This, What Keeps the States United?, is a well-written and clearly reasoned review by Joseph Baldacchino of a book, Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century edited by Donald Livingston. (I haven’t read the book though I’ve read writings of some of the authors.) It deals with the general problems in American political and economic and cultural communities which I discussed in a recent essay: The Fragmented States of America. The review comes to a conclusion similar to my claims, though I would have gone beyond words about `Christian traditions’ to write of communities actually shaped in response to the Creator and His work in a special way, a way at least hinting of what we will be in our individual and communal human beings if we are chosen to enter the completed and perfected Body of Christ. I also concluded that we’re not capable of reforming the United States as it stands and would be wise to voluntarily separate into smaller republics which could then start the hard and multi-generational work of doing it better, even to rebuilding not just the United States but a larger scale North American or even Western hemispheric republic or “federation of republics.”
It’s clear there are very deep political and other problems in the United States in this year of 2013. The wrongful ideas and attitudes and ways of acting which underly those problems probably originated in the West in general and—I think—were nurtured most tenderly in the United States. See Gore Vidal’s novel Empire for a view of our corruption around 1900 from the viewpoint of the likes of Henry and Brookes Adams as well as men of political action such as John Hay. I’ve also read works by other thinkers of that time who came to a similar conclusion, such as the Irishman W.E.H. Lecky or Lord Acton who was worried about the damage Americans would do to themselves and their country if American leaders meddled in the complex affairs of Europe and Asia. Our leadership elite has been bad for a long time—Tocqueville found them to be scoundrels in the 1820s, as soon as the Founding Fathers’ generation was gone. Yet, we can’t blame them entirely. Better men, such as Ron Paul, arise sometimes and we’re not interested. In the likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, we have the leaders we deserve, even the leaders we want in some sense of `want’.
So things are bad and Mr. Baldacchino is here to tell us what I also tell my readers: very fundamental reforms are needed, not short-term, painless, technical fixes. Here are his concluding paragraphs:
Like many conservatives, the book’s authors seem to think that the principles of the U.S. Constitution could be revived if only more people could be persuaded of its correct interpretation. But the original Constitution and its liberties presupposed Americans with certain character traits and cultural habits. The moral, religious, and social practices prevalent in America in the 1780s were grounded in a Christian and British tradition. Only a society with that kind of public ethos would pay more than lip service to a Constitution of checks and balances.
Returning to the Constitution of the Framers would require nothing less than a revival of the kind of civilization and character type from which it is indistinguishable. This cannot be accomplished quickly, through political speeches or decisions. It would require protracted moral-cultural regeneration of Americans, one person at a time.
My title doesn’t refer to either either the reviewer or the authors in the book getting public religious issues upside-down but rather to the lack of understanding on the parts of the leaders of American Christian communities, the American Catholic bishops and other Catholic leaders as well as the Protestant leaders, ordained and lay. In their current battle in favor of religious freedom, they have gotten wrong the main point of the above paragraphs from Mr. Baldacchino’s review: the Constitution is grounded upon Christian beliefs as manifested in a particular British cultural tradition. Our sorts of freedoms come from Christianity and whining as if the Constitution is what allowed Christians to be `free’ in a Western Civilization of mysterious origin shows ignorance, cowardice, and faithlessness.
The religious and other freedoms implicit or explicit in the Constitution weren’t a result of the words or the political struggles at the Constitutional Convention but rather the background of those words, the background from which those various freedoms emerged after centuries of struggle by Christian peoples to overcome the temptations to misuse of power which seemed to overwhelm the Western Christians as soon as they came into power. The overcoming of these temptations involved, among other complex events, the renunciation of certain advantages of power and wealth by their holders, Popes as well as princes and kings and merchants and rentiers. The actual history is certainly ugly, perhaps at its worst when it is decent and morally well-ordered men who regress to an abuse of power, usually in an effort to reach a greater good.
The result was ugly even after some had learned lessons from the disedifying wars over the control of a people’s religious communities, the persecution of a Galileo who wished to simply pay attention to the Creator’s works, the burning of Servetus and Hus by Calvinists and Catholics respectively. Over the succeeding centuries, political theories which justified rights and freedoms matured and were sometimes enacted in governmental structures and definitions of power. Yet, we still look at matters in the way I phrased it in the previous sentence and that is wrong, dualistically wrong in the eyes of a Christian. In fact, theories were, as usual, the description of empirical realities however dimly seen, however imperfectly and incompletely realized as the theories were being formulated. Yet, we modern men, including nearly all practicing Christians, have swallowed the modern liberal story of Western freedoms being a matter of some sort of progressive recognition of some allegedly metaphysically grounded rights. (See my book, Human Rights: An Evolutionary and Christian Perspective, for a radically different take of these modern rights and the allied freedoms. My take is both Augustinian and Darwinian.)
