A Nation That Believes: America without religion is not America

Michael Novak

This is always the season of the year for reflection on new beginnings, but the horrible deaths of September 11 have added to this year's thoughts a special urgency: If terrorists are going to kill us just because we are Americans, we might as well be Americans, and inquire more deeply into what being American means.

One thing being American means is believing, more than people from most other nations do, that there should be a close relation between reason and faith. As the sociologist Peter Berger puts it, America is the most religious of the developed nations, despite its elites. America, he says, has a people more religious than any other except maybe the Poles or the Indians, while being publicly led by an elite as irreligious as the Swedes.

Some members of the American elite cannot tell you where some of their most important beliefs come from, since they are in denial: They reject the basic truth that our nation originated in Jewish and Christian faith. Many years ago, the John Birch Society coloring book was said to portray the American eagle without a left wing; the coloring book used by our elites today also shows the American eagle with only one wing. Reason flaps alone, faith has been clipped away-and, as a result, the bird won't fly.

Historical evidence shows quite clearly that, for our founders, common sense and humble faith taught complementary lessons about truth and liberty. For them, Jerusalem and Athens-and Cicero's Rome-spoke in harmony on these issues, and reinforced the same points. Faith itself inspired the founding of universities, the presenting of argument and evidence, and the Jewish and Christian ideal of the man of reason and common sense. Meanwhile, common sense and reason, contemplating the sorry record of human experience (as do many passages of The Federalist), pay homage to the "indispensable" role of religion in preparing the common run of men for self-government. Our founders knew that faith ignites new awakenings and fosters new births of struggle and reformation.

Not quite a century after this nation's founding, for example, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" reached back into Jerusalem for one of our nation's deepest roots, and proclaimed resoundingly:

His truth is marching on!

This was a truth Thomas Jefferson grasped, but could not make effective in his own life: "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." God, that is, made all men free; slavery is an affront to the dignity with which their Creator endowed them. Foreseeing the bloody price that would be paid for slavery, Jefferson wrote: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

As He died to make men holy,

Let us die to make men free. . . .

His truth is marching on!

The founders of the United States held some truths to be self-evident, and cited often the words of St. John: "The truth shall make you free." In recent decades, by contrast, many have given up their roots in Jerusalem. They no longer believe in truth, or that it is truth that makes men free. They believe that relativism is essential for freedom. At least, that is what they say they believe; but the idea itself is absurd, and it is clear that they do not really believe it. They do not accord equal truth-value to the opinions of religious fundamentalists and their own. All such persons abhor and oppose religious fundamentalists, and some of them (Michael Lind and Andrew Sullivan, for instance) scathingly equate Jerry Falwell's views with those of Osama bin Laden. They tout their own moral superiority, and credit secularism with all that is good in Western civilization.

Anyone who argues holds implicitly that argument under rules of evidence is a norm for reasonable men. Such a man commits himself to something more than vulgar relativism; he holds that truth matters, inasmuch as the proposition for which there is superior evidence is more worthy of belief. By this method, Aristotle and Plato showed the Sophists and relativists of their day that they were talking nonsense.

This is why our nation's second president, John Adams, held that the Hebrews, by introducing the idea of a transcendent Creator who deliberately created all things and "saw that they were good," did more than any other people to establish the possibility of civilization. No human being may be in possession of the rationality behind all things, but the confidence that there is such a rationality requires each inquirer to listen sharply to evidence that sorts out what is true from what is false. It also requires him to respect the rationality of all other inquirers, who may be in possession of evidence he himself lacks.

The belief that there is ultimate truth in all things (to be approached, step by step, through the examination of evidence) makes possible rational argument among those who disagree. That possibility, in turn, makes civilization possible. Barbarians, contemptuous of evidence and believing only in power, club one another. Civilized people converse, trying to persuade one another through argument and mutual respect. This is truth's superiority to power. The very possibility of government by the consent of the governed depends on it.

That is one way in which truth makes men free. So strongly did Adams believe that homage should accordingly be paid the Hebrews, that he affirmed he would pay such homage even if he were an atheist. But there are also other ways in which truth makes us free. For what Jerusalem added to the vision of truth reached by the Greeks and the Romans is that truth is not solely a quality of propositions, or the result of a weighing of evidence, but also a proper name, a preferred name for the Creator. From His intelligence springs the rationality found in all things. All things (and all events) may be understood as "speaking" of Him.

This step is no doubt a bridge too far for those who prefer the tidier, smaller world of Athens and Cicero's Rome. Nonetheless, this nation's Declaration of Independence speaks of "Nature's God" also as Creator, Supreme Judge of the rectitude of consciences, and Providence. It should be obvious that no man comes close to being master of such a God, but on the contrary can be only a very fragile, limited, and self- consciously inadequate subject. In that respect, no man can claim to possess the Truth but, rather, is held under judgment by it. No one of us sees things in all their wholeness and infinite range, but only in part and rather darkly. We are painfully aware of our own mistakes and changes of mind, as we learn more and inquire more. Knowledge of our own ignorance is not uncommon among us.

In short, while relativists seem to claim all capacity for humility and tolerance for themselves, it seems rather obvious that those in awe of Truth, the splendor of their Creator and undeceivable Judge, also have reason for humility and tolerance. Quite aware of their own errors, they have reason to know that others, especially their adversaries, may see parts of the truth that they do not see. Many institutional advances in politics, economics, and human rights have been accomplished by unbelievers, even by those calling themselves relativists, rather than by believers. (The Bible suggests that believers are often humbled in this way.)

