9

The American Trinity

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is not merely a geographical location. And unlike most of the world’s nations, Americans are not, and never have been, a race or an ethnicity. America is and has always regarded itself as an idea. That idea is a value system. And that value system—unique to America—can be called the American Trinity.

Ask most Americans what the American value system consists of and you will get many responses, many of them in conflict with each other. The truth is that most Americans do not know what America’s distinctive values are. But two things will unite nearly all respondents.

First, they will not consider the question odd. Most Americans believe that America has a distinct value system. This itself is significant. Most people in other nations would not understand what the questioner was asking. Ask a Dutchman or Uruguayan, individuals who live in decent, well-functioning democracies: “What are distinctive Dutch or Uruguayan values?” and they will probably respond by asking, “What do you mean?” Few citizens of any other country think about whether their country has a distinctive value system, and even fewer would resonate to the concept of their country being an idea. Yet one of the leading American historians, Gordon S. Wood, has written a book titled The Idea of America, in which he argues the case that from the outset, Americans conceived America as being an idea. The second way in which almost all Americans would be united in their response to what constitute American values is that they would use the words liberty or freedom.

Beyond agreeing that America is an idea and identifying liberty as an American value, few Americans could identify a distinctive American value system. For much of my life I was one of them. I knew that America had values, and I knew that liberty was one of them. But I could not name any distinctive American value. After all, the French Revolution declared its values to be “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and it therefore seemed presumptuous, even sanctimonious, to argue that liberty was a distinctly American value.

Then one day, in the most routine of actions—emptying my pockets—I discovered what generations of Americans used to know, but did not successfully pass on to my or even to my parents’ generation. On every American coin were inscribed the three primary values of America—“Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “E Pluribus Unum.”

Those three values make up the value system I have come to call the American Trinity. No other society or nation has identified those three values as its core values.

I will explain each of these values, argue why they constitute the best system ever devised to govern a society, and clarify how Leftism seeks to replace each of them with a Left-wing value.

 

Liberty

LIBERTY IS THE ESSENCE OF THE AMERICAN IDEA

The United States was the world’s first free country.

It was the country that most inspired other countries to be free.

It is the country that has been free the longest.

It is the country that has most protected other free countries.

It is the country that has most spread freedom to other countries.

This is all because the United States was founded on the value of liberty.

America, “sweet land of liberty,” is how one of its most beloved national songs describes the country. And it ends, appropriately, with these words: “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

The American national anthem ends with these words: “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner [the American flag] yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” That is why France built the Statue of Liberty as a gift to the American people. No other country has exemplified liberty as has America.

More people from more countries have immigrated to America in order to be free than to the rest of the world’s countries put together.

More black Africans have immigrated to the United States voluntarily—looking for freedom and opportunity—than came to the United States involuntarily as slaves.¹

And no country has ever the felt the obligation to spread liberty elsewhere as has America. People differ as to whether this is always—or ever—a good idea. But it is indisputable that this has been an animating American idea.

It animated Americans to die in the liberation of Europe in two world wars.

It animated Americans to die to keep half of the Korean peninsula from falling under the rule of Communist totalitarians.

It animated Americans to die trying to keep half of Vietnam from falling under Communist totalitarians.

It animated America to fly food into West Berlin in order to break the Soviet blockade of a free city located in the midst of totalitarian East Germany.

It animated America to intervene on behalf of Muslims in Kosovo and to aid Muslims in Afghanistan.

Has America also backed dictators? Yes, it has. But that in no way negates all of America’s unique sacrifices on behalf of others’ liberty. And in nearly every case of America backing a non-democratically elected leader, the alternatives to that leader were deemed—usually correctly—to be morally worse for his people and for the cause of liberty. Those who call America hypocritical for backing non-freely elected leaders rarely cite the most blatant example—America’s backing of Joseph Stalin in World War II. It would be hard to identify a more blood-soaked regime than Stalin’s. Yet no one charges America with hypocrisy for backing Stalin during World War II. Anyone whose moral compass works understands that in order to stop Hitler and Nazism, supporting Stalin against Hitler was obligatory. Had the Soviet Union fallen to the Nazis, it is difficult to see how the Western democracies could have prevailed in World War II.

So, too, many of the dictators America supported during the Cold War were perceived as the only viable alternative to a Communist dictatorship, which would have resulted in more cruelty, less freedom, and more death. That was the case in Cuba, where all Cubans had much more freedom, had access to a plethora of independent newspapers and radio stations, and most had a higher standard of living under the dictator Fulgencio Batista than under the Communist tyrant who overthrew him, Fidel Castro. So, too, by virtually any measurement of quality of life, Iranians were far better off under the American-backed dictator, the Shah of Iran, than under his successors, the theocratic tyrants who came to rule the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The fact is that America has been the greatest model of liberty, the greatest spreader of liberty, and the greatest preserver of liberty the world has ever known. It believed that it was its mission to spread liberty. President John F. Kennedy famously expressed this belief in his inaugural address in 1961, proclaiming, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Regarding this pronouncement, it is important to note that it is unlikely that the inaugural address by the leader of any other country promised the world that his country would pay any price to assure the survival and the success of liberty elsewhere. It is also worth noting that few Americans—Republican or Democrat—found the Kennedy statement odd. Yet it would be very odd for, let us say, a Swedish prime minister to make a similar comment upon taking office.

From the beginning, liberty was the great animating impulse of the American colonies. Probably the best-remembered statement from America’s founding is that of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

We have here, in a nutshell, a major difference between America and Western Europe: Liberty animates America; economic equality and economic security animate Western Europe.

For this reason, among others, if the United States ceased to exist, liberty would be diminished, if not extinguished, nearly everywhere on earth.

WHAT LIBERTY MEANS

For Americans, liberty has meant:

• Political freedom—the freedom to elect whomever the citizens of the country want to elect, and the right to be governed with the consent of the people
• Religious freedom—the right to practice any or no religion
• Freedom from religious coercion—the state may not impose religious requirements. Though not known to most Americans today, this was most insisted upon by many of the most religious founding groups in America. “Separation of church and state would not exist if not for the efforts of eighteenth-century evangelicals.”²
• Freedom of assembly—the right to gather and associate publicly and privately with whomever one chooses
• Freedom of speech—the right to say and write whatever one wants short of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”
• Economic freedom—the right to start and maintain a business and the right to keep as much of what one has legally earned as is practically possible
• Freedom of the press—the right of newspapers and magazines and other media to advocate anything legal
• Freedom from the state—the ability of individuals to be as free as practically possible from governmental interference in their lives

This last right is the one that is most responsible for so many people around the world seeing America more than any other place on earth as a land of opportunity. This right also means that one must have the ability to fail. Without that possibility, success for either the individual or for society is rarely possible.

LIBERTY NECESSITATES SMALL GOVERNMENT

Individual liberty exists in inverse proportion to the size of the state. The bigger the government/state, the less liberty the individual has. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Whatever the arguments for a big state—such as protecting citizens from economic hardship and providing a free education and health care—the bigger the state, the more it controls. And the more it controls, the less the individual controls.

That is one reason the Founders of the United States were adamant about keeping the federal government out of every area of American life except for those specifically enumerated in the Constitution. As the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

But for the Left, for whom abolishing material inequality is a higher ideal than individual liberty, the ideal of small government is really little more than a cover for preserving economic inequality. As one Left-wing think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, has written: “Americans of a more progressive bent tend, of course, to consider all this solemnity around the ‘principle of limited government’ just so much mumbo-jumbo meant to keep the rich and powerful safe and secure from any challenge to their wealth and power.”³

For this reason, people on the Left are perplexed by the fact that many non-rich Americans, even poor ones, hold conservative/American values and oppose big government. The Left-wing understanding of life is that the ultimate conflict is between rich and poor. So why would any poor person advocate small government when big government is the vehicle to material equality? The Left cannot quite fathom that many people are driven by values that transcend material considerations. For those who hold American values, liberty—which depends on keeping government small—greatly transcends economic equality as a value.

The Bigger the Government, the More the Abuse of Power

The Founders of the United States were adamant about limited government for another reason: They did not trust people with power. Professor of history Thomas Kidd explained: “Because of their doubts about the goodness of human nature, they saw centralized government power as dangerous.”⁴

Unlike the Founders, those who seek big government do trust people (provided they are kindred spirits) with immense power and do not see “centralized government power as dangerous.” They believe that putting enormous power in a few people’s hands is a good thing because for Leftists big government is the vehicle to accomplishing their goals. The Left does not trust the individual to govern his life.

In fact, evil ideologies—fascism, Nazism, Communism, military dictatorships—depend on big government, and fail when state power contracts. It is overwhelmingly because of big government with its vast amount of corruption that countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are poor. Their poverty is not because of a lack of raw materials, nor a lack of smart and talented people, nor is it the residue of Western colonialism. Any African, Asian, or Latin American nation that embraced the American value system would produce both prosperity and liberty for its people.

The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen

The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen is in every way, the moral sphere included. In other words, as the government gets bigger, not only does the individual recede in significance but the character of the average citizen also gets smaller.

1. Moral Character Begins with Taking Responsibility for Oneself

Moral character begins with taking care of oneself, if one is able to. Conversely, it is a moral defect to rely on others when one does not have to. That said, there are times when people simply cannot take care of themselves and must rely on others. Life is tragic and some people, despite their best efforts and their commitment to being a responsible person, must have others support them. And the rest of us are morally obligated to support them.

Given that people taking care of themselves is a moral virtue, even those who believe that the ideal society is one in which the state takes care of as many of its citizens as possible must acknowledge that such a state exacts a moral price. The more the state takes care of its citizens, the more deleterious the effects are on most citizens’ moral character.

Of course, some might argue that there is no relationship between moral character and taking responsibility for oneself. But to do so would mean turning the concept of character, as it has been understood throughout Judeo-Christian and Western history, on its head. A seminal teaching of Judaism, enunciated by Rabbi Hillel, the leading rabbi in the making of the Talmud, Judaism’s holiest work after the Hebrew Bible, is: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?” and the New Testament teaches, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (II Thessalonians 3:10). The essence of good character is to be a responsible person, meaning, first and foremost, taking responsibility for oneself. Then one assumes responsibility for one’s family and then for others who cannot take care of themselves.

2. Reliance on the State Creates a Sense of Entitlement

The more people rely on government, the more they develop a sense of entitlement, an attitude characterized by the belief that one is owed whatever one receives—and often more than one receives. This is a second big-government blow to moral character; and it, in turn, has terrible consequences.

First, the more one feels entitled, the less one believes one has to work for anything. Why work hard if I can look to the state to give me much of what I need, and, increasingly, much of what I want? This is one reason that Americans esteem work more than Europeans do. Europeans have been raised by the Left-wing welfare state, and Leftism places little moral value on work. Leftism regards work as a necessary evil; Americanism regards work as ennobling. The ideal for the Left, and therefore for most Europeans, is to work as little as possible, enjoy as much vacation time as possible, and retire on a state pension as early as possible. This is why Europeans riot over vacation time.

Second, the more entitled one feels, the less grateful one feels. This is obvious: Why be grateful for getting what you are owed?

This is of supreme importance because gratitude is the most important human quality. It is the root of both happiness and goodness. The ungrateful cannot be happy people, and the ungrateful cannot be good people.⁵

The ingratitude induced by Leftism is, therefore, another reason people Left of center are less likely to be happy than people Right of center. And that’s not all. The more entitled one feels, the angrier one is likely to be. People who do not get what they think they are entitled to become angry. Anger and ingratitude are a toxic brew that produces not only unhappy people, but destructive ones as well.

Third, if the welfare state teaches people not to take care of themselves, how much more so does it teach them not to take care of others? Smaller government, along with religion, has been the primary reason Americans give more charity and volunteer more time per capita than do Europeans living in welfare states. After all, why take care of your fellow citizen, or even your family, when the state will do it for you? This question alone makes a powerful moral case against the welfare state. In other words, while altruistic motives may have created the welfare state, the welfare state creates selfishness.

This lack of concern for others extends to other nations as well. I am not referring to foreign aid, which is often ineffective and even destructive when given, as it often is, to countries ruled by corrupt governments. Rather I am referring to a willingness to fight, and if necessary die, for other nations’ liberty. In that regard, no country has been as willing as America to sacrifice for others. And it is the conservatives in America (though not its libertarian wing) who most support these efforts and who most volunteer to fight. Conservatives in other Western countries are also far more supportive of fighting for others than are Left-wing citizens and governments. Shortly after the Left won in Spain, they withdrew all their forces from Iraq. Apparently, the massacre of Iraqis that would have followed a withdrawal of all coalition troops from Iraq meant little to Spain’s Left. So, too, the election of a center-Left government in Japan meant abandoning that country’s war effort in Afghanistan.

There are fine individuals on the Left, and there are selfish individuals on the Right. But as a rule, bigger government increases the number of angry, ungrateful, lazy, spoiled, and self-centered individuals.⁶

The Smaller the Government,
the More the Individual Is Needed

Among the things that Left and Right, religious and secular, agree on is that human beings have to feel needed. When we are not, life seems pointless.

Unfortunately, however, the larger the state the less its citizens feel needed and, therefore, the less they—especially men—feel significant. It is definitional. The more the state does, the less its citizens need to do. One well-known example is the way welfare robbed so many men of significance when women and their children came to depend financially on the state.