These rights and the allied freedoms were earned by sweat and blood and tears and are not to be found in some metaphysical realm of truths accessible to the mind of any human individual but are rather the result of evolutionary and developmental processes in mostly the communal human being of the Christian West. Those rights and freedoms were largely character traits of Christian communities from the Western traditions. The modern political theories, at their best, were descriptions of a well-ordered Christian’s mind and heart and hands, where `Christian’ points toward communal human being even more than individual human being.
If the Western realms, including the United States, are losing their formal respect for freedom of religion, then it’s a result of the losses on the part of Christian communities. Fewer Americans and Europeans are truly attached to Christian communities, and this lack of attachment covers many who still show up most Sundays to attend Mass or other worship services. Even those attached to Christian communities seem not to have a true Christian understanding of the rights of Anglo-American traditions, typically seeing those rights in the way advocated by secularists. The American Catholic bishops and intellectuals seem to have mostly accepted this secularist justification of freedoms and rights. (And this secularist justification is probably derived from unhappy branches of Christian natural-law thought; there is a vicious circle of sorts being traveled, most especially in various Christian ghettos of thought.)
Christian communities of the modern West are more often than not gatherings of individualistic Christians cut off from a living tradition or sometimes gatherings of Christians trying to be in communion with each other in ways which were part of earlier phases of God’s story.
If we Americans would enjoy the benefits of Christian civilization, Christian rights and freedoms, Christian political structures, Christian culture, then we as a national community must be predominately Christian. What we have lost in our political and economic and cultural communities can be described as “ways of the West””, including the more particular ways of the Anglo-American regions of the West. If we’ve lost some of our most important freedoms, we’ve done so because we’ve not properly cared for and loved our communities which have, as a consequence, decayed to states of weakness and relative disorder. As Mr. Baldacchino says in his review: “Returning to the Constitution of the Framers would require nothing less than a revival of the kind of [British and Christian] civilization and character type from which it is indistinguishable. This cannot be accomplished quickly, through political speeches or decisions. It would require protracted moral-cultural regeneration of Americans, one person at a time.” I’d purge the term “one person at a time” and insert something like: “in an iterative and recursive process involving individual human beings and old or new communal human beings.” A creature in such a world as this can enjoy only limited freedom if trying to be a freestanding individual. True freedom can come only when we share the life of God and that comes only when we enter fully into a Biblical religious community, when we accept the communal human being of the Body of Christ (or the People of Israel) as our own and contribute all we have and are to that Body.
Over the past two centuries, American and the British peoples have passed on their Christian beliefs and the closely connected traditions of particular political and moral order in an increasingly weak, hollow-chested, form. By cutting the communal ties, we cut ourselves from the tradition, the links, that would tie us to the historical events in which God revealed Himself and His plans for us, however little the greatest of Christian thinkers have understood those revelations. The Constitution is merely a piece of paper without those Christian beliefs and British manifestations of certain Christian traditions. Logically enough, our politicians and judges treat the Constitution as a paper covered with words which mean what they wish them to mean at any instant, any point of fruitful crisis. Christian leaders, including American Catholic bishops, should be worried about their failure and the failure of their predecessors to nurture Christian beliefs in those under their care, the failure to pass on some manifestation of Christian traditions. It’s quite possible that much of this failure is due to forces beyond their control, but they have the duty to be honest with their own selves and with their fellow-Christians about this situation. We don’t need any Bishop Alfred E. Neumann: “What, me worry?”
In any case, we aren’t losing our religious and other freedoms because politicians or judges suddenly decided to take them from us. Rather is it the case that our ancestors long ago began a gradual process that we’ve continued: step by step, we’ve passed on progressively weaker versions of Christian belief and traditions until many decided it wasn’t even worth going to Mass or other services if, for example, God had gained the interesting trait of all-forgivingness. We tore ourselves from our communal human beings so that we could become modern, radical individualists. Gatherings of such individual human beings have nothing to do with the Biblical traditions of religious communities being shaped by God: the people of Israel in the Old Testament and the Body of Christ in the New Testament. We modern American Christians, in fact—all Americans, are no longer peoples capable of being free nor are our Christian leaders capable of being the leaders of free peoples. We rely on the Constitution’s illusory promises, once well-grounded to be sure, when we should be learning how to share the true freedom of God.
I’ll invite the interested reader to explore my ideas about individual and communal human being my blog writings at Acts of Being or in my recently released, downloadable book, A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. In part, this book develops an understanding of the Body of Christ in which the Church is the most important organ and not the entirety of that Body. I think that we’ve passed into a part of God’s story which is so complex and rich as to overwhelm our priestly orders and the lay bureaucracies which are the institutional church. If I’m right, recovery will come as new Christian communities develop to deal with educational matters as well as to handle relationships with political and economic and cultural institutions. These new communities won’t exclude ordained men, religious men and women, or lay employees of Church institutions, but these new communities will not be under the control of the official Christian institutions. For at least the beginning of an approaching reform and revival—which might be very painful, the new instruments of a greater Christian civilization will likely be dominated by the laity outside of Christian institutions.