Enlightened America, Part 1

In my last blog, supported by the writings of our nation’s Founders, I asserted America was not founded as and is not today a “Christian nation.” I did not identify the founding principles of America or why in the world we should care about them nearly 250 years later. Addressing that means I must digress to provide some crucial historical context, and since our Founders were European, this must be some European history.

(Ugh! History. I know, we all hate it, but stick with me for a few minutes. It’s important.)

In the 15h and 16^th  Centuries, leading into our nation’s founding, Europe was emerging from 1,000 years of a social order built on three pillars – hereditary rulers (aristocracy and nobility), Church authority, and brute force.* In various ways each pillar supported the other to maintain power. The state supported the authority of the church, the church sanctified the authority of the state and, should you rebel against either, they could resort to brute force to keep you in line.  Your heredity determined your social class and no matter how good or vile a person you were with few exceptions, you and your progeny maintained that class and the privilege or burdens that came with it. The religious authority insisted the aristocracy and nobility had a divine right to rule over commoners and commoners had a divine mandate to submit. The Church also taught that, in a world filled with demons, angels, saints, and witches,  we are all in danger of hellfire. Conveniently the Church, via moral instruction and ritual, offered a way to escape damnation, extending or withholding eternal salvation. Your body was owned by the aristocracy and your soul belonged to God who was available only via the Church. Each were intent on expanding their wealth and influence and when negotiation failed, brute force was called to action. Religion became political, and with the force of the state the political became brutal. Religious wars became devastating political wars [see the 30 Years War]. A change of monarch altered the fates of millions based on a monarch’s religious loyalties. Millions died in war’s combat, disease, and starvation. Commoners were the foot-soldiers and cannon fodder of the powerful political and ecclesiastic elite.

In the 14^th Century, the technology of the printing press with moveable type and published translations of the Bible in the common languages eventually germinated the Protestant Reformation in the 16^th Century. This fractured the authority of the Church as Protestants asserted every man had a right to a direct connection to God and the right to study the Bible on their own terms.

Out of this ferment of new technologies and ideas, the Age of Reason emerged in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries and “natural philosophy” of ancient Greek scholars was rediscovered and refined. This was essentially the birth of the mindset of modern science, although the term “scientist” would not be used until the 19^th Century. Inductive and deductive reasoning was used to examine everything, including religious claims. New scientific discoveries demonstrated that much of what had been explained by God or demons could be explained by natural processes. Deism was a theology claiming the nature of God could be determined by the study of his creation rather than divine revelation. And in that creation, it was the nature of every man – we didn’t get to women yet – to have certain inborn, natural, and inalienable rights. This gave rise to the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment thinking deemed all men are created equal (goodbye to aristocracy) and that every man owned his own self (goodbye, hereditary authority) and that his life was his alone. Anything which a man produced by his own labor also became his property (so long, serfs) and he could not be deprived of it without a due, fair process. The church provided opportunities to pause and commune with God – who still had His rules – but it was no longer the sole authority of that access. As these ideas took hold, more commoners began demanding a say in their own destinies.

Our nation’s Founders were educated men who embraced the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson once said that “Bacon, Locke and Newton are the greatest three people who ever lived, without exception.” Enlightenment philosopher John Locke especially influenced our Founders. Locke insisted life, liberty, and property were natural rights that pre-exist any government or religion. While Locke held his own Christian views and his writings were influenced by them, he insisted religious tolerance was necessary to a civil society since a man’s conscience was his own. Likewise, no government should establish a particular religion since it could not verify absolute truth nor command a person to believe what they do not believe. Violating a man’s conscience violates his property and therefore his natural rights.

These are Enlightenment principles on which America was founded. When Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” he did not echo words from the Bible, he stated Enlightenment philosophy. This seed sprouted into both the American and French Revolutions. It also upended hereditary monarchy as a ruling force across Europe. Monarchies acceded to democracy in various forms, giving people a say in their own lives to an extent not seen in 1,000 years.  

Across American history our major conflicts have been around Enlightenment principles – the nature and rights of individuals. Sadly, our Founders cultural blinders let them create a nation with gaping contradictions to Enlightenment theory including the rights of enslaved people, the rights of non-European native peoples, and the rights of women. This blunder is our great national sin which abolitionist, suffragette, and union member progressives have continually tried to correct to make “a more perfect union.” We are now in a period where the forces pushing us back are the same old ones. Religious “authority” in the guise of Evangelicals using political power to control the lives of the majority. As our new “aristocracy” the uber-wealthy now own our legislative processes and wish to own us as “human resources.” The Republican Party wants to restrict the power of the common person to vote.  These movements are coordinated. They are also as unAmerican and as unenlightened as any tin-pot dictator.

Next time I’ll say more about how our Enlightened Nation is threatened. Until then, as I opened with the words of Langston Hughes, let me also close with them:

“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.”

Langston Hughes, American poet

Tikkun Olam

(*I am deeply indebted to Seth David Radwell for his concise summary of medieval social order and other definitions in his excellent book American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret for Healing Our Nation. I highly recommend it to those concerned for our country.)