Golden Triangle of Freedom by Os Guinness

Golden Triangle of Freedom

 

 

FREEDOM REQUIRES VIRTUE

Yet for all these differences, inconsistencies and hypocrisies, the framers consistently taught the importance of virtue for sustaining freedom, which is the first leg of the golden triangle: freedom requires virtue….
Benjamin Franklin made a terse statement: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”¹⁸ Or as he stated it negatively in his famous maxims: “No longer virtuous, no longer free; is a maxim as true with regard to a private person as a Commonwealth.”¹⁹
“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty . . . ,” John Adams wrote to his cousin Zabdiel in 1776. “The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may exchange their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.”²⁰ Or as he wrote to Mercy Otis Warren the same year, “Public virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only foundation of Republics.” If the success of the revolution were to be called into question, it was “not for Want of Power or of Wisdom, but of Virtue.”²¹
A key article in the influential Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 explicitly denies that “free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.” New Hampshire went further, substituting for “virtue” “all the social virtues.”²²
As these quotations show, evidence for the first leg of the golden triangle is profuse—so much so that it is tempting to reach for one of the multitude of “quote books” that form part of the arsenals on either side of the culture wars. In contrast, works such as Edwin Gaustad’s Faith of the Founders or James Hutson’s The Founders on Religion establish the claim beyond argument but with the solid reliability of distinguished historians.²³

VIRTUE REQUIRES FAITH

If the framers’ position on virtue is suspect today and needs to pass through stringent intellectual security checks, how much more so their views on religion. Indeed, they are an open battleground, and all the earlier qualifications about virtue need to be underscored once again, and others added (the founders were not all people of faith; they had very different views of the relationship of religion and public life, for example). Yet the overall evidence for what they argued is again massive and unambiguous, even from some of the more unlikely sources such as Jefferson and Paine: the founders believed that if freedom requires virtue, virtue in turn requires faith (of some sort).

“If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion,” Benjamin Franklin said, “what would they be without it?”⁴⁰

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being,” George Washington wrote, “and it is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.”⁴¹

“We have no government armed with powers capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams wrote. “Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”⁴²

“Should our Republic ever forget this fundamental precept of governance,” John Jay wrote about the importance of faith for virtue, “men are certain to shed their responsibilities for licentiousness and this great experiment will surely be doomed.”⁴³

“The only surety for a permanent foundation of virtue is religion,”Abigail Adams wrote. “Let this important truth be engraved upon your heart.”⁴⁴

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure,”Thomas Jefferson wrote, “when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are violated but with his wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep for ever.” ⁴⁵

“Is there no virtue among us?” James Madison asked. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks— no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government can secure liberty or happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” ⁴⁶

“The wise politician,”Alexander Hamilton wrote, “knows that morality overthrown (and morality must fall with religion), the terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of man, and confine him within the bounds of social duty.”⁴⁷

Did this emphasis on religion mean that the framers were arguing for an official “Christian America”? Not at all. Unquestionably most Americans at the time of the revolution were either Christians or from a Christian background, and most American ideas were directly or indirectly rooted in the Jewish and Christian faiths. Thus even Franklin as a freethinker, writing to Ezra Stiles in 1790, made clear that he would never become a Christian, yet stated this: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see.”⁴⁸
But the historical and statistical importance of the Christian faith in 1776 did not for a moment translate into any official position for the Christian faith or for any notion of a “Christian nation.”
…The First Amendment, on the one hand, barred any official national establishment of religion, and over the next decades the States slowly came into line until the last establishment had gone. On the other hand, many of the framers, like President Eisenhower in the 1950s, spoke of religion in generic rather than specific terms, and they advocated religion only for secular or utilitarian reasons that the Romans understood well and on which Edward Gibbon commented famously. Religion, at the very least, was the sole force capable of fostering the virtue and restraining the vice necessary for the health of the republic…

FAITH REQUIRES FREEDOM

Needless to say, the third leg of the golden triangle is the most radical, and if the first two legs challenge the unexamined assumptions of many liberals today, the third does the same for many conservatives: faith requires freedom.
Nothing, absolutely nothing in the American experiment is more revolutionary, unique and decisive than the first sixteen words of the First Amendment that are the “Religious Liberty Clauses.” At one stroke, what Marx called “the flowers on the chains” and Lord Acton the “gilded crutch of absolutism” was stripped away.⁵³ The persecution that Roger Williams called “spiritual rape” and a “soul yoke” and that Lord Acton called “spiritual murder” was prohibited.⁵⁴ The burden of centuries of oppression was lifted; what Williams lamented as “the rivers of civil blood” spilled by faulty relations between religion and government were staunched; and faith was put on its free and fundamental human footing as “soul freedom”—Williams’s term for what was a matter of individual conscience and uncoerced freedom. The Williamsburg Charter, a celebration of the genius of the First Amendment on the occasion of its two hundredth anniversary, summarized the public aspect of this stunning achievement:

