Since the Founding, America’s religious enthusiasms have waxed and waned, confounding Jefferson’s prediction, made in 1822, four years before his death, that “there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian.”29 In 1908, William Jennings Bryan, the Democrats’ presidential nominee, said his Republican opponent, William Howard Taft, was unfit because, being a Unitarian, he did not believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. The electorate yawned and chose Taft. In 1953, the year before the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed the Fourth of July a national day of prayer. On that day, he fished in the morning, golfed in the afternoon, and played bridge in the evening. Were there prayers in the interstices of these recreations? Perhaps when the president faced a particularly daunting putt. When George Washington swore the first presidential oath of office, he did not conclude with the words “so help me God.” After reciting the constitutionally prescribed presidential oath, and his brief—1,428 words—inaugural address, Washington immediately walked across the street from Manhattan’s Federal Hall for a two-hour service at St. Paul’s Chapel.30 This conformity to expectations of public piety was probably as perfunctory as it was obligatory.
On September 22, 1881, following the death of President James Garfield, Vice President Chester Arthur—who as president would sign the law giving federal workers Christmas day off—took the presidential oath of office, which he ended with the words “so help me God.” He seems to have been the first president to do so. Several versions of these words were used, intermittently, at the installation of other presidents; Herbert Hoover was the last president not to use them. America’s public piety is more frequently avowed than constraining—so much so that it has invited raillery. In 1958, during Eisenhower’s second term, Peter De Vries, whose novels are splendid satires of America in the second half of the twentieth century, created the Reverend Mackerel of the People’s Liberal Church in a posh Connecticut suburb. The reverend spoke from a pulpit made of a “slab of marble set on four legs of four delicately differing fruitwoods, to symbolize the four Gospels, and their failure to harmonize.” He offered this prayer during a flood: “Let us hope that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.”31 In the years immediately after the 1962 Supreme Court decision forbidding organized prayers in public schools, some polls indicated that more Americans favored such prayers in schools than regularly prayed in churches. Today, many people who insist on the importance of piety in the lives of individuals and society are not particular concerning what people should be pious about. They are like the British ethicist who said: “I am fully convinced that the highest life can only be lived on a foundation of Christian belief—or some substitute for it.”32
In 1952, William O. Douglas, one of the most progressive justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court, wrote: “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”33 If by that Douglas meant that the natural rights tradition logically requires belief in God, he was simply mistaken. And as recently as 1984 the Supreme Court repeated Douglas’ words.34 The first part of this is more or less true (and less true than it once was) but of no relevance to constitutional law. The second part is of uncertain meaning. It is, however, certainly false: Are the institutions senseless, imprudent, or doomed if there is no Supreme Being? The nation’s first president was more circumspect. George Washington had a way of taking an indirect path to his point, as when he said in his first inaugural address, “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men, more than those of the United States.”35 And in his Farewell Address, Washington said: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”36
The third president, whose relationship to religion was cool and attenuated, sounded a theme similar to Washington’s. Jefferson wondered whether American liberties could be secure without “a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God.”37 Jefferson was suggesting an empirical postulate—that, absent a certain “conviction” about the origin of natural rights, those rights will not receive sufficient respect. Less than a month before his inauguration, president-elect Eisenhower said, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”38 By having “no sense,” Eisenhower might have meant that, absent a general acceptance of some character-forming and behavior-shaping theisms, our form of government will not be stable or durable. That, too, is an empirical assertion, and one that an increasingly secular America is testing.
The “bulk of mankind,” Locke thought, requires religious instruction, not because human reason is inherently insufficient to reveal how one should live, but because most people are incapable of the “long and sometimes intricate deductions” to reach that wisdom. “Such trains of reasonings the greatest part of mankind have neither leisure to weigh; nor, for want of education and use, skill to judge of.” Thus “you may as soon hope to have all the day-labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairy maids perfect mathematicians, as to have them perfect in ethics this way.”39
Many Americans—perhaps a majority—agree that democracy, or at least our democracy, which is based on a belief in natural rights, presupposes a religious faith. People who believe this cite, as Eisenhower did, the Declaration of Independence and its proposition that all of us are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. However, two separate and related questions are pertinent to any consideration of the role of religion in American politics. One is an empirical question: Is it a fact that the success of self-government requires a religious demos—religious people governing themselves by religious norms? The other is a question of logic: Does belief in America’s distinctive democracy—a government with clear limits defined by the natural rights of the governed—require religious belief? Regarding the empirical question: Religion has been, and can still be, supremely important and helpful to the flourishing of American democracy. But what is the evidence that it is necessary for good citizenship? Regarding the question of our government’s logic, the idea of natural rights does not require a religious foundation, and the Founders did not uniformly think that it did. It is, however, perhaps the case that natural rights are especially firmly grounded when they are grounded in religious doctrine.
