 |
|
||||||
I
The Old Citizenship
I had a lesson once in citizenship, as it exists in most of the world, when I went round an old castle in England with my father in law, a brave and good man who did much honorable service to his country and his community.
It happens that he had been appointed by the Queen to be High Sheriff of Lancashire, and his shield hangs in this old castle, which is called Lancaster Castle. This castle was built by John of Gaunt, a Lancashire noble who is prominent in Shakespeare's Richard II. On the wall where that shield hangs, one can go back through the centuries and see the names of others in my wife's family, right back to the time of John of Gaunt. Here is a connection of blood going back many centuries. Here are roots, the old sort, sealed over the centuries, memorialized by the poets.
Back in the mists of time, when my wife's ancestors made their way into England, they were not welcomed as equal citizens. The idea of equal citizenship did not really exist, and it did not under any circumstances apply to foreigners. My wife's family came into England making war. Following upon that war were generations of strife between the conqueror and one or another faction and race among the conquered people, until the races merged gradually together and became, often under the scourge of the sword, one people.
That is the way citizenship is generally built. It is hammered out over the generations, exclusive to those who have felt the hammer blows. Citizens are blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the soldiers and farmers, the lords and commoners who are buried beneath the land where they abide.
We lack this in America, and we feel the lack of it. In a certain way we all, liberal and conservative, long for it, and all of us have our schemes for achieving it. I wish to elaborate some of these schemes, and present the one that I think will work.
Citizenship to the Liberals
Citizenship has always been an important question in America, and sometimes it is urgent. Americans live now in such a time. American government leaves to private action very much that is vital to society. Her citizens accept this as a matter of principle, in the interest of the liberty that is their entitlement. American law recognizes this liberty as natural, and therefore permanent, not subject to repeal or replacement by government, however benevolent in intent. That is why private action is unusually important there. But today private action is not doing its job.
The facts are well known. Children are now commonly born out of wedlock. Marriages now commonly break up. Thievery and pillage, rape and murder, operate at horrific levels, even if they are down from their peaks. Our graduates know neither basic facts nor main ideas. Most of us are attached in some economic way to the government, which means we are dependent upon it. Our world is more sophisticated, and riches are more abundant than ever before, yet we are experiencing a decline in civility, in responsibility, in knowledge about the highest things, a decline that gives our society in some aspects a low and even primitive cast. Americans have the feeling that something more than their greatness may be going. They feel the loss of goodness, and the emptiness of that feeling cannot be borne.
The liberals have a plan to repair this loss. Although its reputation is tainted, at least on the policy level, it still has moral authority and is still formidable in public discourse. It is the centralized, bureaucratic, administrative state. Its language is familiar: it calls us to "attack our problems on a national scale," "with the full resources of our country," "with the best minds in the nation," "coordinated from the top." It reminds us "that Washington has a responsibility" — for example in the nutrition of children.
Liberalism finds its energy in utopian promise. Woodrow Wilson would "marry our interests to the state," as if we could be in the literal sense one grand family. Franklin Roosevelt would eliminate want, not just from the United States, but from the world. And he would eliminate fear while he was at it. Lyndon Johnson would build a medical administration that could extend our lives to 200 years. Hillary Clinton would "change what it means to be a human being in the 21st century."
This is modern liberalism, progressive, visionary, ever expanding, and it has a conception of citizenship that is appropriate to its principles. The citizen under modern liberalism responds to policy. He conforms his posture, his language, his nutrition and his dress not to taste but to policy. He examines his soul and makes his confessions in response to policy. He is steadfast in his pliability for the state. He is worked upon, not for. When the administration has finished with him, he will be a thing he knows not what, but he longs to be that thing, because it will be a new thing, born of a process in which he believes.
The liberals have a vision of American citizenship. They speak of it in patriotic language — removing, of course, the connotation of father that is in the term. This vision is infused with a redefined notion of the special mission of America, which is to secure liberty and equality for all citizens. Liberty under liberalism means the ability to redefine ourselves, to make ourselves into what we please. Liberty is being one's own creator, and the thing we create will be our thing. Equality — the other essentially American idea — under liberalism demands that we re-create ourselves, because the kind of equality the liberals seek cannot be had by people as they now exist. They are too uneven in their characteristics, too apt to take care of themselves and their own first, too variable in their abilities and their outlooks.
