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Religion and the Limits of Limited Government
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
A reflection on the meaning of limited government illuminates both its theoretical limits or boundaries and its practical limitations. The full rationality of the Lockean argument for narrowing the scope of politics to bodily self-interest may be questioned from two apparently opposite standpoints: because of its aggressive materialism or because it seems to rest upon a distinctly Christian dichotomy between spiritual and secular concerns. This paradox is further represented in the religious liberalism of the American Revolution, and a consideration of Calvin's theology suggests that this spiritual secularism is not simply an eighteenth-century confusion, but may derive from a radicalization of the Christian idea of transcendence. Thus both religious and secular sources of the ideal of limited government rest on unlimited claims for the unity of private self-preservation and universal Truth. This faith does not, however, exhaust the meaning of the Founding.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1988
References
Notes
1. An earlier version of this essay was prepared for presentation at the “Symposium on the Constitution of the United States: American and European Perspectives,” 11 18–22, 1987Google Scholar, Charlottesville, Virginia. The author gratefully acknowledges the sponsor of this symposium, the International Foundation for Human Sciences, Henri Cavanna, Director, for permission to publish here.
2. Bobbs-Merrill, , Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: 1955)Google Scholar. Page numbers will be indicated in parentheses in the text.
3. The very absoluteness of Locke's protestations should cause us to wonder whether nature indeed reveals such a “perfect” distinction or so “infinite” a difference. Certainly men of reason have not always seen such an absolute separation between body and soul or between the concerns of politics and those of religion. Such a separation was first asserted not on the basis of natural reason but as a consequence of the alleged revelation of God's radical transcendence. And Locke indeed seems to rely heavily on a distinctly Christian sort of inwardness: “all the life and power of true religion consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing … without which nothing can be acceptable to God.” (18)
It is noteworthy, to be sure, that Locke here insinuates the term “persuasion of mind” as synonymous with the soul's “faith” or “belief.” A little further on he will similarly seem to equate “their own reason” with “the dictates of their own conscience.” (19) This complicates, though it does not resolve, the question of the dependence of Locke's argument on a fundamentally religious idea of radical transcendence. Although the idea of a radical separation between mind and body might seem to owe more to Descartes than to any religious source, this observation simply raises the question of the relation of Descartes' famous “metaphysical” distinction to Christian theology (see Gilson, Etienne, La Liberié chez Descartes et la Théologie [Paris: F. Alcan, 1913]Google Scholar; and Gouhier, Henri, La Pensée Religieuse de Descartes [Paris: J. Vin, 1924])Google Scholar and, perhaps more fundamentally, to a distinctly post-Christian (not simply non-Christian) practical project (see Kennington, Richard, “The ‘Teaching of Nature’ in Descartes' Soul Doctrine,” Review of Metaphysics 26 [1972]: 86–117)Google Scholar. The question, in a word, is whether Locke's assimilation of reason to faith, which might seem to be calculated to favor a rational interpretation of faith, might not also betray a faith-full understanding of reason.
4. Locke is naturally eager to assure the reader that conflicts between heaven and earth will be very rare “if government be faithfully administered and the counsels of the magistrates be indeed directed to the public good” (48), and to choose examples (such as the sacrifice of cattle, p. 40) of such conflict in which his readers are not likely to have a big stake. But the careful reader will not ignore the broader implications of Locke's willingness to suppress opinions “contrary to human society,” or that “deliver [subjects] up to the protection of another prince” or “tend to establish domination over others” (51, 52).
5. Berns, , Taking the Constitution Seriously (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 153, 158–160, 170Google Scholar; 177 for quotation.
6. Berns, , The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 26.Google Scholar
I choose Berns as a particularly clear and well-reasoned example of a prevailing tendency. To be sure, the role of religion in shaping the American mind is a prominent theme in much literature on the Founding period. Wood, Gordon's The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972)Google Scholar argues that “the traditional covenant theology of Puritanism combined with the political science of the eighteenth century into an imperatively persuasive argument for revolution” (pp. 117–18). But Wood believes that the Protestant republicanism which informed the idealism and public-spiritedness of the Revolution was repudiated in 1787 in favor of “an entirely new conception of politics … that was recognizably modern” (p. viii) and reduced liberty to private self-interest (pp. 606–609)
Gary Schmitt and Robert Webking's examination of Wood's own sources argues persuasively that the discontinuity between the ideas of 1776 and those of 1787 is not nearly so great as is argued in The Creation (“Revolutionaries, Antifederalists, and Federalists: Comments on Gordon Wood's Understanding of the American Founding,” Political Science Reviewer 9[Fall 1979]: 195–229Google Scholar). But this reconciliation favors the alleged modernity of the Constitutional period and thus is accomplished at the expense of the people's religious and public-spirited selfunderstanding (pp. 195, 198, 201, 205, 209, 215).
