Liberty and Tyranny

by Mark R. Levin

  Support for the Statist ought not be confused with support for the state as is. The Statist himself will criticize the state, not for the purpose of reforming it or reducing it, but for changing it in the name of reforming it. The counterrevolution is a constant revolution, since the Statist can never rid the individual or state of imperfection and inequality, no matter how hard he tries. He is obsessed with the task nonetheless and is credited with deep compassion for the effort.

  The British writer-philosopher C. S. Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”11

  3

  ON FAITH AND THE FOUNDING

  REASON CANNOT, BY ITSELF,

  explain why there is reason. Science cannot, by itself, explain why there is science. Man’s discovery and application of science are products of reason. Reason and science can explain the existence of matter, but they cannot explain why there is matter. They can explain the existence of the universe, but they cannot explain why there is a universe. They can explain the existence of nature and the law of physics, but they cannot explain why there is nature and the law of physics. They can explain the existence of life, but they cannot explain why there is life. They can explain the existence of consciousness, but they cannot explain why there is consciousness.1

  Science is a critical aspect of human existence, but it cannot address the spiritual nature of man. In this respect, science is a dead end around which the Atheist refuses to reason. Reason itself informs man of its own limitations and, in doing so, directs him to the discovery of a force greater than himself—a supernatural force responsible for the origins of not only human existence but all existence, and which itself has always existed and will always exist. For most, the supernatural reveals itself in the Creator—God. Man seeks God’s guidance through faith and prayer. The Agnostic accepts the supernatural, but is not so sure of the form of its existence. The Deist accepts that God created the universe and man’s condition but left it to man to sort things out through reason.

  Man is more than a physical creature. As Edmund Burke argued, each individual is created as a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience and is bound to a transcendent moral order established by Divine Providence and uncovered through observation and experience over the ages.2 “There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity—the law of nature and of nations.”3 This is the Natural Law that penetrates man’s being and which the Founding Fathers adopted as the principle around which civilized American society would be organized.

  The Declaration of Independence appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It provides further, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

  The Founders were enlightened men, but not men purely of the Age of Enlightenment. They were highly educated, well-informed men who excelled at reason and subscribed to science but worshipped neither. They comprehended them—their strengths as well as weaknesses. The Declaration’s signers were Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Anglican, Unitarian, and Roman Catholic. At least two Founders, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, are widely believed to have been Deists. They were men of varying denominations but united and emphatic in the belief that the Creator was the origin of their existence and the source of their reason.

  Is it possible that there is no Natural Law and man can know moral order and unalienable rights from his own reasoning, unaided by the supernatural or God? There are, of course, those who argue this case—including the Atheist and others who attempt to distinguish Natural Law from Divine Providence. It is not the view adopted by the Founders. This position would, it seems, lead man to arbitrarily create his own morality and rights, or create his own arbitrary morality and rights—right and wrong, just and unjust, good and bad, would be relative concepts susceptible to circumstantial applications. Moreover, by what justification would “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” be “unalienable Rights” if there is no Natural Law, since reason alone cannot make them inviolable? What then is Natural Law if its origin is unknown or rejected? It is nothing more than a human construct. An individual may benefit from the moral order and unalienable rights around which society functions while rejecting their Divine origin. But the civil society cannot organize itself that way. It would become unstable and vulnerable to anarchy and tyranny, imperiling all within it, especially the individual. The abandonment of Natural Law is the adoption of tyranny in one form or another, because there is no humane or benevolent alternative to Natural Law.

  Some resist the idea of Natural Law’s relationship to Divine Providence, for they fear it leads to intolerance or even theocracy. They have that backwards. If man is “endowed by [the] Creator with certain unalienable rights,” he is endowed with these rights no matter his religion or whether he has allegiance to any religion. It is Natural Law, divined by God and discoverable by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights—rights that are not conferred on man by man and, therefore, cannot legitimately be denied to man by man. It is the Divine nature of Natural Law that makes permanent man’s right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” In the last sentence of the Declaration, the Founders proclaimed: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

  And what of the government’s role in religion, or vice versa? Prior to the founding, America was a land settled by people mostly from Europe, and many of them were escaping religious persecution. Consequently, several colonies had distinct religious and denominational characteristics. The Puritans (and later Baptists and Congregationalists) were concentrated in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Roman Catholics in Maryland, etc. Several of the colonies were immersed in religion, some more than others, and some were more tolerant of religious diversity than others. Many settlers were drawn to America in search of economic opportunity and congregated in places such as New York, New Jersey, and Georgia.

