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John Adams and Alexander Solzhenitsyn Were Right
A huge reason for the success of Western Civilization is that our Judeo-Christian faith focuses on improving yourself. You are made in God’s image. Act like it. Look inside yourself. Are there improvements that you could make in your soul? Well sure, but that’s really hard. But with God – the creator and master of the entire universe – watching you and taking a personal interest in your soul, perhaps you might give it a try. So we work at it. With varying degrees of success, to be sure, but we work at it. Our religious leaders are constantly imploring us to study the lessons of the Bible, and take them to heart. Don’t criticize others when you are so flawed. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and so on. Fix yourself first. A society full of Jews and Christians who truly believe in their God and seek to please him; that society is generally a pretty nice place.
John Adams was characteristically insightful when he observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” I would argue that this is true not only of our Constitution but also of any other government ever conceived.
Adams’ point is that if the behavior of people is not governed by their religion, then it must be governed by their government. He was a student of history. He knew that that does not end well.
In Matthew 22:21 Jesus said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.” He understood that government was necessary to manage the affairs of men, but when it comes to managing really important things, like our souls, only God could do that. I would presume that students of the 20th century could reach no other conclusion.
Because government, understandably, takes a different approach. The government manages citizens and things, not souls. So it is essentially in the business of telling people what to do, and what not to do. What else could the government do? There is no other way.
In Christianity, you seek to improve yourself. In government, you seek to improve others. Modern progressives and others who have a great deal of faith in the power of government to improve our lives should stop and consider this very important distinction. And they should consider how well this has worked in the past.
Over the course of history, this has been tried in many different ways. Tribes governed by chiefs. Kingdoms governed by royal families. Socialist systems. Communist systems. And so on and so forth. They all look different on the outside, but on the inside, they’re all the same. They involve telling other people what to do. And for whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to work very well. In fact, these systems seem to rapidly, and consistently, devolve from ineffective to catastrophic. Every time. There is no other way.
It would appear that the only way to improve a society full of people is to improve the actual people. One at a time. From the inside out.
Teachers recognize this phenomenon. A kid from a good family is easy to teach. A kid from a horrible home will be either very difficult or impossible to improve, no matter how talented and dedicated his teachers are. The damage is done. There’s nothing to work with. And good teachers can recognize which kid is which by the end of the first week of school. They know which kids will be in college prep courses, and which will be in detention. They do their best with everybody, of course. But they know how things will turn out. They’ve seen it before.
So as we abandon our religious faith as individuals, we hope that improved government can maintain this very nice society to which we have been accustomed. And despite its flaws, our government is certainly one of the best in the world.
But it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. There’s nothing to work with. Teachers would understand. John Adams was right.
Viktor Frankl felt that freedom was a negative aspect (a lack of something – a lack of oppressive government), and that the corresponding positive aspect was responsibility. He said, “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” He didn’t understand how one could exist without the other.
The government can’t create 300 million responsible, moral individuals, by fiat. That is the work of parents, and of the church. There is no other way.
We’ve tried other ways. Those who believe that morality and ethics can be created by pure reason should stop and think about that if they study the history of the 20th century. Or even studied the history of any era, if you think about it.
To look deep into oneself, and critically judge what one sees, and then undertake to improve upon it to the very best of your ability – that is agonizingly difficult. The government cannot encourage us to do that. Only religion can.
On the contrary, if our behavior is governed by a system of laws, then it is only natural to work around and within those laws as effectively as possible. Most people are reasonable, and that is a reasonable thing to do. But even if your behavior is reasonable, and even legal, it may not be ethical. Which seems harmless. But as it turns out, it’s not harmless. Thousands of years worth of brilliant men, from Moses to Solzhenitsyn, have spent their lives explaining to us why this is so incredibly dangerous.
We pursue wealth and technological advancements to make our lives easier. And it works. I don’t walk to work. I drive a car. With air conditioning. It’s nice. Much easier than walking. And I like easy. We all hope to avoid things that are difficult. That effort to make difficult things easier is human nature, and it leads to many of the things that make our modern lives so pleasant. We prefer easy things over difficult things.
So we naturally prefer the government to religion. Religion is hard. Improving myself is really hard. It’d be so much easier for me to just tell other people what to do. Would I rather seek out the worst flaws of my character and endure the agony of brutal self-criticism and go through difficult work needed to improve them? Or would I rather put a political bumper sticker on my car and go vote? One can understand why so many people choose the bumper sticker.