7. Tocqueville, , Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 47.Google Scholar
8. Berns, , First Amendment, pp. 11, 12Google Scholar. See also Berns, , Taking the Constitution Seriously, p. 167.Google Scholar
9. Ibid., pp. 15–16, 18, 20.
10. Anyone who has surveyed the election sermons of the period will recognize immediately the currency of arguments such as Perry Miller finds in a John Langdon Sermon of May 1775: “For, Langdon's argument runs, once we have purged ourselves and recovered our energies in the act of contrition, how then do we go about proving the sincerity of our repentance (and insuring that Divine Providence will assist us)? We hereupon act upon the principles of John Locke!” (“From the Covenant to the Revival,” in Nature's Nation [Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard, 1956], p. 100).Google Scholar
11. Berns's view is clear and bolder than many, but its secularism is more representative than first appears. Even Perry Miller, the scholar most responsible for the revival in the middle of the twentieth century of serious interest in the intellectual life of colonial North America, despite his impatience with the “obtuse secularism” (“From the Covenant to the Revival,” p. 99 f.n.)Google Scholar of a writer like Clinton Rossiter, seems in the last analysis to see in the revolution the ascendancy if not the final triumph of a secular worldview. Miller's departure from conventional intellectual history seems to consist mainly in his insistence that modern rationalism was by no means altogether a foreign import in eighteenth-century America, but that the germ of a rationalistic worldview had been present in the Federal or Covenant Theology of the first Puritans. Thus, for Miller, a decisive break with the past was effected a century and a half earlier than is commonly believed, though the Puritans themselves did not appreciate the radical potential of their modification of pure Calvinism (“The Marrow of the Puritan Divinity,” Errand into the Wilderness [Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard, 1956], chap. 3)Google Scholar. This approach indeed tends to make Puritans more interesting to the modern mind, but it does not fundamentally alter the terms of the problem under consideration here. Miller, in the last analysis, does not deny that the mingling of modern rationalism and orthodox Protestantism represented a confusion; he only pushes back the genesis of this confusion to an earlier period than most scholars.
12. This survey is based upon documents gathered in Hyneman, Charles and Lutz, Donald, American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as H & L. Though I believe my selections are representative of a prevalent form of thought in this period, I of course make no claim to exhaustiveness.
13. H & L, pp. 288–89Google Scholar
14. Ibid., p. 161.
15. Ibid., pp. 162, 165–66.
16. Ibid., p. 296.
17. Ibid., p. 556.
18. Ibid., p. 120.
19. Ibid., p. 119.
20. Ibid., p. 307 (Levi Hart, 1775).
21. Ibid., p. 193.
22. Hatch, Nathan, The Sacred Cause of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)Google Scholar, have amply documented the widespread application of the book of Revelation and other apocalyptic sciptures to the American struggle for independence and nationhood.
23. The following analysis of Calvin's thought is based on my Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. References to Calvin's work are to the Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia, 1960)Google Scholar indicated by book, chapter, and section (thus: IV. xx. 3).
24. IV. xiii. 11, p. 1265; IV. xiii. 16, p. 1271.
25. II. iii. 1 and 2.
26. City of God 19:17.Google Scholar
27. IV. xx. 3.
28. IV. xx. 4.
29. IV. xx. 14.
30. II. vii. 51.
31. I. xv. 6–8. Compare II. viii. 51: “The reasoning of these sophists is not worth a hair: that the thing ruled is inferior to its rule.”