But what we seek-all of us-is truth, because "the truth shall make you free." For Jews and Christians, this phrase has meaning on three levels. The first meaning is that fidelity to the Light that infuses all things, the intelligibility that springs from the mind of God, has a practical payoff. Fidelity to the light of evidence in things is the only way to avoid being ensnared by power, money, influence, and other seductions that would turn one's eyes away from the truth. One might not know in any particular matter what is true, just, or right, but one does wish to avoid being swayed by improper partiality.

The second meaning is a set of practical operational maxims: Be of steady and sober judgment. Develop habits that strengthen your ability to perceive keenly, deliberate wisely, and judge in a manner that hits the bull's-eye more often than not. The freedom of action of people without such habits is much diminished.

The third meaning draws the broader conclusion implicit in the first two: that if one is to be ruled by evidence, instead of meandering to no result, then one must deploy all the habits and dispositions necessary for acting with self-mastery, rather than being governed by fickle passions and passing whims. To be free does not mean to blow like a weathervane, but to turn like a rudder-with deliberation and forethought, a goal in mind.

My daughters' cats (if I may tell a parable to exemplify the point) seem to roll about freely and frolic as they desire, but they are not free; they cannot do other than follow the law of their own nature. They do not act (invent a new future, choose a new way of life); rather, they behave, as cats have done for some five thousand years, since one of them posed for the Sphinx. By contrast, our children had to learn to master their own far more complex natures, in which instincts under one law were at war with instincts under another, and they had to learn the art of self-government from within a maelstrom of anarchy. Merely behaving was not an option for them; they had to learn to invent their own selves, within certain genetic and environmental limits, and thus to become agents of their own destiny. To keep their minds open to the Light was their best path toward becoming free men and women.

A liberating concept of truth is not Jerusalem's only gift to the future progress of humankind; another is the imperative to care for the widow and the orphan, that is, for the needy and vulnerable. Richard Rorty calls this imperative "solidarity," Bertrand Russell calls it "compassion," and both have had the intellectual honesty to say that they learned the idea not from other philosophers but from Jesus Christ, whom they regard as they regard other wise persons such as Socrates.

Jerusalem also laid the groundwork for the end of slavery. The Greeks had regarded slavery as natural, not merely in the sense that it was a virtually universal practice (what the strong always do to the weak), but also in the sense that it seemed good and fitting that those with the souls of slaves ought to be slaves. Working gradually, like yeast in dough, the teaching of Judaism and Christianity-about the dignity of each man and woman, made in the image of God, and called by name into friendship with the Almighty-revealed the ancient practice for the abomination it was (and eventually gave rise to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"). Christians, in particular, often failed this teaching; but they are to be judged in the light of the teaching, not the teaching in theirs.

A deeper legacy of faith is religious freedom itself. When Thomas Jefferson composed the argument for the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, he relied on a purely Jewish and Christian starting point: the sacred space between the Creator and His free creature, a space in which no other agency dares to intrude, since therein alone can be exercised the inalienable liberty of every individual to respond yes or no to the Creator's offer of friendship. It is, Jefferson remarked, a relation prior to civil society.

That there is a Creator, and that He offers human beings His friendship in the recesses of each individual heart (such that neither father nor mother, brother nor sister can stand in for any one of us), and that it is the inalienable responsibility of every person to respond to his Creator in full and perfect liberty-all these are not deliverances of unaided reason. They are not even deliverances of other religions, many of which are quite content with mere external observance (as in Greece and Rome). These ideas express a reasoning whose eyesight is lifted up to a new trajectory by Jewish and Christian faith. The encounter with God in spirit and truth, in the inviolable recesses of the self, is a Jewish and Christian discovery. That is the place where the philosophy of religious liberty was born.

Whether the awful events of September 11 occasion a deep and long- lasting infusion from this nation's spiritual roots depends on how we take hold of the moment. The first moral obligation is to think clearly: We need to end the long bifurcation of reason and faith in the mental habits of recent generations. In the founding generation, those two wings beat very nearly as one, but in generations both before and after there has been a tendency to exalt either reason at the expense of faith, or the reverse. This is a foolish, unnecessary, and destructive mistake. Practical wisdom and common sense are good checks and balances to faith; and faith, with its call to awakening from the natural entropy of natural morals, gives reason second chances.

Further, we need to recognize that the serious partisans of liberty and truth are few; and that we need each other's contributions, faults and all. It was wrong of Jerry Falwell to point the finger at his secular adversaries as if they were responsible for God's "anger" at the United States, and just as wrong of Michael Lind and Andrew Sullivan (and many others) to point their fingers at Jerry Falwell as if he were a soul mate of bin Laden.

It would have been far better if leaders on all sides had looked to their own sins rather than the sins of their adversaries. To be faithful to the demands of liberty and truth, as our forebears understood them and bequeathed them to us, is a heavy enough burden for all of us.

The unity of a free society is not properly that of a herd of cattle, nudged this way and that by "opinion leaders." It is that of independent persons who respect each other's inalienable consciences, and argue unflinchingly about the important matters on which we disagree. One reason we argue is mutual benefit. There is in such argument a kind of friendship; of such friendship republics are made. The city named by our forebears Philadelphia, Love of Brothers, was intended to foreshadow something like that. And so, I believe, was the coming of the Word to lowly Bethlehem, over which angels sang-to Him, glory, and peace to all of good will.

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