Senator Tim Kaine came within a shade of being our vice president a decade ago, despite apparently knowing very little about American history. He recently likened “the notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator” to “what the Iranian government believes.” He finds the idea “extremely troubling.” He should probably take up his gripe with Thomas Jefferson, who snuck it into the Declaration of Independence, that rascal. Yet Kaine’s shameful illiteracy points to something important: Clearly, even our elites—Kaine graduated from Harvard Law School—do not grasp the role of religion and the God of the Bible in the early republic, which is not just to say the quantity of that role (a big one), but its qualities.
That America’s Founders were familiar with—even fluent in—biblical language, stories, and ideas, and considered the Bible an important source of wisdom about building a nation, is no longer disputed or downplayed. Any amateur historian reviewing the personal papers of George Washington, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson (just to name a few) can see that, despite the theological differences between the three men, all were conversant in biblical language and regularly made use of its turns of phrase. More systematic analysts will find, as historian Donald S. Lutz did, that the Bible, specifically the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, more specifically still the book of Deuteronomy, was quoted in 18th-century political literature more than Enlightenment titans like John Locke. Depending on how you count, it may be quoted more than all Enlightenment influences combined. The Political Hebraists, a school of thought once derided for insisting that the Bible was at least as important to colonial and Founding-era Americans as Enlightenment and classical republican texts, have made their point.
Their achievement raises at least two natural questions, which we who want to make fun of Sen. Kaine ought to be able to answer in some detail. First, in what ways? Put differently, what was the specific content that made biblical allusions and political sermonizing appealing and effective?
The answer to this first question is, as Stuart Halpern and Wilfred McClay show in their fascinating new volume, Jewish Roots of American Liberty, more profound than one might surmise.
America’s Founders were Protestants, indeed, and their Protestantism influenced their politics in ways subtle and overt. Their view of politics, which frequently began with reflections on human nature, often took its cues from the doctrine of radical depravity, popularized by Christian reformer John Calvin, and served as the starting point for discussions of the need for good government in the Federalist Papers. “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary,” wrote James Madison. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.” This remains the crispest justification of the American system of state police powers, individual liberties, and divided government, and it takes as its starting point the fallenness of man, which may be meliorated but (in this world) never cured.
Furthermore, American Protestants emphasized reading the Bible in an unmediated fashion. No priest or translator—the latter being an interpreter by necessity—could be trusted to relay God’s word. This radical distrust of authority stemmed from and reinforced America’s radical individualism, especially among frontier peoples. It also led to the learned classes of early Americans returning to reading the Bible in Hebrew, which may help explain how the republic’s political culture became just a touch Jewish—not merely Hebraic.
That Jewish-inflected Protestantism unleashed a distinctly American spirit, as Jewish Roots amply demonstrates. After an introductory essay from Hillsdale College historian McClay (more on which momentarily), the volume turns to an essay by Dov Lerner that occupies surprising primacy, at least at first blush. Lerner analyzes Milton’s Paradise Lost—a poem about a biblical story, by a gentile non-American—showing how Milton represented a paradigm shift from a pagan view of desert and purpose to a Jewish one.
While the pre-Jewish world simply accepted that “kings had their place atop the great chain of humanity,” as Lerner writes, Milton cited the rabbis of the Talmud as rejecting hereditarianism and raw power as bases for organizing man’s affairs, for “all Men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself.” This logic of individual dignity flows directly from the Jewish tradition to Milton, who was long ago deemed “more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States.” The poet sowed the seeds of the American Revolution when he “reimagined modern politics,” in Lerner’s telling. Yet still today, the competing claims of identity- or power-based morality seek to reassert themselves.
Other contributions take on new importance in light of Lerner’s terrific framing. Halpern’s own short essays reveal how biblical characters and narrative arcs remained the reference point for just about every movement in American history. They served at first as inspiration, and could do so because Americans were capable of engaging in close textual readings. That our forebears did so suggests that once upon a time we treated the Bible’s stories as our inheritance and our memory; we didn’t speak their language, but we were close. It filled us with the ennobling sense that the Bible had not ended, and that God was still among us, an almost-chosen people, in President Abraham Lincoln’s phrase.
Today, and in the examples the authors marshal of our deployments of biblical language, our relation to the Bible is much thinner. Halpern and other contributors compile contemporary references, which amount mostly to puns, idioms, and basic knowledge. The Bible is still flowing through our national bloodstream, but clearly its role has changed as a descriptive matter.
This brings us to the second question, the normative one that follows from examining the qualities of the Hebraic influence on our forebears: Why should anyone care about all this now?
One answer comes from the surprising source of President Calvin Coolidge, who spoke brilliantly upon the dedication of the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C., and whose words the authors reprint on its 100th anniversary. Americans, the president declared, owe a “debt … to the sacred writing that the Hebrew people gave to the world.” Coolidge pointed to Connecticut adopting “the Mosaic model” of law, in which judges “were authorized to administer justice ‘according to the laws here established, and, for want of them, according to the word of God.'” New Haven’s founders “were expert Hebrew scholars” who “leaned upon the moral and administrative system laid down by the Hebrew lawgivers” and felt “the Hebrew language and literature ought to be made as familiar as possible to all the people.” The Hebrew Bible, in its original language, was thought of as not just a source of laws but a guide to political morality, with distinct principles of justice. Americans adopted those principles just as they adopted English common law.
McClay echoes Coolidge in his masterful opening essay on why religious Americans need to learn civic history. (Eric Cohen’s barn-burning capstone piece, a must-read in its own right, does too.) Americans of faith, not least of all faithful Jews, must see that they play an integral role in America’s civic health, whether they like it or not. McClay illustrates the idea with a splendid exegesis on Thomas Jefferson’s haunting pronouncement on slavery in the early republic: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
Adds McClay: “Jefferson was saying that the very possibility of human liberty itself, that liberty of every man and woman, is dependent upon our prior willingness to understand liberty as a gift of God, rather than a dispensation of man.” (So this learned professor is a closet ayatollah, too.) “Even a world-class skeptic like Jefferson understood that erasing the name of God from the foundation of American public life could lead to fearful consequences.”
Religious Americans have a duty to repay this nation for its openness and charity toward us by ensuring that its animating spirit of biblical justice is never extinguished. It was that spirit that moved us to fight a bloody war to end slavery, to bring the equal protection and due process of the laws from aspiration toward reality, and still today to ensure that each person is treated with dignity. That view is under assault from those who insist you can know what you need to know about someone by their superficial characteristics, or their choice of a profession. There are those who will celebrate the death of an innocent man because he represented bad politics. These are repudiations of biblical justice, which does not eschew the notion of reward and punishment—to the contrary—but confines it to a realm in which it is connected to one’s actions, not one’s identity.
When this country’s Founders integrated the biblical view of justice into our nation’s DNA, they set before us a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that it set the stage for the most rich, powerful, and decent society in the history of the world. The curse was that we took its underpinnings for granted. With McClay and Halpern revealing the foundation that has been beneath us all along, we must choose blessing once more.
Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story
by Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern
Encounter Books, 304 pp., $32.99
Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow and adviser to the president at the Manhattan Institute.
The post Faith of Our Founders appeared first on .
Comments are closed.