The View From 1776

The Bible and the Origins of Western Culture
By Jeff Lukens

Our progressive culture is separated into those who believe in the Bible and those who do not. Many people believe the scriptures to be the revealed word of God that provides a moral foundation to human behavior that cannot be found elsewhere. Secularists say that moral issues are mostly matters of personal opinion, and that we are accountable to no one but ourselves. Secularists, however, offer no credible alternative framework for preventing the worst acts of human behavior while promoting the good ones.

What makes murder wrong, for instance, is not some logical deduction, or that it feels wrong, but a Creator who commands, “You shall not murder.” Likewise, what makes compassion a virtuous trait is not reason or emotion, but that same Creator who says, “Love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

The Bible has been scrutinized more than any other book in the world. Though many have tried, no one has ever been able to invalidate it. Many who have attempted such an endeavor have instead come become believe in it.

Scores of individuals wrote portions of the Bible over a period of hundreds of years. Although the Bible consists of 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament, and 27 in the New Testament, it has nonetheless become known as one book. Its unifying theme is the redemption of fallen man by a merciful God. It is often said that within its pages lie the answers for all the problems facing humanity.

While one can point to ancient Greek and Roman influences in the rise of Western culture, it is Christianity that has played the leading role. To find the origins of Western culture, one must delve into the origins of the Bible itself.

The Chosen People

After creating the world and its inhabitants, God selected a specific group of people, the Jews, and spent hundreds of years showing them who He was and that He cared about their behavior. The Old Testament chronicles many repetitive cycles of their obedience toward God, their rebellious falling away, God’s rebuke, and then their humble return to obedience.

Around 2000 B.C., God made a covenant with Abraham, promised to make a great nation through his descendants, and to bless all the peoples of the earth through them. In doing so, God established a witness for His singular self in the midst of polytheism, a recipient and a custodian of His divine revelation, and finally a specific culture of people through whom the Messiah would come.

Abraham’s offspring, the Jewish people, were one of the more advanced cultures for their recording of traditions, genealogy, and law. The early stories of the Bible were passed down through the generations of descendants virtually word by spoken word.

By the time of Moses, alphabetic writing had become common. Moses is credited for writing most of the Pentateuch (the first five books) around 1450-1400 B.C. The Jewish inclination for accuracy and verbatim recording of text made possible the availability of scripture for the world for all time. The Ten Commandments and other laws became the legal foundation for Jewish society, and eventually the basis for civil law in Western society.

The Old Testament includes the writings of the Jewish prophets, who predicted a redeemer, or a messiah, to be born among them. Among the many prophecies that foretold the character and circumstances of this individual was that he was to be a descendant of David, the King of Israel (1003-970 B.C.), and born of a virgin in the city of Bethlehem. He was to be a man of sorrows, cast off by the Jewish people.

The Old Testament sets the stage for his coming into this world. The New Testament records the realization and fulfillment of the prophetic and redemptive truths contained in the Old Testament.

Jesus of Nazareth

No reasoned person could deny that the single most prominent individual in all human history was Jesus of Nazareth. No other person has been nearly as influential in the historical progression of civilization as has Jesus. This is a shocking realization if one considers that he lived a short life in a remote corner of the Roman Empire, and was publicly (and unjustly) executed as a criminal.

Jesus was not just another religious leader or someone seeking spiritual truth. He claimed to be the Son of God and proved it by performing many miracles. Jesus himself affirmed the Old Testament by referring to it throughout his public life, and even while dying on a cross. As prophesied, the Jewish establishment rejected him and killed him, but then—to the amazement of many witnesses—He rose from the dead.

His message of eternal life and personal redemption by faith was at first preached by word of mouth. Four accounts of Jesus’ life and work were recorded in writing by the end of the first century, and are now known as the Gospels of the New Testament.

The Early Church

The believers of the First Century wrote the New Testament and spread the Gospel message to what was then the known world. The 12 apostles of Jesus began this work within the Jewish community. Later, the apostle Paul was the principal agent to spread Christianity to those outside the Jewish world and eventually to Rome.

In the early days, a profession of Christianity was punishable by torture or death within the Roman Empire, but in A.D. 313, the Emperor Constantine began to institute legal recognition for Christians. The change in relations between Rome and the church had a wide-ranging effect. Christians were suddenly free to share their faith and establish churches. Christianity soon spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.

