Americans have a genius for amnesia. It’s in our DNA. Henry Ford captured this best more than a century ago when he said “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.” The past comes with annoying lessons. It interferes with our imagining the future. And yet it’s inescapable. The past shapes who we are and explains where we came from – details that are handy when trying to understand a crisis like the political car wreck we face this fall.
The United States began as a marriage of Biblical faith and Enlightenment thought. The tension between those elements in the American character has fed the nation’s dynamism from the start. The Calvinism of founders like John Witherspoon, rooted in the Scottish Reformation, combined with the moderation of the Scottish Enlightenment, shaped the early American experience. Together they distinguished the American Revolution from the more extreme revolutionary events in France and set it on a far more successful course.
Calvinist Protestantism is key to understanding the American psyche and its political implications. On the positive side, Pierre Manent, the French Catholic political philosopher, credits “the magnificent contribution of Calvinism to modern political freedom.” In Calvinism’s deep respect for the law, “human power is liberated or encouraged, but no human being, religious or secular, is above the law.” He contrasts this with his own (Catholic) Church’s regrettable past preferences for authoritarian regimes and resistance to liberal thought. For Manent, Catholic thought has always been “more alert to the risks than. . .to the grandeur of political freedom.”
The same Calvinism, though, has a downside of unintended consequences. And it’s chronicled by both the Yale historian Carlos Eire and the late Anglican philosopher George Parkin Grant. Calvin’s motto was “glory to God alone.” In Calvinist practice, this led not just to a powerful faith but also to an intense iconoclasm. The elimination of relics, sacramentals, religious statues, “magical” thinking about saints and the Eucharist, and belief in such things as Purgatory logically followed.
In effect, Calvinism desacralized the world, wiping out the mediating links in worship and everyday affairs between this life and the next. In doing so, argues Eire, Calvin became “a pioneer on that steep trail” that has led, centuries later, to modern unbelief.
At the same time – wrote George Grant – Calvinism created a community of very driven individuals who sought to be God’s elect. Today God may (seem to) be absent, but a community of the elect remains, more driven and puritanical than ever on issues ranging from “reproductive rights” to climate change. That sense of anointing, of destiny’s special favor and its demand for an endless, urgent striving toward success, is at the heart of modern progressive politics. Destiny’s favor comes with an intolerance for anything in its way.
That’s why permissive abortion, in the Kamala Harris campaign, is not just another policy matter. It’s a passionate element of creed. Put simply, a woman’s right to kill her unborn child at any stage of development is a non-negotiable sacrament.
So what’s the point in all of this? Again, the past shapes us. And while it needn’t determine our actions going forward, forgetting its lessons can be bitterly expensive. Before we descend into the final weeks before this year’s Election Day, we may want to refresh our memories about the roots of a humane political and legal order:
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, until Christian times, the law was often made by the ruler himself, and the law changed according to the whim of that leader. The word of the leader was law. The morality of the law, the rightness of the law, was neither here nor there. The ruler had the power to make the law, and the freedom to apply it as he or she saw fit. There was no appeal to a higher ideal.
With Christianity however, the ruler . . . has not only the right to make laws and apply them, he or she has the duty to make laws that are right, laws that are just, and to apply them without fear or favor.
We’ve heard of the post-Reformation idea of the “divine right of kings” . . . But before there was the divine right of kings, there was the divine duty of kings: Kings were accountable to God and to a higher moral law, above any human justice.
By embracing this ideal, Christian kings and their Christian laws were to seek and to treasure a humility and objectivity that were unknown among rulers prior to the Christian era. They didn’t value or apply the criteria of political correctness or expedience or fashionable social theories. They valued and applied facts in an endeavor to get at the truth of things as they truly are, and make their judgments accordingly.
That humility, that recognition that our law-making is imperfect, gave Christian legislation strength and durability in Europe. It pointed legislators towards an application that didn’t favor the wealthy and the powerful or the people with the biggest sticks. Instead, Christian-inspired legislation favored reality, truth, honesty, and integrity.
Those words were delivered last month at the annual Red Mass in Edinburgh, Scotland, by the Catholic Archbishop Leo Cushley. The audience was Scottish judges and lawmakers in a nation of dwindling religious observance and increasingly toxic “woke” spirit. But the archbishop’s comments are useful to us in America, this fall. There’s no truth, honesty, or integrity in the cult of abortion. Every such “medical procedure” is the killing of an unborn child. We need to remember that when we vote. Lawmaking is imperfect because people are imperfect, including those people who govern us. But we nonetheless need to choose as best we can from among the imperfect. And candidates who support a “right” to kill the innocent are not among the options.
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