The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (40 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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(133). Yet their experience “may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded
by some of later times
; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God” (emphasis mine).
 
What we have in Plymouth, then, and elsewhere in America, is a third way, neither the absolute State praised by Hobbes, nor the banishment of religion to the dusty corners of the soul. Here is room for individual competence and enterprise, in the service of the family, and to the benefit of the community. We have an ideal that was largely realized during Bradford’s long governorship, and that remained a template for New England villages for many generations: a people united by the God they worship, who commands them to love one another.
 
I’m not saying that the American colonists always lived up to so high an ideal. When, in the history of man, do people live up to their ideals? But the Puritan congregation, like the monasteries of old, combined equality with the necessary hierarchies that develop among brothers who obey their acknowledged superior. Unlike the old monasteries, the congregations did so while fostering the family. Strangely enough, it was from their commitment to the local church polity that the Puritans gave us a model, not for church government, but for a secular order friendly both to family and church.
 
And it was, more or less, this model that colonists replicated wherever they went. In a sense it was conservative and European. It resembled the monastery far more than any Puritan would care to admit. It also resembled the chartered towns of old England. In some places, like Plymouth, to join the town was to join the church, or to put oneself partly under the direction of the elders. But if that was not to one’s taste, one might settle somewhere else—Pennsylvania, for instance, where freedom of religion was guaranteed by the charter that Charles II granted to William Penn. But even in Pennsylvania, this freedom of religion extended also to a community’s vigorous practice of religion. So a Moravian settlement springs up in Bethlehem, an Amish settlement in Lancaster, and a Mennonite settlement in Germantown.
 
Conservative Founders?
 
Historians may debate whether the Founding Fathers were correct in their assessment, but they themselves believed—or at least most of them did—that in their revolt against England they were only claiming the rights of Englishmen under common law, rights recognized by long tradition. That is why the conservative Edmund Burke supported them (and why, with that same veneration for the particular pieties of a nation, he supported the Quebec Act, allowing French Catholics freedom
from
English laws regarding religion). Franklin had persuaded Burke that it was George III and his ministers who were the innovators, and Burke knew enough of the Whig party in England—mercantile, secular, and centralizing—to find the argument plausible.
19
 
So when we look at the opening salvo of the Declaration of Independence, we should not be quick to assume that it sets forth an utterly new doctrine of government:
 
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
 
 
What distinguishes Jefferson’s assertion from the cry of “
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
” that echoed through the streets of revolutionary Paris? Let’s answer by dispelling a few misconceptions about the Founders and their beliefs.
 
 
 
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
 
The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Emmuska Orczy; New York: Penguin, 2000.
 
Written as a play in 1903 (panned as too old fashioned by London’s critics), it became a novel soon thereafter, and since a fine movie. The story’s protagonist is the scourge of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, and a hero of the nobility, saving scores of them from the guillotine.
 
A reactionary hero defending the aristocracy? Hardly politically correct.
 
 
Error one: The Founders were Deists
who believed in the cipher-god of Spinoza, or the god of the optimist Leibniz, a god that sets the celestial machinery in motion, but who cannot dwell within the heart of man.
 
People who say so are looking at America as if it were Europe, governed by a skeptical and cynical intelligentsia and aristocratic elite. It is not the America of the Great Awakening of 1739–1742, a movement both popular and educated, witnessing the plain eloquence of the Methodists Whitefield and John Wesley, but also the learned reformed theology of Jonathan Edwards. Setting aside natural science, there was nothing in classical learning, logic, political theory, and practical experience that the two or three most skeptical among the Founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, could have taught the likes of John Witherspoon, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry. Had Jefferson not become President—which is to say, had his predecessor John Adams not signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, criminalizing criticism of the fledgling government when French nationals were thought to be undermining it—we might have a very different idea of who the most important Founders were.
20
 
It is true that the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, not a member of either Continental Congress, was a genuine Deist, if not an atheist outright. But that the nation was not all enamored of Paine and his equalitarian ideals is amply illustrated in a letter of John Adams. Do not call ours the Age of Reason, he says, satirizing Paine’s irreverent book by that name, but rather “the Age of Paine”:
He deserves it much more than the courtesan who was consecrated to represent the goddess in the temple at Paris, and whose name Tom has given to the age. The real intellectual faculty has nothing to do with the age, the strumpet, or Tom. (Quoted in Kirk;
Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams
)
 
 
 