By the Fourth Century, the New Testament contained the same books as we have today. Since then, the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” have been used to differentiate the Hebrew from the Christian Scriptures. The collection of Christian New Testament books was placed alongside the Old Testament Hebrew books with the same authority and finality by Christians then as they are now. Christians have always recognized the Old Testament to be God’s Word to man. The early church recognized the New Testament writings as the completion of His message to humanity.

Still Our Guide Today

The Great Commission of Jesus to “go and make disciples of all nations” continues today to reach into all corners of the globe. All who believe in Jesus are to be “grafted in” to God’s chosen people, not by law or genealogy, but by their faith in Him alone.

Beyond our need for personal redemption before God, our values—the dignity of the individual, creativity and free will, political and economic liberty, representative government, and so on—have been based on the principles of the Bible and the Judeo-Christian culture that sustains them.

Without the Bible as a guide, the moral choices between good and evil are mostly subjective. For our society to discard the Bible for any of the multitude of philosophies and faiths available today would radically alter the framework in which we live. What an individual or a culture loses when it rejects biblically based values is not easy to replace. In particular, we would lose the social structure most likely to advance positive human behavior that upholds our way of life.

While a Bible-based culture has not always known freedom or humaneness, it still holds the best possibility for the continuance of these values into the future. No other philosophy or construct of human reasoning can make that claim. In a world with ever changing norms of human behavior, the values of the Bible remain timeless and unchanging.

Some would even argue that God blesses a culture that follows biblical values. Thousands of years of progression and increasing abundance in our civilization would suggest they are correct.

Jeff Lukens is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

Commenting on Scientific Snake-Oil, ryan wrote:

"Darwinian evolution [was] concocted originally to discredit the Bible and to support the philosophical materialism of the socialist religion.”

This statement is completely absurd.  Can you supply any facts whatsoever to support this claim?

My answer:

There is abundant evidence that Charles Darwin was, as early as his voyage on the Beagle, interested in some hypothesis, any hypothesis other than that offered in the Bible, to explain the fantastic varieties of animal and plant life.  Darwin’s works, the outgrowth of similar studies in geology by Charles Lyell, were rebuttals aimed directly at Judeo-Christian doctrine found in the Bible.

Darwin, by the time of his voyage on the Beagle, had become a convinced agnostic.  In one of his manuscripts regarding his abandonment of Christianity, Darwin wrote: Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. As Gertrude Himmelfarb notes (Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution):

The progress of his disbelief must have been sufficiently advanced by 1838, when he became engaged to be married, to provoke his father’s warning about the advisability of concealing one’s doubts from one’s wife.

During his married life, Darwin kept his agnosticism to himself without challenging his wife’s Christian beliefs. Himmelfarb writes that, in the original version of his posthumously published autobiography, however, he expressed himself forthrightly.  In it he wrote that he had come to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. Nor, he wrote, could he be persuaded of the existence of God.  In the autobiography he also referred to Christianity as a “damnable doctrine.”

How then to explain the hypocrisy of the concluding sentence of On the Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one...

The answer is to be found in the self-serving prudence explained in a letter to his son:

[Charles] Lyell [the famous geologist who greatly influenced Darwin’s views] is most firmly convinced that he has shaken the faith in the Deluge far more efficiently by never having said a word against the Bible, than if he had acted otherwise...I have lately read Morley’s “Life of Voltaire” and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect...

Darwin’s ideas were a product of the climate of opinion then gaining ground in England: the Victorians’ reaction to the horrors of working conditions under industrialism and the hope that socialism might indeed bring a secular heaven to mankind, in our lifetimes, here on earth.
 
Had it not been for J.S. Mill and others around 1859, who looked favorably upon the doctrines of Saint-Simonian and Comtean socialism, and advocated them so effectively, Darwin’s On the Origin would probably never have found much of a following.  Even his idol and early mentor Charles Lyell initially rejected it on scientific grounds.  Absent the evangelical-style preaching of Thomas Huxley extolling the gospel of secular materialism, Darwin might have remained an obscure, but decent and kindly gentleman retired in ill health. 

Instead, his work became a fundamental plank in the doctrine of socialism. 

Eleven years before On the Origin, Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. In it he theorized that the materialistic factors of the economy caused societies to evolve, in a sort of natural selection, toward the foreordained triumph of world socialism. English Marxists enthusiastically took up Darwin’s biological evolution as proof of what they called scientific socialism.  Here in the United States it became the basis of Professor John Dewey’s materialistic philosophy of pragmatism.