Before the expansion of the state, the average American had much more societal significance. A generation ago, the men of the local Rotary Club had more prestige and social importance. So did fathers. So did clergy. With the ascendance of the state, much of these individuals’ societal significance has eroded. As the state expands further into health care, the same will happen to doctors as autonomy and prestige are transferred from them to the heads of dozens of new government health regulatory agencies. Over time, if the Left has its way and the state keeps expanding, the individual’s significance will continue to decline. He will not be allowed to decide at what temperature to keep his house (Left-wing legislatures seek to have home thermostats regulated by local and state governments), and she will not be able to make the lunch she wants for her schoolchild (American schools increasingly ban food from home because it is deemed less healthy), among many other examples.

This is what the battle in America was about with regard to the government banning the incandescent lightbulb: liberty and individual significance—not lightbulbs per se. If I cannot even choose what lightbulbs I use in my own home, I lose some autonomy, some liberty, and some dignity.

This is why the Left opposes homeschooling—it grants the individual too much influence over his or her children. In big-government Europe, homeschooling is strongly discouraged, and in Germany it is illegal except in rare cases.

In short, as the state grows, the individual citizen will be needed essentially for one thing: to finance the one thing that is needed—the state.

 

THERE ARE PRICES TO BE PAID for liberty, prices that Americanism is willing to pay, but which Leftism is not: economic inequality in particular, but also personal failure and hurt feelings. With liberty, some people will inevitably be much richer than others. Therefore, the more a society demands equality, the less liberty it will have. With liberty, people are freer to fail. And with liberty, children will experience the hurt of losing a game by many points, and all people will experience the hurt that free speech may produce. Reduce the chances of experiencing emotional pain and you reduce the amount of liberty in society.

Americans fought for liberty above everything else. Did they extend it to all Americans? No, they did not. Slavery blighted the American moral landscape until vast numbers of Americans killed one another over the issue.^* However, slavery troubled the Founders and it troubled any American who believed in liberty. The glare of the discrepancy was simply too bright to avoid. And America eventually created the freest place on earth for a black person to live.^*

In God We Trust

THERE IS, OF COURSE, one great risk to a society founded on liberty—anarchy. Since liberty means that the state will be too small to effectively morally constrain each individual, this presents a problem. If, as the Founders believed, people are not basically good, what or who will keep people from acting poorly? To whom will each citizen feel accountable for their actions if not a powerful state?

Or, to put it another way, if the Founders mistrusted big government because they knew that people were not basically good, why would they trust liberty? If inherently flawed people will inevitably abuse power, won’t inherently flawed people inevitably abuse liberty?

The answer, of course, is yes.

And that is the reason for the second value of the American value system—God.

If people are not morally accountable to an all-powerful state or to a monarch and they are granted an amount of personal freedom that is unprecedented in the history of mankind, they need to be accountable either to themselves—that is, their own hearts and consciences—or to a God who is moral and who judges each individual (and nation).

The first alternative was out of the question for the Founders—and should be out of the question for anyone who doesn’t romanticize human nature. The heart is an awful guide to good behavior and the conscience may be a fine guide but 1) it is easily overwhelmed by human nature (for example, appetites, lust, envy, greed, etc.) and 2) it can be easily overridden by rationalizing one’s behavior (“it’s not that bad,” “everybody does it,” “it’s a big department store, not a mom-and-pop store”); and therefore 3) people need to believe they are accountable to, and will be judged by, something greater than themselves.

What the Founders did regarding God and liberty was as unique as it was brilliant: they substituted God (and moral religion) for a powerful secular or religious state and they tied liberty to God. Thomas Kidd summarized Alexis de Tocqueville, the great nineteenth-century French observer of America, on this matter: “The partnership of religion and liberty lay at the heart of America’s political success…. Freedom by itself would inexorably degenerate into rabid selfishness, but religion nurtured the purposefulness of freedom.”⁷

God is as central to the American value system as is liberty. It was so from the beginning.

America was founded by God-centered individuals and God-centered religious communities. Not one of those identified as the Founders—including the so-called deists—was an atheist; every one of them believed in a judging God, and that without God-based values, America could not survive.

John Adams, one of the most influential of the Founding Fathers and second president of the United States, wrote in a letter to officers of a Massachusetts militia, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”⁸ And on another occasion, he said, “Religion was the only thing that could tame our savage natures.”⁹

George Washington, in his Farewell Address in 1796 made this point abundantly clear: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.” Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, the authors of the Federalist Papers, all helped Washington write this address.

Those who wish to deny the God-centered roots of the American experiment frequently argue that many of the Founders did not hold Christian beliefs such as the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus. They are right, but the argument is irrelevant. Not all the Founders held specifically Christian beliefs, but all believed in God. And not in Aristotle’s unmoved Mover, but in the God of the Hebrew Bible. Benjamin Franklin, widely considered a deist, was, like every one of the Founders, an ethical monotheist, who, moreover, “embraced a very non-deistic view that God intervened in the lives of human beings.”¹⁰

Franklin proposed that each session of the struggling constitutional convention be opened with a prayer imploring the Almighty to intervene on the delegates’ behalf: “I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?…I therefore beg leave to move—that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business…”¹¹

The American experiment in liberty was inconceivable to the Founders—and should be inconceivable to everyone today—without God and without God-based, morality-teaching religion. Tocqueville summarized the American view of the dependence of liberty on faith: “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot.”¹²

The American value system is predicated on the belief that a good society must be God-based and must have good religion to keep its citizens decent. One does not have to be American or to live in America in order to affirm this proposition. As the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in the nineteenth century (in The Brothers Karamazov), “Where there is no God, all is permitted.” America’s Founders would have wholeheartedly agreed.

While it is true that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison—those widely regarded as the preeminent Founders of the United States of America—departed from some or all aspects of specifically Christian theology, each of them passionately advocated God-based religion, in their case Christianity, or, to use the more modern term, Judeo-Christian values. Steven Waldman summarized the Founders’ views on the moral necessity of religion: “Each felt that religion was extremely important, at a minimum to encourage moral behavior and make the land safe for republican government.”¹³

Benjamin Franklin put the need for God-based religion perfectly: “If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be without it?” (emphasis added)¹⁴

“As for John Adams,” writes Waldman, “although he was personally inclined toward Unitarianism (which denied the Christian doctrine of the Trinity), he also affirmed the public value of religion.”¹⁵

Waldman summarizes John Adams’s views this way: “He disliked secular humanism and feared that a world without faith would lead to moral mayhem.”¹⁶

The Left, in its determination to secularize society, distorts many of the Founders’ views on religion. Waldman cites a particularly telling example with regard to Adams:

“The liberal magazine The Nation and the website www.deism.org both honed [sic] in on this comment from Adams: ‘Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, “this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”’ But in typical culture-war behavior neither The Nation nordeism.org included the rest of the quote, in which Adams explained that the negative sentiment soon passed and was replaced by his realization that ‘Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society, I mean hell.’”¹⁷

Adams is saying that as bad as the world has been with religion, it would be a living hell without (Bible-based) religion (we will see why this is so). Adams attended church regularly. And with all his criticisms and despite his rejection of Christian theology, he regarded Christianity as the embodiment of “the eternal, self-existent, independent, benevolent, all powerful, and all merciful creator, preserver and father of the universe, the first good, first perfect, and first fair.” Christianity was so perfect in its essence that “[n]either savage nor civilized man, without a revelation, could ever have discovered or invented it.”¹⁸

WHY GOD AND RELIGION ARE NECESSARY

The Founders of America understood that flawed man needs God to make a moral society, and that a free society, in particular, needs God.

The Left believes that people can be good without God (indeed, that the world would be better without God). Now, it is true that there are good individuals who do not believe in God or religion. By and large, however, these individuals (in the Western world, at least) have simply adopted the values bequeathed by centuries of Judeo-Christian values. They are living on what one author called “cutflower ethics.” Flowers are nurtured in a certain soil, and, when cut from that soil, they can appear to survive for a certain amount of time. But, of course, they soon wither and die. So, too, Western societies’ ethical values were nurtured in Judeo-Christian soil, and cut off from that soil they, too, will seem to survive, but eventually, like cut flowers, those values will wither and die.

Therefore, while there will always be some good individuals in all societies, including primitive ones, godless ones, and even evil societies, that is of little consequence. What matters is making a good society, with large numbers of good people, not merely some good individuals.

To put it another way, there are fine musicians who never took music lessons and never even learned how to read music. But no one would argue that just because there are some fine musicians who never studied music, we don’t need to teach music. If we want to produce good musicians and a musically literate society, music must be taught. Likewise, if we want to produce good individuals and an ethical society, we need moral religion to teach morality and a moral God to believe in.

Finally, when Leftists make the argument that God and religion are unnecessary, they omit to note that this is only achievable with a strong state. According to Leftists themselves, men will not treat women decently without a vast number of laws prohibiting sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment, etc. Nor will whites avoid hurting blacks without a vast array of civil rights laws and politically correct speech codes. So the Left implicitly admits that only a powerful state can ensure a decent society without God. Here we have another reason that both Islamism and Leftism believe in a strong state—to enforce either Sharia laws or Leftist laws.

The American value system is predicated on liberty and God, which together enable a much weaker state than either Islam or Leftism advocate.

WHAT GOD?

Given that “In God We Trust” is one of the three components of the American Trinity, it is important to explain who and what this God is.

Here are the essential characteristics:

1. This God Is the God Introduced by the Hebrew Bible

The “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence is the God of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Though this God is the Creator, He is not an uninvolved, disinterested, amoral deity. He acts in history, primarily through the lives of nations, and sometimes in the lives of individuals. As Kidd summarized it, for all the Founders, “God—or Providence, as deists and others might prefer to deem it—moved in and through nations.”¹⁹

This God is the reason every human life is infinitely precious. This, too, is from the Bible: Man was created “in the image of God.” This does not mean that like God, man is inherently good; it means that human life is sacred and that, like God (but unlike the animals, who are not created in God’s image), man knows good and evil—and has the freedom to choose between them.

And of critical importance to making a good society, this God is the biblical God who commands, “Love your neighbor as yourself, I am God” (Leviticus 19:18).

Every Founder, no matter what his theology, was preoccupied with the Bible. Every great university founded before the eighteenth century, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, was founded by clergy, and these universities placed Bible study at the center of their curricula.

Dartmouth College was founded by a pastor and a missionary to the Oneida Indians, Eleazar Wheelock.²⁰

Columbia’s first provost was a Presbyterian pastor, John Mitchell Mason, who was so orthodox in his Christianity that he wrote The Voice of Warning to Christians on the Ensuing Election, attacking Thomas Jefferson for denying the Flood and other miracles.

Princeton, Waldman writes, “was an evangelical [emphasis in the original] Christian school. It was founded by New Light Presbyterians, the faction that had arisen during the Great Awakening to emphasize adherence to the Bible and passionate evangelism—to churn out evangelists. Its first president was Jonathan Edwards, the Billy Graham of his day…. The school’s curriculum melded evangelicalism and science, scriptures and the classics.”²¹

2. This God Is the Source of Morality

Without this God as the ultimate source of a standard of good and evil, there is no objective good and evil, only personal or societal preferences about right and wrong. If God is not the author of “Thou shall not steal,” men might still come up with the idea that stealing is wrong. Indeed, many will. But it would still be men’s opinions, not an objective moral truth. Moreover, when God says something is wrong, it has infinitely more clout than when reason or logic or opinion or feeling alone says it. Among other things it means that one who steals will be accountable to this God.

3. This God Demands Moral Behavior from All People and All Nations (Ethical Monotheism)

God judges all individuals and all nations. One aspect of the revolution inaugurated by Jewish ethical monotheism was that one God means one morality for all humanity. Morality is the same for the Jew, the non-Jew, the American, and the non-American. Ethical monotheism was a moral earthquake in human history. Before the Hebrew Bible, all gods acted capriciously; they did what they wanted—they were no more than supermen—and what they did was beyond good and evil.

The notion of God judging nations was instrumental to all of the Founders’ beliefs, and this notion very much included America itself. Kidd writes, “Even though Washington seems personally to have held rather a distant view of the deity, he still believed that God was providentially active in human affairs…. [H]e believed that God, through acts of providence, would judge wicked nations…”²²

All of the American Founders, even Thomas Paine, who is considered the least religious and the most anti-Christian, believed in the afterlife. As Paine said: “I trouble not myself about the manner of future existence. I content myself with believing, even to positive conviction, that the power that gave me existence is able to continue it, in any form and manner he pleases, either with or without this body…”²³

Not one of the Founders was a deist in the sense that term is erroneously understood today—belief in a creator who has no interest or involvement in his creation.²⁴ The one most identified as deist in the sense of not believing in Christianity, Paine was raised in a religious home by an Anglican mother and a Quaker father, and he kept their values while dropping their religion. Kidd tells us that Paine “apparently worked for a brief period as an evangelical Methodist preacher…”²⁵ And Waldman writes, “Although he once described himself as a Deist, at other times in his life he embraced the very non-Deistic view that God intervened in the lives of human beings.”²⁶ Moreover, his extremely influential Common Sense was filled with religious language and biblical references.