The evidence that even Franklin and Jefferson were not
exactly
Deists is straightforward enough: we sometimes catch them praying. The Deist “god” is an impersonal force. One does not appeal to an impersonal force. Helvetius didn’t; La Mettrie didn’t; Paine didn’t. But at one key moment during the first Continental Congress, Franklin urged his fellows, before they undertook any more business, to appeal to Him who directs the course of nations, without whose assistance they could not succeed. It is not an isolated moment of piety. Here he condoles with a woman on the loss of a friend:
Our friend and we are invited abroad on a party of pleasure, which is to last for ever. His chair was ready first, and he is gone before us. (Letter to Elizabeth Hubbart, February 22, 1756)
 
 
 
He writes the following, one month before his death:
Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another life respecting its Conduct in this. (Letter to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790)
 
 
 
It is not exactly Christian, but it is far closer to that than to the materialism of Hobbes, or to the hostile secularism of our academy today.
 
It is true that Jefferson cut from his New Testament all those passages wherein Jesus worked miracles.
21
True also that his friend and rival Adams slid from Calvinism to Unitarianism, and that, advising him about the establishment of the University of Virginia, he urged him to make sure that genuine divinity, of a Christian Unitarian sort, would be taught there, and not that absurd doctrine that holds that the Maker of all this splendid universe was swaddled up in flesh and lay in a manger.
22
But then, Jefferson did study this redacted “Bible” of his lovingly
.
He who hated the State establishment of a church—taxing men to pay the salary of a clergyman—never once protested the teaching of Scripture in local schools, built and paid for by the people of a community. Why should he have? There was, after all, an odd conservative streak in Jefferson the planter and landed gentleman, as opposed to Jefferson the political theorist and diplomat. I know plenty of churches that could use a few Deists like Jefferson.
 
Error two: The Founders wished to establish a purely secular state.
If the term “secular” implies a public square denuded of religious discourse, or even a theory of law that is not rooted in the eternal truths of good and evil, the claim is untenable. One word in Jefferson’s sentence gives it away:
Creator.
 
It is not an idle word. Jefferson appeals beyond the authority of the State to the Creator of human nature and of the natural laws of good and evil. He was following a beaten path. John Locke, who wrote his treatises on government to justify the limited, constitutional monarchy established in England under William and Mary, rejects Hobbes’ account of the state of nature, the war of all against all. He replaces it with something like the Genesis story of man before the Fall. The Father created man to be free and to replicate His government by paternal rule upon earth.
23
In other words, man’s freedom and his rights flow from his created nature, and the natural law consists of those rules that such beings cannot break without denying that nature. Lucretius is the author whom Hobbes cites most frequently, but for Locke it is the Anglican divine and theorist of natural law, Richard Hooker. The State—the Leviathan—is no demigod. It is rather, to quote Locke, what man creates to help secure his liberty to “follow [his] own will in all things, where the rule [of law] prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man” (
Second Treatise on Government,
ch. 4).
 
I’m not arguing that Locke is wholly correct, or that the egalitarian individualism he preaches is not finally corrosive to the community. I only note that Jefferson follows Locke, not Hobbes. Jefferson sympathized with the French Revolution, undoubtedly. It was another matter on which he and Adams violently disagreed. But the Jacobin slogan lacks an appeal to the One who makes liberty, equality, and fraternity possible. Jefferson’s declaration does not make that mistake.
 
Error three: Jefferson insists that the State cannot take away your rights by force.
Well, he certainly believed it couldn’t, in justice. But his sentence means something different. These rights, he says, are
unalienable.
Again he has Hobbes and the dreamers of totalitarian systems in mind. When people could no longer endure the chaos of the war of all against all, said Hobbes, they
alienated
their “rights” to everything, vesting them in the Leviathan, the State. But these rights, granted by the divine King as surely as an earthly king would grant rights to a chartered town, are ours, and not ours to hand over to any ruler or any State. We cannot sell ourselves into slavery. We cannot sign our children over as wards of the State. We cannot trade fundamental freedoms, which are ours
from the Creator,
for a pittance of health insurance. We cannot swap our right to support or criticize people running for public office for the benefit of cheaper and cleaner elections managed by the State. We can’t do a hundred things we now do all the time, alienating our rights and comforting ourselves because, after all, the State will take care of them. Hobbes was more honest than we are. He wanted the Leviathan. We do too, but we pretend that we can put a ring in its nose and lead it around on a leash.
 
Error four: Jefferson says that each individual has the right to pursue what he thinks will make him happy.
No, he says no such thing.

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