  In 1776, when representatives of the colonies signed the Declaration, they did so for the first time as representatives of states and as part of a loose confederation. The designation of the colonies as states did not erase the long histories and traditions of the former colonies. Many continued to promote religion with taxes and land grants. Some states required officials to affirm their allegiance to a particular religion or religious sect by way of an oath, although this practice was dropped a few decades after the founding. And some states continued to discriminate against certain religions. But when they bound themselves to the Declaration’s principles, they bound themselves to, among other things, religious liberty. It is little understood that the Declaration was a declaration of political and religious liberty.

  Despite its different denominations, Christianity was and is America’s dominant religion. There is no dispute that Judeo-Christian values and traditions have and do influence America’s fundamental laws and policies. However, despite its varying practices and applications in the colonies and the early years of the states, Christianity itself does not preach operational dominance over the body politic or seek justification from it, even while it promotes and defends its teachings through proselytism and activism. In contrasting Christianity to Islam in this respect, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “Mohammed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxim
s, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The Gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other—beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith….”4

  In Saudi Arabia, the Basic Law provides that “the nation’s constitution consists of the Quran and the Sunna, the actions and sayings of the prophet as recorded in the Hadith…. [S]upreme religious councils dictate how Islamic law is applied and, to a large extent, have veto power over legislation.”5 Islamic law, or sharia, dictates the most intricate aspects of daily life, from politics and finance to dating and hygiene. There is not, and never has been, support for a national construct of this sort in America.

  The Constitution’s Framers wrote the First Amendment to include the words “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” because they believed the establishment of a theocracy would be destructive of both liberty generally and religious liberty in particular. Although the First Amendment, as originally intended and applied, had no effect on the states, its adoption by the federal Congress and ratification by the states evinced a national consensus that liberty and religious liberty are inseparable, the same national consensus that motivated the Declaration’s signers. The Founders were remarkably foresighted. It is no accident that Americans are among the most religious and tolerant people in the world.

  For the Statist, however, the Declaration is an impediment to his schemes. The Statist cannot abide the existence of Natural Law and man’s discovery of “unalienable rights” bestowed on all individuals by “their Creator.” In ideology and practice, the Statist believes rights are not a condition of man’s existence but only exist to the extent the Statist ratifies them. Furthermore, rights do not belong to all individuals. They are to be rationed by the state—conferred on those whom the Statist believes deserving of them, and denied to those whom the Statist believes undeserving of them. He acknowledges only that law which he himself sets in place, and which is subject to change or arbitrary application on his say-so. The Statist may wrap himself and his deeds in the language of enlightenment—claiming to be the voice of reason, the beholder of knowledge, and the architect of modernity—but recent history has shown him to be unenlightened in his understanding of mankind, moral order, liberty, and equality. Statists have launched bloody revolutions followed by violent periods of terror in France, Russia, Germany, China, and elsewhere, always under the flags of democratic populism, Marxism, national socialism, and fascism. For the Statist, revolution is an ongoing enterprise, for it regularly cleanses society of religious dogma, antiquated traditions, backward customs, and ambitious individuals who differ with or obstruct the Statist’s plans. The Statist calls this many things, including “progressive.” For the rest, it is tyranny.

  Is the Statist a Secularist, or vice versa? The Secularist may believe in the supernatural or God and practice a religion but share the Statist’s objective of excluding their influence from public life. If such a Secularist also shares the Statist’s egalitarian ends, he is at one with the Statist—a religious Statist or a Secular religionist, if you will—oddly endorsing the Enlightenment without Natural Law and the Statist’s promise of heaven on earth. Moreover, the Statist may express his politics in the semantics of religion to disarm religious believers and enlist their support to simultaneously advance his secular and, ultimately, statist agenda. A Secularist may also be a Statist stripped of God or religion.

  It is no coincidence that with the rise of New Deal statism, secularism would rise with it. It is also unsurprising that secularism would make its strongest showing not from the ranks of the people’s representatives, but from the judiciary.