Who will get more votes? The 1700’s theologian Jonathan Edwards, whose stump speech is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?” Or Bernie Sanders, who says you can do whatever you like, and he’ll give you whatever you want? Actually, forget Jonathan Edwards. A nice, unthreatening Republican can’t win elections if he simply suggests that someone has to pay for all of Bernie’s programs. That sounds hard. We, naturally, prefer easy.
Some will choose the bumper sticker. They always have. Understandably. But what happens when a quarter of us do that? Or half? That’s when things get dicey. And then, inevitably, violent.
Choosing the easy path makes things difficult, eventually. It always does.
There is no other way.
When I have an idea for a post, I often just write it as it appears in my head – just dump it onto the page, with little concern for quality. I type fast. This part generally takes 20-30 minutes. No more, because I get bored as quickly as I type.
Once my thoughts are on the page, I save it, and come back to it in a week or a month, when I feel like posting something. At that point, I’ll generally reorganize it, cut its length by half or so, and clean it up in an effort to achieve, well, coherence, at least. This part takes another 20-30 minutes, usually, unless my original version was total garbage. If this part takes more than 30 minutes, I’ll generally consider that post hopeless, dump it, and try another old first draft to work on, if I’m still in the mood.
I came back to this post today to clean it up, and thought, “Eh, whatever.” I’ve been doing that more and more recently. Sorry about that.
So to paraphrase somebody famous that I’m too lazy too look up, “Sorry this is so long, because I was too lazy to make it short.” Or something like that. It’s easier to just post it.
Again, we often choose the easy way. And that leads to sloppy essays and deadly government.
You’re lucky I’m just writing an essay, and not writing policy.
Published in General
No, theft and redistribution are never a “nice” thing to do.
That’s because of the times. People who were destitute and had to pay a debt sometimes became slaves to others to pay off a debt; they had to be freed at specific times, although they could choose to stay as slaves. In the Torah, Jews are ordered to treat their slaves fairly and respectfully; they were even given the Sabbath off. I think the West has grown sufficiently to say that slavery is not moral. Yet parts of the world still practice it.
And the reason for the change of philosophy is not based on religion. It probably has more to do with prosperity than anything else, because religion was used in our nation alone to both condemn and support slavery. It was our prosperity and the resultant freedoms we gained that made us understand that slavery is wrong. As you point out, in less prosperous times slavery was an accepted norm among all religions. The change of philosophy came from something other than religion.
I don’t see the reasoning behind your statements, @skyler. What does prosperity have to do with it? People all over the world who are rich still have slaves (legally or illegally). How did our “resultant freedoms” lead to less slavery? It wasn’t less prosperous times that led to slavery; it was a different mindset about what was and wasn’t acceptable. I would suggest that those in fairly modern times who tried to use the bible to justify slavery were self-serving and not-genuinely religious. (Just because a person calls himself religious doesn’t make him so.) Washington knew that slavery was wrong, but was unwilling to disrupt the entire society to stop it. Lincoln knew that slavery was wrong but knew eliminating it would lead to civil war. Prosperity had nothing to do with their ideas; morality did. And that morality was established from religion.
Sharing this around. Thanks Doc. And I understand perfectly what you mean by government being used to “improve” people. Government is force — coercion. Religious faith is an invitation (unless it’s Islam). I had this same argument with a deacon in the basement of our church during youth group.
Those who owned slaves often regretted it and saw the evil of doing so both to society and to themselves, Jefferson being a prime example. That generation of slave owners thought it would wither away with time for economic reasons as you stated. And the economic reasons were the reason it gained a second wind with the cotton gin.
What killed off slavery was the chain of events resulting from the Compromise of 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act, followed by the Dred Scott decision which recognized slaves as property that could be moved to anywhere in the nation and that any escaped slave was required to be tracked down anywhere in the nation. The non-slave states which had provisions in their state constitutions were in fact threatened by these events. This was a threat above all to non-wealthy, free whites in the North who could be threatened with a vassalage just as non-wealthy whites were in the South. This was the basis for the coming of the Republican Party and Lincoln. These were highly religious people (granted people on both sides were). Religion was part of their identity – as was being free. The differences between North and South were stark not only for African Americans but also for non-wealthy whites. The South was an oligarchy. The North was not. The South had its capital tied up in slaves. The North had its capital tied up in railroads and increasingly factories. The education levels of free whites in the North vs. the South was stark as were public educational expenses. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois all had large numbers of immigrants from the slave states who were escaping their plight in the South and being ruled over by an oligarchy.
The change for the reason in philosophy was the South lost the Civil War. But again, to underestimate the role of religion because it was bound up with identity is a mistake.
