The famous “separation” of church and state requirement that most Americans think, incorrectly, is to be found in the text of the Constitution epitomizes this attitude in modern America. Less noted these days is the long tradition of understanding, at least among wise men, of the mutual dependence of church and state. The Church, as St. Augustine among others has noted, depends greatly upon the civil authority for the preservation of basic goods of human life that make it possible, or at least easier, to turn our attention to the higher things. It is hard to study scripture if you are mugged on the way to Bible study class.
The importance of religious belief to the well-being of the state is a less familiar truth in our day. And yet our Founders understood and emphasized how crucially necessary religion would be to the very survival of the American republic.
In a debate with me recently, Alan Dershowitz tried to take away the breath of his audience by disagreeing with a remark attributed to George Washington, and quoted with approval by Senator Lieberman. Washington, according to Lieberman, “. . . warned us never to indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion,” Dershowitz announced that Lieberman and Washington were simply wrong, and went on to dispute that there is any particular reason to believe that religion is a support for morality.
What particularly interested me was that both Lieberman and Dershowitz got the quotation wrong, and accordingly registered their agreement and disagreement, respectively, with an opinion much simpler and less sophisticated than the one Washington actually held. I think it bears reflection that our Founders were subtler human beings than many of us realize today.
What Washington actually said was not that we must never indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion, but that we should “indulge with caution the supposition.” Our first president showed caution himself in this careful remark, and a prudence that exceeds that of either of his two modern commentators. Washington was in fact both more knowledgeable and wiser than Mr. Dershowitz gives him credit for. His full statement was: “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Washington recognized the possibility that there will be good people who don't acknowledge the existence of God, and who are good not by virtue of religion. That's why he said that we must indulge with caution the possibility that moral virtue can exist apart from religion. He did not rule out this possibility.
But caution implies the indulgence of something dangerous, and therefore of the need for care to avoid destruction. Washington's remark suggests that indulging the notion that morality can be maintained without religion might, if care is not exercised, lead to the destruction of morality and of the nation itself.
Washington understood that the task of statesmanship is to guide nations down paths that will actually avoid for them the worst consequences. And that is the question we actually face if we consider whether our nation can survive a thoroughgoing acceptance of the view that religion is not an essential foundation for morality. Does religion have a place in the attempt to secure a permanent and just liberty for an entire people? Can we not simply aim at virtue directly, without mention of God?
Our Founders faced, and answered, this question when they decided to base the public expression of their reasons for declaring independence explicitly on the national confession of the self evident existence of God. The Declaration shows little inclination to indulge the supposition that virtuous statesmanship or citizenship can be maintained without religion. The Founders justified their actions by appealing to the God they believed in, and they declared the nature and requirements of citizenship in terms that reduce to the religious acts of belief in and obedience to the will of God.
Washington was only stating the common sense of the subject as the entire founding generation understood it. Even a man as renowned for his wide learning and freedom from convention as Thomas Jefferson was perfectly clear that the separation of liberty from politics was the road to ruin. Jefferson asked: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” Jefferson insisted on the invocation of the Creator because he knew it was necessary.
Necessary for what? The invocation of God – an act of religion – was necessary in order to complete the argument that constrains human power. Our Founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.
Will earthly powers give such respect just because decent people like Alan Keyes and Alan Dershowitz think that it is moral for them to do so? No. The challenge of human history has been to articulate a principle of justice so compelling that the powers that so often have claimed to be the substance of justice must rather be bound by it.
More importantly, the challenge has been to be sure that those who have been docilely subject to those powers in the many centuries of human abuse would never again believe such abuse to be right, even when they did not have the power to stand against those who oppressed them.
(Look for Part 2 of “The Mutual Dependence of Church and State” in this weekend's Edge.)
