What is meant by the American heritage? What distinctive ideals and goals define our national perspective?
At a time when our purposes are in doubt, the urgency and relevance of these questions are inescapable.
Foreign nations are unsure of American objectives. For this confusion communist propaganda is somewhat to blame. But fault accrues also to our own diplomatic ambiguity. Even the unparalleled contributions of foreign aid domestically promoted as concrete expressions of the Golden Rule are interpreted by some powers simply as global investments of American self-interest. Material and mercenary motives have assumed prominent status both abroad and at home in rationalizing American policies. When moral motivations follow this primary appeal to private interest, their impact crumbles under the Marxist calumny that in the free world morality and self-interest are simple synonyms. We are failing to clarify adequately the relatedness of national and international good. We are failing to clarify convincingly egoistic and altruistic motivations. Moreover, the rival interests that jeopardize international understanding gnaw devastatingly in smaller scale at home in the party-spirit and sectional conflicts of the day.
Overdue, therefore, is an awareness that naturalistic and materialistic forces have dissolved many venerable elements of American idealism. Rediscovery that the American perspective was once basically spiritual, that national unity and purpose are historically related to that perspective, could be a propitious restorative. At times of ideological vagrancy a nation is particularly subject to the lure of alien ideals and may perhaps irrevocably yield its resources to delusive and deceptive promises. Mounting interest in those American purposes that specifically portray our true national traditions is consequently a happy note in our day. It involves a turning aside from the experimental novelties of twentieth century social scientists to the firmly fixed perspectives of the founding fathers.
Obviously, risk and hazard may shadow this development, especially as the American perspective is discovered to be a religious one.
A major problem adheres in the growing veneration of this religious heritage for its dynamism as a cultural force. To value religion for its indispensable contribution to “the democratic way of life,” or because it vitalizes those virtues necessary to the success of “free enterprise,” makes of religion little more than a mechanical catalyst for other interests.
Any proper religion has and must preserve its inherent sense of priority. It dare not demean itself by becoming a tool for welding nationalistic or commercial enterprises. Such warning was voiced nowhere more eloquently than by representatives of all three major Western traditions at the recent Fund for the Republic seminar on “Religion in a Free Society.” Spokesmen Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Father Gustave Weigel and Professor Paul Tillich all cautioned against reverencing religion primarily as a protective shoring for the sagging foundations of our national and social life.
Rabbi Heschel warned against invoking religion as “a way of satisfying human needs.… Values and needs have become modern idols.” “Tragic is the role of religion in contemporary society,” he added. “The voice of the Lord is powerful … is full of majesty. Where is its power? Where is its majesty?”
Father Weigel granted that “religion can help society—but should it? That can be its consequent, but it is not its proper goal.… Religion is now invited to become an active dynamism in the commonwealth—something that can be used.… Beware of this kindness!” admonished Father Weigel. He stressed that religion can best help the community by “being itself” instead of existing for the sake of something else.
Professor Tillich, too, warned of misgauging the function of religion. Dare religion be used as a tool for something else? Dr. Tillich took special note of the enlarging American emphasis that “we must undergird our democracy by religion.” If religion is ultimately concerned, noted Professor Tillich, it cannot become simply a means to the non-ultimate.
As the “use of religion” is practiced, its peril worsens increasingly. It may be invoked to bolster venerable traditions, or to salvage a sagging republic. Religion may be “used” because Madison Avenue public relations experts think it strategic, or helpful to a “good press.” The full measure of exploitation comes from communist leaders who discover that even this “opiate of the people” may serve the monster-state. To guard against such abuse, such perversion of the holy, requires prizing religion for its one purpose and message, namely, the exclusive centrality and pre-eminence of the living God.
Something greater than American ideology and purpose motivated the founding fathers. They themselves confessed a sense of national mission. And to them the United States was not only under divine protection but under divine obligation as well.
This spiritual priority they guarded in two conspicuous ways: They projected a limited government, specifically depriving rulers of absolute authority over human life. Thereby they reserved a right to discredit civil government (as witness their rebellion against the English sovereign) as arbitrary and tyrannical. As safeguards against centralized federal power, the founding fathers established three branches of government, a two-party system, states’ rights, and a Bill of Rights to protect individual liberties. Moreover, as the very First Amendment, they prohibited an established or state religion, thereby inaugurating a form of separation of Church and State to preserve religious freedom.