Liberals have not yet been able to create the new kind of citizen in large enough numbers to run the country the way they want. What stands in the way is a stubborn inequality of condition. But if they work at it, the liberals think, they will get past this problem, and then Americans can realize together the real and perfected dream of equality and liberty, not as they were dreamed in Philadelphia 200 years ago, but as they have been expanded and improved here today.
Meanwhile the liberals understand the importance of making this new thing seem compatible with, even necessary to, the old thing it replaces. When Bill Clinton was inaugurated, for example, he became all of a sudden not Bill but "William Jefferson" Clinton. His attendants made the point that he is named after Thomas Jefferson, and to emphasize the point he spent the night before his inauguration at Monticello. He traveled the same route as Jefferson to arrive at the ceremony. He announced his tax increase on Lincoln and Washington's official birthday, and in his speech he spoke much of their greatness and attention to duty. In doing so he continues a tradition of successful modern liberalism, begun by Woodrow Wilson, and perfected by Franklin Roosevelt. Modern liberals know better than to reject the ideas of the Declaration of Independence in any open way. But they talk plenty about "completing them," which means changing them completely.1
Because of this cleverness, the liberals are good at seeming devoted to the old ideas and appearing to be public spirited. People have long trusted them to serve the community, to care about citizenship and neighborliness. At least until lately, the liberals have enjoyed a huge advantage in these realms.
Citizenship to Conservatives
Conservatives are united first and foremost in their opposition to liberal ideas, and in particular the liberal idea of citizenship. Conservatives have seen from the first that there is no liberty under that program. It extinguishes liberty, because it extinguishes the creature capable of liberty. By the force of government, it replaces him with some new being. It takes a lot of government to "change what it means to be a human being." Several million administrators, deploying a quarter of the largest economy on earth, do not seem to have finished the job in a full generation of trying.
But if conservatives do not like the liberal idea of citizenship, what do they like? There I think is where they need to do more work.
Recall for a moment a list that I gave above, the standard list of the things wrong with American society, such things as the rate of divorce and illegitimacy and the prevalence of crime. Now I would add one that is generally forgotten. I mean a loss not only of habit, but of knowledge, a loss not only of the disposition to good citizenship, but the ideas that underlie that disposition. I mean in short Americans' ignorance of the basis of their government and the way that it should operate.
I recently attended a men's breakfast at my church. After limbering up with some solid man talk about baseball, we turned to politics. What those participants at the men's breakfast in Upland, California know and do not know about politics is indicative of the state of citizenship in America. There is both good news and bad. The good is that most working Americans today know that the government is too big, and they know just as surely that it wastes their money and tells them lies on a regular basis.
The bad news is that very few people know more than that. Few know or understand even the basic issues of contemporary politics. They do not know that the "cuts" proposed by Congress amount to only a small fraction of federal spending. They do not know that each of the Clinton budgets have called for large increases in domestic spending, although he has said they do not. They do not know that the welfare system pays its typical clients more than $22,000 per year in Southern California, nor that this is more than double the minimum wage.
This ignorance is not, by itself, either surprising or worrisome, except that it betokens a larger ignorance, an ignorance both of the high purpose of and the strict limits on government in America. Because of this Americans tend today to work out their policy practically. They talk of devolving welfare to the states because "the federal system has proved that it does not work." They hardly mention, if they mention at all, that the only real entitlement is to the money people earn for themselves, and that no one has a right to anything earned by another. In this respect they compare poorly to the generation of Americans who would not pay a tax on tea because they were not represented in the legislature that imposed it. These earlier Americans could tell you, right down to the law of nature and human equality, why that tax was wrong, and why another one might be right. They were schooled in the business of being citizens. That schooling made it possible for them to win their liberty.
Today's statesmen — even those on the right — do not do a sufficient job of recovering this lost knowledge. For instance, none of them called the Clinton health care plan unconstitutional. Few oppose entitlements root and branch. Perhaps to do so would be incompatible with electoral survival, except in the rare offices that carry little risk for the incumbent. What are we to do?