No longer can sword, purse, and sacred mantle be equated. Now, the government is barred from using religion’s mantle to become a confessional State, and from allowing religion to use the government’s sword and purse to become a coercing Church. In this new order, the freedom of the government from religious control and the freedom of religion from government control are a double guarantee of the protection of rights. No faith is preferred or prohibited, for where there is no state-definable orthodoxy, there can be no state-definable heresy.⁵⁵

The First Amendment was of course no bolt out of the blue. It was the crowning achievement of the long, slow, tortuous path to religious liberty that grew out of the horrors of the Wars of Religion and the daring bravery of thinkers such as Roger Williams, William Penn, John Leland, Isaac Backus, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, the Culpeper Baptists and many others.
Many of the great peaks of the story of religious freedom and many of the greatest protagonists of religious liberty lie in the terrain of American history. In the “argument between friends,” for example, the maverick dissenter Roger Williams clashed with the orthodox John Cotton of Boston in challenging the notion of “the uniformity of religion in a civil state” and the “doctrine of persecution” that inevitably accompanied it. This pernicious doctrine, he said, “is proved guilty of all the blood of the souls crying for vengeance under the altar.” In its place, he asserted, “it is the will and command of God that … a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all countries: and that they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s spirit, the Word of God.”⁵⁶
Almost like an echo, Madison rang out the same themes in his “Memorial and Remonstrance” protesting against Patrick Henry’s proposal to levy a religion tax that everybody could earmark for the church of his or her choice. No, the little man with the quiet voice protested, hammering home point after point with precision as well as force, that this was absolutely wrong and there was a better way. Among the highlights of Madison’s historic protest are the following:
First, the principle of religious liberty, or freedom of conscience, is foundational and inviolable: “We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, ‘that Religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.’ The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. . . . This right is in its nature an unalienable right.”⁵⁷
Second, understanding that the flower is present in the seed and the greatest problems start with the smallest beginnings, “it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” Even a minute tax of three-pence on behalf of religion should be enough to sound the alarm: “Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree.”
Third, the principle that rights are both inalienable and equal operates like the Golden Rule for religious liberty, “while we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.”
Fourth, it is both wrong and foolish to think “that the Civil Magistrate is a competent judge of Religious truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy.”(Or as Pastor John Leland wrote tartly, “If government can answer for individuals on the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise let men be free.”⁵⁸)
Fifth, the Christian faith needs no government support. To say that it does is “a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself; for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.”
Sixth, establishing religion is disastrous for the church. “What have been its fruit? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
Seventh, established religions are bad for civil government. “In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instances have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people.”
Eighth, any establishment of religion departs from the generous American policy of“offering asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion” and thus lights “a Beacon on our coasts warning [the asylum seeker] to seek some other haven, where liberty and philanthropy in their due extent may offer a more certain repose from his troubles.”
Ninth, failure to guarantee religious liberty for all destroys the “moderation and harmony” of“the true remedy”that the United States has brought to an issue that elsewhere has spilt“torrents of blood.”
All these principles are as fresh today as when Madison wrote them. Freedom of conscience, for example, is the best single antidote to the radical extremism of certain Muslims, as it is to the state-favored secularism of the European Union and as it is to the illiberalism of American legal secularism. Coercion and compulsion from one side and exclusion from the public square from the other contradict conscience, and therefore freedom, at its core.
Without coming to grips with freedom of conscience, Islam cannot modernize peacefully, Europe cannot advance freely and America will never fulfill the promise of its great experiment in freedom. The present liberal reliance on such purely negative notions as hate speech and hate crimes is both inadequate and foolish, and can even be dangerous. Without acknowledging the cornerstone place of religious liberty, Europe will not be able to accommodate both liberty and cultural diversity; Muslims will not be able to maintain the integrity of their own faith under the conditions of modernity, let alone learn to live peacefully with others; and America will never create the truly civil and cosmopolitan public square that the world requires today.⁵

source:

full article
http://rzim.org/just-thinking/the-golden-triangle-of-freedom/