George Washington, in Waldman’s words, “wasn’t a Deist. He believed in an omnipotent and constantly intervening God…. He issued many orders calling for days of prayer, was heard to pronounce or call for prayers at meals, and—most important—seemed to believe that God could be influenced by the prayers and behavior of men.”²⁷

4. This God Is the Source of Liberty

This God was the source of liberty. In the famous words of the Declaration of Independence, all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If God is not the source of liberty, what or who will be? A king, a dictator, the state? Only if men regard God as the source of liberty will it not be removed by men. The American experiment in God-based liberty was unique—and it, too, traced it roots to the Hebrew Bible. A biblical verse concerning liberty is the one inscription on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.”²⁸ No other society except America’s with its Judeo-based ethical monotheism made God the source of liberty and the one who demands that society be based on individual liberty.

ETHICAL MONOTHEISM, NOT NECESSARILY CHRISTIANITY OR JUDAISM

One does not have to be a believing Jew or Christian in order to affirm this God of the American value system. One can come from any religious background or even affirm no specific religion, providing one affirms Judeo-Christian values (as set forth below). One can be an ethical monotheist like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. According to Kidd, “Franklin did question the divinity of Jesus, and he believed that morality was the essence of true religion, not correct doctrine…. Nearing the end of his life, Franklin privately expressed doubts about Jesus’s divinity, but he believed in Christ’s ethical teachings and a God who answered human prayers.”²⁹

If one had to be a Jew or a Christian to affirm American values, those values could not be exported to non-Christians and non-Jews. But a major theme of this book and of Americanism is that Judeo-Christian values are applicable to virtually every society and individual, no matter what their religion, nationality, or ethnicity. It was not theology that concerned the Founders of the United States and those who made “In God We Trust” the country’s motto. It was God-based morality. It was understood that, as night follows day, without a moral and judging God, mankind will devolve into moral chaos.

The Founders—specifically, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—believed as the Jewish prophets did, that God is most concerned with humans behaving decently toward one another. The prophet Micah summed it up this way: “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”³⁰

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin penned his core religious beliefs. It is one of the most succinct and eloquent descriptions of ethical monotheism ever offered:

“I never doubted the existence of a deity, that he made the world, and governed it by his providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crimes will be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter; these I esteemed the essentials of every religion.”

America Was Founded to Be a God-Based Country with a Nonsectarian Government

Contrary to what most Americans have been taught for at least two generations, America was designed to be a religious, that is a God-based, country; and from its inception it was.

From even before the United States was founded, Americans believed that America had a God-given purpose: to be a “City on a Hill,” and later “the Second Israel.”

Yale professor David Gelernter (who is a Jew, not a Christian) has expressed it perfectly:

“America is no secular republic; it’s a biblical republic.

“Americanism is no civic religion; it’s a biblical religion.

“‘America’ is one of the most beautiful religious concepts mankind has ever known.”³¹

The religion of the vast majority of its inhabitants has been Christianity. But America was not founded to necessarily be a theologically Christian country, that is, one in which all its citizens affirm Christian theological doctrines (specifically, the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus). God is affirmed in the Declaration of Independence as the author of human rights, but the document does not mention Jesus or Christianity. And every American president has mentioned God in his inaugural address, but no president has mentioned Jesus or Christianity in his inaugural address.

None of this denigrates the central role of Christianity and Christians in creating and sustaining America and its values. On the contrary, it is to American Christians’ everlasting credit that they were so preoccupied with God and morality that they invented a value system for America that did not necessitate acceptance of Christian theological beliefs. No other religious group has done that.^*

What every Founder did believe was that America had to be a God-based society, that its citizens had to be God-fearing men and women, and that America had no chance of surviving, let alone surviving as a good country, without widespread belief in God and adherence to Bible-based morality, that is, ethical monotheism.

America was always a religious country, and it remains the most religious of industrialized Western democracies. America derived its strength from religion, not secularism. It is a rewriting of history to deny the religious origins and purposes of America, or to claim that America was founded to be a secular state. The British historian Paul Johnson, who wrote a magisterial history of the United States, has affirmed America’s religious purpose. “In [George] Washington’s eyes, at least,” Johnson wrote, “America was in no sense a secular state,” and “the American Revolution was in essence the political and military expression of a religious movement.”³²

The phrase “separation of church and state,” which appears in no founding document (only in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson), means that America must never have a state religion, not that the state be indifferent to religion. On the contrary, Kidd writes, “Washington believed that the government should support the interests of general nonsectarian religion.”³³

Jefferson, too, appreciated the indispensable role religion played in American life. In his first inaugural address, he described Americans as possessing: “A chosen country…enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?”³⁴

Only in a deeply religious country would its leaders proclaim, as the Continental Congress did in 1774 and 1775, Days of Fasting, calling on all Americans to confess their sins and repent. To this day every session of Congress is opened by a member of the clergy invoking God’s blessings.

The Jewish Roots

Both believing Christians and the Christian ethical monotheists who founded America regarded Americans as a chosen people. But unlike the Church in Europe, these Christians did not see themselves as replacing Israel’s chosenness, but rather as being a “Second Israel.” In that sense and in so many others, America has Jewish roots.

• America may be said to be the first Judeo-Christian country.
• Even the so-called deists, Jefferson and Franklin, were Judeo-centered. Jefferson and Franklin had a great seal of the United States designed, and on it was depicted the Jews leaving Egypt. Just as the Jews left Egypt, Americans left Europe.^*
• Until the nineteenth century students at Harvard University were required to study Hebrew.
• The inscription on the Liberty Bell is from the Torah.
• The insignia of Yale University is from the Torah, and it is in Hebrew. It appears on the breastplate worn by the Jewish high priest.
• George Washington, among many others, was a Mason and “Rituals firmly placed Jewish biblical tradition at the heart of all Masonry.”³⁵
• Abraham Lincoln referred to the United States as the “almost-chosen” people.

JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES

America was founded on Judeo-Christian values. These are values originating in the Jewish scriptures (the Old Testament), especially the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), as applied to society by American Christians.

Before explaining these values, some preliminary observations:

First, in order to affirm or live by these values one does not have to be a Jew or Christian, or to affirm Jewish or Christian theology. These values do not demand that one forsake one’s ethnic, religious, or national identity. The proof, as we have seen, is that the Founders of America themselves embraced Judeo-Christian values while frequently not holding Christian (and obviously not Jewish) theological beliefs. They were models of how these values can be held without being a religious Christian or Jew.

Second, the converse is also true. Just as one can hold Judeo-Christian values without holding specific Jewish or Christian religious beliefs, there are believing Christians and Jews who do not hold all or even most Judeo-Christian values. These Jews and Christians affirm Leftist values alongside their Christian and Jewish religious beliefs. But Judeo-Christian values are in deep conflict with Leftist values, which is why there has been such a concerted effort on the part of the Left to undo the influence of religion in America and other Western societies. It has largely succeeded in doing so in Western Europe, which has been almost thoroughly secularized and rendered Leftist in its values—so much so that many of the remaining religious Christian leaders, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, are indistinguishable from secular Leftists in their values.

Nevertheless, Left-wing Jews and Christians argue that they are not only committed to Judeo-Christian values, but that they are actually more committed to Judaism and Christianity than other Jews and Christians, since they care more about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry.

This argument is only another testimony to the high self-esteem in which the Left holds itself. Who, pray tell, is for leaving the naked unclothed and the hungry without food? Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism advocated caring for the helpless millennia before Marx was born. So, when the Jewish, Christian, or secular Left tell us repeatedly that they are for clothing the naked, they really mean two other things: (1) Their opponents are not for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and (2) Only those who affirm Left-wing policies are.

Third, as is the case with American values, most people who believe they hold Judeo-Christian values cannot identify—let alone advocate—many of them. These values, therefore need to be explained.

Fourth, a word about why we need values. It may seem obvious, and it should be. But in the present Age of Feelings, it isn’t. If people were basically good, we wouldn’t need values; we could rely on the human heart to always do the right thing. But the heart is not a moral compass; it is a generator of emotions. Values are there to overrule our heart, our emotions, our appetites, our weaknesses, and even our often flawed reasoning. I have noted one example of the substitution of feelings for values: the answer I have received for thirty years when asking American high school and college students whether they would first try to save their dog or a stranger if both were drowning. At most, one-third vote that they would try to save the human being first. Two-thirds consistently say either that they would save their pet first or they just don’t know what to do.

Why do they not all vote to save the human? Because they love their dog or cat, they do not love the stranger, and they are guided by a feeling, love. And what is greater than love? In fact, however, there is something greater than love—namely, moral values. In this case that value is the greater worth of a human being.

The best-known animal-rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, funded by many of the best-educated individuals in our society, launched a campaign called “Holocaust on your plate,” which equates barbecuing millions of chickens with cremating millions of Jews in the Holocaust. PETA believes that there is no difference between the value of chicken life and human life.

Only a morally confused age could produce so many people who do not recognize the immeasurable distance between human and animal worth. We live in that age. We do in large measure because values based on God and the Bible have been replaced by feelings and/or by Leftist values.

The moral record of Christian Europe is, to be sure, a mixed one, especially regarding the one continuous religious minority that lived in its midst—the Jews. One has to be quite naive to believe that faith in God guarantees moral clarity, let alone moral behavior. But Chesterton was right about people not believing in nothing but believing in anything with the death of belief in God. The collapse of Christianity in Europe led to the horrors of Nazism and Communism. And to the moral confusions of the present.

The oft-cited charge that belief in God and religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is as untrue as it is widely believed. Secular movements in the twentieth century alone killed and enslaved more people than any other movement in any century in history.

In fact, it was a secular Jew, the great German poet Heinrich Heine, who understood that despite its anti-Semitism and other moral failings, Christianity in Europe prevented the wholesale slaughter of human beings. In 1832, 101 years before Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, in the concluding passage of his Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heine prophesied:

Christianity—and that is its greatest merit—has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame…. The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedral….

Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder…comes rolling somewhat slowly, but…its crash…will be unlike anything before in the history of the world…. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away…. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.³⁶

When that “restraining talisman, the cross,” was shattered, fifty million people were slaughtered.

Judeo-Christian Values, Not Judeo-Christian Theology

Many people wonder how anyone can speak of Judeo-Christian values when Judaism and Christianity have different, sometimes mutually exclusive, beliefs.

The answer is that we speak only of Judeo-Christian values, not Judeo-Christian theology. Religious beliefs and moral values are not the same things.

Of course, Judaism and Christianity have differing beliefs. If they had the same beliefs, they would be the same religion. Christianity believes in a Trinity that Judaism does not believe in, and that is a major theological difference. But it has little or no relevance to moral values. So, too, Christianity believes that the Messiah has come, whereas Judaism believes that he has not yet come. This, too, is a theological, not a moral values, issue.

Regarding essential values, both religions are based on the Old Testament, which Judaism and Christianity both hold to be divinely authored or divinely inspired. There are a few values differences between the Old and New Testaments—for example their views on the permissibility of divorce—but in general, conservative, traditional, believing Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Jews have much the same views on moral issues. Another way to put it is that virtually all those who regard the Torah as divine (that would include Mormons as well) share moral values—values that are called, quite correctly, Judeo-Christian.

Judeo-Christian values are values that emanate from a Jewish scriptures–based Christianity. Christians always had the choice to reject the Jewish roots of Christianity, to ignore those roots, or to celebrate and embrace them. American Christians have, more than any other Christian group, embraced them. For much of Christian history, however, the majority of Christians either denied the Jewish origins of Christianity and/or ignored the Jewishness of Jesus and the Apostles.

The great achievement of Judeo-Christian values as developed in America is that they combined the best of both religions and cast aside some other aspects. For example, the Christian emphasis on faith above works led too often to faith without works. And, while most American Christians continue to hold that only faith in Christ saves, the Judeo-based American Christian has always emphasized good works in the here and now—as well as the need to work alongside non-Christians who affirm Judeo-Christian values.

As for Judaism, Judeo-Christian values helped universalize Jewish moral teachings in ways that religious Jews, historically preoccupied with Jewish survival and religious observance, had not done. Over the centuries, God-centered, Torah-believing Jews retreated from mainstream society. They did so because anti-Semitism forced Jews into ghettos and because Jewish ritual laws increasingly restricted contact with non-Jews. (On the other hand, though Jews were exiled from their homeland for thousands of years, most of them in hostile societies, it was Jewish rituals that kept Judaism and the Jews alive—while the abandonment of ritual, for example, Sabbath observance, has hurt Christianity.)

We now turn to the important task of defining some of the basic Judeo-Christian values.

Basic Judeo-Christian Values

1. People Are Not Basically Good

American values are predicated on the recognition that people are not born basically good, but morally flawed.

Thomas Kidd writes, “In promoting this God-centered idea of virtue, [the great eighteenth-century revivalist preacher Jonathan] Edwards was fighting against the tide of most eighteenth century philosophy associated with the Enlightenment, which asserted that people were naturally good…”³⁷

The men who founded America were not seduced by Enlightenment fantasy about human nature. John Adams reflected on this in a letter to a friend: “When men are given up to the rule of their passions, they murder like weasels for the pleasure of murdering, like bulldogs and bloodhounds in a fold of sheep.”³⁸

James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, the seminal essays on behalf of the proposed U.S. Constitution, written by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay: “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”³⁹

Madison attended Princeton University when its president was the Reverend John Witherspoon. The reverend’s outlook on human nature: “Nothing can be more absolutely necessary to true religion, than a clear and full conviction of the sinfulness of our nature and state.”⁴⁰

Those who believe people are born good argue that babies are born innocent. They are right. But people confuse innocence with goodness. Babies are born innocent, but not good. No culture—including Judaism—prior to the Enlightenment held that human beings are naturally good.^*

No issue has a greater influence on people’s social and political views than whether they view human nature as basically good or not.