California's debate over illegal immigration, fueled by Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot measure that cut off entitlements and other government benefits to illegals, suffered from this failure. Good people supported the initiative, and good people opposed it. The good people who supported the initiative, with a couple of important exceptions,2 did not make a case about the meaning of citizenship. They talked about denying these so-called benefits of citizenship to some who did not deserve them, without saying what most of them believed, namely that citizens do not in fact deserve them either. The good people who opposed the initiative talked a lot about equal treatment, and they said little or nothing about the real content of citizenship, and the beliefs and practices that constitute citizenship in America. Voters were left with a debate about a side issue, however important. The main point, much more important, was lost in the whirlwind.
If statesmen do not do the work, then simple citizens must do it. I would like to help them make a start. Or rather, I would like to help continue the start that has begun already. In so doing I would salute, for example, the conservative writings that support the re-generation of fatherhood, and the sanctity of the family, and the necessity for religion to become once again powerful in our public as well as our private lives.3
I salute these people, and I wish also to add a point to their writing that I think is vital: the problems we face today are deeply political, and their solution will require hard political action, based upon deep political reasoning, giving rise to unyielding political conviction. It may be true that the answer to the evils we face is not policy. It is not the Bureau of This or the Agency for That. Even the Block Grant for This and That will not do the job. And yet still we are a profoundly political nation, and our public life is infused necessarily with political ideas. In a decisive sense we are a more deeply political nation than any in history.
Take, for example, conservatives' current celebration of "voluntary and local associations." There has been a lot of writing lately about how important these are. Many have turned back to Tocqueville, and most now understand that American life until lately teemed with these associations and was elevated and ennobled by them.
One must reflect on these associations for a minute to see precisely why they are specially important in America. Local institutions are, for example, a hallmark of British government and British society. The barons who summoned King John to Runnymede gathered in opposition to the centralized authority. They had an idea of federalism. The king had his prerogatives, true enough. But the barons asserted in the Magna Carta that they had their prerogatives too, and theirs came from the same source as the king's. The king could not, therefore, tax their property, or expropriate their land, or conscript their retainers, except in the manner permitted by the law and custom of England. The king's will is a limited and a lawful will, which forms the basis for decentralized authority, a basis laid more than 700 years ago.
Americans are not then unique in possession of local institutions. One might, however, rejoin that American institutions are not merely local, but also voluntary. The barons were constrained by duties that had little to do with consent. Still less did the retainers of a feudal baron live in any kind of voluntary association. They almost belonged to their lord, not altogether unlike slaves. Americans on the other hand are equal citizens forming local associations because they wish to, joining the political community by our consent.
That is indeed the distinction, and it is also my point. In America, functions elsewhere under the purview of government have been carried out by local and voluntary institutions because of a great principle at the heart of American government. According to this principle, all citizens are equal, equal in their rights, and not to be governed except by their consent. American citizenship itself operates under this principle of equality, a principle announced with authority, not merely in some resolution of a town council, or of many town councils, but in the first organic law of the United States. It is a principle not of local but of national scope, a principle authoritative not because it was adopted by a town or even by a country, but known to every man who is rational, and forming the basis of a nation for that reason. In America local and voluntary institutions operate under the impetus, beneath the shelter, of high national principles.
When contemporary Americans seek then to escape from the Federal government to the haven of local and voluntary associations, they find they have not escaped at all. This raises the possibility that what is wrong with American government is not that Washington is influential, but rather the manner in which it is influential. Washington, after all, is a city named after that first and greatest American citizen, the father of the United States, George Washington. He was the first president under the American Constitution, a constitution written and adopted in large part to remedy problems with state government. Those governments were expropriating property, and they were raising up and encouraging bad passions, which led to bad citizenship. The Constitution was thought at the time to support a higher standard of citizenship, not to corrode the standard then existing.
Now consider the matter of religion, which conservatives rightly think should play a larger part on the public stage. Religion has indeed been a vital component of American citizenship from the beginning. People are rediscovering just how vital now, when citizenship has sunk to such a low point. But here too, more work must be done before a real recovery can be effected in the realm that matters, the minds of citizens.
