Really love this. I wrote a (very, and rightly, poorly-marked) paper on Nelson's squabble with Gordon S. Wood over Nelson's The Royalist Revolution in grad school. Didn't think I'd expect to see his name show up in basically anything outside of the niche subfield of history I was studying.
Wondering, Brad, if you've dealt much with the Cambridge School of Intellectual History? What you're doing here is strikingly similar to their approach.
Great stuff! Many "American" political tenets have achieved sainthood. It will take a sustained Divine warfare to topple these idols entrenched in the minds of the women and men that inhabitant our land. The nascent Christian sects at the time of our founding were accomplices to this debacle we find ourselves in today. It is the church that sowed the seeds of our demise. They still carry the torch today. If we are not willing to strike the tree at its root, the LORD will bring us swiftly to our end. The fact that you are writing this post gives reason for great hope.
So as a long-time listener to the Mars Hill Audio Journal, I've been hearing these critiques of "secular liberalism" pretty much my whole life, but I've never quite understood what they are *for* in an American context. We have a country whose founding, structure, and organization seems to me designed to frustrate the ideals expressed here. So, is the "point" that this is regrettable, but we just have to make the best of it and we shouldn't be too surprised when it seems dysfunctional? To promote the political project of establishing a separatist movement for the United Christian States of America? The subversive undermining of the founding structure and organization of the country?
Can you clarify which "ideals expressed here" you think that our founding was "designed to frustrate"? Although it's not my field, I've studied the Founding quite a bit and I don't think most of them would find much to disagree with here.
"it is the duty of rulers to cultivate religion in their commonwealths, and as much as possible, right religion."
I certainly see the founders and the constitution acknowledging the importance of right religion to the nation, but all my (admittedly limited) study of the first amendment leads me to read it as expressly forbidding the government from weighing in on what constitutes "right religion" (at least on the federal level).
Sure. So the interesting question is where they part ways with Hooker's syllogism. For many, it is simply on minor premise 2, where they conclude that the best way to encourage "right religion" is through expanding religious freedom, because state support for Christianity actually tends to stifle and deaden it. This is one of James Madison's arguments in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (see paragraphs 6-7). For some, it was simply a state vs. federal issue--they still believed state-level support for leading Protestant denominations was desirable.
So for instance Joseph Story, one of probably the three leading jurists of the early republic, writing in Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833):
“The right and the duty of the interference of government in matters of religion have been maintained by many distinguished authors, as well those who were the warmest advocates of free governments as those who were attached to govts of a more arbitrary character. Indeed, the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues;--these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can well exist without them. And at all events, it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity as a divine revelation to doubt that it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens."
Yeah, I agree that at the founding there seems to be a very wide toleration of the state's abilities (indeed, responsibility) to encourage right religion. However, would not the incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states in the Reconstruction Amendments curtail the states' ability to do so?
Additionally, how can the ideas of Madison, that state support of Christian tends to deaden and stifle it, be reconciled with those of Story, that it is the duty of government to foster and encourage religion among the citizens? It may be the case that they simply disagree, but are we then reduced to concluding that, "The founders disagreed about the role of the government in promoting religion in its citizens"?
When I try to synthesize this, I come up with a scenario that I do think is true to the founding of the nation in which state/local governments have the latitude to take religious claims and beliefs into more explicit consideration (which some founders might think will be beneficial and other might think is counter-productive, but which ultimately gets decided democratically). However, in practicality, this would require a constitutional amendment carving out the restrictions of the Establishment Clause in regard to state and local governments, which, if you'll forgive me, seems like a pretty quixotic ambition, however, interesting I would find it.
To your first question: actually, 14th-amendment incorporation was not really applied to the 1st amendment by the states until the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education, and there's been some recent chipping away at the precedents that flowed from that; if some recent state laws allowing public funding of religious charter schools are ruled on by SCOTUS that whole line of precedent could in theory be revisited; I'm not holding my breath, but I don't think it's entirely quixotic either given the current predilections of the Court toward greater federalism.
To your second question: they can be reconciled at the level of principle: Madison and Story could both agree, "the government should want to encourage the growth of the Christian religion" but one conclude that is best done through a laissez-faire approach and another that it is best done through state subsidies. It would be similar to the debates currently taking place on the Right over industrial policy,. And in principle it could be resolved through experimentation (although the results of such experiments would be murky in the extreme, to be sure, so there'd remain plenty of room for disagreement). I think this more or less aligns with what you say in your final paragraph. (Now note, for the record: I don't know that Madison was being entirely honest when he claimed that he thought more religious freedom would lead to more Christianity--or at least, I don't think he wanted to see more *orthodox* Christianity--but plenty of people of the time, like the Baptist John Leland, certainly did believe this.)
Thanks for helping me to understand this discourse a bit better.
It's probably unfortunate that the Jim Crow laws muddy the waters so much about what the reconstruction amendments were intended to do versus how they were implemented by the states. To me it just looks like the states pretty much ignored the incorporation of the Bill of Rights until the federal government held their feet to the fire in the mid 20th century. Disentangling the Establishment Clause from that overall picture seems like a challenging case to make, and perhaps too technical to be broadly persuasive.
I tend to think that the best American Christians can hope for is reducing actual antagonistic practice and policy towards religious groups by the state ("You don't need to treat religion better than anyone else similarly situated, but you can't treat them worse,") but I think that anything that favors one religion over another is doomed legally and politically for the foreseeable future (watch the question of members of the Satanic Temple filling roles as "Chaplains" in Florida to see what direction the law comes down on this I would think).
Really love this. I wrote a (very, and rightly, poorly-marked) paper on Nelson's squabble with Gordon S. Wood over Nelson's The Royalist Revolution in grad school. Didn't think I'd expect to see his name show up in basically anything outside of the niche subfield of history I was studying.
