Dilulio on American Civil Religion
Jonathan Rowe on Apr 25th 2008
Here is the first chapter from John Dilulio’s “Godly Republic.”
I agree that his centrist-civil religion approach is consistent with America’s Founding (that America’s public institution’s presuppose a Supreme Being, and therefore supplications to such ought to be constitutional). However, I think the scholarly case made by such figures as Steven Waldman and Jon Meacham is more accurate. Here is Dilulio’s thesis:
The truth, however, is that present-day America is blessed to be in religious terms pretty much what Madison and most of the other framers intended it to be. It is a godly republic with governmental institutions that (as Justice Douglas phrased it) “presuppose” monotheistic belief in the “Supreme Being” known to Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the God of Abraham. It is a godly republic that affords a special civic status to nondenominational and interfaith (God-centered) religious expression. It is a godly republic that respects, promotes, and protects religious pluralism: Methodists, Muslims, Mormons, and all other faiths are welcome. It is a godly republic in which both the Constitution and federal laws prohibit government from discriminating against citizens who profess no faith at all (atheists have the same constitutional standing as Anglicans) or who are actively, but peacefully, hostile to all religion or to all church-state collaboration (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is no more or less entitled to tax-exempt nonprofit status than the National Association of Evangelicals).
In his book, Dilulio takes slight issue with Jon Meacham’s thesis which is well summarized in an article by Meacham here.
However, American history suggests that allusions to faith in the political arena are part of what Benjamin Franklin called “public religion,” a religion whose God is perhaps best understood as the “Creator” and the “Nature’s God” of the Declaration of Independence. This was not the God of Abraham or God the Father of the Holy Trinity, but a more generic figure who made the world, is active in it through the workings of providence, and will ultimately judge how people conducted themselves in life.
Taken together, the past reveals that the benefits of faith in God in our public life have outweighed their costs. “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” said Alexander Hamilton. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
The issue is whether the God of the American Founding is the “God of Abraham.” I would argue not necessarily, instead of simply not. The God of the American Founding is the God of natural religion [i.e., laws of Nature and of Nature's God], one whom all good men worship, regardless of whether their religion is Abrahamic. To Christians, it is a Triune God, to Jews, Unitarians and Muslims, it is a unitary father, and to others it is simply a Providence that goes by many names to many peoples. For instance, to Native Americans such Providence goes by the name “The Great Spirit.”
As Presidents, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison repeatedly made public supplications to “The Great Spirit” by name, when speaking to unconverted American Indians. For instance, Washington:
I now send my best wishes to the Cherokees, and pray the Great spirit to preserve them.
I now sincerely wish you a good Journey and hope you may find your [families and] Brothers well on your Return, and that [the Great Spirit above] 55 may long preserve your Nations in peace with each other and with the United States.
Next Jefferson:
I receive with great satisfaction the visit you have been so kind as to make us at this place, and I thank the Great Spirit who has conducted you to us in health and safety. It is well that friends should sometimes meet, open their minds mutually, and renew the chain of affection. Made by the same Great Spirit, and living in the same land with our brothers, the red men, we consider ourselves as of the same family; we wish to live with them as one people, and to cherish their interests аз our own.
– To the Brothers and friends of the Miamis, Pottawatomies, and Weeauks, January 7, 1802.
I thank the Great Spirit that he has conducted you hither in health and safety, and that we have an opportunity of renewing our amity, and of holding friendly conference together. It is a circumstance of great satisfaction to us that we are in peace and good understanding with all our red brethren, and that we discover in them the same disposition to continue so which we feel ourselves. It is our earnest desire to merit, and possess their affections, by rendering them strict justice, prohibiting injury from others. aiding their endeavors to learn the culture of the earth, and to raise useful animals, and befriending them as good neighbors, and in every other way in our power. By mutual endeavors to do good to each other, the happiness of both will be better promoted than by efforts of mutual destruction. We are all created by the same Great Spirit; children of the same family. Why should we not live then as brothers ought to do?
– To The Brothers of the Delaware and Shawanee Nations, February 10, 1802.
And Madison:
I have a further advice of my Red children. You see how the country of the eighteen fires is filled with people. They increase like the corn they put into the ground. They all have good houses to shelter them from all weathers, good clothes suitable to all seasons; and as for food, of all sorts, you see they have enough and to spare. No man, woman, or child, of the eighteen fires, ever perished of hunger. Compare all this with the condition of the Red people. They are scattered here and there in handfulls. Their lodges are cold, leak, and smoky. They have hard fare, and often not enough of it.
Why this mighty difference? The reason, my Red children, is plain. The white people breed cattle and sheep. They spin and weave. Their heads and their hands make all the elements and productions of nature useful to them.
It is in your power to be like them. The ground that feeds one lodge by hunting, would feed a great band by the plough & the hoe. The Great Spirit has given you, like your white brethren, good heads to contrive, and strong arms, and active bodies. Use them like your white brethren of the eighteen fires, and like them, your little sparks will grow into great fires. You will be well fed, dwell in good houses, and enjoy the happiness for which you, like them, were created. These are the words of your father to his red children. The Great Spirit who is the father of us all, approves them. Let them pass through the ear in to the heart. Carry them home to your people; and as long as you remember this visit to your father of the eighteen fires, remember these are his last and best words to you!