Tocqueville is once again a fine authority. He says plainly that "there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America."4 In Tocqueville one learns that this flourishing of religion and liberty together comes because of the peculiar relationship between them:
Religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the faculties of man and that the political world is a field prepared by the Creator for the efforts of mind. Free and powerful in its own sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it, religion never more surely establishes its empire than when it reigns in the hearts of men unsupported by naught beside its native strength. Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. It considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality is the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.5
It is not merely the openness of politics to religion, but also of religion to politics, not only of reason to revelation, but also of revelation to reason, that makes the partnership possible. Tocqueville writes:
Thus religious zeal is perpetually warmed in the United States by the fires of patriotism. . . . If you converse with these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be surprised to hear them speak so often of the goods of this world, and to meet a politician where you expected to find a priest.6
Tocqueville points to this larger truth, but he does not fully explain it. The partnership between politics and religion operates in America upon a still higher level than is apparent from any source except the country's founding documents themselves. The point is summarized in the writing of that great student of the Declaration and the Founders, Abraham Lincoln, who said simply: "[one] cannot say that people have a right to do wrong."7
Consider for a moment why this is important. The evils that beset the "culture" as it is termed, and those that beset the government stem from the same root. At that root is relativism and its stronger and later intellectual siblings. According to relativism, nothing is true except that which we make so. If nothing is true, if reason can discover no guide for human action, then two things follow.
The first is personal. Relativism is an invitation to vice. Today there is a movement in America to restore fatherhood. Those of us who are fathers are driven sometimes to reflect how easy it would be to provide for ourselves, if we were alone. We, after all, are strong, and those who depend on us are young and weak. We have then an interest in abandoning them. Why should we not give way to that interest? If nothing is true, then surely that, and anything like it, is permitted.
Why for that matter fulfill the duties of citizenship? It may be noble to serve in wars. It is also cold, wet, dirty, and dangerous. Soldiers are often maimed and killed, and the pay is miserable. Thus while it may be held noble to be a soldier, if nothing is true, what is the ultimate value of that nobility?
One can see the power of this argument in contemporary life not merely in the divorce rate, but more impressively in the fact that the divorce rate among active and even fundamentalist Christians is also very high. Evangelical ministers will often say that though they deplore divorce, they are reluctant to preach against it. They dwell instead upon the undoubted Christian virtues of forgiveness and acceptance, of compassion and inclusion. Bill Clinton himself, who would have put gays in the military if the people had let him, is one of the most outspoken of presidents in our history about his devotion to the Christian faith. My point is not that Christianity is a negative force; on the contrary. My point is that Christianity is practiced today under the influence of the same philosophic doctrines that have corrupted our government and our society.
The second consequence of relativism is political. If there is a right to do wrong, if there is no distinction between right and wrong, then the limits on government disappear. Thomas Jefferson said famously, in explaining the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, "some men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor others booted and spurred to ride them." Men have a different nature than animals. It is their nature — and the laws of nature and of nature's God — that set the limit upon government. If there is a right to do wrong, if there is no natural right to guide us, then government itself has no bounds.
The progressives, the ancestors of our current liberals, were caught in this contradiction. They wanted to effect progress, a term implying that one condition is better than another. Yet they built their policy upon principles that denied any standard of better or worse. They sought to effect progress even as they denied progress was possible. They have been from the beginning what they are today, energetic but aimless, resolute to go they know not where. They will "change what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century." Change to what? That, one supposes, will be decided along the way.
This is the problem that conservatives mean to fix when they proclaim that a public avowal of the name of God is the method to fix it. For this view they ought to rely upon the commands not of God alone, but also the example of the Founders. Consider the beautiful words of George Washington written to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. . . . May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.8
Harry Jaffa believes that this is the first time the chief executive of a nation, not Israel, addressed a group of Jews as fellow citizens in the full and complete sense. This demonstrates something unique: citizenship in America has no religious prerequisite. It is open to Jews as well as gentiles, to people of any faith or creed. Liberty — the freedom to use one's property, to pray to one's God, to speak one's mind — sets a limit upon politics that is inviolable.
At the same time, the basis of liberty sets a limit upon something more than politics. It sets a limit too upon religion, or rather upon impostors that call themselves religion. Religion is free in America from all oppression, and yet those who practice it must still live under a political guideline. They must "demean themselves as good citizens." Nor is this standard simply a negative or passive requirement. Citizens must give their country "on all occasions their effectual support." From the perspective of the law, the standard is not then primarily liberty, but citizenship, because only good citizens can be free. From the perspective of the law, citizenship provides a standard against which religion itself must be measured.