  In 1947, in the case Everson v. Board of Education, Associate Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, writing for a 5–4 majority, asserted that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”6 He added, “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”7

  Black had been Franklin Roosevelt’s first appointee to the Supreme Court. He was a senator from Alabama—and a reliable New Deal proponent in the Senate and on the Court. He had also been a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and was hostile toward the Catholic Church. According to Black’s son, “The Ku Klux Klan and Daddy, so far as I could tell, had one thing in common. He suspected the Catholic Church. He used to read all of Paul Blanshard’s books exposing the power abuse in the Catholic Church. He thought the Pope and the bishops had too much power and property. He resented the fact that rental property owned by the Church was not taxed; he felt they got most of their revenue from the poor and did not return enough of it.”8

  Whatever Black’s motivations, he orchestrated a wretched betrayal of America’s founding and succeeded in rewriting the First Amendment to say what the Framers would never have countenanced.

  Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued in 1985, in the case Wallace v. Jaffree, “The [First Amendment’s] Establishment Clause did not require government neutrality between religion and irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build a ‘wall of separation’ that was constitutionalized in Everson.”9

  Actually, the Founders did not require nondiscriminatory aid to religion, for it existed at the time of the founding and the Constitution’s ratification. They rejected the establishment of a national religion, leaving the states free to make their own decisions. And by the time Everson was decided, the few states that had established churches had long past abolished them. Still, the Everson fiat applied to all levels of government because the Court was not concerned with the establishment of a theocracy but rather with establishing a secular polity. And the courts subsequently extended Everson to mean the exclusion of references to God in certain public settings. A more thorough repudiation of the nation’s founding principles—of Natural Law and God-given unalienable rights—would be difficult to invent. Indeed, as Claremont Institute senior fellow and University of Dallas professor Thomas G. West wrote, “[T]he Supreme Court will allow the theology of the Declaration to be taught in the classroom as long as it is understood that it belongs to a ‘world that is dead and gone,’ that it has nothing to do with the world that we live in here and now, that it is not a living faith that holds God to be the source of our rights, the author of the laws of nature, and the protector and Supreme Judge of America.”10

  A theocracy is not established if certain public schools allow their students to pray at the beginning of the day, or participate in Christmas or Easter assemblies; or if certain school districts transport parochial students to their religious schools as part of the district’s bus route; or certain communities choose to construct a manger scene on the grounds of their town hall or display the Ten Commandments above their courthouse steps. The individual is not required to change his religious affiliation or even accept God’s existence. He is not required to worship against his beliefs or even worship at all. Some might be uncomfortable or offended by these events, but individuals are uncomfortable all the time over all kinds of government activities. Some might oppose the use of their tax dollars to support these events. So what? Individuals oppose the manner in which government uses their tax dollars all the time. That does not make the uses unconstitutional. While all religions may not have similar access to these public places, they are largely free to conduct themselves as they wish, uninhibited by the community, as long as they do not engage in criminal or immoral practices. Yet even these passive expressions of religious liberty, which represent a community’s dominant religion or religious denomination, must, according to the Secularist and the Court, be abandoned.

  The American courts sit today as su
preme secular councils, which, like Islam’s supreme religious councils, dictate all manner of approved behavior respecting religion. Whereas the supreme religious councils enforce Islamic law, the supreme secular councils have seized for themselves the mission of segregating God and religion from public life and have immersed themselves in religious matters. Neither of the councils tolerates conflicting or diverse viewpoints, insisting that their rulings are the final word for all society.

  The question must be asked and answered: Is it possible for the Conservative to be a Secularist? There are conservatives who self-identify as secularists, whether or not they believe in God or take a religion, and it is not for others to deny them their personal beliefs. However, it must be observed that the Declaration is at opposite with the Secularist. Therefore, the Conservative would be no less challenged than any other to make coherent that which is irreconcilable.

  Moreover, for the Conservative, as it was for Burke and the Founders, faith is not a threat to civil society but rather vital to its survival. It encourages the individual to personally adhere to a dogma that promotes restraint, duty, and moral behavior, which not only benefit the individual but the multitudes and society generally. As George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable results…. And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”11