John Adams may well have done the same. However, I haven’t been able to find his quotations. He certainly believed all world religions worshipped the same God and noted to Jefferson that Hindus worshipped the same God they did.
America’s civil religion obviously presents a problem for atheists who don’t believe in a God or for polytheists who don’t like the supplication to a singular monotheistic God. However, America’s civil religion may equally impose a philosophical problem for honest orthodox Trinitarian Christians who realize that all of these religions really don’t worship the same God that they do and that America’s Founders therefore erred in trying to construct a civil religion based on natural religion that held all good men of all religions worship the same God. See for instance Joe Carter’s case against the civil religion here, where he also notes the idea comes from Rousseau, who was explicitly anti-Christian. America’s key Founders including Jefferson, I don’t believe consciously followed Rousseau. Rather, they seemed to absorb his powerful ideas through osmosis. But it doesn’t change the fact that their civil religion (which is represented today by things such as “under God,” “in God We Trust” and the National Day of Prayer) is a Rousseauian notion at its heart.
I don’t think such an honest orthodox Christian should mind saying things like “under God” or “In God We Trust.” After all, to him, these things can mean his own God. Just as long as he takes such with a grain of salt and understands the way America’s Founders intended the civil religion to work was that generic references to “under God” likewise included concepts of God (like Allah or the Great Spirit) that he would consider false teachings.
Bottom line for orthodox Christians, don’t look for redemption in politics; if you do, you will invariably commit idolatry against your God.
Filed in The Belfry, The Bureau
The syncretic tradition of liberal religious traditions, which happened to be on the rise in the eighteenth century, indeed lends respect to the idea of a generic God of natural religion that could include both the God of Abraham, the Great Spirit of certain Amerindian cultures, and perhaps even the Spinozist view of a universe driven by natural law, which even atheists could subscribe to. However, the modern politically active strains of Christian fundamentalism represent a decisive rejection of syncretism and religious liberalism. These fundamentalists then claim that the God the founders were talking about is the Abrahamic God of their faith, and then work on the assumption that this gives their religion a special status.
Jon Rowe appears to have a tendency to link the Founders religious beliefs closely with the Founders form of government much as some Christian nation people do. The Founders religious beliefs does not imply an intent on their part to have the government establish a civil religion that mirrored their religious views. On the contrary, while some Founders may have wanted as many people as possible to ultimately share their religious viewpoints, they preferred that government not establish religion, and they weren’t so stupid or lacking in integrity as to think that non establishment of religion should apply to other people’s religious beliefs but not to theirs.
The issue is whether the God of the American Founding is the “God of Abraham.” I would argue not necessarily, instead of simply not.
A cautious formulation.
I’m not aware of any other monotheistic, providential Creator God that can be remotely construed to endow man with certain unalienable rights.
All this talk of syncretism must acknowledge that the syncresis took place within a very narrow milieu of a Judeo-Christian European culture with, admittedly, the acknowledged philosophical influence of the Enlightenment and the Greeks [with a dash of the Romans thrown in].
But there is no new God of the Enlightenment except perhaps for man himself, and the gods of the Romans and Greeks are nowhere to be found here except on the edges, and only rhetorically.
The God of the Founding is not a new one, fabricated from whole cloth. He may not be Abraham’s, strictly speaking, but He is none other, either.
“But there is no new God of the Enlightenment except perhaps for man himself,…”
I’ll probably blog further about this later. In Dr. Frazer’s PhD, citing some earlier literature, he describes the God of the American Founding as a transition from the older “real” Biblical God to modern day secular humanism. They were not secular humanists because they were devout theists. But the theistic rationalists had made the Biblical God over in their more “man-centered” image.
The effort continues to this day. It is the modern project to create a church of Christ without Christ. But you hit the nail on the head when you wrote recently that “the laws of Nature” only have teeth when “Nature’s God” is added, which is why they did.
And to get the theists on board, of course.
Ran across this, which may be useful at some point:
Alexander Hamilton, in The Farmer Refuted (1775), denounced Hobbes’s principles, which he attributed to his enemy, the Tory Samuel Seabury:
“[Hobbes's] opinion was exactly coincident with yours [Seabury's], relative to man in a state of nature. He held, as you do, that he was then perfectly free from the restraint of law and government. Moral obligation, according to him, is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue, but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians, for the maintenance of social intercourse. But the reason he ran into this absurd and impious doctrine was that he disbelieved the existence of an intelligent superintending principle, who is the governor and will be the final judge of the universe.
. . . To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures; and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appear to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable.
Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.
This is what is called the law of nature. . . . Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind. . .”
From an essay on Allan Bloom.
The Farmer Refuted is a classic. As I’ve noted to you before, I’ve dealt with a few Christian America folks who insist that Hamilton was a Christian all his public career, like when he wrote the passage. They’d also likely read in their “Biblical” content to his generic references to God. It seems pretty clear from the context that the “eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever,” refers to natural law or reason because he states “Good and wise men, in all ages…have supposed.” Good and wise men, in all ages, have not had access to biblical revelation.
[...] Tom Van Dyke leaves a thoughtful comment on whether the God of the American Founding is the God of Abraham: I’m not aware of any other monotheistic, providential Creator God that can be remotely construed to endow man with certain unalienable rights. [...]