By these policies they did not intend to exclude religion from significant social and political influence. Rather, they hoped to assure both the responsibility of government to the Ultimate and the prevention of sectarian monopoly of the political order. They were guarding against both political and ecclesiastical arbitrariness. They prized limited government and religious freedom because they themselves had experienced that earthly totalitarianism which exercises a compulsive power over human conscience, jeopardizes the dignity and responsibility of the individual and nullifies man’s opportunity to serve conscientiously both God and the governing powers he has ordained.
This does not mean that they minimized therefore the importance of supernatural religion and morality. The Declaration of Independence spoke of endowment “by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights, and of a “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” While some were Deists rather than biblical supernaturalists, all of the founding fathers believed in a transcendent God and in supernatural and unchanging norms of truth and morality. In his Farewell Address, President Washington stressed morality as vital to the success of the American form of government, and noted that morality is not long observed in the absence of religion.
Supernatural religion and morality were recognized not only as indirect but as indispensable supports of the Republic. Only within this spiritual and moral framework, from which confidence in limited civil government and religious freedom derived, could the American mission and the national purpose be comprehended.
Theistic religion (even the Deists were theists of sorts) produced not simply national slogans or formulas such as “In God we trust,” or “under God,” but was a vital force in community and family life as well. Confidence in the divine endowment of human rights furnished the dynamic to rebuke the kings of earth. Reliance on divine Providence made these forebears adequate to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in a cause where both ruler and ruled answered to the rights and duties derived from the Ruler of all.
Whatever may be said of other religious traditions, the decisive significance of Judaeo-Christian revealed religion in shaping American outlook is indisputable. Unfortunately, the importance of Judaeo-Christian conviction in forging the American outlook has paled in our generation because theistic philosophy has defected from biblical supernaturalism and has joined humanistic philosophy in identifying the decisive roots of “the democratic vision” with Graeco-Roman thought. By doing this, the essence of the American heritage is interpreted in such broad emphases as respect for the dignity of the individual and freedom to develop intuitive intellectual and spiritual faculties to the maximum of his abilities. It is often added that concern for the individual is a direct heritage of Christ’s teaching, an incentive to the doctrine of the brotherhood of man. To thus state the case places the mainsprings of American beginnings rather one-sidedly in Graeco-Roman speculations rather than in Judaeo-Christian sanctions, in Renaissance rather than in Reformation traditions. Consequently, the American perspective becomes secular and hides those spiritual elements that belong rightly and ineradicably in the forefront.
The beliefs that sustain the Western world today are doubtless a classical and biblical conglomerate. Europe once had its Dark Ages, when revealed religion lost its social significance, and the speculative traditions of ancient philosophy shaped the cultural climate of the day. More than one scholar has noted the similar tendency in the early twentieth century to deprecate Christian traditions or to prize them only for their affinity to Graeco-Roman learning. Such an assessment, however, inverts the historical situation in respect to early American traditions. Documentation of a genuinely American ideology recognizes the essentially Christian outlook not only of the Pilgrims and Puritans, but of the masses generally. Even where the people lacked dedication to it, they acknowledged the validity of the Christian view and permitted its presuppositions to shape the accepted virtues of the times. Deists remained a sophisticate minority, however influential in intellectual affairs. At that, they often viewed Providence, and the connection between Deity and man’s dignity and destiny, with a warmth unwittingly reflective of the inherited religious tradition. In earlier centuries, the center of community life was not the philosopher and his podium, but the clergyman and his church. Churches, in turn, inspired schools and colleges, and the religious awakenings among the populace lifted the political morality of the day.
America’s special indebtedness to the religion of the Bible is indelibly written into her past traditions. The divine Creator of responsible creatures, the value of the individual endowed in the plan of God with inalienable rights, are facets of this heritage. The sense of a living community wherein spiritual purposes are realized reflects the influence of a biblical view of history. The principle of religious freedom and the rejection of state religion were advanced by Roger Williams and others by appeal to the New Testament. The virtue of neighbor-love, essential to the spirit of a democratic society, is most precisely defined by revealed religion. Anyone who has ever recognized the gulf separating Greek and Christian views of God and man; of the state and man; of man in history; and of man’s responsibility to his fellow man, will comprehend that the American spirit has inherited a generous debt to revealed religion. Classic philosophies of antiquity furnish no adequate explanation of these attitudes. While its religious traditions were diverse, the incontrovertible fact is that America’s beginnings were steeped in biblical Christianity, especially in that of the Protestant Reformation. This tradition not only shaped many of the profoundest ideals of the American Republic but also supplied the enthusiasm and loyalty for implementing these ideals in community life.