32. II. viii. 54.
33. II. i. 13.
34. It is possible on the basis of this analysis to solve the contradiction which stands as a final obstacle to coherence in Ernst Troeltsch's brilliant discussion of Calvinism in The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, trans. Lawrence, George ((New York: Harper and Row, 1969):Google Scholar “There is,” Troeltsch argues, “an inner contradiction within [Calvin's] whole theology, which on the one hand recognizes to a great extent the rationalism of the Lex Naturae, and on the other hand asserts the irrational character of the Divine Will.” From Calvin's irrationalism it follows that “all government seems to be simply appointed by God, and the whole duty of subjects seems to consist in the exercise of self-humilitation.” Calvin's rationalism, on the other hand, leads to the idea that “authorities are bound by the Law of Nature and they are to be controlled by those who have called them to their office.” Troeltsch can only conclude that “this discord goes right through Calvin's teaching.” However, Troeltsch's “inner contradiction” dissolves when one realizes that, in Calvin's thought, rationalism (collective self-preservation) and irrationalism (the Glory of God) are not enemies but allies in a joint attack on purposive reason.
35. I. xv. 7.
36. H & L, p. 110.Google Scholar
37. Ibid., p. 159.
38. Ibid., p. 164.
39. Ibid., p. 117.
40. Ibid., p. 165.
41. On this point our preachers very frequently quote Paul's statement that the civil ruler is “minister of God for good” (Shute, , p. 112Google Scholar; Tucker, , p. 165Google Scholar; Adams, , p. 541)Google Scholar
42. I. v. 9–12.
43. Daniel Shute: “To lay a foundation of greater security to ourselves is indeed a laudable motive … and may be justified by the principle of self-preservation…. To secure his own, and to promote the happiness of others, is the part of every one in this great assembly. To this end were we born, and for this cause came we into the world” (H & L, pp. 134–35Google Scholar; cf. Simeon Howard, Ibid., pp. 201–203).
44. It should be noted that Calvin is in no direct way the source of the millenialist doctrines of the later preachers. (See Tuveson, , Redeemer Nation.)Google Scholar However, Calvin's teaching does imply that the glorification of God in history manifests itself in the liberation of the natural desires of mankind. Given this decisive coupling of Divine purposes to universal desires, it seems to me that the specific application of scriptures concerning a thousand years of peace to the accomplishment of such purposes is an important but relatively secondary development.
45. Berns, , First Amendment, p. 30Google Scholar; my emphasis.
46. See Wallin, Jeffrey D., “John Locke and the American Founding,” in Natural Right & Political Right: Essays in Honor of Harry V. Jaffa, ed. Silver, Thomas B. and Schramm, Peter W. (Durham, NC, 1984), pp. 143–67.Google Scholar Locke denies, in effect, according to Wallin, , “that there is anything other than man of significance to man” (p. 155).Google Scholar If the Founding is Lockean, this means that “what is really primary is … the act of choosing itself. In the beginning is not dependence or sobriety or prudence, or reasonable choice, but arbitrary freedom, truly free choice” (p. 157).
47. Second Treatise of Government, 2. 34.Google Scholar Cf. Berns, , Taking the Constitution Seriously, p. 173Google Scholar (f.n.), where he quotes Jefferson's parallel evocation of divine authority: “Those who labor the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people.” Yet on the same page Berns construes Locke's teaching in this minimalist fashion (quoting from the Second Treatise): The “great and chief end … of men's uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is [merely] the preservation of their property.” (my emphasis) One might say that my whole quarrel with Berns is summarized in his subtle but decisive alteration of Locke's tone by the insertion of “merely.”
48. H & L, p. 1196.Google Scholar
49. See Lutz, Donald, Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1988), p. 135.Google Scholar
50. Harvey Mansfield, Jr., reached the core of the problem when he wrote of Jefferson, : “In his hands the truth of equality was too abstract; there was not enough justice for himself. His partisanship was based on the self-forgetting of the modern idealist, whose cause is not the public good but always someone else's good” (“Thomas Jefferson,” in American Political Thought [Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock, 1983], p. 50).Google Scholar This “always someone else's good” could be taken as a critical allusion as much to Calvinist or Kantian universalization as to Thrasymachus' (Republic I) unfounded egoism.
51. Bernard Bailyn approaches this conclusion but, failing to understand that transcendence can issue into secularism and that, in any case, secularism is a faith, retreats to emphasize Commonwealth republicanism (Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], pp.34–36).Google Scholar Similarly, Strout, Cushing (The New Heavens and the New Earth [New York: Harper & Row, 1974])Google Scholar and Hatch, Nathan (Sacred Cause of Liberty [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977])Google Scholar conclude, not altogether incorrectly, that the religion of the period sold out to secular motives, but fail to see the necessarily religious or non-natural dimension of modern secular ideology.