Blame Outside Forces, Not the Individual, for Evil

Those who believe that people are not basically good blame the evil that people do on individuals not controlling their flawed nature or on their holding beliefs that lead to evil. On the other hand, those who believe that people are born good attribute the evil that people do to forces outside the individual. They have no choice. If people are intrinsically good, evil must originate outside the individual.

One of the most widely cited external causes of evil is poverty. This has been so since Marx because of the materialist nature of Marxist and other Leftist thinking: Economics explains human behavior more than any one other thing. As a result, our secular liberal culture has usually attributed evil to poverty. This is true whether the evil are domestic criminals or international terrorists. A typical Left/liberal explanation for violent crime in America is unemployment and poverty in America and a typical Left/liberal explanation for international terrorism is unemployment and poverty in Muslim countries. Both explanations are wrong.

To take the terrorist example first, the nineteen Muslim terrorists who committed the 9/11 atrocities in the United States were all from middle-and upper-class families. So, too, Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh, better known as “Sheikh Omar,” the man who was sentenced to death in Pakistan in 2002 for the beheading murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl and suspected of links to the September 11, 2001, attacks, came from a privileged background. Born in Britain in the early 1970s, Omar was the son of a well-to-do wholesale clothes merchant, and he attended the London School of Economics. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim who attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from London as it landed in Detroit, had been enrolled, at a cost of $25,000 a year, as a student at University College, London.⁴¹

The fact is that people who strap bombs to their bodies to blow up families at a Bar Mitzvah in Israel, plant bombs at a nightclub in Bali, or slit stewardesses’ throats and ram airplanes filled with innocent Americans into office buildings do not do so for any reason related to poverty. They do so because they hold evil beliefs and have deformed consciences.

“Poverty causes crime” has been a credo of the Left since Marx. Abolish poverty, the thinking goes, and you will essentially end human evil.

Take the recession in America beginning in 2008, America’s worst recession since the Great Depression. Just about every liberal and Leftist who has commented on this phenomenon expressed surprise that the crime rate actually declined during this period.

Tim Rutten, Left-wing columnist for the Los Angeles Times: “The remarkable thing is that the last 36 months of decline [in crime rates] have coincided with the worst period of economic distress since the Depression…. Serious historians and analysts now acknowledge that the reasons crime—and, particularly, homicide—waxes and wanes are complex…” (emphasis added)⁴²

To this man of the Left, it is “remarkable” not only that increased poverty did not lead to increased crime but also that crime actually sank to its lowest level in half a century. And “serious” historians and analysts only now acknowledge that the reasons for crime are “complex,” meaning not necessarily related to economics. Of course, everybody else has known this for thousands of years. But by “serious,” our liberal columnist means liberal. Only liberal historians and analysts are serious; and they all believed that since poverty causes crime, a recession will bring about a significant increase in crime.

Writing on the same subject—the plunging level of crime in Los Angeles—a Los Angeles Times editorial the day before the Rutten article acknowledged that “[s]ociologists and criminologists [that is, liberal sociologists and criminologists] once doubted that police could do much about violent crime,” but, alas, they turned out to be wrong. Now, why would liberal sociologists and criminologists ever have thought such a foolish thing? Because they believed that poverty and socioeconomic circumstances determined violent crime rates much more than values and policing did.

Another example of an external factor widely blamed by the Left for violent crime is racism. This is particularly so in the United States, where blacks have accounted for a highly disproportionate amount of violent crime (which is directed mostly against fellow blacks, one might add). This is as false as the poverty explanation for violent crime.^*

Finally, if poverty and racism are responsible for violent crime committed by poor and black criminals, how does one explain the great majority of poor people and blacks who do not commit robbery, rape, and murder? Do they react abnormally to their poverty and race? Or do they have better values and self-control?

Goodness and Character Are Neglected in Raising Young People

A second reason the question of whether people are born good is so important is that when society and parents believe that people are born good, they do not stress character development in the raising of children. Why would they? The already good don’t need to learn how to be good. Just give them love, the thinking goes.

In the past, when Americans understood that people are not born good, parents and schools emphasized the teaching of moral character. This was regarded as the primary task of education. After all, what is the worth of knowing literature, the arts, history, and the sciences if not to make a decent human being?

But now schools teach young people everything but character development. They are taught the alleged dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke, how to use condoms, how to avoid using plastic bags, and how to slow global warming. And they have been taught how to struggle against the alleged evils of American society, such as sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia.

The struggle they have not been taught is the one they most need to wage: against their own natures. Arguably the greatest difference between a religious education and a secular one is that students in secular schools learn that their greatest struggles are with society, while the religious students are taught that the greatest struggle is with themselves and their morally flawed human natures—their natural inclinations toward laziness, insatiable appetites, self-centeredness, greed, and so on.

God and Religion Become Unnecessary

A third consequence of the belief that people are basically good is to render God and religion morally unnecessary. Why would basically good people need a God to hold themselves accountable to or a religion to provide them with moral standards?

Faith in Oneself and in Power

And fourth, those who believe that people are basically good will, obviously, believe that they themselves are good. This certitude about their own goodness leads to some very significant attitudes. One is that Leftists view those who differ with them not as merely wrong, but as bad. Another is faith in men (and women) holding power. Those who, like the American Founders, regard the human being as a fundamentally morally flawed creature do not trust the concentration of political power in anyone. The Left does.

 

NO GREAT BODY OF WISDOM, East or West, ever posited that people were basically good. This naive and dangerous notion originated in modern secular Western thought. It is another example of the absence of wisdom and the dangers ensuing from the death of God and religion in the West.

2. God-Based Morality

No God, No Good and Evil

To the Founders of the United States, from evangelical Christian to deist, it was axiomatic that God and God-based religion were indispensable to morality. That, of course, is the Judeo-Christian position and the only rational position. Only if there is a moral God do right and wrong really exist. If there is no God, “right” and “wrong” are opinions. In other words, if there is no God who says, “Do not murder” (“Do not kill” is a mistranslation of the Hebrew, which, like English, has two words for homicide), murder is not wrong. Many people may think it is wrong, and it may well comport with common sense, but it is still subjective opinion. There are no moral “facts” if there is no God; there are only moral opinions.

Years ago, I debated this issue at Oxford University with Professor Jonathan Glover, one of the leading moralists of our time. Because he is a man of great intellectual honesty, he readily acknowledged, even though he is an atheist, that without God, morality is subjective.⁴³ Glover is not alone among atheist thinkers who acknowledge that good and evil do not objectively exist if there is no God. Most serious moral thinkers do. Another atheist professor with whom I dialogued was Steve Stewart-Williams, lecturer in evolutionary psychology at Swansea University in Wales.⁴⁴ He, too, acknowledged the subjectivity of morality without God. And one of the most revered liberal (and atheist) philosophers of the modern era, Richard Rorty, wrote that for secular liberals, “there is no answer to the question, ‘Why not be cruel?’”⁴⁵ You cannot get more honest than that regarding the absence of objective morality if there is no God.

Most secular individuals, however, do not acknowledge this, the most important fact about morality. They deny it because they recognize that if good and evil do not objectively exist, good and evil are no more real than “yummy” and “yucky,” and they are exquisitely uncomfortable with this fact. Secularists want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to deny the only possible source of objective morality, God, and still believe that good and evil really exist. They want this because life is a moral absurdity if there is no good and evil, and few people can make psychological or emotional peace with an absurd world. It is too painful for most decent secular people to realize that their moral relativism, their godless morality, means that cruelty is not really wrong, and there is no objective answer to Rorty’s question.

As for the argument that human beings have a conscience that tells them that murder is wrong, those of us who believe in God as the source of morality would agree. But given the inability to locate this conscience in any laboratory, belief in the existence of a conscience is tantamount to belief in God. Those who believe that only matter is real, and that therefore only science can tell us what is real, cannot at the same time argue that there is a non-material, non-scientifically provable conscience. And if there really is this non-material, non-scientifically provable conscience, it is the non-material, non-scientifically provable God who created it.

The denial of God and of Judeo-Christian religions has, therefore, led to moral relativism. With no objective good and evil, morality has devolved into “What I think is right is right for me, and what you think is right is right for you,” or “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

In the late 1970s, in a public interview in Los Angeles, I asked one of the leading liberal writers of the past generation, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., if he would say that the United States was a morally superior society to that of the Soviet Union. Even when I repeated the question, and clarified that I readily acknowledged the existence of good individuals in the Soviet Union and bad ones in America, he refused to do so.

The Left fears and rejects the language of good and evil because they realize that it smacks of religious values and because it violates its moral relativism. This is also one of the most important differences between America and Europe. A New York Times article on European-American differences forthrightly acknowledged this divide: “The secularization of Europe, according to some political analysts, is one of the forces pushing it apart from the United States, where religion plays a potent role in politics and society, shaping many Americans’ views of the world. Americans are widely regarded as more comfortable with notions of good and evil, right and wrong, than Europeans, who often see such views as reckless.” (emphasis added)⁴⁶

A major reason for the Left’s loathing of American president George W. Bush was his use of moral language such as in his widely condemned description of the regimes of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as an “axis of evil.” But if those tyrannical regimes were not “evil,” nothing is. Which is the point to the Left. It often seems that the only evil according to the moral relativists of the Left is the judging of evil (even though, in a remarkable failure of self-awareness, the Left does it all the time).

Is abortion morally wrong? In the secular Left world, the answer is “It’s between a woman and her physician.” Whatever one’s view of abortion, there is no clearer expression of moral relativism than every woman determining whether abortion is moral. To the individual with Judeo-Christian values, or even just common sense, the morality of ending the life of a human fetus is not determined anew by each individual. If it is, then “moral” means nothing more than personal opinion, and the tens of millions of abortions of female fetuses (largely in China and parts of India) performed for no reason other than a desire for a boy are perfectly “moral.”

Probably the best-known verse in the Bible is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). It is a reflection of the secular age in which we live that few people are aware that the verse concludes with the words “I am God.” The point of this verse is that this great ethical principle comes from God; otherwise it is just another man-made suggestion, no more compelling than “Cross at the green, not in between.”

Let it be clear that nothing said here suggests that an atheist cannot be a good person or that all believers in God are good people. When we say that if there is no God, there is no good and evil, we are not saying that an atheist cannot be a good person. We are saying that there is no objective good and evil.

What has supplanted belief in the existence of moral truths are feelings about what is moral. Many children have been raised to ask, “How do I feel about it?” rather than “Is it right or wrong?” An example of this was the “Values Clarification” programs many American public schools utilized in the United States in the 1970s. Its name says it all. The program merely clarified the values the students held; it did not tell them what values are better or worse. How could it? If moral values are not objective, no values can be taught as true, or as superior to any other.

This has been confirmed by an extensive study of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-three conducted by sociologist Christian Smith of Notre Dame University and discussed by New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing….

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all….

Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it….

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste….

As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong….”

Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart. (emphasis added)⁴⁷

The death of God leads to the death of right and wrong as real, and ultimately to the death of universal moral standards, as opposed to feelings-based individual opinions.^*

If Not to God, to Whom Is One Accountable?

A second reason God is necessary to morality is that if there is no God, there is no moral accountability to anyone but the self and/or society. One has to have a very elevated belief in the innate goodness of human beings to believe that accountability to oneself will work. And one has to have a very elevated belief in the goodness of society and of its leaders—and their ability to catch and punish those who do evil—to believe that accountability to society will work.

But even with an exalted view of the self and of society, there is still no real accountability without God. By accountability, we are talking about reward and punishment; without reward and punishment, accountability means nothing. That is the bigger reason accountability to oneself is meaningless. In addition to how easy it is for the individual to convince himself of the righteousness of whatever he does, one cannot reward or punish oneself like society or God does.

All of the American Founders, whatever their theology, believed that individuals and nations are accountable to a God who rewards and punishes—generally speaking, nations in this world and individuals in the next.

3. Reason Without God Is Ineffective

Those who do not believe that moral values must come from the Bible or from God argue that they have a better source for values: reason. That is why the era that began the assault on religion is known as the Age of Reason. It ushered in the modern secular era, a time when the men of the “Enlightenment” assumed that mankind would be liberated from the irrational shackles of religious faith, and rely solely on reason to make a good world.

As it happened, the era following the decline of religion in Europe led not to unprecedented moral greatness, but often to unprecedented levels of irrationality, cruelty, and mass murder.

The secular argument posits that those of us who rely on reason will all agree that stealing is wrong because reason tells us so: We don’t want to be stolen from, the argument goes, and therefore all reasonable men will conclude that stealing is wrong.

But this reasoning is flawed. What if I am stronger than others and can get away with stealing? What if I don’t care about the general human good, just my own? What if the rush I get from stealing is worth it? Why then is my decision to steal, especially if I am pretty certain I will get away with it, irrational?

The fact is that it is not an irrational decision.