Wondering, Brad, if you've dealt much with the Cambridge School of Intellectual History? What you're doing here is strikingly similar to their approach.
Great stuff! Many "American" political tenets have achieved sainthood. It will take a sustained Divine warfare to topple these idols entrenched in the minds of the women and men that inhabitant our land. The nascent Christian sects at the time of our founding were accomplices to this debacle we find ourselves in today. It is the church that sowed the seeds of our demise. They still carry the torch today. If we are not willing to strike the tree at its root, the LORD will bring us swiftly to our end. The fact that you are writing this post gives reason for great hope.
So as a long-time listener to the Mars Hill Audio Journal, I've been hearing these critiques of "secular liberalism" pretty much my whole life, but I've never quite understood what they are *for* in an American context. We have a country whose founding, structure, and organization seems to me designed to frustrate the ideals expressed here. So, is the "point" that this is regrettable, but we just have to make the best of it and we shouldn't be too surprised when it seems dysfunctional? To promote the political project of establishing a separatist movement for the United Christian States of America? The subversive undermining of the founding structure and organization of the country?
Can you clarify which "ideals expressed here" you think that our founding was "designed to frustrate"? Although it's not my field, I've studied the Founding quite a bit and I don't think most of them would find much to disagree with here.
"it is the duty of rulers to cultivate religion in their commonwealths, and as much as possible, right religion."
I certainly see the founders and the constitution acknowledging the importance of right religion to the nation, but all my (admittedly limited) study of the first amendment leads me to read it as expressly forbidding the government from weighing in on what constitutes "right religion" (at least on the federal level).
Sure. So the interesting question is where they part ways with Hooker's syllogism. For many, it is simply on minor premise 2, where they conclude that the best way to encourage "right religion" is through expanding religious freedom, because state support for Christianity actually tends to stifle and deaden it. This is one of James Madison's arguments in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (see paragraphs 6-7). For some, it was simply a state vs. federal issue--they still believed state-level support for leading Protestant denominations was desirable.
So for instance Joseph Story, one of probably the three leading jurists of the early republic, writing in Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833):
“The right and the duty of the interference of government in matters of religion have been maintained by many distinguished authors, as well those who were the warmest advocates of free governments as those who were attached to govts of a more arbitrary character. Indeed, the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice. The promulgation of the great doctrines of religion, the being, and attributes, and providence of one Almighty God; the responsibility to him for all our actions, founded upon moral freedom and accountability; a future state of rewards and punishments; the cultivation of all the personal, social, and benevolent virtues;--these never can be a matter of indifference in any well-ordered community. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how any civilized society can well exist without them. And at all events, it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity as a divine revelation to doubt that it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens."
Yeah, I agree that at the founding there seems to be a very wide toleration of the state's abilities (indeed, responsibility) to encourage right religion. However, would not the incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states in the Reconstruction Amendments curtail the states' ability to do so?
Additionally, how can the ideas of Madison, that state support of Christian tends to deaden and stifle it, be reconciled with those of Story, that it is the duty of government to foster and encourage religion among the citizens? It may be the case that they simply disagree, but are we then reduced to concluding that, "The founders disagreed about the role of the government in promoting religion in its citizens"?
When I try to synthesize this, I come up with a scenario that I do think is true to the founding of the nation in which state/local governments have the latitude to take religious claims and beliefs into more explicit consideration (which some founders might think will be beneficial and other might think is counter-productive, but which ultimately gets decided democratically). However, in practicality, this would require a constitutional amendment carving out the restrictions of the Establishment Clause in regard to state and local governments, which, if you'll forgive me, seems like a pretty quixotic ambition, however, interesting I would find it.
To your first question: actually, 14th-amendment incorporation was not really applied to the 1st amendment by the states until the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education, and there's been some recent chipping away at the precedents that flowed from that; if some recent state laws allowing public funding of religious charter schools are ruled on by SCOTUS that whole line of precedent could in theory be revisited; I'm not holding my breath, but I don't think it's entirely quixotic either given the current predilections of the Court toward greater federalism.
To your second question: they can be reconciled at the level of principle: Madison and Story could both agree, "the government should want to encourage the growth of the Christian religion" but one conclude that is best done through a laissez-faire approach and another that it is best done through state subsidies. It would be similar to the debates currently taking place on the Right over industrial policy,. And in principle it could be resolved through experimentation (although the results of such experiments would be murky in the extreme, to be sure, so there'd remain plenty of room for disagreement). I think this more or less aligns with what you say in your final paragraph. (Now note, for the record: I don't know that Madison was being entirely honest when he claimed that he thought more religious freedom would lead to more Christianity--or at least, I don't think he wanted to see more *orthodox* Christianity--but plenty of people of the time, like the Baptist John Leland, certainly did believe this.)
Thanks for helping me to understand this discourse a bit better.
It's probably unfortunate that the Jim Crow laws muddy the waters so much about what the reconstruction amendments were intended to do versus how they were implemented by the states. To me it just looks like the states pretty much ignored the incorporation of the Bill of Rights until the federal government held their feet to the fire in the mid 20th century. Disentangling the Establishment Clause from that overall picture seems like a challenging case to make, and perhaps too technical to be broadly persuasive.
I tend to think that the best American Christians can hope for is reducing actual antagonistic practice and policy towards religious groups by the state ("You don't need to treat religion better than anyone else similarly situated, but you can't treat them worse,") but I think that anything that favors one religion over another is doomed legally and politically for the foreseeable future (watch the question of members of the Satanic Temple filling roles as "Chaplains" in Florida to see what direction the law comes down on this I would think).