Is it true that the U.S. government is not founded on the Christian religion?

In “The inescapable relevance of Darwinism,” I said that our liberties are founded on the Christian religion and that non-believing conservatives therefore have an interest in opposing the current move to make atheist Darwinism the official creed of American society. In response, Gilbert B. writes:

The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense founded on the Christian religion!

LA replies:

Gilbert is referring to a statement in the U.S. treaty with the Moslem power of Tripoli that was negotiated under President Washington and ratified under President Adams.

There are several things to be said about it.

First, that is an unfortunate statement which contradicts many other things said by Washington and Adams. Basically it was a glitch that got through.

Second, to the extent to that it is true, it is true in the bare sense that the federal government, the Constitution, makes no mention of Christianity, and the First Amendment prohibits any establishment of religion by the federal Congress.

A key point to remember, constantly forgotten, is that the federal government is not the totality of the United States. The federal government is a system created by the states to handle certain indispensable governmental functions that the states could not handle themselves, through the states delegating certain powers to the federal government. The states, which comprised the actual substance of American society, were certainly founded on religion and many of them even had established religions at this point. By contrast, the federal government was seen as a neutral shell holding together the states. That’s why the First Amendment prohibited any establishment of religion by the federal Congress, even as the states continued with their religious establishments. Since the states had different majority religions and different established religions, the federal government, in order to hold the states together, had to be neutral as regards religion.

Thus the United States Constitution, while “made only for a moral and religious [i.e. Christian] people … [and] wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” in Adams’s famous words, is not FORMALLY Christian. In the formal sense, the U.S. government is not founded on the Christian religion. But that government, as delineated by the Constitution, comes from an overwhelmingly Protestant Christian people, was made for an overwhelmingly Protestant Christian people, and would have been impossible without an overwhelmingly Protestant Christian people.

Further, even at the time that that treaty with Tripoli was made, the Congress started its sesssions with prayers, the Congress had Bibles distributed to the federal territories, and did other things that promoted and expressed the Christian religion. What the Congress did not do was to establish any Christian denomination as a favored denomination, which is what is meant by an establishment of religion.

Finally, it is a key traditionalist criticism of the American Founding that America’s religious, moral, and cultural basis, referred to constantly by the Founders, was not made explicit in the Founding documents themselves. There is thus a fatal ambiguity in the American Founding between the actual religious, moral, and ethnocultural character of American society, and the liberal, neutral Founding documents which make no mention of that substance and do not support it. This has allowed the progressive emptying out of America until it is now seen today as not a nation and culture at all but only a liberal universalist idea. And as nothing but a liberal universalist idea, it has no basis for, among other things, preventing the immigration of Muslims and the increase of their numbers and power among us. A country defined as nothing but a universal idea is an empty shell and will inevitably be taken over by alien peoples who do not regard themselves as nothing but a universalist idea.

It is therefore not wise of Gilbert B., who presumably is in sympathy with the traditionalist aims of this website, to trumpet the anti-traditionalist seed that was planted in America at the beginning in its Founding documents and is now leading to America’s undoing. He, like me, should want to undo that mistake made in the American Founding and define America as a culturally and religiously specific country.

Such a change could be accomplished by, for example, the Constitutional amendment I have suggested, banning the practice of Islam in the United States. This amendment would establish at the highest level that our government is not strictly neutral as to all religions.

Hannon writes:

You present basically the same argument here as in this earlier post where you say “Central to American traditionalism is the understanding that the Founding documents were too abstract, making the universal, procedural, and liberal aspects of the Founding explicit, while leaving the cultural, religious, and moral aspects of the actual American society implicit.”

Then as now this assertion really got me thinking. I think the Founders knew what they were doing when they constructed the Constitution as they did—even allowing for the fact they could not have foreseen the mess we are in today.

If civil society requires legal codification to maintain its historic sense of national culture (religious or otherwise), its concrete identity and its morality, this suggests that such a society does not have what it takes in the first place to retain its traditional heritage. Isn’t this the whole point, that we as a free society carry, or don’t carry, these things along that make up our larger collective identity? The fact that we are not fixed in these matters, that government has nothing to say about how we are defined characteristically, means that a give-and-take is always operating, between the left and the right, between believers and the faithless. This sometimes trying process keeps ideas strong—or expunges them—by the continuous exercise of social forces within society.

Perhaps this sounds too Darwinian to you but an example of how I see this working is the trouncing of the immigration reform bill last summer. There was no government edict to say that uncontrolled immigration will damage our society; people knew that instinctively and acted accordingly. Trusting the general population to have such good sense is risky, but expansive government is worse. Your proposal for an amendment to quell Islam is a good one and it has a strong basis because it is in line with the proper role of government: protecting Us from Them. It is not promoting the good per se, which has little or no place in sound government.

Living under the current Constitution means that everyone takes their lumps periodically and I think traditionalism stands as good a chance as any philosophy of weathering the current liberal deluge. How could our mettle ever be tested, our precepts refined, if the Constitution were to dictate or attempt to revive our character as a nation?

LA replies:

You’re making good strong points.

The problem is that, given the unique structure of the American political system, with the Constitution at the top, whatever is in the Constitution ultimately becomes the highest authority and self-definition for the whole society. For example, the prohibition against establishment of religion by the federal Congress ultimately turned into a prohibition not only of establishment of religion in the states and localities, but a prohibition of any religious expression by states and localities. The absence of any reference to religion in the federal Constitution ultimately turned into the idea that America as such is a secular country; and with the destruction of the states’ reserved powers, the federal courts gained the power to impose secularism on the entire country.

I am not suggesting that the Constitution should have had some detailed statement on religion. But it needed something, some acknowledgment of God, Christianity, and our cultural heritage as the basis of the society, so that the Constitution would not be bare technical instrument of government over a society conceived as a blank slate, but an instrument of government over a society identitied as particular, concrete society. Would such an acknowledge of our religious and moral underpinnings have prevented all liberalism? Of course not. But it would have meant that at the highest level of our society, we acknowledged that we were a people under God.

Hannon replies:

Thank you. I guess there are still targets for the Left to destroy (“In God We Trust” on tender, taking the oath on the Bible) that give us a little insulation. As you know I am not religious per se but quite frankly the idea of our country being wrested from God-fearing men and women is absolutely blood-curdling. I can’t really explain this visceral feeling in rational terms. I suppose “Man as God” pretty much sums it up and it is stunning that there are people who don’t feel trepidation at this notion. To the contrary!

All of this reminds me of what a liberal friend said the other day that I found troubling. We talked about everything political, atypical for us, and then in connection with race or immigration he said “If in a few decades the US becomes majority Hispanic, becomes an Hispanic nation, so what? It’s still America so what’s the difference?” I’m sure you’ve heard this kind of thing but this has the interesting angle of ostensibly retaining trust in God while simultaneously destroying the traditional culture of the country. My friend’s matter-of-fact tone in delivering this thought prompted me to ask, with reduced restraint, if there is anything about this country that is worth protecting, worth preserving into the future? He gave a vague nod, even ceding the value of white culture, but his overall mentality was obvious. At least liberals have the habit of giving themselves away.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 16, 2008 12:09 PM | Send