It is wishful thinking that reason alone inevitably leads to the good. If anything, goodness in the world would probably diminish if reason alone dictated human behavior. The firefighter with a family to support who risks his life to save an elderly person from a burning building is not acting on reason. Nor are the Christian missionaries who leave lucrative careers in the West to work among impoverished people in the Third World. Nor does the individual who takes care of his or her spouse who has Alzheimer’s.

To argue that such actions are derived from reason alone is to argue that every person whose actions are guided by reason will engage in similar acts of self-sacrifice, and that anyone who does not engage in self-sacrifice is acting irrationally. But that itself is an irrational argument. Did those non-Jews in Europe who risked their lives to save a Jew during the Holocaust act on the dictates of reason? In a lifetime of studying rescuers’ motives, I have never come across an instance of an individual who risked his or her life to save Jews because of reason. There is a good explanation: It was quite irrational for non-Jews to risk their lives—and often the lives of their family members as well—to save Jews.

In sum, there are at least five problems with reason as a guide to morality when divorced from God.

First, with regard to many vexing moral questions, there is no such thing as a purely rational viewpoint. What is the purely rational view on the morality of abortion? On public nudity? On medical experimentation on animals? On capital punishment for murder? On any of these issues, reason alone can argue for opposite positions. What impels people to do the right thing in these instances is a value that is higher than reason (though one should be able to rationally explain that value).

Second, as noted, reason can often argue for evil as easily as it can for good. Reason is only a tool, and therefore it is amoral. If you want to achieve good, reason is immensely helpful, and if you want to commit evil, reason is immensely helpful. It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right.

Third, human beings are usually incapable of morally functioning on the basis of reason alone. Our passions, psychological makeup, values, beliefs, emotions, and experiences all influence the ways in which even the most rational person determines what is moral and especially whether to act on it. Anyone who thinks that he guides all his moral decisions by reason alone is thinking irrationally.

Fourth, the belief that reason alone is sufficient to produce a moral world is itself irrational and must be based on an irrational belief—that people are basically good. After all, if people are not basically good, they are hardly likely to use reason solely to do the right thing.

Fifth, even when reason does lead to moral conclusions, it does not compel one to act on those conclusions. Let’s return to the example of the non-Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. Imagine that a Jewish family knocks on a non-Jewish family’s door, asking to be hidden. Imagine further that on rational grounds alone (though I cannot think of any), the non-Jew decides that the moral thing to do is hide the Jews. Will he act on this decision at the risk of his life? Not if reason alone guides him. People don’t risk their lives for strangers on the basis of reason. They do so on the basis of faith in something that far transcends reason, or just because their nature is such that they cannot say no to people whose lives they can perhaps save.

None of this means that reason is useless. Good would be impossible if people ignored reason. A reason-free world would be a nightmare. Reason and rational thought are hallmarks of human greatness. Reason is as necessary to goodness as oxygen is to life. But, like oxygen, reason is necessary, but not sufficient. Alone, reason is largely worthless in the greatest quest of all—producing large numbers of decent human beings and decent societies. To accomplish that, a moral God, belief in a divinely revealed moral text—such as the Ten Commandments—and, yes, reason, are all necessary. And even then, as history has made abundantly clear, there are no guarantees.

But if you want a quick evaluation of where godless reason leads, look at the irrationality and moral confusion that permeate the embodiment of reason without God—the Western university.

The Judeo-Christian value system and the American value system are rooted in a good and moral God who demands that His human creations choose goodness and morality—and use reason to help determine how to apply the divine moral will in any given situation.

4. Human Life Is Sacred and Humans Are at the Center of the Universe

To return to the question I have posed for decades: If your dog (or other beloved pet) and a stranger (a person whose identity you did not know) were both drowning, which would you save?

The answer depends on whether one’s moral guidance is rooted primarily in feelings or in values that may conflict with one’s feelings.

One of the most obvious and significant differences between secular and Judeo-Christian values concerns human worth. One of the great ironies of secular humanism is that it leads to a devaluing of humans. In secular thought, human beings are frequently depicted as essentially just another animal, and as one moves leftward, humans are often depicted as banes on the environment.

The God-based Judeo-Christian value system renders man far more valuable and significant than any secular value system possibly can. Indeed, it places man at the center of creation.^*

The reason is simple: Only if there is a God who created man and made him “in His image” is man worth more than any other creation. If we are not created in the image of God, we are created in the image of carbon dioxide and primordial biological matter. We are no more than self-conscious matter. Which attitude renders the human being more valuable is obvious.

Contemporary secular society has rendered human beings less significant than at any time in Western history.

The secular denial that human beings are created in God’s image has led to a concerted effort on the part of secular thinkers, especially those on the Left, to minimize the difference between humans and animals. As Dan Wharton of the Chicago Zoological Society, a population biologist and research scientist at Columbia University, has written, “I have come to the conclusion that the so-called divide between animals and humans is really a laugh. The only concrete difference that I can find is that a few humans are better readers than most animals.”⁴⁸

Wharton’s view that the “so-called” divide between animals and humans “is really a laugh” is the normative secular Left-wing view of humanity.

One result is that many people estranged from Judeo-Christian values (including more than a few Jews and Christians) support public awareness campaigns such as the previously noted “Holocaust on Your Plate,” the effort by PETA to convince us that there is no difference between barbecuing chickens and burning Jews in the Holocaust—since humans and chickens are of equal worth.

The human-animal equation is not theoretical. A Tucson, Arizona, woman screamed to firefighters that her “babies” were in her burning house. Thinking that the woman’s children were trapped inside, the firemen risked their lives to save the woman’s three cats.⁴⁹

Those inclined to dismiss these examples as either theoretical (the dog-stranger question) or extreme (the Tucson “mother” of cats) need to confront the very real question of animal experimentation to save human lives. More and more people believe as PETA does that even if it led to a cure for cancer, it is wrong to experiment on animals. (The defense that research with computers can teach all that experiments on animals teach is not true.) In fact, many animal rights advocates oppose killing a pig to obtain a heart valve to save a human life.

Belief in human-animal equivalence follows the death of Judeo-Christian values, and it serves not so much to elevate animal worth as to reduce human worth. Those who believe it is immoral to kill animals for any reason, including eating and humane medical experimentation, should reflect on this: While there are strong links between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans, there are no links between kindness to animals and kindness to humans. Cruelty to animals frequently indicates a tendency toward cruelty to fellow human beings. But kindness to animals does not indicate that a person will be kind to other people. The Nazis, noted for their cruelty to human beings, were also the most pro-animal-rights group prior to the contemporary period. They outlawed experimentation on animals—but performed widespread experiments on human beings. And Hitler was famously affectionate toward his German shepherd, Blondie, while consigning millions of people to hellish misery and agonizing death.

The breakdown of Judeo-Christian values greatly diminishes human worth. If man is not created by God, in the divine image, the human being is stellar dust, the product of random chance, no more designed—or significant—than a grain of sand.

5. Holiness: We Are Not Animals

If humans are only animals, another key Judeo-Christian concept, the value of holiness is rendered moot.

People who do not believe in God or religion can surely lead ethical lives. But they are very unlikely to lead holy lives. By definition, the ideal of the holy, as understood by Judaism and Christianity and that unique amalgam known as Judeo-Christian values, needs God and religion.

Perhaps the best way to explain holiness is this: There is a continuum from the profane to the holy that represents the dual bases of human nature—the animal and the divine. The human being can be said to be created in both the image of God and in the image of animals. We are biologically animals, but in spiritual and moral terms we transcend mere biology. God is the most holy, and animals, as helpful, loyal, and lovable as many are, are at the opposite end of the holiness continuum. This is in no way an insult to animals. Saying dogs and lions are not holy is no more degrading to them than saying men are not cars. It’s simply reflective of the fact that they cannot elevate themselves above the animal level, while human beings can.

There is a secular way to understand this. If we see a person eating food with his face in a bowl, we think that he’s eating “like a pig” or “like an animal.” Now, that is considered an insult to a person—because humans are supposed to elevate their behavior above the animal (this is a goal of Judeo-Christian and every other major religious tradition). But it is no insult to an animal. When an animal eats face-first out of a bowl, we do not think ill of it; but when a person mimics animal behavior, we do have a lower view of that person. So, even nonreligious society has imbibed some of the religious view that acting like an animal is not how a human being should generally act.

To better understand this, one needs to appreciate that holiness is not necessarily a moral category. It is not immoral to eat with one’s face inside a bowl, given the general understanding of morality as whether an action “hurts anybody.” But it is animal-like, not elevated, and therefore unholy.

Elevating human behavior toward the divine is one of the greatest achievements of religion and civil society.

If, in the sexual arena, we did behave like animals, society would eventually devolve. An aspect of societies that are deemed primitive is their not placing a marital fence around sexual intercourse. This can also be seen in the Western world’s underclass, where sex and having children outside of marriage is normative and marriage has been in precipitous decline (to the detriment of all people living in those communities, especially the children who are often subjected to chaotic home lives and grow up to repeat the cycle). The religious ideal of confining sexual intercourse to marriage has played a major role in the creation of advanced civilization.

Speech is another example. In our increasingly secular world, the concept of elevating one’s speech is increasingly rare. The idea is so foreign that perhaps most young people, raised in a secular home and society, would not even understand the concept. If you see a vehicle with a bumper sticker that contains an expletive, you can be sure that the owner of that vehicle does not regularly attend religious services.

The consequences of the death of the holy are ubiquitous. Secular Europe is far readier to feature nudity on public television than is Judeo-Christian America, and it is far more accepting of people walking around nude in public at beaches. The Judeo-Christian problem with public nudity at a beach or even at a nudist colony is not about religiously licit or illicit sexual behavior; it is that clothing elevates human beings above the animals, whose genitals are always uncovered.

And that is what the Judeo-Christian value system ultimately yearns for—the elevation of human conduct, rather than allowing us to behave like animals. In the final analysis, if the holy breaks down, the ethical and moral will do so as well.

6. Hate Evil

The core moral value of the Bible is not just to love our neighbor but to hate evil. Indeed, it is the only thing the Bible instructs people to hate—so much so that love of God is equated with hatred of evil. “Those who love God must hate evil,” the Psalms declare.⁵⁰

The notion of hating evil was, and remains, foreign to many. Ancients did not have a religious obligation to hate evil. How could they? Their gods were often cruel. Nor did all higher religions place hating evil at the center of their worldviews. In Eastern philosophy and religion, the highest goal was the attainment of enlightenment (Nirvana) through effacing the ego, not through hating and fighting evil. Evil and unjust suffering were regarded as part of life, and it was best to escape life, not necessarily fight it.

In addition, in many cultures, “face,” “shame,” and “honor” define moral norms, not standards of good and evil. In parts of the Muslim world, as we have seen, “honor killings”—the murder of a daughter or sister who has brought “shame” to the family (usually by refusing to marry the father’s choice of a husband or by committing an alleged sexual sin)—are widely viewed as heroic.

In the West, with notable exceptions, Christians historically did not tend to regard evil as the greatest sin but rather unbelief, blasphemy, and sexual sin. Over time, however, Christians came to lead the battle against evil—from slavery to Communism. And today it is not coincidental that America, the country that most thinks in terms of good and evil, is the most religious of the Western industrialized countries.

In the contemporary Western world, most people who identify with the Left hate corporations, pollution, Christian fundamentalists, economic inequality, tobacco, and executing murderers. But they rarely hate the greatest evils of their day.

Communism, a way of life built on murder, lies, and deprivation of the most fundamental human rights, attracted vast numbers of people on the Left, and from the 1960s, it was opposed by only a small fraction of the Left. Even most people calling themselves liberal, not Leftist, spoke out against anti-Communism much more than against Communism.

Ask Leftists what they believe humanity must fight against, and they will likely respond poverty, inequality, and whatever they perceive as threats to the natural environment. In fact, the Left throughout the world generally has contempt for people who speak of “evil.” The Left labels such people “Manichaeans,” moral simpletons who see the world “in terms of black and white.”

The American labeling of evil as such—not to mention often fighting these evils—is a major divide between America and Europe. As an editor of the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, wrote about Europe: “The notion of the world divided between Good and Evil is perceived with dread.”⁵¹ Similarly, the leading German weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, commented during the Bush administration that “Mr. Bush’s recent speeches have made no retreat from the good vs. evil view of the world that the Europeans hate.”⁵²

Typical of the Left’s deconstruction of good and evil is this series of questions posed on the Left-wing website Counterpunch by Gary Leupp, a professor of history and comparative religion at Tufts University: “Questions for discussion. Was Attila good or evil to invade Gaul? Saddam good or evil to invade Kuwait? Hitler good or evil to invade Poland? Bush good or evil to invade Iraq? Are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ really adequate categories to evaluate contemporary and historical events?” (emphasis added)

Western Europeans on the Left, and their American counterparts, have disdain for the language of good and evil and correctly attribute it to America’s religious—that is, Judeo-Christian—values. Among those values is fighting evil. And to do that, you have to hate it. Because if you don’t hate evil, you won’t fight it. And good will lose.

7. Murderers Must Die

One cannot identify all Jews or all Christians with Judeo-Christian values. Even many sincerely religious Jews and Christians take certain positions that are contrary to traditional Judeo-Christian, and certainly biblical, values.

A particularly contentious example is the death penalty for murderers. Many Jews and Christians take the Left-wing position on the death penalty for murder. They believe that all murderers should be kept alive—that it is not only wrong to take the life of a murderer, but actually un-Jewish or un-Christian.