Twentieth century secularism has posed a serious threat to these influences. For one thing, Protestantism, the dominant American religious tradition, revolted against its own supernaturalistic traditions and thereby impugned the religion of redemptive revelation. Then, too—and no doubt encouraged by this internal Protestant defection—the intellectuals progressively located the roots of the American heritage in Greek and Enlightenment influences. Consequently, democracy in America as elsewhere has tumbled into trouble. The spiritual orientation that once inspired the dedication of the masses has withered, and the moral vitality necessary to its well-being has long been on the wane.
Curiously enough, the men who risked life and property to found the Republic shared a virile faith that divine Providence participated in the birth of this nation. On the other hand, many contemporary Americans, in the midst of military and materialistic security, are skeptical of any divine significance in our country’s mission. The recent warning of Charles M. White, chairman of Republic Steel Corporation, scores its point that “perhaps the most dangerous illusion of all is the concept of ‘The Great American Destiny’ ” or the “doctrine … that we cannot fail because we are Americans.” But more devastating is the absence from individual life of “a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence.” It is therefore no surprise that confidence in that protection is absent also in contemplating the nation’s destiny. How different from current attitude is the spirit of Samuel West’s 1776 election day sermon in Dartmouth:
For my part, when I consider the dispensations of Providence toward this land, ever since our fathers first settled in Plymouth, I find abundant reason to conclude that the great Sovereign of the universe has planted a vine in this American wilderness which he has caused to take deep root … and that he will never suffer it to be plucked up or destroyed.
The role of Providence in American ideology has taken a tragic turn. While the founding fathers clearly believed in the providential origin and special mission of the United States, they did not confuse or identify this nation as a kind of redemptive historical center. Their knowledge of biblical truth maintained the decisive pivot-point of human history to be a Person. For them special redemptive history climaxed in the life, suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The American destiny was to radiate a borrowed glow; it had no self-sufficient glory of its own. Modern notions of evolution and progress, however, together with America’s rise as a world power, erased much of this mood. For a season the notion of a “great American destiny” arose. Wholly apart from spiritual dependence on the past, twentieth century America was to shape the world spirit—inaugurating a new and permanent era of peace and plenty. The biblical sense of divine dependence thereby vanished from America’s idea of national providence; the conscious relationship of tenets of the Gospel to the nation’s mission disappeared. Then came the detachment of the national interest from any transcendent realities whatever. The American political spirit has little except natural and military strength on which to anchor its present expectation of permanent survival.
The New England clergy have been called “the forgotten heroes” of the American Revolution. This is not because of their military exploits but because they recognized the political importance of Christianity. They preached liberty, as Franklin P. Cole reminds us in a volume by that title (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1941) in an age when freedom was under fire. They were guardians of liberty not in addition to their proclamation of the biblical revelation but rather because of it; to them the Bible was “the cornerstone of liberty’s wall.” Among their favorite texts was “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
During the Revolutionary period, many New England ministers preached sermons on political subjects at least twice annually, besides at Thanksgiving and at other special observances. Their preaching underscored the spiritual source, the nature and the cost of liberty. They found the source of freedom in biblical rather than in secular traditions. The passion for liberty they traced to the divinely escorted Hebrew exodus from Egyptian bondage and Pharaoh’s tyranny, and they stressed a heritage of freedom that reached far beyond Anglo-Saxon roots to the Sinai wilderness. To them liberty shone as the Creator’s gift, and in its nurture they extolled the divine plan and providence of “the invisible hand that rules the world.” They spoke of God and freedom in one and the selfsame breath.
In delineating the nature of freedom, these clergy reiterated certain basic truths: Civil government is a divine institution. Since rulers derive their power from God, anarchy and chronic revolution are disapproved. The law is not to be taken into one’s own hands; hence compact and constitution are important in communal life. Rulers are ordained to minister for good. Thus the aim of government is linked to the divine moral order, and not simply to common utility and safety, that is, to man’s need as a social being. Government, said Ebenezer Bridge in 1767, is “for advancing his [God’s] own glory and for promoting the good of his rational intelligent creatures.” But the specific form of civil government is not absolutely fixed. Its form depends on matters of temper, genius, situation and advantage; no perfect model exists for all nations. While government does not have its source in the people, it requires the consent of the governed, who retain the right to challenge it. Only government for the good of mankind is of God’s ordination.
