Separation of Reason and State

     The season is upon us.  I should like someday to read the speeches of political candidates through our nation's history, and the editorials favoring them, to see whether we have dropped in evident intelligence, and eloquence, and historical knowledge, and practical reason.  Whether we have dropped -- I leave it open for question, although I know well how deliberate and articulate were the debates between Lincoln and Douglas, and how steeped in American and classical history were the nineteenth century orations in that august body of statesmen and blowhards, the United States Senate.  Even allowing for the orotundity of the overrated Dan'l Webster, it seems to me, at a cursory view anyway, that we are rather like half-Greek babblers from Thrace trying to vie with the political insights of Plato, or with the argumentation of Isocrates and Demosthenes.  With this qualification: the Thracians were not lazy and effeminate.  But I leave the matter open for question.  If anyone can point me to a compendium of popular political writing from the time of Jackson or Cleveland or Coolidge, I'd be most grateful.

     When I view the comments to the See Jack Run postings on the internet political magazines, I wonder whether the partisans of the major parties, apart from the time of the civil war, were ever so quick to attribute wickedness (rather than old-fashioned folly) to their opponents than our partisans are now.  Ah, maybe they were.  But it is strange, that some of us should persist in the astonishing notion that it is religion that divides people, while politics, that great bamboozling substitute for religion, unites.  I'd like somebody sometime to point me to said unity.

     I'm thinking about this, because of what happened the other day in a debate for the Senate seat in Delaware.  Now I am not going to attribute eloquence or clear thinking to any great number of candidates I've heard about this year.  But the Republican in the Delaware race, Christine O'Donnell, challenged the Democrat to show her where in the Constitution "separation of church and state" appears.  You'd think that he or she or the moderator or somebody might have thought to clarify matters, by asking, "You mean the words 'separation of church and state,' don't you?"  But nobody did.  If anyone had, then we might have been spared the depressing and embarrassing laughter from the audience of law school students, and the depressing and embarrassing high-toned dismissal of Mrs. O'Donnell by the Grand High Mystic Poobahs of the media.

     For of course the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution.  They appear in a private letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, to allay their fears that he was nothing better than an infidel, and also to win them over to his way of looking at things, seeing as they had formerly been pushed around by the established Episcopalians of their state.  We know that the First Amendment protects the free exercise of a host of things, among them speech, by which the drafters meant principally political speech; assembly, by which the drafters recognized the rights of people to gather together for their own purposes, within the constraints of civil order; and the exercise, the vigorous and public exercise, of religion -- for religion is by its very nature public and unitive.  In a wonderful inversion of judicial insight, we now turn dirty pictures into "speech," but limit the expression of certain political opinions; we assume the right to bully private organizations into following our prescriptions for membership, activities, and mission; and we wish to cleanse the public square of all trace of religion, relegating it to the bedroom, as if it were suspicious or obscene.

     We know too that the "establishment clause" of the First Amendment prohibited the federal government from following the example of the European states, in establishing an official religion.  That it therefore meant that the federal government, much less state and municipal governments, must be severely neutral as to religion or irreligion would have struck them with amazement.  I daresay that if that is what the clause had been understood to mean, one would hardly have found a legislator of the day in any of the thirteen colonies to ratify it, and that would have included the sometimes Unitarian and sometimes Who Knows What, Jefferson himself.  We don't have to guess at these things.  All we have to do is to take notice of their behavior: the laws they then went on to pass, for instance.

     What distinguishes the self-styled conservatives of our time, more than anything, seems to be a residue of a very old-fashioned virtue, hardly talked about today.  The virtue is that Roman thing called pietas.  It is consonant with patriotism, but more deeply founded -- it reaches down into the core of a person's being.  The "pious" American, by the Roman definition, reveres the Constitution as it was written by the framers, because he reveres the framers themselves, perhaps considering, if but vaguely, that a group of men who reintroduced democracy to the world, men who were steeped in learning that the pious fellow himself no longer attends to (as Adams was steeped in the analysis of the Roman republic written by Polybius, friend of Scipio Aemilianus), men as brave and modest as Washington, as fiery as Jefferson, as astute as Madison, probably ought to be given the benefit of the doubt in all of our political controversies.  We ought, in other words, to pay attention to what they wrote and said and did, not to imitate it blindly, but to learn wisdom from it.

