Worldnet Daily
12/23/00
By Alan Keyes
In a debate with me recently, Alan Dershowitz tried to take away the breath of his audience by disagreeing with a remark attributed to George Washington, and quoted with approval by Sen. Lieberman. Washington, according to Lieberman, "warned us never to indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion," Dershowitz announced that Lieberman and Washington were simply wrong, and went on to dispute that there is any particular reason to believe that religion is a support for morality.
What particularly interested me was that both Lieberman and Dershowitz got the quotation wrong, and accordingly registered their agreement and disagreement, respectively, with an opinion much simpler and less sophisticated than the one Washington actually held. I think it bears reflection that our founders were subtler human beings than many of us realize today.
What Washington actually said was not that we must never indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion, but that we should "indulge with caution the supposition." Our first president showed caution himself in this careful remark, and a prudence that exceeds that of either of his two modern commentators. Washington was in fact both more knowledgeable and wiser than Mr. Dershowitz gives him credit for. His full statement was: "And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Washington recognized the possibility that there will be good people who don't acknowledge the existence of God, and who are good not by virtue of religion. That's why he said that we must indulge with caution the possibility that moral virtue can exist apart from religion. He did not rule out this possibility.
But caution implies the indulgence of something dangerous, and therefore of the need for care to avoid destruction. Washington's remark suggests that indulging the notion that morality can be maintained without religion might, if care is not exercised, lead to the destruction of morality and of the nation itself.
Washington understood that the task of statesmanship is to guide nations down paths that will actually avoid for them the worst consequences. And that is the question we actually face if we consider whether our nation can survive a thoroughgoing acceptance of the view that religion is not an essential foundation for morality. Does religion have a place in the attempt to secure a permanent and just liberty for an entire people? Can we not simply aim at virtue directly, without mention of God?
Our founders faced, and answered, this question when they decided to base the public expression of their reasons for declaring independence explicitly on the national confession of the self-evident existence of God. The Declaration shows little inclination to indulge the supposition that virtuous statesmanship or citizenship can be maintained without religion. The founders justified their actions by appealing to the God they believed in, and they declared the nature and requirements of citizenship in terms that reduce to the religious acts of belief in and obedience to the will of God.
Washington was only stating the common sense of the subject as the entire founding generation understood it. Even a man as renowned for his wide learning and freedom from convention as Thomas Jefferson was perfectly clear that the separation of liberty from politics was the road to ruin. Jefferson asked,"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?" Jefferson insisted on the invocation of the Creator because he knew it was necessary.
Necessary for what? The invocation of God -- an act of religion -- was necessary in order to complete the argument that constrains human power. Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.
Will earthly powers give such respect just because decent people like Alan Keyes and Alan Dershowitz think that it is moral for them to do so? No. The challenge of human history has been to articulate a principle of justice so compelling that the powers that so often have claimed to be the substance of justice must rather be bound by it. More importantly, the challenge has been to be sure that those who have been docilely subject to those powers in the many centuries of human abuse would never again believe such abuse to be right, even when they did not have the power to stand against those who oppressed them.
How were such revolutions in the very possibility of justice accomplished? After all, the argument down through human history has been that might makes right. And while philosophers in their closets have come up with other things, and still do it all the time, philosophers in the closet don't govern nations. Philosophers in the closet don't move human hearts and shape human conscience and characteristics directly. That has to be done by other agencies. And sadly those agencies down through the years have been unconstrained, in so many instances, by elements of conscience. The consciences of rulers seem mostly to have been provoked not by the universal considerations of justice, but by the incidental factors of biology and tribe. Loyalty to family and ally, however, has been quite consistent with unspeakable indifference to those who do not happen to be in the favored group.
So what about those beings left out of the purview of those definitions of community, who have nothing to recommend them in their dignity except the bare humanity that they can claim? Down through the ages, power hasn't had much respect for them at all. And so the challenge gone unanswered was not just to shape the consciences of the ordinary or the good. The challenge was to get the leaders that would otherwise be tempted to abuse their superiority seriously to pursue justice, and to inspire those that would otherwise be tempted simply to submit to their abuse to have the courage to oppose them.
It is precisely here, I think, that the founders had somewhat greater wisdom than the people who reduce their views to the caricature that morality only arises from religion. They were faced with a real problem, and they wanted a solution that had some chance of being translated into a relatively lasting reality. And they understood the fact -- a little bit cynical, perhaps, but none the less verified by much of human history -- that power ultimately only respects a greater power.
This is sad, but true. Power cannot be relied upon to respect greater wisdom. That's why Plato, though he dreamed that kings might be philosophers, understood that they probably wouldn't end up that way. Power doesn't necessarily respect holiness, either. Sometimes the pope can walk out of Rome and talk Attila out of sacking the place, but usually it doesn't work. And the real cost of the absence of such discipline on human power is that people die, and whole civilizations are destroyed, so that the smoking ruins left behind are now called deserts -- as the Mongols left in great parts of the world.
The aim of the founders was to invoke a paradigm that offered a surer foundation for our appeals to conscience. For with what better logic can the ruled face the ruler than the notion that whatever the power of the king, the simplest human being gains his dignity from the absolute greatest power of all, which the king cannot overshadow, cannot equal, cannot even touch. The power of the ruler can be tamed, finally, only by the glint in the eye of his would be victim that tells him that the secret of human equality under God is a secret no longer.
Once the victims understand that they can claim their dignity by virtue of that greater power, then even on the day they are defeated and the tyrant grinds his foot on their neck, principled resistance still lives in the hope that justice will arise, because the tyrant cannot defeat His will. That's why it was no accident that Martin Luther King was a preacher. And that is why we must indulge only with the utmost caution the supposition that we can ever dispense with preaching, and with principled invocation of the name of God, in our highest public affairs. If we mean to have the courage to defend our liberty, then I believe we must preserve our reliance upon that appeal which lies beyond the reach of human power, and which therefore cannot be defeated in hope, even when it is defeated in battle.
Invoking the will of God that the dignity of all men be respected is not simply an abstract scheme that would give comfort to philosophers as they read their books. Rather, it is the liberating truth which can move the hearts of a nation threatened by oppression to lay down their very lives for the sake of its liberty. It is the most practical of truths that it is the force of religious conviction that has enabled, and will continue to enable, the mass of humanity to extract from reluctant power the concessions consistent with the truth of human dignity. It is religion that has, on balance, made possible the justice of nations.
George Washington was not such a simpleton, or ideologue, as to dismiss absolutely the possibility of individual human goodness apart from God. Mr. Dershowitz's shunning of the notion that men, in general, need faith in order to be good, and need it most of all when tempted or threatened by power, would strike Washington, if it struck him at all, as the very definition of small-minded. More to the point, his greatness as a statesman included the understanding that the attempt to lead an entire nation toward justice was a task utterly beyond simple human power. Those who believe they can be good on their own are, in the America Washington founded with divine aid, free to try. The wise American statesman will feel no such temptation to see if he can preserve our liberty in the same manner. He knows that he, and the citizens for whom he is responsible, need all the help they can get.