Too many Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzars and Caesars, too much absolute “divine right” of kings and magistrates, had shadowed pre-American history. This awareness of arbitrary and capricious rulership is eloquently expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s reference to “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” a design of despotism that conferred the right and duty to throw off such government. The people have a right to expect and to require the performance of acts for their own good not as a special work of grace but as their due. The ruler who cannot fulfill this expectation should resign office for the common good.
Clergy of the Revolutionary era proclaimed the obligation of freedom as well as its source and nature. Bounded by God’s sovereignty and his unchanging moral purpose, man’s freedom rested on the stable foundation of justice and righteousness. Anything offensive to God and injurious to man was considered detrimental to piety and virtue, to neighborliness and good will. Tyranny was the act of exalting oneself above all that is godly. Hence immorality and licentiousness were to be feared more than the military threat of external foes, for in the absence of a sound morality liberty could survive in neither peace nor war. Clergymen warned colonial merchants that if they treasured liberty only when their prosperity and security were threatened (thereby making freedom an irrelevant concern in “good times”), they were already guilty of jeopardizing freedom, for the guarantees of liberty can be found only in a good ruler, in a good constitution and in a good people. Reminding the citizenry of the Scriptures “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.… If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:32, 36), these clergymen preached the Gospel of redemption. In this context they spoke of public spirit, of civil happiness, and of the enjoyment of government.
It was Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard College, who cried out in an election sermon in 1775: “O, may our camp be free from every accursed thing! May our land be purged from all its sins. May we be truly a holy people, and all our towns cities of righteousness.
Where in American life today is this sense of ultimate mission and purpose? Our reliance on Providence in matters of state is broken. Indeed, even the very concept of Providence is vanishing from the political scene. The thesis of separation of Church and State is parroted to provide a patriotic halo for secular and naturalistic theories of national life. Even some religious leaders fearful of sectarian exploitation of the political order seem complacent over its corrosion by secular agencies and influences.
No matter what its phrasing—the need to awaken slumbering Puritan convictions in our heritage, or the need to arouse American conscience to fresh awareness of its debt to the Gospel, or the need to bestir freedom’s taproots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition—however the need is expressed, a great responsibility rests on the clergy and on the churches of our day. The majority of Americans, and therefore the largest bloc of public opinion in American life, is registered on the church rolls. A unique opportunity exists to rebuild our national reliance on Providence. If this resurgence is not forthcoming, it may well reflect the churches’ own spiritual impotency and their lost sense of needed revival.
Fortunes Of Democracy Quaver In France
The decline of France—one of the three world powers at the peace table of Versailles—holds somber warning for the Western democracies. Will they learn a lesson from the drift of the fourth republic?
The instability of French government became the subject of satire and skit. The fate of the third republic did not discourage the masses from a transference of state affairs to politicians with partisan goals. The fourth republic sagged from its outset with interparty rivalry. Since World War II, the republic witnessed the collapse of 25 governments in 13 years, while the people trusted in bureaucratic efficiency. But lack of common dedication increasingly sapped the nation’s energies.
Then came a fateful moment. The army, escaping civilian control, virtually dictated a national leader. The alternatives were civil war (anarchy) or entrustment of all the executive power wielded for 91 years by the National Assembly to General de Gaulle.
To his credit, General de Gaulle not only is anticommunist, but he hesitated to take power by direct force—however artificial his “mandate.” What scope his leadership will allow to democratic processes is left unsure by ambiguous commitments. But even if democratic safeguards are erected, the fourth republic very likely slipped into its death coma the day the National Assembly, threatened with civil war, reluctantly surrendered its powers while the French people thumbed newspapers. To bring about suspension of the republic did not require majority action by the French people; it took only majority inaction. Nobody desired dictatorship, even in modified form; no majority even approved suppression of the National Assembly for a single hour. But, after long indifference, the people no longer counted in the crisis.
Representative government carries a high price: the citizenry’s watchful participation. Whoever evades political responsibilities, entrusting state affairs wholly to professional politicians, hastens its doom. Every neglected democracy faces inevitable crisis. If the mere gloss of legality is preserved, the people will then allow the powers of state to pass (presumably for the moment) from appointed leaders to a strong (and perhaps benevolent) man waiting for the void. A precedent then exists for a man on horseback to assume quasi-dictatorial powers. The next “savior” (shades of Napoleon Bonaparte), unconcerned with constitutional forms, may not scruple over democratic safeguards.
Human government swerves uneasily between anarchy and dictatorship; happy is that land whose dedicated majority is aware that government is limited by God and subverted by men—by irresponsible citizens as well as by tyrannical rulers.