Jews opposed to capital punishment cite the Talmud (the second most important religious text to Jews), which is largely opposed to capital punishment. The rabbis of the Talmud, living as they did in a time of monstrous state cruelty in the Roman Empire, came to loathe state execution even though the Torah adamantly demanded it. Meanwhile Christian opponents of the death penalty for murder often cite Jesus on loving one’s enemies. And Catholic abolitionists also cite the late Pope John Paul II and the many cardinals and bishops who, though not denying the Church’s teachings on the permissibility of the state to take the life of a murderer, oppose capital punishment.

Yet the notion that a murderer must give up his life is one of the central values in the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. In fact, taking the life of a murderer is the only law that is found in all five books of the Torah. That is remarkable in and of itself. It is even more remarkable considering how few laws there are in the first book, Genesis. Yet the law is in Genesis, and it is given after God wiped out nearly all of what had become a universally wicked humanity as a fundamental value in the maintenance of moral civilization: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God He created him (Genesis 9:6).”

The Torah’s reasoning is that societies that allow all murderers to keep their lives consider murder a less serious crime than it is and thereby cheapen the worth of human life. The punishment for a crime is the most convincing way in which a society teaches its members how serious that crime is. This is easily demonstrated. Imagine a society that meted out the same punishment to murderers as to those who had parked their car in a no-parking zone. That society would obviously be communicating that it regards murder as no more serious a crime than illegal parking. In the same way, a society that allows all murderers to live deems murder less awful than one that takes away the life of a murderer.

Opponents of the death penalty argue that they oppose the taking of any murderer’s life precisely because they value human life so highly. They argue that you cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. But that is the same as arguing that you can’t teach that stealing is wrong by stealing (that is, confiscating) a thief’s money or that you can’t teach that kidnapping is wrong by kidnapping (that is, imprisoning) kidnappers.

To the Torah, the first source of Judeo-Christian values, murder is the greatest sin; the immoral shedding of human blood (as opposed to the moral shedding of human blood in self-defense, in a just war, or in the execution of a murderer) pollutes the world. That is why the Torah legislated that even an animal that killed a human should be put to death. The purpose was not to punish the animal; animals do not have free choice and cannot be morally culpable. And it was hardly to teach other animals not to kill. It was because a human life is so valuable, it cannot be taken without the taker forfeiting its life.

But, some will object, the Torah decrees the death penalty for many infractions, yet we don’t put to death people who practice witchcraft, or commit adultery or other capital infractions. Why those who murder?

There are two answers.

First, the only capital crime mentioned in the Bible before there were Jews or Israel is murder. Other death penalties applied specifically to the people of Israel when they entered the Land of Israel—a unique code of behavior for a unique time in a unique place. And virtually none of them were carried out. Other than for murder, the primary purpose of declaring a sin worthy of capital punishment was not to actually execute the sinner, but to declare how serious the infraction was—especially when a society was establishing itself as the first one based on ethical monotheism. Capital punishment for murder, on the other hand, was clearly intended for all time and for all people. It is independent of the existence of Jews, and independent of the Jews living in Israel. It is fundamental to the existence of a humane order.^*

Second, all the other death penalties are laws. But the death penalty for murder is not only a law; it is a value. Laws may be time-bound or even place-bound. Values are eternal. Thus the Christians who believe in the divinity of the Torah are not bound to the Torah’s dietary laws (such as not eating pork and shellfish), but they are bound to the value of taking the life of murderers.

Finally, the Old Testament is preoccupied with justice. And allowing one who has unjustly deprived another person of life to keep his own is the ultimate injustice. It is not coincidental that the United States, the one major industrialized democracy to retain the death penalty for murder, is also the one most prepared to fight evil around the world.

8. Distinctions and Order

It is difficult to overstate the depth of the differences between the Judeo-Christian view of the world and that of its opponents on the Left. In addition to such basic issues as objective versus relative morality, it involves the question of whether there is order to the world. Basic to the biblical worldview is the proposition that God made order out of chaos—order expressed largely through separation and distinction.

Order is dependent upon distinctions, and order reflects the divine. Attempts to abolish those differences represent a denial of that order, a denial that leads to chaos, moral and otherwise. Here are some of the distinctions that are central to the Judeo-Christian worldview. All are under attack.

Good and Evil

Central to the Judeo-Christian value system is that good and evil exist and are polar opposites: “Woe unto those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). As the breakdown of good and evil as objective moral realities has been discussed in a number of contexts, I will note one additional example here. It was expressed by one of England’s leading crime novelists, Ruth Rendell, regarding about as clear an evil as exists—the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden. Jeanette Winterson of the Guardian wrote:

“My friend Ruth Rendell was in conversation at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last weekend. Her sell-out audience was conservative and over-50. Someone asked a question about pure evil, citing the terrorist attacks on America as an example. With great presence, Rendell replied that we could not categorise such attacks as evil, since they were carried out from the highest motives and in the name of freedom. The audience hated this reply—there was a collective and audible shudder. Yet who reading Bin Laden’s speeches can doubt it? There is no cynicism in the man—he has never heard of a spin doctor…”⁵³

God and Man

God and man constitute a separation that many modern people reject. For Marx and Engels “man is God” and “God is man,” and many people today would essentially agree. The idea of God as infinitely higher than man offends the egalitarian impulse. Moreover, when man becomes the source of moral values, he becomes, in effect, his own God.

Man and Woman

“…male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:26).

“A woman must not wear men’s clothing nor a man wear women’s clothing” (Deuteronomy 22:5).

This is the area of the greatest current cultural battle over obliterating a distinction. The Judeo-Christian view is that man and woman are distinct beings, and that civilization rests in large measure on preserving the male-female distinction. That is why Genesis mentions the creation of male and female only with regard to human beings, not with regard to the creation of the animals, even though, obviously, God also created male and female animals.

The Left is working to abolish this distinction. That is in part what the battle for the “transgendered” in “GLBT” is about—“Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered.” It is not only about sympathy for those individuals who feel alienated from the biological sex into which they were born. It is about getting rid of the male-female distinction.

Some schools and government agencies have begun to offer three options under “Gender”: “Male, Female, Other.” And more and more American high schools elect males to be homecoming queens and females to be homecoming kings—they have been well taught that male and female mean little or nothing.⁵⁴ More than a few universities have eliminated men’s and women’s bathrooms—they regard forcing students to identify as male or female as unfair to those who do not identify as either male or female and they do not wish to impose this distinction on any student. There are parents in Sweden and America who are raising their children with no sexual identity (mixed clothing, a gender-neutral name, no consistent references to “him” or to “her”) They do not want to “impose” but rather have the child choose later which, if either, sex to identify as.

The battle over same-sex marriage is ultimately over this issue. If the sex of spouses does not matter, if the sex of parents does not matter, then male and female do not matter. Standing in the way of this movement to remove the male-female distinction are Judeo-Christian values.

Preserving the male-female distinction is a value that may be essential to civilization. Society needs to figure out how to maintain the oldest human distinction and still be fair and decent to sexual minorities. In this instance, as in so many others, the goal should be to maintain both standards and compassion.

Holy and Profane

A major Judeo-Christian distinction is that of the holy and the profane. Applied to speech, for example, this would mean that cursing is regarded much less seriously by those parts of society estranged from Judeo-Christian values. I deal with the cursing issue at length elsewhere. Applied to sex, those who believe in the holy-profane distinction regard sexual intercourse as having a dimension of holiness unknown to the secular schools that have reduced intercourse to being exclusively a health issue.

Differing attitudes toward public displays of sexuality also emanate from the Judeo-Christian–secular divide. When the American popular singer Janet Jackson bared her breast—accidentally or intentionally—on national television during a performance at the most widely watched sporting event in America, the Super Bowl, most religious Americans were disturbed, while commentators on the Left were disturbed only by those who were disturbed. Public and media nudity are often regarded by the Left as signs of societal enlightenment and by those committed to Judeo-Christian values as signs of civilizational decline.^*

Human and Animal

As explained above, Judeo-Christian values strongly distinguish between humans and animals. Human life has infinite worth and sanctity; animal life does not. This does not allow humans to cause animals gratuitous suffering, however.

That Torah law and three others began the long road to protecting animals from needless suffering and awakening human beings to the fact that they must treat animals properly. The Ten Commandments require that even animals must have a day of rest; and Deuteronomy prohibited muzzling an animal when it works in the field⁵⁵ and banned yoking two different species of animals to the same plow.⁵⁶

Great and Poor Art

Just as the distinction between good and evil in the moral realm has been reduced to personal opinion, so, too, has the distinction between great art and junk. There is no longer great art, only art that one enjoys or personally thinks is great. The art world, since the Left’s domination of it began around the turn of the twentieth century, has abandoned its heritage of striving for greatness, for truth, and for beauty. The West’s most prestigious art museums and art galleries routinely feature, and award, works that demonstrate no artistic greatness, beauty, or profundity. What is frequently most honored is that which affronts tradition and especially middle-class bourgeois values.

9. Nature Must Not Be Worshipped

It is difficult to overstate how radically different Old Testament thought was from that of the rest of the world from which it emerged. Among the most radical of these differences was the declaration that God created nature and exists entirely outside of it.

In every society, people deified nature and worshipped nature gods. There were gods of thunder and gods of rain. Mountains were worshipped, as were rivers, animals, and every natural force known to man. In ancient Egypt, gods included the Nile River, the frog, the sun, the gazelle, the bull, the cow, the serpent, the moon, and the crocodile.

Then came Genesis, which announced that a supernatural God, that is, a God who existed above and outside of nature, created nature. Therefore, nothing about nature was divine.

Professor Nahum Sarna of Brandeis University, the author of one of the most important commentaries ever written on the Book of Genesis, put it this way: “The revolutionary Israelite concept of God entails His being wholly separate from the world of His creation and wholly other than what the human mind can conceive or the human imagination depict.”⁵⁷

Another superb commentary on Genesis was written in the 1940s by Umberto Cassuto, a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “Relative to the ideas prevailing among the peoples of the ancient East, we are confronted here with a basically new conception and a spiritual revolution…. The basically new conception consists in the completely transcendental view of the Godhead…the God of Israel is outside and above nature, and the whole of nature, the sun, and the moon, and all the hosts of heaven, and the earth beneath, and the sea that is under the earth, and all that is in them—they are all His creatures which He created according to His will.”⁵⁸

This was extremely difficult for the men of the ancient world to accept. And as society drifts from Judeo-Christian values, it is again becoming difficult to accept. Major elements in secular Western society are returning to forms of nature worship: The natural environment is increasingly regarded as sacred. Extreme expressions of nature worship actually regard human beings as blights on nature.

It is understandable that people who rely on feelings more than reason would exalt nature. It is easier—indeed more natural—to worship nature in all its grandeur than it is to worship an invisible and morally demanding God. What is puzzling is that many people who claim to rely on reason would do so. Nature is unworthy of worship. It is amoral and frequently cruel. Nature, “red in tooth and claw,” has no moral laws, only the amoral law of survival of the fittest.

Why would people who value justice or kindness to the stranger or caring for the weak venerate nature? These moral qualities are unique to humanity. In nature, the weak are to be killed or left to suffer and die. A hospital is a profoundly unnatural, indeed anti-natural, creation: To expend precious resources on keeping the most frail alive is a violation of the natural order. The individual means nothing to nature; the individual is precious to humans.

The romanticizing of nature, let alone the ascribing of divinity to it, involves ignoring what really happens in nature. It is most unlikely that those American schoolchildren who conducted a campaign on behalf of freeing a killer whale (the whale in the film Free Willy) ever saw films of actual killer whale behavior. They should have watched the National Geographic videos that show, among other things, killer whales tossing a terrified baby seal back and forth before finally killing it. If they had, the schoolchildren might then have petitioned killer whales to free baby seals.

Without Man, the Environment Is Insignificant

Nature has been created for man’s use, and on its own, without man, it has no meaning. Dolphins are adorable because human beings find them adorable. Without people to appreciate them or the role they play in the earth’s ecosystem to enable human life, they are no more adorable or meaningful than a rock on Neptune.

That is the point of the Creation story—everything was made in order to prepare the way for the creation of the human being. God declared each day’s creation “good,” but declared the day of man’s creation “very good.”

Critics find three biblical notions about nature unacceptable: that man shall lord over it; that it was created for man and has no intrinsic value; and that it is not sacred.

With regard to man “conquering and subduing nature,” this was one of the revolutionary ideas of the Old Testament that made Western medical and other scientific progress possible. In all other ancient civilizations, nature (or the capricious and amoral gods of nature) ruled man. Only by conquering and subduing nature does man develop cures for nature’s diseases. Either we conquer cancer or cancer conquers us.

As for the objection that the Judeo-Christian notion of man as the pinnacle and purpose of nature is “arrogant” one can only say woe unto mankind if that objection prevails. When man is reduced to being only a part of the natural world, his status is reduced to that of a dispensable animal.

Let it be clear that the biblical view of man and nature does not in any way suggest that man has the right to poison the earth or to abuse animals. The former is unfair to future generations of human beings, and the latter is immoral.

But man is what matters. If DDT is necessary to keep millions of Africans from dying from malaria (as it had been to prevent Americans from dying of malaria), then DDT must be used to wipe out the anopheles mosquito. Western environmentalists have been responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans because of the ban on DDT. In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that “in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise be inevitable.”⁵⁹

But this has been of little consequence to the environmentalist movement, which has come to place the natural environment on a par with, and often higher than, human beings.

