“The Constitution is rooted in Revealed Law and we live in a Judeo-Christian nation.”
The above quotation was taken from a FaceBook thread that is reflective of a popular folk-history meme that dominates the minds of those on the Christian right. However, this Constitutional “revealed law” hypothesis just happens to be absolutely 100% incorrect, despite its popularity among Theo-cons.
While we continually hear the words that “we are founded on Christian principles” coming from the mouths of Theo-cons, for some reason we never hear them explicitly articulating what these principles are, nor where these Christian principles are to be found within our founding documents.
You can read entire books on the subject of “taking back America,” and never hear one word about the spirit of the Enlightenment. You’ll hear this handy sound-bite being tossed around, starting in chapter one all the way through to the end-notes, without ever discovering what these “founding principles” exactly are. It’s always left floating about untethered to any specifics. There is a reason for this – the facts do not support their narrative.
But, before we can get into any of this, we need to partake in a little intellectual hygiene by clearing away as much of the political mud, that has been hurled about, as possible.
The first bad intellectual habit that needs to be broken is using fragmented Founding Father quotations (or, using any of the popular fake quotations from Theo-con historian David Barton, that are often passed around online) as some sort of definitive statement on the topic. Single quotations serve as poor arbitrators, as most often they have been ripped away from any background context. Being able to see big pictures is a mandatory skill when surveying the historical landscape. Using quotations without any regard for the background and political climate; or positing one’s prior commitments into single words – such as inserting “Jesus” and “Christianity” into any mention of the word “God” – is quite superficial and disingenuous, as will become clear as we proceed.
As I often say, if we’re going to play a quotation ping-pong game, I can surly muster as many Adolf Hitler quotations as necessary. Hitler quotations that are far more explicit endorsements of Christianity than anything you will find coming from the Founders whom I will discuss (excluding Hamilton).
Next, when we speak of our Founding Fathers as they pertain to political science and our Constitution, we should avoid including men such as George Washington and Paul Revere. For the most part, when we talk of political philosophy and political science we are speaking about Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton (the only Christian of the bunch). These were the primary learned men of the Enlightenment who provided the foundation of our Democratic Federal Republic.
It is also important to recognize the distinction between the Puritan visions represented through John Winthrop’s famous shining theocratic city-state on a hill, and the Enlightenment philosophes who constructed our Democratic Federal Republic. Far too often this little historical slight-of-hand is employed by our modern Theo-cons in an attempt to inject their toxic religion into the arteries of the body politic.
I must also note that the above quote fails to make the distinction between political science and cultural tradition, and blurs these two separate camps into one nice foggy package (this is like throwing ideological salt into the eyes of your adversary, i.e., an intellectual swindle).
Finally, we need to get underneath the surface level patriotic motifs of individual men and their personal beliefs, and look to the zeitgeist in which they lived. Without this backdrop, our historical narrative lacks the necessary canvas on which we can begin to paint a clear picture. Now that we’re done with our intellectual hygiene, we can move on.
“We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun. For this whole chapter in the history of man is new,” wrote Thomas Jefferson to his good friend Joseph Priestley. Indeed theirs was a new age, an “enlightened” age, as Thomas Paine proclaimed, this was the “Age of Reason.” More than anything else this “age of reason” was a massive paradigm shift in metaphysics (i.e., the nature of things in reality) and epistemology (i.e., how we know what we know).
This is no minor point, but is conveniently (and intentionally) omitted from the right-wing historical narrative. John Adams, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, wrote that “since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung up from this original are the canon and feudal law” and that since the time of the “reformation to the first settlements of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people, ecclesiastical and civil tyranny seem to have lost their strength and weight.” This age is not known as the “Enlightenment” because it was some sort of religious revival; quite to the contrary, this was an expulsion of priestly domination over the minds of men.
“Nature’s God” encapsulates in two words the essence of the American Enlightenment concerning “revealed law.” That one word “Nature” places the old God one step further removed from the equation. Nature, not the Bible, nor Christ, nor “revealed law” served as their metaphysical and epistemological mediators. In the minds of the Founders, there was more than likely some sort of a Creator, given the complexity and immensity of the Cosmos, but this said Deity was beyond the reach of men’s minds. To these Enlightenment men, it was through examining Nature’s Law with the use of reason, that man was best able to be at liberty to pursue his own happiness (it would be quite interesting to see what they would have to say today in our post-Darwinian world).
Jefferson wrote that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions,” and that the American experiment had suffered through the “barbarians” who continually attempt to look backwards rather than “forwards for improvement,” back to a time before the Enlightenment when “ignorance put everything into the hands of power & priestcraft.” Oddly enough we hear the same exact sentiment oozing from the mouths of Theo-cons today. Oh how they long to go back; they desire to “Take America Back” to a time when everyone was a good Christian; back before Darwin, back to Winthrop’s shining Theocratic city-state on a hill, where all was well and in accord with their revealed religious doctrines.