     One wise thing we might learn, if we attended to these men -- and not just to a few obiter dicta by the secuarist's darling, Jefferson -- is that none of them believed that democracy could last without its being supported by the pillars of religious faith.  Their view of faith, rather than of denominational controversy, was incomplete, but what they did see they approved of heartily, and most especially for its irreplaceable role in forming the virtues of a free people.  They knew, as we did not, that virtue is a difficult thing to attain, and is as high above some lazy "tolerance" and mere refraining from breaking laws as the mountains are above the sea.  They wanted more than a people who generally did not steal or kill.  They wanted a "land of the noble free." 

     And they knew, too, that free people will naturally gather to celebrate what means most to them, and will want to pass on to the next generation not only their technical knowledge, but their wisdom and their objects of love and devotion.  That is, after all, the essence of what it means to be a people, and not just a congeries of persons.  So for nearly two centuries, America boasted public schools in which students could sing national hymns (like, for instance, the National Hymn, "God of Our Fathers"), or say a prayer together, or read passages from Scripture; and they could do so, while somehow managing, more or less, to admit to their halls Catholics and Jews and others, alongside the dominant Protestants.  All of this was ruled out of bounds by the archons of the Supreme Court some decades ago, about at the time when the archons would begin to take more and more authority from the people in their localities, and tell them what they must do for their own good.  Thus we have the irony, as our Touchstone writer Bill Tighe put it to me the other day, that Americans are supposed to govern themselves in matters about which very few people know anything of substance, while they are incapable of determining matters about which everybody knows quite a lot, as for instance marriage, child rearing, and schooling.

     Christine O'Donnell, I suppose, was trying to say, "I do not agree with an interpretation of the First Amendment which privileges irreligion over religion, because the supposed 'neutrality' gives the game over to the secularists eo ipso."  But all our political speech must be aimed at the electorate such as we are.  Run, Jack, run.

Comments

[Diane]

"If anyone can point me to a compendium of popular political writing from the time of Jackson or Cleveland or Coolidge, I'd be most grateful."

George Grant's "The Patriot's Handbook" would definitely give support to your suspicion that "we have dropped in evident intelligence, and eloquence, and historical knowledge, and practical reason."

[Bob Srigley]

How interesting that even the pagan societies of the ancient world had a clearer grasp of essential virtue than is commonly seen in our times. In the Greek NT the word which seems comparable to "pietas" is "eusebeia", usually translated as "godliness." When Paul needed a word for godliness under the gospel, it already existed in Greek; he didn't have to invent it.
We have lost the minimal reverence that the pagans gave their flawed dieties. They would have been appalled at the degree of hubris we seem to revel in.

W.E. Vine puts it this way, "'anomia' is disregard for, or defiance of, God's laws; 'asebeia' [ungodliness] is the same attitude towards God's Person."

Yes, this is the season some call "silly," but in all my lifetime I cannot remember when the lines have been so starkly drawn. Of course many issues are prudential and people of good will may differ on solutions. However the prudential issues seem to be receeding while more fundamental issues loom larger than ever before.

[GL]

When Jefferson penned his letter, he undoubtedly was referring to a "separation of church and state", for Jefferson had a gift with words and knew how to use them to precisely communicate what he meant. In fact, Jefferson had written on the same subject some years earlier, in 1779 to be precise, when he penned a proposed statute for his home state of Virginia, which was enacted seven years later under the title "The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom", which provided, in part, "Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities."

Jefferson went on to include the following, immediately following the words just quoted, "And though we well know this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no powers equal to our own and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right."

What's are these "natural rights" to which Jefferson turns to justify and defend his proposed statute and from where do they come? Fortunately, we don't have to guess. Jefferson dealt with that in another document he penned three years earlier, "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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men . . . ." What's this? Man has "natural" and "unalienable rights" and they come from their "Creator". And not only that, "governments are instituted among men" for the very purpose of "secur[ing] these rights." What is that other than a declaration not merely of independence but one that government exists for the purpose of securing natural rights endowed by our Creator or, in other words, that government exists to secure the natural moral law?