Himmelfarb writes that Marx, in a June, 1861, letter to German socialist leader Ferdinand Lasalle, wrote that he had read Darwin’s On the Origin and found it to be a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.

Both Darwin and Marx, Himmelfarb writes, ...insisted upon the basic fact of struggle and upon progress as its result.  It was on this ground that Marxism had a legitimate claim to the title of “social Darwinism.” And it was for this reason that some socialists, to Engels’s horror, joined together Darwin, [Herbert] Spencer, and Marx as the trinity that would bring salvation to mankind.

Darwin’s acolytes, from Thomas Huxley to John Dewey, preached that there is no right or wrong, just the struggle for survival.  This meant that the end justifies the means.

Precisely this viewpoint was repeatedly and widely expressed here and in Europe from the mid-1850s until after World War II, when the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin began to merge into public awareness.

The evolutionary view of life means that events of history are not influenced by individual free will, either at the biological level or at the political level, because events are determined by the materialistic conditions within which people live. Only the all-powerful socialistic state can regulate those material conditions, and only the intellectuals know how to use the powers of the collectivized state. 

This is the Darwinian philosophical view that underlay Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Russia in the 1920s, as well as Franklin Roosevelt’s imitative New Deal and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany in the 1930s.

From Darwinian evolution to “man-made” global warming, scientists too often start with a political agenda and cook the books to make their conclusions appear to be scientific.  Students are taught to believe anything that claims to be scientific, provided, of course, that it is certified as such by liberal-socialist-Progressive educators.

Darwinian evolution, concocted originally to discredit the Bible and to support the philosophical materialism of the socialist religion, can be challenged literally on thousands of points.  Al Gore’s “science,” adoringly endorsed by scientists and politicians, is so replete with falsehoods that it is little more than fiction.

As noted in Faith Unconquerable by Fact, when large research grants are in the balance, the tendency is to trumpet guesses as scientifically-proved fact. 

Most of the great scientific discoveries were made many decades ago by lone scientists, both amateurs and professionals, who were motivated by pursuit of knowledge, not fame and money.  Science in the age of Federal research grants has become a big business, a get-rich, fast lane to fame, and “scientists” have learned how to game the system.

Robert Lee Hotz, the Wall Street Journal‘s science editor, writes,

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined."

The message is clear: if it is labeled scientific, it probably isn’t.

In 1996, when Bob Woodward’s The Choice was published, the media had a brief feeding frenzy over his report that Hillary Clinton had held “conversations” with the deceased Eleanor Roosevelt – “channeling,” as the media called it – to seek inspiration for her book, It Takes a Village.

The message of It Takes a Village is that individuals and families no longer can cope with the complexities of modern life, that socialized government is the necessary agent for that purpose.

Senator Clinton’s modified revival of her earlier National Socialist Health System suggests that she remains in close communication with the Roosevelts.

In the tradition of the New Deal’s federalization of states’ Constitutional functions and its socialization of agriculture, industry, and labor relations, Senator Clinton proposes to make health insurance mandatory (you can’t hold a job if you don’t have a National Health card).

Capturing the essence of her plan for socialized medicine, Mark Steyn wrote:

Our theme for today comes from George W Bush: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.”

When the president uses the phrase, he’s invariably applying it to various benighted parts of the Muslim world. There would seem to be quite a bit of evidence to suggest that freedom is not the principal desire of every human heart in, say, Gaza or Waziristan. But why start there? If you look in, say, Brussels or London or New Orleans, do you come away with the overwhelming impression that “freedom is the desire of every human heart”?

A year ago, I wrote that “the story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.”

Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan.

The accuracy of Mr. Steyn’s thrust is attested to by no less a personage than President Franklin Roosevelt, who, in his 1944 State of the Union Address to Congress, proclaimed:

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

President Roosevelt, being a good liberal-Progressive-socialist, naturally omitted the most important of our rights – private property – the impetus for our War of Independence in 1776.

He continued:

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness…

We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed...All of these rights spell security.

In that “second Bill of Rights,” never ratified in accordance with Article V of the Constitution, the President listed “rights” that were to be guaranteed or provided by the Federal government, among them jobs; food, clothing, and recreation; public housing; farm price supports; government price-fixing; Social Security; and free education.

His successor, President Harry Truman, added socialized medicine to the list.