I have a quibble here. Christianity isn’t primarily about introspection. The focus is very much self-abnegation — of putting aside one’s ego and loving God and neighbor in a self-sacrificial way modeled for us by Christ. Once one accepts that the source of all good is external — the Perfect Good — one doesn’t have to spend a lot of time focusing on oneself. Just get on with serving others. I strongly believe this is what has advanced Western Civilization beyond all others, and the subjectivism of our times is what’s destroying it. People are looking to their own ill-formed consciences for what is “good.” So, we end up with swaths of people who practice the moral inversion of “social justice,” where they decide recycling is a high moral good, but killing one’s offspring is too.
There were many splits in opinion. Abolitionists were one split in opinion. Calhoun and the fire breathing southerners claiming slavery was an absolute good was a second. Lincoln represented a third split and he was anti-abolitionist because what abolitionists were doing was illegal. Douglas represented a fourth split who wanted slavery to be decided by the territories coming into the union itself. The Dred Scott decision made Douglas’s faction irrelevant. But all these other factions were anti-abolitionist though for different reasons. They were all religious and religion was part of their identity. @zafar was making the point about religion was losing its grip. And that was the point I was disputing.
I owned a Dodge for a while, but it became inconvenient repairing it so I bought a Ford, @skyler
The last sentence seems to be bunk on its face. You can hardly turn around in America without running into some self-improvement movement, initiative or product, anything from Great Courses to meditation teachers to change support groups, and all secular and non-governmental. DeTocqueville had a thing or too to say about it; my observation is hardly new or unique. You can argue such efforts at improvement are wrongly aimed, but you can’t argue that it takes a belief in God to inspire them, given current professions of belief.
My question is different: If you believe there is to be no compulsion in matters of religion, only convincement, why has religion (and particularly Christianity) become so unconvincing in our current society, even given its claimed benefits both individual and collective?
The reason for the change in philosophy was economics. As we tend to do, we find reasons to support what’s beneficial to us.
Certainly it was articulated in terms of religion – everything was at that time, right? – but those changes in economics were part of a trend that’s led to both greater unbelief (or scepticism) and also greater personal liberty in many ways.
Was the Protestant reformation (where it started this cycle?) driven by the first cracks in feudalism?
I would not deny that economics had a role in this at all. However, I would dispute that it was primary in terms of how people at the time thought of it. I would also dispute that it was primarily religious which would probably come much closer to how people of the time thought of it. It was a complex mixture of all of this and bound up with political power, which I would state was the primary cause. Winning wars (which is political) is primary. That decided slavery because the Southerners withdrew from the political process by seceding. Passing legislation and constitutional amendments is a political act.
The Protestant Reformation could easily have fizzled. There were attempts to break away from the Catholic Church in southern France and in Spain again for reasons of corruption prior to Martin Luther. Those efforts fizzled. I’m not by any means an expert on the historiography of Feudalism, but I would bet Feudalism is an after-the-fact construct of what was occurring,i.e., people weren’t aware during the age of feudalism that they were living in a feudal age. The Reformation is a very complicated subject (which I am not an expert in) and boiling it down to economics is giving it far too short a shrift.
In your post I think you have had both a very Whig view of history and a very Marxist view of history, which I find interesting.
@hangon I can see the dialectic but how Whig? (I mean maybe, but I just don’t understand what you mean.)
Also: Wars are largely fought for economic reasons. The primary purpose of politics is to regulate our economic life.
I agree that people in the thick of it didn’t perceive themselves to be living feudal lives – they were just living. The ability to properly assess and define comes from the ability to compare with what something is not, or from which it is different. So in our case from distance.
@zafar : Ever greater Progress (upper case “P”) towards greater personal freedom – or at least that’s how I read your post. Granted, my take.
If that were true, people would just want to spend their money, be happy and content, and war would never occur because it is expensive and far too uncertain. Why would England and Germany fight each other in World War I? They were making lots of money off each other.
A giant trigger – it would certainly be considered “triggering” to the resident population.
This is an interesting question you have raised.
If Christianity is the cause of both personal happiness and societal well-being one would think that Christians would be the demographic group enlarging their proportional share of the American population. Instead, it is the “nones,” those with no religious affiliation, who represent an increasing share of the American population.
If secular humanist America is such an awful place to live why aren’t Christians leaving the United States in droves?
Our current culture wails for legislation when a slight is perceived. “Someone needs to make a law.” The founding fathers didn’t need an explanation that morality is not legislated but many of our contemporaries do.
