(To read Part 1 of this article, please click on “The Mutual Dependence of Church and State” in the upper left hand corner.)
How were such revolutions in the very possibility of justice accomplished? After all, the argument down through human history has been that might makes right. And while philosophers in their closets have come up with other things, and still do it all the time, philosophers in the closet don't govern nations. Philosophers in the closet don't move human hearts and shape human conscience and characteristics directly. That has to be done by other agencies. And sadly those agencies down through the years have been unconstrained, in so many instances, by elements of conscience. The consciences of rulers seem mostly to have been provoked not by the universal considerations of justice, but by the incidental factors of biology and tribe. Loyalty to family and ally, however, has been quite consistent with unspeakable indifference to those who do not happen to be in the favored group.
So what about those beings left out of the purview of those definitions of community, who have nothing to recommend them in their dignity except the bare humanity that they can claim? Down through the ages, power hasn't had much respect for them at all. And so the challenge gone unanswered was not just to shape the consciences of the ordinary or the good. The challenge was to get the leaders that would otherwise be tempted to abuse their superiority seriously to pursue justice, and to inspire those that would otherwise be tempted simply to submit to their abuse to have the courage to oppose them.
It is precisely here, I think, that the Founders had somewhat greater wisdom than the people who reduce their views to the caricature that morality only arises from religion. They were faced with a real problem, and they wanted a solution that had some chance of being translated into a relatively lasting reality. And they understood the fact — a little bit cynical, perhaps, but none the less verified by much of human history – that power ultimately only respects a greater power.
This is sad, but true. Power cannot be relied upon to respect greater wisdom. That's why Plato, though he dreamed that kings might be philosophers, understood that they probably wouldn't end up that way. Power doesn't necessarily respect holiness, either. Sometimes the Pope can walk out of Rome and talk Attila out of sacking the place, but usually it doesn't work. And the real cost of the absence of such discipline on human power is that people die, and whole civilizations are destroyed, so that the smoking ruins left behind are now called deserts – as the Mongols left in great parts of the world.
The aim of the Founders was to invoke a paradigm that offered a surer foundation for our appeals to conscience. For with what better logic can the ruled face the ruler than the notion that whatever the power of the king, the simplest human being gains his dignity from the absolute greatest power of all, which the king cannot overshadow, cannot equal, cannot even touch. The power of the ruler can be tamed, finally, only by the glint in the eye of his would be victim that tells him that the secret of human equality under God is a secret no longer.
Once the victims understand that they can claim their dignity by virtue of that greater power, then even on the day they are defeated and the tyrant grinds his foot on their neck, principled resistance still lives in the hope that justice will arise, because the tyrant cannot defeat His will. That's why it was no accident that Martin Luther King was a preacher. And that is why we must indulge only with the utmost caution the supposition that we can ever dispense with preaching, and with principled invocation of the name of God, in our highest public affairs. If we mean to have the courage to defend our liberty, then I believe we must preserve our reliance upon that appeal which lies beyond the reach of human power, and which therefore cannot be defeated in hope, even when it is defeated in battle.
Invoking the will of God that the dignity of all men be respected is not simply an abstract scheme that would give comfort to philosophers as they read their books. Rather, it is the liberating truth which can move the hearts of a nation threatened by oppression to lay down their very lives for the sake of its liberty. It is the most practical of truths that it is the force of religious conviction that has enabled, and will continue to enable, the mass of humanity to extract from reluctant power the concessions consistent with the truth of human dignity. It is religion that has, on balance, made possible the justice of nations.
George Washington was not such a simpleton, or ideologue, as to dismiss absolutely the possibility of individual human goodness apart from God. Mr. Dershowitz's shunning of the notion that men, in general, need faith in order to be good, and need it most of all when tempted or threatened by power, would strike Washington, if it struck him at all, as the very definition of small-minded. More to the point, his greatness as a statesman included the understanding that the attempt to lead an entire nation toward justice was a task utterly beyond simple human power. Those who believe they can be good on their own are, in the America Washington founded with divine aid, free to try. The wise American statesman will feel no such temptation to see if he can preserve our liberty in the same manner. He knows that he, and the citizens for whom he is responsible, need all the help they can get.