However, to the founding Enlightenment philosophes, the Word of God was not to be “found amongst old parchments or musty records,” as Hamilton once wrote, but rather, as Thomas Paine put it; the “word of God is in the Creation we behold,” and that “Creation speaketh an universal language” that unlike holy scripture which “any hand might make,” the “scripture called the creation,” was knowable to all, and – that no “human invention [could] counterfeit or alter.”
This was a revolution in thinking long before any shots were fired. This was the birth of a new age and the philosophers were the new men of Natural Law. The Enlightenment was a bridge between the Middle Ages, where the disciples of death ruled all fields of knowledge – from how the heavens go, to how to go to heaven – to modernity, where the tools of reason would lift mankind to greater wealth and prosperity than the world had ever seen, and has since taken mankind all the way to the moon, into the farthest reaches of space, and into the micro world of the human cell.
Indeed, after much deliberation, Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson decided to use the word “God” in the Declaration of Independence, as any Theo-con will quickly be sure to point out. But the God of the Enlightenment was not the old Christian or Jewish God at all. It was just the last dying ember of a very old and bad idea that was allowed to hold on, much the same as slavery was. We could (and must) easily remove the word God from the founding vocabulary and arrive at the same natural conclusions concerning political science and morality.
So, where exactly did our founding principles come from if not the Judeo-Christian religion? One would think that the references to the Bible would abound if it were revealed law that served as our Constitutional bedrock; and yet the Bible, Jesus, and Christianity are mysteriously absent from the Constitution. In fact, one must twist into painful intellectual contortions attempting to posit Christianity into what little mention there is of Divinity. The only affirmative statement on Christianity mentioned in the Constitution itself, is located at the end where they wrote, “In the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.” Numerous Theo-cons have actually attempted to offer this up as definitive proof of the Christian-based political science used to form our system of government! As if saying “God bless you” after someone sneezes constitutes a statement of Christian faith.
Outside of this minor and customary reference to the redeemer, there is no mention of Christianity whatsoever. Not in the Constitution, nor in the Federalist Papers, nor in Madison’s Notes to the Convention, nor in the correspondences between the main players. Not one word (not one positive word anyway). Why is this? Simply put, because our Founders did not use revealed law, the bible, Jesus, or religion in any way shape or form in constructing our republic, other than employing religious pluralism (with a sincere hope that religion would evolve out of mythology and superstition, i.e., “revealed knowledge”).
These Enlightenment thinkers looked to history, philosophy, Natural Law, and their own rational intellect as the tools to abstract their moral sources for what they were doing. In reading the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, leading up to the Convention debates; one learns that Jefferson was spending a small fortune sending books overseas to Madison. Madison was sucking up philosophy and history in preparation for the debates. In his monumental work, A Struggle for Power, Theodore Draper describes the frenzy for knowledge that overtook the great minds of the Enlightenment Age as follows:
“For there were two parallel British traditions. One went back to the republican thought of Milton, Sydney, Locke, and others in the seventeenth century and to the Commonwealth or ‘Real Whigs’ in the first half of the eighteenth century. This intellectual trend has been minutely studied, because it provided the Founding Fathers with an armory of rights, concepts, and rhetoric with which to justify the struggle for independence. The colonial leaders ransacked the storehouse of ancient and modern history and literature for precedents, heroes, and inspiration.”
Benjamin Franklin offered this telling statement at the Convention of 1787, after weeks of gridlock, that clearly expresses where it was that they gained their moral “principles” that we hear so much about: “We have gone back to ancient history for models of Government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution now no longer exist. And we have viewed Modern States all round Europe, but find none of their Constitutions suitable to our circumstances.” Indeed they were immersed in the history and philosophy of government, so much so that Franklin exclaimed, “how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understanding?” (Don’t be so fast to posit Christianity into Dr. Franklin’s head – remember the public Hitler quotes?)
Apparently, our Founders were far too caught up in the reality of the situation to petition the said Father with prayer. Franklin put a motion forth to begin each day with prayer, but it found such disagreement that it was never even put to a vote.
Of the philosophers, John Locke was without a doubt the main source used in justifying individual rights to property and the nature of sovereignty, starting in the pre-revolutionary period around 1763. The entire project started with the issues of power, political power and the right to own and control private property. They called upon John Locke’s essays concerning civil government as their primary moral source (later, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx would consult Locke’s “workmanship theory” to develop their respective theories of value).
It is worth taking a moment to elaborate the importance of John Locke, for without some understanding of Locke, our historical canvas is fatally incomplete. In many ways, Locke IS the canvas.
There are actually two parts to Locke’s treaties on Government that served as the most frequently consulted manuscripts when our Founders were looking for the moral authority to declare independence. Locke’s First Treaties was a rebuttal of the political doctrine of Sir Robert Filmer and served as the refutation of the principle of divine right (i.e., “revealed law”). The thrust of Filmer’s argument was that the rights of kings were inherited, and Filmer utilized divine law theory, tracing royal right all the way back to the Biblical Adam.
After thoroughly deconstructing Filmer, Locke then continued on in his second treatise to construct his own natural philosophy. Locke begins with a sort of thought experiment, and basically says; alright, let’s start over from square one and place man in a state of nature without any centralized ruling authority, and investigate what that might be like.