Loved your post so much I am forwarding to friends and those that need to know…..I wouldn’t change a thing – it was perfect!!
The New Testament term doulos also means servant or bondservant, and is not necessarily translated “slave.”
We do have at least these things in the Bible which sit poorly with slavery:
–each human being is the image of G-d;
–the Exodus is the narrative of redemption from slavery;
–in Torah law, every 50 years the Year of Jubilee is to cancel all bondservice related to debts (Leviticus 25);
–Paul includes enslavers when listing some different kinds of sin in 1 Timothy;
–the New Testament repeatedly teaches that each human being is equal before G-d;
–and Paul in his letter to Philemon is almost certainly arranging for Onesimus to no longer be a doulos to Philemon; whether he is or not, he is to be welcomed as a “brother.”
I think the good doctor was speaking of faith in a general sense in the forming of cohesive societies that add the spiritual (speaking of Judaeo-Christianity) element as the antithesis to the secular – communist – that was obvious in the 20th century. It is the only thing that stands in the way of complete and utter moral collapse of western civilization. PS Welcome to Ricochet.
Another complicated issue. From what I hear of the statistics, the sort-of Christians who don’t believe in the authority of the Bible are the ones whose churches are shrinking and disappearing. The churches that really believe are apparently not shrinking.
America is not exactly a secular humanist place, unless someone like John Locke is a secular humanist. “Nature and nature’s G-d” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” and religious liberty and so on–these are still American concepts written in law and culture.
Let the Left take power completely for awhile and eradicate what remains, and see if Christians don’t leave the US in droves. If they don’t, ask whether there’s anywhere else to go that makes much sense.
I’m hoping for the option of a Mars colony myself. Not kidding.
This is just silliness. The good Doctor answered the question in his post: Christianity is hard! Self-sacrifice on others’ behalf is hard! I’ve always said this about conservatism generally: it’s a hard sell, and especially to a people who live in such abundance and have never known anything else. There’s an underlying overconfidence in oneself (the source of morality and goodness — self-deification) and the continuation of good things at your fingertips. After all, Democrats keep promising more stuff for “freeeee”!
Why are “Nones” on the rise? It’s the same foolishness that keeps them ignorant of history. It’s the chronological snobbery that makes one believe he’s “evolved” beyond the archaic ideas and ethics of the past. It’s the wide road of secular humanist leftism — the devil’s ideology. The appeal is tremendous — no need to struggle against your own inclinations. Everything is permissible since there’s no accountability to a higher power. Why, you can even kill your own children if you find them inconvenient! Welcome to Ammon.
You have a point there.
An argument like If Christianity causes happiness then there would be more Christians; there aren’t; so Christianity does not cause happiness has the same structure as the argument If vigorous exercise leads to health then more people would exercise; they don’t; so exercise does not lead to health.
The premises guarantee the conclusion; obviously the first premise is bunk.
Let’s do a thought experiment and say that over the next 20 years, the American population becomes even less Christian that it is currently, following in the footsteps of Canada and the United Kingdom (and much of Europe).
Would we really expect Christian Americans to move to Sub-Saharan Africa where Christianity is on the rise? I doubt it.
If my assumptions are correct, then can’t we write off this “America is going to hell in a handcart because they took the Bible out of the schools” rhetoric just a lot of empty bluster?
If we aren’t talking about Christianity but are instead talking about free enterprise, let’s be honest about it.
Milton Friedman wasn’t a Christian; he was an agnostic Jew. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t a Christian; he was a Deist who came up with the “Jefferson Bible” which eliminated all of the miracles from the New Testament.
You changed the subject. The question was, “Why are there fewer Christians and more Nones.” I think Doc (and I) answered that.
You like the direction Canada, the UK, and Europe are going? Well, then, you would like that a general prayer for the good of our parents, teachers, and nation was taken out of schools to accommodate a tiny subset of atheist parents (at the time). For secular humanism not being an “established” religion, it sure has a lot of sway with the state.
Government schools are the problem. If the government provides the school, then it it has no right to impose prayers on children.
It is not just atheists who worry about school prayers. My catholic parents had no desire for protestants (fake Christians) to be leading prayers. And growing up in Virginia Beach a large and vocal contingent of teachers were in the 700 Club, sporting their “200” pins on their lapels. If they were not forbidden to do so there is no doubt in my mind that they would have preached almost as much as they taught their math class.
Public schools eliminate choice and make alternative schools prohibitively expensive. Eliminating public schools is the most important reform our nation can make, bar none.
On that, we agree.
So religion can’t be convincing or effective unless there is government-enforced prayer in schools?