10. Material Well-Being Is One of Many Values

Judeo-Christian values place great importance on bettering man’s material life. That is why the biblical prophets spoke so emphatically about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. That is why many Christians left—and continue to leave—affluent countries to devote their lives to feed the hungry and to provide medical assistance in the most impoverished places on earth.

But beyond assuring that our fellow human beings have their basic material needs met, man’s material condition is not as supreme a Judeo-Christian value as it is a Leftist one. It is certainly important, but man’s moral and spiritual condition are at least as important. Moreover, there is the extremely important issue of the afterlife. Even the American Founders who are labeled “deists”—such as Franklin and Jefferson—strongly affirmed a belief in the afterlife. The Judeo-Christian traditions all affirmed an afterlife where the ultimate justice that will always elude mankind is finally achieved. Therefore there is no Judeo-Christian seeking of a material utopia on earth, as there is on the secular Left.^*

A good example of the Judeo-Christian difference with the Left in this arena would be the lavish cathedrals the Catholic Church has built in many impoverished countries. To Leftists this is widely regarded as a great wrong. In their view, all that labor, not to mention the gold and treasure, should have been spent on the poor. To those who hold Judeo-Christian values, however, while feeding the hungry is a primary value, so is feeding the soul. A cathedral in a poor Latin American city is therefore vitally important. These beautiful churches and cathedrals have been among the few things, aside from family and friends, that afforded millions of poor people in Catholic countries a measure of comfort and joy.

To a materialist, the notion that poor people—or even people who are just not rich—would place non-material concerns over material ones is perverse. That is why Leftists do not understand why the non-rich, let alone the poor, would vote for any conservative party. An American bestseller in 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Left-wing author Thomas Frank, illustrated this point. The theme of his book was that Americans of a lower economic status who vote Republican do so against their own best interests. When I dialogued with Frank on the radio, he seemed incapable of understanding that many millions of Americans consider the Left’s views on social issues—abortion, same-sex marriage, sex education in elementary schools, among others—more important than the alleged economic advantages of voting Democrat.

Biblical values deeply emphasized material progress. The Bible gave the very idea of moral and material progress to the world. Every other society in the world had a cyclical view of life—life just kept repeating itself throughout the generations. It was the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament who enunciated the divine obligation to care for the poor and the helpless. But such concerns were never the only Judeo-Christian values, and the poor in biblical nomenclature were truly destitute, not at all analogous to those classified as poor in America, for example. In 2005, those designated as “poor” in America lived in a home with two or more rooms per person and air-conditioning, and they owned a car, refrigerator, stove, clothes washer and dryer, and microwave. They also had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player and a stereo, and obtained medical care (even without health insurance). Nearly half owned their own homes.⁶⁰

A final irony here is that preoccupation with material concerns does not lead to more personally altruistic behavior vis-à-vis the poor. Religious Americans give more charity to, and volunteer more time to help, the poor.⁶¹

11. Life Has Ultimate Meaning

If the God introduced by the Hebrew scriptures exists, life has ultimate meaning. If there is no such God, it does not. If we humans are made solely out of matter and exist solely because of random impersonal forces, our lives have no more meaning than inanimate objects.

This does not mean that people who do not believe in such a God cannot feel that they have a purpose and meaning for their own lives. Indeed, most people do. They have to because the need for meaning is the greatest of all human needs. It is even stronger than the need for sex. There are people who lead chaste lives who achieve happiness, but no one who lacks a sense of purpose or meaning can achieve happiness.

Nevertheless, the fact that people feel that their lives are meaningful—as a parent, a caregiver, an artist, a professional, or any of myriad ways in which we feel we are doing something meaningful—has no bearing on the question of whether life itself is ultimately meaningful. The two issues are entirely separate. A physician understandably views his healing of people as meaningful. But if there is no God, he will have to confront the fact that as meaningful as healing the day’s patients has felt, that was just a feeling. Ultimately everything is meaningless because life itself is. In this sense, it is better for an individual’s peace of mind to be a poor person who believes in God than a successful neurosurgeon who does not.

Therefore, while secular government is a good thing, secularism has been devastating for individuals and for societies. On the individual level, among these consequences have been increased unhappiness (all surveys report that religious Americans are happier than secular ones); increased reliance on drugs, sex, alcohol, and mind-numbing entertainment to get through life; moral confusion; a paucity of wisdom (for example, belief in male-female sameness); and a search for substitute religions such as Marxism, socialism, fascism, Communism, environmentalism, and pacifism.

Secularism is even leading to the disappearance of Western nations. In order to maintain the population of a group, its women must give birth to at least 2.1 children. But in thoroughly secularized Germany, for example, the birthrate in 2010 was 1.38.⁶² Most other Western European nations also have a birthrate below replacement level. And while secularism gives people little reason to have children, Leftism has given people reasons not to have children: the preservation of the natural environment through zero population growth, and discouraging women from making motherhood their primary occupation.

Given the indispensability of God to meaning in life, to liberty, to human worth, and to the other values enumerated here, it is no wonder that “In God We Trust” is one of the three elements of the American Trinity. Perhaps more Americans would be aware of this if they were not taught in schools that push secularism to the point of virtually banning mention of God.

A godless America would no longer be America. It would be Europe between Mexico and Canada.

E Pluribus Unum—From Many One

The other day, I was in a small company—and there were Asians, Koreans, Middle Easterners, some other people. And they had been in America for, like, two, three, four years. And they talk American. They look American. Body language is American. I’m sure they already think American. Go to Korea and become Korean in one or two years’ time. Good luck with that.

That’s so special about this country.

—Mikheil Saakashvili, president of Georgia, February 2, 2012, FoxNews

THE MOTTO OF AMERICA, E Pluribus Unum, is rare, if not unique as a governing principle or motto of a country. For good reason: No other nation is made out of as “many” as America is. In virtually every society in history, the national or group identity was correlated with its ethnic or racial identity. No other nation calls itself a “nation of immigrants,” as Americans—of all political persuasions—routinely call America.

At first the pluribus in E Pluribus Unum referred to the thirteen original colonies—and the motto was adopted in order to help forge these many colonies into unum, one nation. But from the beginning, the phrase came to refer to the many peoples who made up America. That is why the motto was retained after America united as one country.

If you are Japanese, you are Japanese because you were born to Japanese parents. There is no other way to be considered Japanese (even if a non-Japanese could in some rare instance become a citizen of Japan). The same has held true for virtually all other groups, from tribes to countries, throughout history.^* America went against the human norm in adopting E Pluribus Unum. This motto ended any significance people attached to race, ethnicity, or blood, each of which has been among the most important values in all societies.

As a result, the American ability to assimilate people from every ethnic, national, and racial background has been unique. Non-Americans who are aware of it find it almost incredible. It runs entirely against the universal human predilection toward defining members of other races, ethnicities, and nationalities as the “other,” an “other” who, moreover, cannot become “one of us.”

This is even true for other Western democracies. European countries, in the second half of the twentieth century, began accepting large numbers of immigrants. However, it is very difficult, and often impossible, for immigrants of other races or ethnicities to be considered truly a member of a host European country. A third-generation Turk in Germany, born in Germany, fluent and accentless in German, is rarely considered a German by other Germans. In America, however, a first-generation Turk who is not fluent in English and speaks with a distinct accent is considered an American by other Americans. And the odds are that his children will not marry another Turkish-American but an American of some other background, quite possibly one of white Anglo-Saxon racial stock.

Anyone from anywhere and of any race or ethnicity can become an American in every sense of the word. This is one reason many of America’s Founders asserted that a new type of person was being made in America. No longer would a man or woman be identified primarily by their ethnic, national, religious, or racial origins, but by their individual achievements and their willingness to identify as Americans.

Aside from its uniqueness, E Pluribus Unum is one of the reasons America developed so rapidly and achieved a level of prosperity that surpassed every other country. Lawrence Harrison, director of the Cultural Change Institute at Tufts University, makes this point in his book Who Prospers: How Cultural Values Shape Economic and Political Success. Harrison, who spent much of his life in Latin America as director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, pondered the question of why the United States developed economically and politically so much more so than Latin American countries, many of which were also blessed with huge areas of rich undeveloped land and immense natural resources.

One of his explanations is that, unlike the United States, Latin America engaged in what Harrison calls “familism,” discrimination on the basis of blood relationships. People did not trust non-blood relations and therefore gave jobs and opportunities to family members—who, of course, were also members of the same ethnicity and race.

Outside of the United States, “familism” has been the human norm. From the beginning of societies, people divided the world by blood and marriage ties—that is, families and tribes. Much later, in some parts of the world, the nation-state developed and indigenous members of that nationality would owe allegiance to the nation-state. But overwhelmingly human beings trusted only members of one’s family or tribe. America became the first society to reject family and national origin, and, eventually, ethnicity and race, too, as defining factors of one’s identity.

Unlike other national identities, there is no racial or ethnic component to being American. We know what Norwegians, Japanese, Chinese, Ethiopians, and others are supposed to look like because there is a racial or ethnic component to being a member of these groups. But we have no idea what an American looks like because an American can look Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese, African, Arab, Latin, or like any combination of them. It is true that there was always a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) look to the majority, but when non-WASPs began immigrating into America, they became as American as any WASP. That is why “God Bless America”—probably the American people’s favorite national song and its unofficial anthem—could be written by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Israel Isidore Baline, aka Irving Berlin. He felt as American as someone whose ancestors came to America on the Mayflower.

Finally, E Pluribus Unum, with its rejection of tribal, familial, ethnic, and blood origins, made possible the essential American value—the individual. The individual matters most, not any group and not any family to which the individual belongs. The only group that matters is the American. This celebration of the individual has never been promulgated anywhere else in the world as it has in America. In earlier times, and in some areas until relatively recently, there was a racist element that deemed non-whites, especially blacks, as less than fully human, not to mention less than fully American. That element has largely disappeared. Today it is the Left that seeks to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism, which is preoccupied with race, ethnicity, and national origins and opposes the notion of one American identity.

Hence the Left’s preoccupation with “diversity,” by which it means ethnic and racial diversity. “Diversity is our strength” is a Left-wing credo. It sounds true and admirable, but it is really an attempt to undo E Pluribus Unum by celebrating Pluribus, not Unum. Much of America’s strength does indeed lie in its diverse origins, but America’s strength is diminished by diverse primary identities. It is not diversity, but the ability to unify the diverse, that is America’s strength and greatness; and that can only be done by celebrating the individual and the nation those individuals form, America.

The consequence of E Pluribus Unum and the celebration of the individual over race and ethnicity has been the creation of the least racist society in the world. While the Left regularly calls America racist, non-white immigrants to America know how untrue that is. Apparently many millions of Africans did not believe the charge of America’s racism. They went there for liberty and opportunity and got them.

NATIONALISM

Another value contained within the Unum in E Pluribus Unum is nationalism. American values celebrate one national identity, that of America—and, since the American value system is exportable, the citizens of every country can and should celebrate their national identity. Once again we have a major difference between Leftism and Americanism. Leftism seeks to do away with national identities and supplant them with one international identity (it uses multiculturalism to achieve the same end—the subversion of nationalism, especially American nationalism).

American nationalism is one of the most important sources of Left-wing hostility to America. America celebrates its national identity more than any Western European country, and almost more than any country in the world.

In the summer of 2008, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, and I were lecturers at a Jewish leadership retreat in Phoenix, Arizona. I asked what most impressed him about America. His immediate answer was “Its patriotism.” He was deeply impressed, for example, that Americans sang or played the National Anthem before all major sporting events.

On the Left, Americans’ celebration of American nationalism is widely dismissed as “flag waving” or even as dangerous “jingoism.” “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the American flag” is a widely expressed sentiment of the Left. The original source of the statement is unknown but, not surprisingly, it was a professor who probably first said something like it. In 1938, Professor Halford Luccock of Yale Divinity School delivered a lecture in which he said: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’”⁶³

Yet there is something particularly morally—not to mention emotionally—healthy about having a national identity. It means that one feels moral and emotional attachments to others. The person who has ties to his country, his religion, his family, his friends, his volunteer group, his local community, his college, his coworkers, and so on is a far better person than one who only has ties to humanity. One does not—because one cannot—have ties to “humanity” that are as strong as the ties one has to a specific group. No normal person reacts to a plane crash that kills passengers from a distant country with the same emotional intensity that one feels toward a plane crash that kills fellow nationals. Likewise, one reacts even more intensely if all the passengers killed in a plane crash lived in one’s hometown—even if one didn’t personally know them. There is nothing morally wrong with such reactions.

We learn to care for others by first caring for family and friends, then for one’s immediate community, and then for one’s nation. Then we can—and should—feel for humans everywhere. People have done immense harm in the name of their nation, and people have done immense harm in the name of “humanity.” The suppression of the natural human instinct to care about the particular has led to great evil.

The famous Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky wrote a book, Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, on this very theme. In it he wrote, “Identity without democracy is totalitarian; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying.”

How weak is proved by what has happened in Western Europe. For one thing, these democracies with weakened national identities lose the will to fight for democracy. It is America that has been defending democracies, including those of Western Europe—often against the wishes of the Western Europeans themselves, as when, during the Cold War, the United States placed Pershing missiles in Europe despite massive protests.

