Listening to Newt Gingrich and History
Newt Gingrich recently published a little book called Rediscovering God in America. It is a brief tour around the monuments of Washington, D.C. emphasizing the references to the Almighty on those various monuments and in the writings of the Founding Fathers. Arguing the faith of the founders is a never ending and, I think, fruitless exercise. Those views were varied enough for anyone to claim authority from virtually any viewpoint. Which in the end is the real point.
Regardless, in the introduction to the book, Gingrich hits on what I consider an excellent formulation of America's "civil religion" that I thought worth presenting here for our reader's consideration.
Then in the Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1789, Washington declared, “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” Note that Washington was not only asserting that individuals have obligations before God, but that nations do as well. At this point, the United States government was not yet a year old.
That most astute observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed in Democracy in America (1835):
I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can read the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizen or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society
The secular Left and the media-academic-legal elite would argue that even if de Tocqueville were right, he is irrelevant because he is writing about an earlier America. They argue that America has changed profoundly and is now a very different country. Justice O’Connor herself wrote that the phrase “under God” was adopted in 1954 when “our national religious diversity was neither as robust nor as well recognized as it is now.”
Yet this is a profound misinterpretation of modern America. As Michael Novak has noted, recognizing one nation “under God” is much more important in a country as religiously diverse as America because the phrase transcends any one faith or denomination and is inclusive. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that “Americans tend to have a certain catholicity toward religion: All deserve respect.”
More importantly, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers concerning religious liberty is just as relevant today as it was in 1787 because it reflects a fundamental insight about human nature and how men and women might best live out the political experiment in ordered liberty that they ordained in Philadelphia.
The Founders had a very straightforward belief that liberty was the purpose of a just government, but that the maintenance of this liberty among a free people would require virtue.
And if virtue was to survive, it would require “true religion”, which was any religion that cultivates the virtues necessary to the protection of liberty.
Implicit within this vision of the Founding Fathers is a pluralistic sensibility. Any true religion would be therefore deserving of the respect of the government, which would include the freedom to express in public the moral principles of such a true religion.
Lowell adds: For those who may be wondering, Mormon doctrine is 100% consistent with, and supportive of, these views. Our 11th Article of Faith states:
We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
Technorati Tags: Newt Gingrich, Founding Fathers, faith, religion, civic religion
Posted in Book Reviews, Candidate Qualifications, Electability, Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry, Understanding Religion | Comment on this post » | 
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