A Nation That Believes: America without religion is not America

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.