As Aristotle observed around 2,300 years ago, some humans are by nature slaves, that is people who prefer to be taken care of, rather than to take responsibility for themselves. 

Updating Aristotle, Hilaire Belloc in The Servile State (1912) described the effects of the British Fabian, gradualist process that was called creeping socialism in the United States.  Voters gain more welfare-state benefits, but the cost always is surrender of some degrees of personal freedom.

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The over expansion of credit fueled by the Federal Reserve between 1922 and 1927 has many parallels to the “irrational exuberance” of financial markets since the beginning of the Clinton administrations.

In the Wall Street Journal‘s September 21 edition, reporter Brian Blackstone writes:

Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh on Friday cautioned against assuming that the Fed will prop up asset prices or protect individual financial institutions...

In Economics and the Public Welfare, a book that cannot be too highly recommended, Benjamin M. Anderson described a similar situation confronting the Federal Reserve in 1926.

Mr. Anderson’s assessment is authoritative, because he was chief economist for the Chase National Bank, then one of the world’s largest, from 1920 to 1937.  During that period he was in close contact with major bankers in the United States and central bankers around the world, as well as being closely involved with Chase’s large corporate clients.

In contrast to the 1922-27 period, The great crisis of 1920-21, he wrote, was primarily a crisis of commerce and industry, and in the course of the crisis customers who needed loans were able to supply the banks with paper which was eligible for rediscount at Federal Reserve banks.

Eligible paper then was based on self-liquidating, short-term transactions, representing sales of products to creditworthy customers who could be expected to pay for the goods, usually within 90 days.

As the Great Crash of 1929 approached, Mr. Anderson observed, The next crisis, however, seemed more likely to come in installment finance, in real estate, and, above all, in stocks and bonds.  And none of these could supply paper eligible for rediscount at the Federal Reserve Banks.

Today, as in 1927-29, financial institutions are clogged with illiquid, long-term assets, this time subprime mortgage loans and complex derivative securities that are several generations removed from any underlying merchandise transactions.

Continuing the quotation from Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh:

Recent problems in financial markets were caused by “complacency” in valuing assets, and not solely by problems in the subprime mortgage sector, Mr. Warsh also said…

Mr. Warsh traced the market’s complacency to the perception that economic conditions were so “benign” and financial markets “robust” that investors “tended to act with confidence greater than warranted by the fundamentals.

Again Mr. Anderson’s analysis of the 1922-27 period provides disquieting parallels:

Bank credit expansion had moved far in the United States between June 30, 1922, and June 30, 1927...Unneeded by commerce, the rapidly expanding bank credit went into capital uses and speculative uses.  It went into real estate mortgage loans on a great scale...There was, moreover, a great increase in installment finance paper...The terms and conditions were relaxing.  Maturities were stretching from twelve to eighteen months, and finance companies were multiplying...The most startling increase, however, in the assets of the banks was in bank investments in bonds and in commercial loans against stocks and bonds…

Stock prices were already high in the summer of 1927...There was a growing belief that stocks, though high, were going much higher.  There was an increasing readiness to use cheap money in stock speculation...Moving concomitantly with the bank expansion and the rising stock prices was a great increase in new security issues.

Today’s parallels are the gross expansion of subprime mortgage loans and so-called home equity, second mortgage, home loans, along with rampant growth of take-overs by private equity funds, based largely upon the abundant availability of cheap loans. 

One difference between today’s situation and the 1920s over expansion, both fueled by the Federal Reserve’s excessive expansion of the money supply, is that in the 1920s our banks were lending heavily to overseas banks to provide credit for our booming exports of farm products and machinery to rebuild Europe after the First World War.  By 1927, blocked by our high tariffs, foreign exporters could no longer sell enough product to the United States to generate sufficient dollars to repay their loans from American banks and investors.

Today, the Federal Reserve finances burgeoning imports from overseas via inflationary expansion of the money supply.  Central banks everywhere are awash in dollar-based assets.  Many of them are beginning to diversify their foreign exchange reserves into other currencies and into new classes of assets.  OPEC countries are making noises about no longer being willing to price oil exports in dollars, because our currency is depreciating so rapidly against the Euro, Japanese Yen, and other major currencies.

Mr. Anderson’s concluding observation on the Federal Reserve’s over-expansion of the money supply from 1922 to 1927 was:

We could prolong it for a time by further bank expansion and further cheap money policies, but only at the cost of creating a desperately difficult situation at a later time.

