Vol.
13 No. 10 (October 2003)
THE FIRST
LIBERTY: AMERICA’S FOUNDATION IN RELIGIOUS FREEDOM by William Lee
Miller. Washington: Georgetown University Press,
2003. 296 pp. Cloth $26.95. ISBN: 0-87840-899-1
Reviewed by
J. Judd Owen, Department of Political Science, Emory University. Email: jjowen@emory.edu
.
This book is
an “expanded and updated” version of William Lee Miller’s
THE FIRST LIBERTY, originally published by Knopf in 1986. The expanding and updating comes largely in a new introduction,
the purpose of which is to reframe the importance of “America’s
foundation in religious liberty” in a post-9/11 world.
Americans who have grown up assuming that the justification of religious
freedom is as obvious as the blue sky (except in a distant benighted past)
awoke on September 11, 2001 to find massive black clouds filling that blue
sky. The United States had been attacked in, of all things, a “holy
war.” Bin Laden’s
war was, as Miller quotes him, one between “the side of believers
and the side of infidels,” including “atheists,” “Crusaders
and Jews.”
President Bush
did indeed refer to the American counter-attack as a “crusade,”
a term he never used again once he learned the significance of that word
for our jihadist enemies. But
Bush’s slip, as Miller points out, is revealing.
On the one hand, the jihadists were aware, as Bush was not, of the
true meaning of “crusade” – a Christian war waged against
Muslims for the Holy Land. On
the other hand, supposing that Bush had any such war in mind when he used
that word reveals a radical misunderstanding of America. An enterprise like a genuine crusade is so alien to us (what
on earth, to an American, is “holy land”?) that any such connotation
has disappeared from the word. But this means that, if we are misunderstood by our enemies,
we are also misunderstood by ourselves.
We are unaware that we are the products of a profound transformation
in outlook on the subject of religion.
Our “blue sky” is part of a novel political horizon with
a peculiar and dramatic history.
Hence the major
task of Miller’s book is to reframe historically for Americans the
religious freedom they ought no longer to take for granted. Much of Miller’s book reads like
an historical narrative, but Miller’s history is chiefly about ideas.
For example, Part One is entitled “Bill Number 82,” the
bill that became Virginia’s famous “Bill for Establishing Religious
Freedom,” penned by Thomas Jefferson.
After recounting the historical drama surrounding Bill Number 82,
Miller takes us virtually line by line through the bill explicating (not
uncritically) its political and theoretical significance.
Part Two, “The Vocation of James Madison,” follows Part
One by presenting an historical narrative frame for another crucial document
shaping American religious freedom, viz. Madison’s “Memorial
and Remonstrance,” written in opposition to a bill that was competing
in the Virginia assembly with Jefferson’s Bill Number 82.
Together, the
first two parts of THE FIRST LIBERTY aim to present one of two main pillars,
or rather SOURCES, of American religious liberty: “the United States
is the distinct product of the modernizing and democratizing movements of
Europe, especially the Reformation and the Enlightenment” (p.228). Madison and Jefferson represent the “rationalistic
Enlightenment,” stemming from, and politically radicalizing, the political
philosophy of John Locke. Locke had claimed that the true basis of beliefs concerning
religion is rational assessment of the evidence, and that this basis ought
not, and indeed cannot, be subject to manipulation by the political authority. The arguments of both Jefferson’s
Bill and Madison’s Remonstrance assert that, as Madison puts it, “the
opinions of men depend[] only on the evidence contemplated by their own
minds.” Miller offers
evidence suggesting that “the founding geniuses and heroes [of the
United States]” (including not only Jefferson and Madison, but Franklin,
Hamilton, and likely the majority of the rest responsible for framing the
Constitution) “in their secret hearts mostly rejected [the Biblical
revelation]” (p.237). But
unlike the French Enlightenment, “the Enlightenment in America would
be soft on religion.” Miller
observes: “The American Enlightenment Revolutionaries did not regard
hanging the last King in the entrails of the last priest as part of their
revolutionary program” (p.236).
As an example of such softness, when asked about the divinity of
Jesus, Franklin, advanced in years, replied that he had some doubts, adding:
“it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it,
and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an
opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.” And again, when Hamilton was asked why the new federal Constitution
made no mention whatsoever of God, he replied “I declare we forgot
it.”
The other pillar
of American religious liberty is, unlike the American political founding
proper, emphatically religious. “Religious
liberty in America is not only the result of the founders and the outcome
of the realities they faced; it is also the result of the radical wing of
the Protestant Reformation” (p.129). As Miller admits, “the stream of
liberty does not run straight from the Protestant Reformation, or from the
main body of the Puritan movement in England, or from the largest group
of Puritan settlers in America … it does, however, run crookedly,
as it were, from these sources,” although “partly inadvertently”
(p.130). Consequently, Miller goes back about 150 years prior to the American
Revolution (at the time of which, Miller tells us, as few as 15% of the
population may have been members of a church) to that eccentric Puritan
vanguard of religious liberty, Roger Williams.
Williams’s religio-political views were an oddity in his own
day, but proved influential as an inspiration for Revolutionary era Christians
who opposed any form of political establishment of religion, such as Massachusetts’s
Isaac Backus. Miller indicates
another way in which earnest religious belief supported disestablishment—i.e.,
what Madison called the “jealousy” and “mutual hatred”
between the various sects. Miller tells us that Madison wrote to
Jefferson that “he did not mind at all” this jealousy, since
it led each sect to fear that another (but especially the Anglicans, in
Virginia’s case) would use any sort of state support of religion to
strengthen itself at the expense of the others.