Yes, Jefferson advocated for a "wall of separation" between church and state, but he also advocated for a government whose purpose was to secure for its citizens their "natural" and "unalienable rights" with which their Creator had endowed them. That is, Jefferson -- based on what he wrote anyway -- advocated for a "separation of church and state" but also for the "legislating of morality" to the extent necessary to secure certain "natural" and "unalienable rights", one of which was the right to life. That is, Jefferson did not, like many contemporary advocates of the "separation of church and state", conflate that phrase with the concept that the state may not "legislate morality", for Jefferson understood that "legislating morality" was the very purpose for which "governments are instituted among men". What Jefferson meant by his "wall of separation" can be readily deduced by what his proposed "Act For Establishing Religious Freedom" proscribed. What he didn't mean can be deduced from his other writings and actions.

[greyone]

"If anyone can point me to a compendium of popular political writing from the time of Jackson or Cleveland or Coolidge, I'd be most grateful."

I have to echo again your point "whether we have dropped in evident intelligence,...." as Diane did above. The record certainly suggests that it is so. Perhaps the filter of history has dropped a lot of the idiocy of the past. When I get hold of a good book that is inspiring and intelligent, I keep it. If I get a particularly silly book, or dishonest, then I won't buy it. Eventually these poorer ones aren't reprinted, and are the first to end up as heating fuel or recycling material.

One book that I picked up in the cheap piles a few years ago is "Dissent in America" by Ralph F. Young. The book has an endorsement on it from Howard Zinn, which would normally mean that it is a poor choice of reading. However, the content is a whole collection of dissident writing, including George Mason, Frederick Douglass, William Jennings Brian, all the way up to the present in the Earth Liberation Front and such things. It certainly bears out the theory of disappearing intelligent debate. If you would read George Mason, or either side in the Constitution debates/discussions, you can see that both sides made intelligent arguments, and both sides had good grounding for their beliefs. Whatever side won, we would probably still have had a good founding document. Now we have people like Michael Moore, where if even half of what they say is true, we should count ourselves lucky.

I looked in the local newspaper for the first time in a long time to see the letters. There was a familiar name who was spouting the same garbage as ever. Sometimes I want to answer, then catch myself and know that it is a waste of time.

I was reading Benet's story The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which there is a good illustration of what to keep in mind. Daniel is listening to the prosecution in the trial over Jabez Stone's soul, and he is getting more angry as time goes on. "Till, finally, it was time for him to get up on his feet, and he did so, all ready to bust out with lightnings and denunciations. But before he started he looked over th ejudge and jury for a moment, such being his custom And he noticed the glitter in their eyes was twice as strong as before and they all leaned forward.(...) Then he saw what he'd been about to do, and he wiped his forehead, as a man might who's just escaped falling into a pit in the dark. For it was him they'd come for, not only Jabez Stone.(...) And if he fought them with their own weapons, he'd fall into their power; he knew that, though he couldn't have told you how. It was his own anger and horror that burned in their eyes; and he'd have to wipe that out or the case was lost."

A good bit of advice. I'll not be wasting my time on the local paper's opinion pages for a while.

If we want to see the intelligent discussion, we have to find it. There's an awful lot of crap out there. I was pretty happy when I found this blog.

As for O'Donnell, I find it funny and sad that once again most people haven't a clue about what is being discussed. Another point that she had brought up was the fact that the evolution/creationist (or whatever they call it today) debate with regards to education is not any business of the federal government. Government has been operating for so long outside the constitutional bounds that no limit is recognized anymore. The department of Education that only arrived in 1979 should never have been made, and yet we cannot get rid of it.

[Rob G]

~~Jefferson understood that "legislating morality" was the very purpose for which "governments are instituted among men".~~

This is true, but there is another sense in which the phrase "you can't legislate morality" can be used legitimately. This is the idea that laws do not make a people moral, that legislation does not change hearts. I believe that this is the original understanding of the phrase, which if memory serves dates to the 1920's (perhaps coming into common parlance related to Prohibition?)