This limit upon the scope of religion, and upon the scope of politics, lays the basis for a cooperation between politics and religion that is unprecedented. One can see this in two respects in the work of the preachers who were a dominant force in the making of the Revolution.
First of all, the preachers were lovers of liberty. Their support for free institutions rivaled that of Sam Adams or Patrick Henry in their most radical moments. And they appealed to the same source as these political men to find the basis for liberty. A fine example is the speech of the Reverend Samuel Cooper before the Senate and House of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on October 25, 1780. Cooper spoke on the occasion of the inauguration of the new Constitution of Massachusetts:
We want not, indeed, a special revelation from heaven to teach us that men are born equal and free; that no man has a natural claim of domination over his neighbours, nor one nation any such claim upon another; and that as government is only the administration of the affairs of a number of men combined for their own security and happiness, such a society have a right freely to determine by whom and in what manner their own affairs shall be administered. These are the plain dictates of that reason and common sense with which the common parent of men has informed the human bosom. It is, however, a satisfaction to observe such everlasting maxims of equity confirmed, and impressed upon the consciences of men, by the instructions, precepts and examples given us in the sacred oracles; one internal mark of their divine original, and that they come from him "who hath made of one blood all nations to dwell upon the face of the earth," whose authority sanctifies only those governments that instead of oppressing any part of his family, vindicate the oppressed, and restrain and punish the oppressor.9
Here then is the natural law in its full political meaning, spoken from the lips of a preacher to a political assembly. The same theme is found in countless sermons given on Sunday morning in the churches of the colonies during the Revolutionary period. That is the first lesson that emerges from an examination of the sermons of the preachers who promoted that revolution. Their reliance upon God was made stronger and more fervent because His revelations accorded with the faculty that He gave us for perceiving the world. Christianity makes claims that go beyond the reason of man. It makes no moral claims that violate it. A religion that does violate it — a cult or a coven parading as an assemblage of God — might properly be limited if it becomes dangerous to good citizenship, which is the basis of liberty.
The second is even more important for those who would repair what is now called the "culture." The preachers of the Revolution spoke often and strongly about morality, both in public places and in their churches. In so doing, they addressed their countrymen not as parishioners simply, but also as fellow citizens. Take for example the words of Samuel West, a preacher and a member of the convention that wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the same Constitution that Samuel Cooper saluted in the address quoted above. West said:
The most perfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he becomes the slave of base passions and vile lusts; he introduces confusion and disorder into society, and brings misery and destruction upon himself. This, therefore, cannot be called a state of freedom, but a state of the vilest slavery and the most dreadful bondage. The servants of sin and corruption are subjected to the worst kind of tyranny in the universe. Hence we conclude that where licentiousness begins, liberty ends.10
If Americans wish to emulate their Founders in their efforts to restore religion to the public square, they must do it in this way. This way is stronger than the appeal often put in its place today. It is stronger because it makes its claims upon an argument and evidence that applies to all, and not only those who are blessed with faith in the person of their Maker. It supports that faith, and lays the ground for it, but it begins with reason, the faculty that perceives the natural law. This law is made the foundation of every American's loyalty to his country. It is the basis of citizenship in the Founding of their country.
Lest this seem to demean the authority of the source of the "laws of nature and of nature's God" in the affairs of men, let us remember with Washington that a society made up largely of believers is best able to be a good society. At the same time we should remember how that belief must be made manifest in politics. It must be connected always to its basis in reason as well as faith. Consider the authority of the great Christian writer C.S. Lewis:
As regards the Fall I submit that the general tenor of scripture does not encourage us to believe that our knowledge of the law has been depraved in the same degree as our power to fulfill it. He would be a brave man who would claim to realize the fallen condition of man more clearly than St. Paul. In that very chapter where he asserts most strongly our inability to keep the moral law, he also asserts most confidently that we perceive the Law's goodness and rejoice in it according to the inward man. Our righteousness may be filthy and ragged; but Christianity gives us no ground for holding that our perceptions of right are in the same condition.11
There is alike faith and reason in this statement. If we know what is right, then we may with justice require right from others under the law. We may with justice expect a man who pledges his faith to a woman to keep that faith, a man who fathers a child to provide for that child, a man who is a citizen to fight for his country. The country is then on the side of the citizen who does his duty. It belongs to that citizen; he and his fellows are sovereign in it. In return for their liberty, which the government does not give them but helps them to protect, they have obligations that they are bound to discharge.