From his exploration
of these two sources of American religious liberty, Miller draws two main
conclusions. First, although
the United States is not a Christian, or even a religious, state, it is
not ANTI-religious. It is instead
impartial or neutral with respect to religious belief. “Yet,” Miller says, “this
impartiality or neutrality does not reflect hostility, nor the expectation
that ‘religious’ belief will wither away; nor indifference,
nor ignorance, but deference” (pp.229-30). The United States is a “religion-respecting
state.”
Or should we
say this is the sort of state the U.S. has become? The quotations in the preceding paragraph conclude a chapter
sketching the development of twentieth century religion clause jurisprudence.
In the sequel, Miller draws his second conclusion, making a strong
case that, although American religious liberty grew out of two theologically
incompatible sources (Enlightenment and Protestantism), it has fostered
somewhat of a third alternative, one that would have surprised both Jefferson
and Madison, on the one hand, and Isaac Backus and Roger Williams on the
other.
What would
surprise Jefferson and Madison is that the U.S did not settle on a (in Jefferson’s
words) “religion of reason,” which paid as little mind as Franklin
had to the “metaphysical riddles” of religion—i.e. theological
truth. “Thomas Jefferson had assumed that now that the ‘standard
of reason’ had been erected on these shores, and the human mind was
no longer ‘held in vassalage,’ the majority of the generation
of men already alive in his old age would shed the shackles of the superstitions
of the past and become altogether reasonable in the Jefferson manner –
Deists, Unitarians – in religion. That, however, is not the way it worked
out”(p.238). (This admission of Jefferson’s aim is enough to
make one wonder if Miller’s claim about the “deference”
to religion reflected in U.S. institutions is adequate.) Miller observes: “As the Unites States settled into the
grooves of nationhood ... the old-time religion did not fade away under
the continual unfolding of scientific evidence, and it did not become either
peripheral or as rational as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison might have
preferred – peripheral, that is, to public life.” Jefferson hoped his reforms would “remake
Virginia ‘with a single eye to reason’” (p.23). Religious
freedom allowed for the continual flourishing, or repeated revival (“awakening”)
of the old-time religion.
What would
surprise Backus and Williams is that the “religion-respecting state”
the U.S. has become respects not only Protestantism, but Catholicism, Judaism,
Islam, among countless others, including new religions, and even atheism
(now considered a “religion” by the Supreme Court).
According to Miller, “Protestant America would inadvertently
give itself an enormous enrichment lesson” (p.241).
Miller’s
conclusions give the impression that the United States has managed to cull
the finest features of the two sources of its religious liberty, while overcoming
their essential theological incompatibility. Yet this new pluralism of American religion is qualified. Non-Protestant religion has been “Protestantized.”
Or, since Protestantism too has been transformed by political liberty,
it is better to say that religion in America has been
liberalized. American
religion is neither Jeffersonian skeptical rationalism, nor is it the old-time
religion, Protestant or other. We
seem to have stumbled upon a THIRD distinct alternative.
One of the
surest signs of this alternative’s novelty, as well as its character,
is reflected in the historical approach of Miller’s book – in
its NEED for an historical approach.
Miller repeatedly is forced to remind his reader of how central and
vitally important religion used to be, even in the widely “enlightened”
early United States. Speaking,
for example, of Bill Number 82, Miller writes: “The politics of this
affair, to a degree that may be difficult for a modern American to comprehend,
revolved around the debates from within, and among rivalries among, the
denominations” (p.32), forcing Madison to argue partly “in theistic
terms” (p.87). And speaking of the English Civil War,
Miller says, “it is easy enough for someone with no stake in any of
that, living in an atmosphere of ‘toleration’ and ‘liberty’
(or utter indifference) so far as those ancient disputes are concerned,
to say: It is ridiculous; everybody stop killing, jailing, persecuting one
another” (p.152). It
is easy enough since, according to “a modern view,” “one
should not believe in any religious affirmation ‘too strongly,’”
lest one be tempted to violate the principle of toleration. Does, then, the principle of religious
liberty prefer “utter indifference” to strong religious conviction?
Miller goes to some length to make clear that Roger Williams, although
a firm proponent of religious liberty, “was indeed a committed –
very committed – religious thinker.”
He is not what the modern reader expects.
He is not, it seems, like us.
One should,
in response, at least raise the question of just how distinct this “third
alternative” really is after all.
Perhaps Jefferson wouldn’t be disappointed that a history lesson
is needed to inform us of how important religion was in the distant past. Perhaps the American regime follows a
bit more closely the intent of Jefferson and Madison (as opposed to Williams
and Backus) than Miller suggests.
On the other hand, it may be no coincidence that the religious indifference
Jefferson sought to foster has extended to the “religion of reason”
that he sought to promote. The
idea of “natural right” also requires a history lesson.
The historical
approach of Miller’s book, as well as its new introduction, will make
it a fine resource for classroom instruction. It would make an excellent companion piece for Jefferson’s
Bill and Madison’s Remonstrance (both of which are reprinted as appendices).
It would also provide a helpful supplement to Tocqueville’s
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. THE FIRST
LIBERTY can contribute to a needed civic “Great Awakening” –
a lesson in “America’s foundation in religious freedom,”
while beginning to indicate WHY the question of religion is foundational.
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Copyright 2003 by the author, J. Judd Owen.