Locke’s conclusion (which at first glance appears to be at odds with Thomas Hobbes’ State of Nature) was that the natural state of man is one of perfect freedom and perfect equality, and that it is “evident that creatures of the same species and rank” are naturally “equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection.” While Locke’s state of nature is one of liberty, it is not a condition of total “license,” because, according to Locke “the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges everyone.” As Aristotle said in the opening of his The Politics, “man is by nature a political animal.”
How is it then, that man comes to know these Natural Laws? Is it through divine revelation? According to Locke, the natural liberty of man is to “have no other restraint but the law of nature,” ascertainable though reason that “teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
It was here in Locke’s Natural Law that our Founders found the ammunition they needed to combat the philosophy of divine right though revealed law.
For the absolute necessity in maintaining a strong separation between the church and state, they looked once again to John Locke, (as well as John Milton) this time to his, Letter Concerning Toleration.
For the idea of checks and balances, as well as the separation of powers between three branches of government, they looked to Montesquieu’s monumental philosophical work, The Spirit of The Laws, where he wrote extensively on the structure and history of government. Montesquieu concluded that “where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.” And further that “there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.”
It is often claimed by Theo-cons that the influence of Montesquieu’s monumental work in political science pales in comparison to the influence that the book of Isaiah had to offer the Enlightenment thinkers. Why, anyone can clearly see that the entire political system is found in this one simple phrase: “For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, and the Lord is our king.” Certainly there would have been no need in Jefferson sending philosophy books by the pound to Madison with such a handy and condensed political science sitting so close at hand on the nightstand (incidentally, the Theo-con theory of Isaiah causes great friction with Montesquieu in that their idea of a perfect theocracy places all three branches in a single godhead where, according to Montesquieu, “there can be no liberty”).
For a quick glimpse into the mind of Jefferson concerning the purported revealed Law of Moses, one must simply look to the first paragraphs in his correspondence to John Adams, dated Oct. 12, 1813. This letter pertained to Jefferson’s endeavor to extract what he felt was the pure code of Christ’s ethics into a “wee-little book” for his personal use. Jefferson had also called upon Joseph Priestley in helping him extract the real teachings of Jesus by comparing the purported New Testament sayings with the ethics of the ancient philosophers of Greece. Jefferson described the process as that of removing “diamonds” from a “dunghill.” Jefferson cites Enfield’s conclusion on the matter of Jewish ethics, stating to Adams that Enfield had “gone deeply into the repositories of their ethics [Jews]” and had concluded that they were a “wretched depravity of sentiment and manners” based upon “corrupt maxims.”
Regardless of whatever potential limitations there may be in man’s intellectual faculties, they sure serve as better guides than blind faith in revealed law.
Despite all the great planning, the Constitution was still not without fault. As Franklin stated at the end of the Convention, “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve.” No doubt the issue of slavery, which had been left on the table intact, troubled Dr. Franklin.
Franklin continued, “Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion think themselves in possession of all truth and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines which is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong… In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults.”
One of the beauties of the scientific method is its requirement of amendment with the development of new knowledge. The Constitution was never intended to be the eternal word written upon tablets of stone, but serves as the solid framework and scientific method for conducting this American experiment.
There were many more philosophers that our framers used in constructing or system of Republicanism, going all the way back to Aristotle and the Greeks, and proceeding through Machiavelli, Hobbs, Berkeley, Hume, and Locke. The trail of writings left behind by these Enlightenment thinkers leads straight back to the Natural Law of the philosophers, not to the purported revealed law of the Bible and religion.
The Enlightenment Age served as the background in which America was born, and was a radical paradigm shift away from the old Christian cosmology, metaphysics, and epistemology (i.e., faith in divine revelation of law). The religious paradigm was left shattered, broken, and lying on the ground as the new age of science – science as the essential tool of reason – replaced the old dogmatic metaphysics and epistemology that were used to oppress that which is best in man for millennia.
Today our political experiment continues and the old forces of revelation still struggle to regain their hold of the political reins of power; to bring to life their Puritan visions of creating a shining Christian city-state that sits upon the hill of “revealed Biblical Law.”
Citations:
1) Thomas Jefferson: A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, June 12, 1779
2) Thomas Jefferson: Letter to Dr. Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801
3) Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason, 1794-95
The Age Of Reason; Being An Investigation Of True And Fabulous Theology. By Thomas Paine, …
4) John Locke (1632-1704): A Letter Concerning Toleration
A Letter Concerning Toleration. By John Locke, Esq.
5) John Locke: Concerning Civil Government
An essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government. By the late learned John Locke, Esq.
6) History of Political Philosophy: Third Edition, edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey
History of Political Philosophy
7) Theodore Draper: A Struggle for Power, The American Revolution – 1996
A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution
8) John Adams: His Political Writings Representative Selections, The American Heritage Series, 1954
9) James Madison: Notes Of Debates In The Federal Convention Of 1787
James Madison”s Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and Their Relation to a More Perf
10) Charles De Montesquieu (1689-1755): The Spirit Of Laws, Great Books Of The Western World – Book 38