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Democrats (and Republicans of late) believe that the answer to every discomfort is increased Federal spending.  The nation is being buried by Federal deficit spending on the never-ending surge of new programs atop the monsters of Social Security and Medicare-Medicaid. 

Inflation is the inevitable result, and the rest of the world will tolerate it only so long (see

Exporting Inflation to China;

Federal Reserve’s NewSpeak;

Macroeconomics and Market Meltdown; and

Pyromaina and the Fires of Inflation).

The Wall Street Journal Online reports (September 20, 2007—Dollar Goes Loonie, By Matt Phillips):

Surging prices of oil and gold, and the increasingly enervated U.S. dollar, have fanned inflation worries after Tuesday’s interest rate cut.

Adding to pressure on the buck was Saudi Arabia’s decision to keep interest rates on hold this week, rather than cutting as it often does in lockstep with the Fed. The kingdom’s currency is basically pegged to the dollar, and the fact that it hasn’t followed the Fed’s cut with one of its own “has many speculating that they are moving closer to removing the dollar peg,” said Camilla Sutton, currency strategist at Scotia Capital in Toronto. If the Saudis do clip their tight ties to the dollar, Ms. Sutton says, “it would cause both a psychological and real drop in demand for the dollar-denominated assets, which would be U.S.-dollar bearish.” Likewise, BNP Paribas analysts divined more weakness against European currencies and noted that “the U.S. dollar index risks breaking its historical 1992 low, which would intensify the bearish U.S. dollar tone.

This sort of thing, however, is just what the doctor ordered, according to liberal-Progressive-socialists, who still worship at the altar of Keynesian economics.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose doctrine guided New Deal socialistic policy-making in the 1930s, preached that savings were bad for the economy, that Federal spending was the only appropriate way to attain full employment.

When reminded that his approach guaranteed inflation in the long run, Keynes flippantly observed that, in the long run, we are all dead.

The long run is again at hand, just as it was in the stagflation of the 1970s. 

No one has ever found evidence of the millions of transitional forms that Darwin predicted, transitional forms that would demonstrate the infinitely gradual transition of one species into another.  Instead, evolutionists look for a few similarities between species and speculate that one “must have” evolved from the other.

Darwin’s Descent of Man stated that humans had evolved from the apes.  For a century and a half, evolutionists have searched for the “missing link,” the transitional form between apes and humans.  No one has ever found a single piece of indisputable evidence for that “link.”

After World War II, National Geographic Magazine hired the Leakeys to search for the “missing link” in Africa.  The contract called for nice color photographic spreads in the magazine depicting the Leakeys’s “scientific” work.  Needless to say, the Leakeys made sure to discover suitable material for the regular National Geographic articles.  No sensational “discoveries,” no more funding for exploration.

The popular impression, falsely created in popular magazines and in high school and college textbooks, is that the Leakeys and other evolutionists in Africa actually found complete skeletons of “missing links.” In fact all that has ever been found is tiny pieces of skeletons, many of which anatomists dispute as being related to human beings.  Nonetheless, from each of those tiny pieces of fossilized bone, magazines and textbooks have fabricated fanciful pictures of shambling, ape-like creatures identified as pre-human creatures.

Every lone tooth, or inch-long fragment of a jaw bone, or small fragment of a skull has, for the past century, been triumphantly hailed as the “missing link” between humans and the apes.  Yet, as the latest news reveals, these so-called missing links did not “evolve” from each other.

This brings us back to the sole point of Darwinian evolution, which is to validate the philosophical doctrine of materialism: the belief that the human soul is a fiction, that all events are simply the results of chance fluctuations of conditions in the physical world. 

It is for that reason that Darwin’s contemporary Karl Marx and his followers so enthusiastically embraced Darwinian evolution as a validation of Marxian socialism, which postulates an evolution of social and political structures as a consequence of changes in economic conditions.  It is for the same reason that today’s liberal-Progressive-socialists hysterically attack anyone questioning the speculative Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis.

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The Scottish Enlightenment & America’s Founding
 by Robert Curry

James Wilson, the Declaration and the Constitution

All men are, by nature, equal and free… all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.  Such consent was given with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed, above what they could enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature.  The consequence is, that the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.

James Wilson, 1774

Any examination of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on America’s Founding must consider James Wilson.  A Scot, educated at St. Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment, he was a signer of the Declaration, one of the most consequential of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and a Justice of the original Supreme Court, appointed by George Washington. 