So, religion is helpful and important, but is not essential. This formulation, which is hardly a departure from the American tradition, is neither hypocritical nor self-contradictory precisely because of the character of the American tradition. This is a tradition that has always marked out a division of labor between the institutions of politics and those of civil society, including those of religion, which play a role in sustaining our limited government by shaping self-sufficient citizens. Hence citizens who want limited government should be friendly to the cause of American religion, even if they are not believers themselves. The division of labor between society and government in America and the character of America’s political community grounded in the concept of natural rights are in dispute today. Understanding those disputes can help us better grasp the place of religion in the republic’s life.
Religion has been central to the American polity precisely because religion has not been central to American politics. Religion has played a large role in nurturing the virtues that republican government presupposes, particularly micro self-government—the individual’s governance of his or her self. The nation assigns to politics and public policy the secondary and subsidiary role of encouraging, or at least not stunting, the infrastructure of institutions that have the primary responsibility for nurturing civic and other virtues. American religion therefore coexists comfortably with, but
is not itself a component of, American government. Religion’s independence of politics has been part of its strength. There is a fascinating paradox at work in our nation’s history: America, the first and most relentlessly modern nation, is, to the consternation of social scientists, also the most religious modern nation. One reason for this is that we have disentangled religion from public institutions.
The modern world got rolling when Martin Luther, appearing at an inquiry into his thinking, reportedly declared: “Hier steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders.” Here I stand, I can do no other.40 This was a peculiar avowal of freedom—“I have no choice”—but it foreshadowed societies based on recognition of “unalienable” rights. Luther’s words announced the ascendance of private judgment—of conscience. He thought the state legitimately could be, and probably must be, powerful and sometimes ruthless. By his reckoning, the state should be cloaked in less dignity than it was when church and state were melded. The state, he thought, is responsible only for order and is barely relevant to the serious business of life, which is the afterlife—salvation. Christianity’s assessment of man, at once high and severe, is just about right for political philosophy: Man can be magnificent, but he is magnificent rarely, and never spontaneously—never without help from nurturing institutions. Luther had a haunting sense of humanity’s utter fallenness, and of humanity’s total dependence on God’s grace for even the slightest amelioration of the consequences of sin. This insulated Luther from the political temptation to believe in the perfectibility of man through the improvement of social arrangements. In the endless argument about which dominates, nature or nurture, Luther knew: nature. His quest for purity in religious experience—an anticipation of the modern quest for “authenticity”—led him to minimize the institutional help that is necessary to assist mankind’s quest for religious satisfaction and social fulfillment. But the radical individualism implicit in his thought was tempered by his celebration of the family as society’s molecular unit.
Luther’s career was made possible by another German’s career, Johannes Gutenberg’s. Luther’s was the first great life bound up with mass communication—printing with moveable type. He was the most prolific serious writer in history. One edition of his works exceeds 100 volumes; more than 2,500 of his letters survive. When people could read scripture, priests were challenged in their role as mediators between people and God. Luther’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone rather than by good works expressed the doctrine that salvation derives from God’s gift of unmerited grace. This doctrine challenged the role of priests as deliverers of grace through sacraments. Luther was no democrat, but with seven words—“each and all of us are priests”—he asserted an idea of equality that evolved into an underpinning of popular sovereignty.41
But are we sovereign over ourselves? If so, in what sense? Political philosophy cannot proceed far without addressing the problem of free will. This is the problem of understanding the extent to which our behavior might be, or perhaps must be, determined by forces outside ourselves. By, that is, what Lucretius, an early worrier about this, called the “everlasting sequence of cause and effect.”42 In his bill for the establishment of religious freedom in Virginia, Jefferson said, “Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint: that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness.”43 Jefferson was, however, concerned with a premodern, or at least a pre–nineteenth century, understanding of what might count as a free mind. Jefferson rightly said that once a person has made up his or her mind on a subject, punishments or civil incapacitations can deter a person from expressing his or her thoughts but cannot prevent the thoughts. A more modern worry is that it is not clear how sovereign a person is in “making up”—in furnishing—his or her mind.
All consciousnesses are immersed in their times. This is not, however, to say that we are “in” our times in the same way that fish are in water—that we are oblivious of what surrounds us. Not all individuals are, however, equally interested in, or aware of, their social surroundings. Not all individuals are equally equipped by their native intellectual abilities or by education to comprehend and critique their social contexts. In most societies most of the time, a disposition to comprehend and critique is characteristic of only a small minority. Social inertia is disrupted by minorities who are able to step, at least partially, out of their times, and whose thinking is conditioned by an awareness of their own social conditioning. We accept the reality that we are conditioned by factors beyond our control, and that this does not nullify the concept of free will. From the fact that our thinking, remembering, and aspiring is the result of neurons firing in the brain, it does not follow that our brains’ activities are as automatic, or autonomous, as the breathing of our lungs, the blinking of our eyelids, or the beating of our hearts.