To the preachers in the Founding, this was the argument to make when they entered the public square. It is based on the law that beckons all citizens of America to fulfill the duties that make society work. In America alone, that law, which Lincoln called "the father of all moral principle in us," is the basis of all the laws that men may make.
I have described the attentive and pliable citizen who is the hallmark and aim of the modern, liberal regime. Another kind of citizen is implied in the heritage that comes to Americans from their forefathers. This is a citizenship that responds to the bidding of the natural law and human equality. Americans who live in another country for a time and then come home notice that Americans take up more space, talk at people more directly, cover their ground more assertively, than those in most places. An American is more likely to start a business and work for himself, more likely to give to charity and care for his community.
Such a citizen, too, has been shaped by hammer blows and the sting of the sword. These were the blows of the Revolution and the wars that have come since. They were fought in the name of a faith and a creed that applies to all and is at the same time special to us.
Winston Churchill, the grandson of an English Duke and the son of an American mother, regarded the American people as the new great people of the earth, able to stand beside the Greeks and the Romans and the British as the leaders of mankind. When he named the great documents that have secured the liberties of the English speaking peoples, he did it on the Fourth of July. He named the Declaration of Independence as the greatest of them all, knowing full well that it covered all men, whatever tongue they spoke.
As I have mentioned my in-laws, I would be wrong not to remark on my own family. My father, too, comes from a long line of Europeans, going far back. The difference is that he did not live the life they lived in any real sense of place, of custom, or of belief, and so we know little about them. They were Germans, on my father's side, and they were farmers, and they came late last century. My father like my mother grew up on farms in Arkansas, during the time when most of the farmers lost their all in the Depression. There is not much aristocracy of the old kind in my background.
Despite this, my father went to college when none in his family before him had done so. In our household was something not at all uncommon here in this country, but astonishing if one knows how things are elsewhere. It was the view that we could do anything we were good enough to do. My father thought the greatest man in the country worked for him. He thought he was obliged, for that reason, to be responsible, responsible for us and for his neighbors, responsible for his country.
My father was in short a citizen of the greatest republic the world has known, or indeed can know, shaped by its creed, fashioned by its faith, elevated by its hope. There is the hope for the future of mankind. There is the repair of a broken nation. It is the only way.
Notes
1 Charles Kesler has written well on this point in his essay "The Public Philosophy of the New Freedom and the New Deal," in Robert Eden, ed., The New Deal and its Legacy: Critique and Reappraisal (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote1return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote1return">(Return)
2 See Edward J. Erler, Immigration and Citizenship, (Claremont, CA: The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1994). href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote2return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote2return">(Return)
3 See Don Eberly, "Even Newt Can't Save Us," Wall Street Journal, February 3, 1995; and David Klinghoffer, "Is God Dead? GOP Eschews Talk of Truth," Wall Street Journal, March 8, 1995. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote3return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote3return">(Return)
4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, Everyman's Library, 1994) v. I, p. 303. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote4return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote4return">(Return)
5 Ibid., p. 44. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote5return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote5return">(Return)
6 Ibid., pp. 306-307. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote6return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote6return">(Return)
7 Abraham Lincoln, Seventh Joint Debate with Stephen Douglas, October 15, 1858; reprinted in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 319. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote7return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote7return">(Return)
8 George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, RI, August 1790; reprinted in W. B. Allen, ed., George Washington: A Collection (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1988), p. 548. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote8return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote8return">(Return)
9 Samuel Cooper, Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution, Boston, 1780; reprinted in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1991), p. 637. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote9return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote9return">(Return)
10 Samuel West, Election Day Sermon, Boston, 1776; reprinted in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing During the Founding Era (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1983) v. I, p. 415. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote10return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote10return">(Return)
11 C.S. Lewis, "The Poison of Subjectivism," in The Seeing Eye (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), p. 108. href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote11return" mce_href="http://www.claremont.org/cmsadmin/internet/publications/edit_pub.asp#footnote11return">(Return)