The quote is from an influential pamphlet Wilson wrote, a pamphlet that was closely studied by Jefferson. Here Wilson presents a fundamental argument of the Scottish moral philosophers, in a version first developed by Francis Hutcheson.  The Founders relied on this argument in both of America’s great founding documents.

The most famous phrase in the Declaration is “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Much ink has been spilled over the third term.  If Jefferson was following Locke it should have read …”and property”--but Jefferson was not following Locke.  Like Wilson, he was following Hutcheson.  Hutcheson argued that Locke was wrong, that property is not one of our unalienable rights, and Jefferson agreed with Hutcheson.

Of course, the argument quoted above is about sovereignty as well, and here the argument also impacts the Constitution. 

Wilson and James Madison were both dedicated to the idea that the people are sovereign.  One way to view the Constitutional Convention is to see it as a dialogue between them about how to shape the Constitution so that the people’s sovereignty is built into the design of the government. 

Both Madison and Wilson are thoroughly schooled in the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.  They are the most learned delegates in history and political theory, and each is closely allied with one of the two most esteemed men in the room, Washington and Franklin.  Everyone in the room knew that Madison spoke for Washington; he was even seated to the right of the dais from which Washington presided.  Only Washington and Madison faced the other delegates.  Wilson was paired with Franklin.  Wilson read Franklin’s prepared statements for him. 

The best way to understand the Constitutional Convention is to envision it dramatically.  Even the staging tells the story, and seems to predict the outcome; Washington and Franklin faced each other, united in their desire for the Convention to succeed.

Washington rarely spoke, confining himself to the role of president.  Franklin held his fire for the critical moments when his enormous prestige was needed to find a way forward by compromise.  Their brilliant junior associates conducted the campaign.  Madison opened with the Virginia Plan; Wilson played a central role in the debate and in the final decisive action, the drafting of the Constitution by the 5 man committee that gave it the shape we know today.

The Scottish Enlightenment & America’s Founding
 by Robert Curry

The American Eagle’s Two Wings

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records.  They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Alexander Hamilton

Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

In his fascinating and valuable account of the Founding, On Two Wings, Michael Novak argues that we have lost sight of the role of religion in America’s Founding.  His thesis is that the Founders were empowered by both faith and common sense working together.

He is certainly correct that the Founders’ faith has been systematically downplayed.  The evidence that the Founders were strengthened in their cause by their religious convictions is simply overwhelming. 

In a series of articles on this site, I have been discussing the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on America’s Founding.  What is fascinating to me is that to support his argument for the impact of religious faith on the Founding, Novak reaches for the same cast of characters that I have relied on to make the case for the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Novak’s preface begins like this: Most of us grow up these days remarkably ignorant of the [Founders]…Benjamin Rush and James Wilson were reputed to be the most learned men amongst them, but what do most of us know about the fundamental beliefs and convictions of either of them? He proceeds to make his case for the impact of religious conviction on the Founding very effectively, marshalling quotes of Rush and Wilson, Witherspoon and Madison, arguing effectively for the power of religion in the lives of Hamilton and Jefferson.

What is going on here?  The simple fact is that these same Founders make equally good exemplars of religious faith and of the Scottish Enlightenment. 

This of course makes it clear that the Scottish Enlightenment and the Enlightenment in America were not opposed to religion.  However, Novak overlooks this difference among the Enlightenments.  There is no country in the world, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, in which the boldest political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers are put so effectively into practice as in America.  Only their anti-religious doctrines have never made any headway in that country. Novak uses this quote of de Tocqueville to make his case—but de Tocqueville makes a significant error here, and it goes unnoticed by Novak.  As we have seen, the political theories that the Americans put so effectively into practice were those of the Scottish moral philosophers, who did not advance anti-religious doctrines.  Of course, the eighteenth-century philosophers from de Tocqueville’s own country of France were famous for their anti-religious doctrines, but the Founders were not influenced by their political theories.

Overlooking this difference among the Enlightenments, Novak ends up doing to the Scottish Enlightenment what he correctly accuses other scholars of doing to faith—missing the key role it played in the Founding.  Mere common sense cannot explain the depth of wisdom in The Federalist.  For the source of that wisdom, we must look to the Scottish Enlightenment.

At the same time, he is correct; the Founders did rise on two wings.  The two wings were religious faith and the Scottish Enlightenment.