It is one thing to acknowledge that there is some determinism at work in our lives, that there are causes beyond our control that have effects on our thinking and behavior. It is quite different to suppose that the fact of some determinism validates fatalism—the belief that our thoughts and decisions are not in any meaningful sense really “ours.” Surely the crucial question is: Can we choose to have choices? That is, can we will into existence an array of alternative thoughts and behaviors?
The prophet of modern masterless man, Niccoló Machiavelli, stands where the ancients end and the moderns begin. The ancients took their political bearings from their understanding of the best of which people were capable. They sought to increase the likelihood of the emergence of fine and noble leaders, and fine and noble attributes among the led. Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they were. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He was no democrat, but he is among democracy’s precursors because he reoriented politics toward accommodation of strong and predictable forces arising from a great constant: the human nature common to all people in all social stations. Martin Luther, Machiavelli’s contemporary, was no democrat, in theory or temperament. But he was one of democracy’s potent precursors. Without fully intending to do so, he celebrated individualism at the expense of tradition and hierarchy—paving the way for a democratic ethos that he could not have imagined.
The advent of modernity in political philosophy coincided with parallel developments in a closely related field of philosophy—epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, which concerns how we know things. Here René Descartes played a role comparable to Machiavelli’s role in reorienting political thought. Descartes sought a ground of certainty, a ground beyond religious revelation. He found it in cognition itself: Cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. The senses would supply the foundations for whatever certainties humanity can achieve. It was in Hobbes’ political philosophy that epistemology became decisive. Hobbes’ experience of religious strife in seventeenth-century England taught him that all human beings fear violent death. On this powerful, simple desire for physical security he erected a philosophy of despotism: In exchange for such security, people would willingly surrender the precarious sovereignty they possessed in the state of nature.
However, Hobbes’ thoroughly secular philosophy contained the seeds of democracy in four ways. First, Hobbes said that all human beings are equally under the sway of this strong imperative. Second, all human beings can, without the assistance of a priestly clerisy, comprehend the basic passions that move the world. Third, to the extent that the world of politics is driven by strong and steady passions and interests, to that extent there can be a science of politics. A science of politics based on what all human beings have in common—knowledge supplied by the senses—is a political science deriving its data from the demos, the people. Fourth, because people do not agree about religious truth, and because they fight over their disagreements, social tranquility is served by regarding religion as a voluntary matte
r for private judgment, not state-supported and state-enforced orthodoxy.
These converging and mingling streams of epistemology and political philosophy helped to produce the US Constitution. It includes no editorial exhortations or admonitions comparable to those in the Northwest Ordinance, which affirmed the importance of religion to the governance of a republic. When some New England divines complained to President Washington because “some explicit acknowledgment of THE TRUE ONLY GOD, AND JESUS CHRIST whom he has sent” had not been “inserted somewhere” in the Constitution, Washington replied laconically that “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.” Gordon Wood asserts that “most leading Founders were not deeply or passionately religious, and few of them led much of a spiritual life,” and Washington “seems never to have purchased a Bible.” Yet religious forms were respected, even by Jefferson, who was baptized and married in his parish and served on his local vestry. Yet, during the 1800 presidential campaign, the Connecticut Courant published what Wood calls “a typical Federalist outburst” warning about the consequences of electing the religiously suspect Jefferson: “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced.”44
With that unfulfilled forecast of apocalyptic secularism in mind, a brief autobiographic snippet by the author of this book seems apposite. My father’s father was a Lutheran minister who served a number of churches in northern Maryland, eastern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. As a boy, my father would listen outside pastor Will’s study as he and some thoughtful parishioners would wrestle with the problem of reconciling the doctrine of grace with the belief in free will. Perhaps this formative experience had something to do with my father growing up to be an atheist—for philosophic reasons, not because he had seen quite enough of the inside of churches—and a professor of philosophy. I grew up in a completely secular home where the subject of religion simply did not arise. I, like my father, am an amiable, low-voltage atheist. And like my father, my model of amiability is David Hume. A story that Hume often told about himself is that one day as he was walking along an Edinburgh bog he slipped into it and, seeking help in extracting himself, he called out to some nearby fishwives. They, however, recognized him as “the wicked unbeliever” and refused to help him unless he solemnly recited the Lord’s Prayer. He did this, and they rescued him. They were pleased, and he was not discommoded by gratifying them.45 Thus are social frictions relating to religion lubricated by mildness.
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