers “take no thought for the morrow.” And though his justification relied on god’s care for the “lilies of the field” and the “fowls of the air,” we can assume Jesus meant what he said.6 For him, tomorrow was not important because the end of the world was supposedly imminent. Jesus would die and his second coming would bring judgment for all and determine their place in eternity. Judgment Day would come in the next thirty or so years, before Jesus’s generation had died. At least, that’s what the bible claims Jesus said: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away”7 and “There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.”8 When Jesus tells his disciples to spread news of the coming end, he tells them, “You will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.”9 Jesus thought he’d be back before his friends had died. (In the thirteenth century, a bizarre story about a “Wandering Jew”—a fictional, immortal Jew and a contemporary of Jesus, doomed to walk the earth until the second coming—was invented, likely to give credence to Jesus’s erroneous predictions.)
Early Christians believed Jesus’s promise,10 and preachers have been terrifying their congregations with predictions of impending Armageddon for 2,000 years. To this day, 41 percent of Americans think Jesus is returning to earth sometime in the next forty years—presumably bringing Armageddon with him.11 That is a remarkably stubborn belief, given that every Christian who has ever held this belief has been wrong.
The true Christian should not be concerned with the paltry cares of this world, but with the next. Had the framers taken Jesus at his word, they never would have built a country for the future. The English philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, discussed this well-known problem:
Private friendship and zeal for the public and our country are purely voluntary in a Christian…. He is not so tied to the affairs of this life, nor is he obliged to enter into such engagements with this lower world as are of no help to him in acquiring a better. His conversation is in heaven. Nor has he occasion for such supernumerary cares or embarrassments here on earth as may obstruct his way thither or retard him in the careful task of working out his own salvation.12
In Harper’s Lee’s classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist, Scout, learns that a “Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle…. There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one.”13 It’s difficult to see how, or even why, Christianity would contribute to a government founded to secure a future for “ourselves and our posterity” when Christian dogma specifically declares that there is no such future.
If Jesus had been concerned with building a government and society, what would it have looked like? The bible mentions government quite a bit, but the bible’s governments do not resemble the government the founders created. Biblical regimes look more like the government from which the colonies declared independence in July 1776.
The governments the bible espouses and those it has bred are theocratic monarchies. The bible is brimming with monarchy. Two books of the bible are titled “Kings.” Many of the bible’s heroes are kings, such as King Saul, King David, and King Solomon. The bible tells readers to “keep the king’s command,”14 and the entire collection is concerned with god’s kingdom: including, in the Old Testament, the “kingdom of the Lord” and “a great King above all gods,” and in the New Testament, “the kingdom of God” and “thy kingdom come.” God himself promises on several occasions to assign kings to rule over his followers.15 And not just kings, but “a king whom the Lord your God will choose.”16 Jesus himself “is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.”17
The biggest of these monarchies is the New Testament “Kingdom of God,” which, as with most biblical monarchies, is hereditary. The father has a son whose kingdom is coming. The bible says, “He…will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.”18 It also says that Jesus will only “[hand] over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.”19
There is no whiff of representative government in the bible. And when given a chance, the Israelites actually request a king, not a democracy or a republic.20 The closest the bible gets to discussing representative government—and it’s not close—is in the noncanonical books of the Maccabees, which partly describe that eponymous tribe’s revolt against Hellenizing cultural influences.21
Unlike the Maccabees, America’s founders did not reject the Grecian culture that birthed democracy. Quite the opposite: they rejected the bible and looked to ancient Greek city-states and pre-Christian Rome when drafting our Constitution. Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that rather than “putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history.”22 Jefferson had been writing about the youth, but the framers at the Constitutional Convention heeded his advice. Greek thinkers such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Solon had far more to offer than biblical monarchists. The Greeks actually thought and wrote about other forms of government, not just divinely sanctioned monarchies. Isocr
ates thought that “the constitution is the soul of the state.”23 Although the bible speaks often of souls, it never mentions constitutions.24 Aristotle more concisely noted that “the constitution is the state.”25 Both men, along with many other Greek writers, spoke extensively about government and constitutions.
John Adams had been ruminating about the structure of government and how to build it since at least 1765, when he wrote “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.” He did not find inspiration in the bible: “Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell.”26 Although Adams studied civil and ecclesiastical government, he failed to mention Christianity when discussing historical examples, going from England to the ancients, to Greece and Rome.27
The American commitment to classical, not Christian, principles is contained in the very name of the government chosen. Constitutional Convention delegate James McHenry of Maryland recorded a wonderful anecdote about a lady who asked Benjamin Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”28 Franklin’s response was the legendary “A republic, if you can keep it.” A republic—res publica—is literally “a public thing,” a thing of the people. Not something divine, not something handed down from on high, and not something that could be maintained without effort—but a thing “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln so beautifully phrased it.29
The Founding Myth Page 18