The loss of identity in Europe has led not only to a lack of will to defend democracy; it has led to a lack of will to reproduce. With no religious identity and no national identity, even the desire to have children is affected. Why reproduce a group you don’t care much about?

The affirmation of national identity is a major reason the American value system is applicable to all peoples. The American ideal is that Thais feel a strong Thai identity, that Uruguayans identify strongly with Uruguay, etc.

In addition to the intrinsic moral and national benefits of countries having strong national identities, the more countries that have a strong national identity, the greater the barrier to international institutions controlling the lives of nations and individuals. Any individual living in a free country has much more control over his life when his government has more power than international institutions do. In a free country one can vote whom one wants into power and out of power. The individual has no such control over who directs international institutions.

That is one reason Americans who affirm American values strongly oppose handing over power to international bodies such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. If a big government in one’s own country diminishes the control the individual citizen has over his life, how much more so do large international institutions?

American Exceptionalism

This negative view of powerful international institutions is a defining aspect of what is known as American exceptionalism. It is the belief that America has better values than international institutions do and because of those values, not because of any inherent superiority, it should guide its own destiny. The cultural war in which America is engaged is in large measure about American exceptionalism. Conservative America generally believes in the concept; liberal America does not. Americans who believe in American exceptionalism do not have a high moral regard for the United Nations, do not trust the World Court more than American institutions, regard Amnesty International as a morally confused Left-wing organization, recognize the biases of the world’s news media, do not share Hollywood’s values, and regard “world opinion” as morally useless.

Liberal America regards American exceptionalism as chauvinistic and therefore dangerous. Even worse, American exceptionalism is the major obstacle to a central goal of Leftism—supplanting nationalism with internationalism. The belief that America usually knows better than the “world” what is right and wrong therefore infuriates the American and international Left, which places far more trust in world bodies and world opinion.

A related issue is international law. For the Left, law defines the good more so than it does for the Right. For the Right, especially the Judeo-Christian Right, morality is higher than law. Take the two sides’ views of the American war in Iraq, for example. A primary reason the Left gave for opposing the war was that, in its view, it violated international law. Had it been authorized by the United Nations Security Council, as was the first war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it would have been considered legal and presumably not have elicited nearly as much opposition as it did (though the Left in America largely opposed the First Gulf War as well). But because the UN Security Council did not authorize the war, it was deemed illegal and therefore wrong.

On the other side are those who believe that morality trumps international legality as determined by the United Nations—which means nothing more than China, Russia, and France voting to authorize a war, thereby making it legal. Overthrowing the mass murderer-rapist-torturer Saddam Hussein was a moral good (irrespective of the presence or absence of WMD). If it violated UN-based international law, that reflected on the moral inadequacy of international law and how it is determined, not on the rightness or wrongness of Americans giving up life and wealth to depose Saddam Hussein.

The American exceptionalism view that morality is higher than legality is the Judeo-Christian view. Indeed, it is the view of all religions, and of common sense. How can it be otherwise? In Nazi Germany killing the mentally retarded was legal; while in Jim Crow America, it was illegal for a black to sit at a lunch counter with whites. Should moral people have followed those laws?

Yet for much of the secular world, especially the Left, law has come to constitute the highest definition of good—because if you do not believe in objective morality, you will posit objective law in its stead. For the Judeo-Christian world, law is very important. But laws are made by men, whereas the rule of morality comes from a higher source. Of course, such a belief has dangers. But the greater danger is thinking that law embodies morality. Virtually every individual who is widely regarded as having been a great moral figure—from Moses (who violated Egyptian law) to Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who violated German law) to Rosa Parks (who violated American Jim Crow laws)—achieved greatness because he or she knew when to violate the law. Too bad more Europeans did not place morality above law. There would not have been a Holocaust.

America Is Good

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH often spoke about the “goodness” of America (and about the “evil” of three world tyrannies). Was this language meaningful—or was it, as many critics at home and abroad contended, sanctimonious rhetoric?

As odd as it may sound, that an American president would refer to America as a good country and speak about good and evil are compelling arguments for America’s goodness. The rhetoric that leaders use tells a great deal about them and about their nations.

Americans are so used to hearing such descriptions of their country that many of them would probably be surprised to learn that such rhetoric is largely confined to American leaders. It does not surprise most foreigners, however. They recognize it as quintessentially American; and they either find it impressive (if they agree with it) or highly objectionable (if they do not).

How, then, do other leaders describe their countries? The answer depends, of course, on which leaders and nations we are talking about. But whichever they are, their national self-description rarely includes the word “good.” This is true regarding both tyrants and elected leaders. Adolf Hitler never spoke about the German people’s goodness—goodness meant nothing to him or to Nazism—but about the inherent (racial) superiority of the Deutsche Volk. Nor do leaders of decent countries speak of their country’s goodness. What leaders frequently invoke, especially in times of crisis, is their countries’ greatness. The postwar French leader Charles de Gaulle famously said about his country, “France cannot be France without greatness.” During World War II, Joseph Stalin often referred to Russia’s greatness. China, Japan, Korea, and other nations with long histories refer to present or past national greatness. And many European national leaders speak with pride of their countries’ social systems, of their commitment to international law and to European unity.

But American leaders speak of their country’s goodness. That has always been America’s self-image: as a nation with a moral mission—a nation that is, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “the last best hope of earth.” Therefore, Americans have a national obligation to be good.

In contrast, the Left identifies a country having a sense of national mission with fanaticism and chauvinism. Like the European Left, the American Left does not use goodness rhetoric—it prefers the language of “fairness,” “rights,” and “equality” to the language of morality. Moreover, the Left does not see America as good, but as profoundly flawed from its inception, with its racism and slavery, to the present time.^*

Is America good?

If “good” means more or less perfect or flawless, the answer is, of course, no. But America is good in the three ways the word matters: in comparison with other countries, especially historically powerful ones; in all the good it has done for the great majority of those who were born in or came to America; and with regard to all the good it has done, at tremendous cost, for vast numbers of people in other countries. No country has given nearly as many individuals the liberty, the life filled with opportunity, and the material well-being that America has given the great majority of its citizens. And no country has done as much or sacrificed as much for other people and other countries as has America. America has been the beacon of hope for mankind since its creation in 1776.

America’s moral record is stained most especially by slavery, the anti-black racism that persisted among many Americans for a hundred years after the Civil War, and by its treatment of American Indians. There are no excuses for these evils. There is, however, moral perspective.

First, slavery was universal. For nearly all of history it was accepted as a normal part of life. Therefore what needs to be evaluated is not so much why there was slavery in America as why slavery was ended in America. The very basis of America, its commitment to liberty, made the existence of slavery in America a moral problem from the country’s founding. And within twenty-eight years of the founding of the United States, in the year 1808, the United States and Great Britain outlawed the international slave trade.

Second, between 618,000 and 700,000 Americans died in a civil war fought over slavery. The most popular song of the Civil War era, and one of the most popular American songs ever written, was Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written just six months into the Civil War. As Americans know, it contained the words, “Let us die to make men free.”

Third, it was the Founders’ commitment to liberty that ultimately led to the end of slavery. No society or individual lives up to their highest ideals. But America’s ideals were taken extremely seriously by America. It is no wonder that the United States became the only non-majority-black country in the world to elect a black leader. Indeed, America has so exorcised racism that—for nearly all Americans—electing the country’s first black president was a triumph, but having a black president was no big deal.

Fourth, weighed against its moral flaws—which were shared by just about all other countries—one must weigh all the good America has done. No country has shed as much blood for others’ liberty, or preserved liberty in so many countries, or became leader of what became known as the free world, or provided so much opportunity for immigrants from every place on earth. When there are natural disasters anywhere in the world, the world looks first to America. When there is great evil, victims of that evil look first to America. And when America liberates a people, whether their government had been a friend or foe, they know that America will not stay as conqueror or as occupier, that it will probably leave and that if it remains it will be solely to ensure that country’s freedom and security. American troops have remained in Germany since World War II and in South Korea since the Korean War. Both nations are very fortunate for that fact—as they have both become free and economic giants. Of what other country’s troops can that be said?

Fifth, imagine what the world would be if there were no America or if America ceased to be strong. As previously noted, if America ceased to be strong, let alone ceased to exist, liberty on earth would gradually be extinguished:

1. Islamists would take over many Muslim-majority countries (they may, in any event). Terrorists would have no foe capable of subduing them.
2. Free Taiwan would be overrun by the Communist regime in China.
3. Iran, other Islamic states, and Islamist groups would seek to annihilate free Israel—resulting in a Mideast war, perhaps nuclear, the probable deaths of millions, and possibly the destruction of Israel.
4. Tyrants throughout Africa would be emboldened.
5. The United Nations would become, even more so than today, a tool of anti-democratic regimes.
6. The non-democratic regime ruling Russia would increasingly suppress liberty in Russia and use force to re-create the former Russian/Soviet empire.
7. Latin American countries struggling to create democratic institutions would be subverted by anti-democratic regimes.

The world would become a far crueler place. It would descend to the law of the jungle where the mighty devour the weak. No good country would replace America as the world’s superpower. Instead a variety of powerful countries—none of which had a comparable desire to be good—would replace America and either vie with one another for superpower status or divide the world into spheres of interest. Terror, torture, and tyranny would increase and become commonplace.

RUSSIA

Russia is one such alternative world power—at least militarily. Yet Russia is a country essentially devoid of a moral value system. Whatever moral role the Russian Orthodox Church once played was extinguished during the seven decades of Communist suppression of religion. Pockets of religious and secular morality notwithstanding, Russia is basically a nihilistic state. Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB director, Russia resumed playing a destructive role in world affairs. It supports and sells arms to some of the worst regimes in the world, forces its will on Ukraine and other neighboring states, and violently suppresses domestic critics who shed light on the autocratic government that rules the geographically largest nation in the world. Without America, Russia would be far more aggressive and seek to reestablish the Soviet Union. Who would stop it?

TURKEY

World media opinion has portrayed the Islamist regime in Turkey as the New York Times did in 2011, “a template that effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics,” and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “its mildly Islamist prime minister.”⁶⁴ However, the “mildly Islamist” prime minister has arrested secular and other opposition journalists.⁶⁵

Erdogan’s party has undone the secular Ataturk revolution. Turkey, long regarded as the bridge between the West and Islam, has rapidly moved away from the West and embraced an increasingly anti-Western Islamism. It seeks to regain the power and prestige of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians are not the only ones who fear such a prospect.

IRAN

The Islamic Republic of Iran is ruled by moral heirs of the Nazis. The totalitarian theocrats who rule Iran boast of their desire to initiate a second Holocaust against the Jews, all the while denying that the first Holocaust took place. And the country’s treatment of Iranians who seek elementary human freedoms and of Iranian women is among the world’s worst. It is the United States that prevents Iran from attaining the greater world influence it seeks.

NORTH KOREA

Without fear of American retribution, North Korea would likely attack South Korea, and threaten Japan. American troops in South Korea and American power are the greatest impediments to the psychopathological regime in North Korea engaging in international aggression.

EUROPE

Europe long ago gave up fighting for or believing in much other than living a life with as much economic security, as many days off, and as early a retirement age as possible. World War I killed European idealism. And whatever remained was destroyed by World War II. What I have written here about the Germans is true for nearly all of Europe: Instead of learning to fight evil, Europe has learned that fighting is evil. If there were no America, much of Western Europe would have come under Soviet control, and Russia—and in the future, perhaps Islamism—would be the most powerful forces in Europe.

ISLAMISM

As the New York Times, originally rather optimistic about the so-called Arab Spring, reported, the battle in the Arab world is not between Islamists and Western-type secular democrats but between Islamists. Without America, many Arab regimes would, with the support of other Muslim regimes, seek to destroy Israel and to spread Islamist doctrines among Muslims throughout the world, including Europe. At least one hundred million Muslims support violent jihad—meaning, among other things, the death of the West and its liberal values—and without America, who would stop them?

CHINA

As in Russia, traditional Chinese virtues were largely destroyed by Communism, and China, too, is essentially a nihilistic state whose government spends vast sums of foreign currency buying influence in some of the cruelest places on earth—such as Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Without America, China would seek to dominate Japan, become the major Asian power, and then the world’s superpower.

UNITED NATIONS

The good performed by some of United Nations institutions, such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been outweighed by the amount of bad the UN has either abetted or allowed. It has enabled genocide in Rwanda, done little or nothing to stop genocide in the Congo and Sudan, given a respectable forum to tyrannies, convened conferences (the Durban Conferences on racism) that simply became forums for anti-Semitism, and been preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel.⁶⁶ Its moral failings were further exemplified by its placing Qaddafi’s Libya on its Human Rights Commission, Iran on its Commission on the Status of Women, and North Korea on the Nuclear Disarmament Commission. It is not that the people who run the United Nations are bad people; it is that the United Nations is run by a majority of the world’s governments, and they are run by bad people. Without America in the Security Council, the bad would nearly always prevail.

The World Should Adopt American Values

AMERICAN VALUES MADE AMERICA a unique force for good in the world, as well as a uniquely free and prosperous nation. There is no reason these values cannot do the same for any other country in the world.

No country has to become America, let alone Christian, in order to do so. On the contrary, according to the American value system, a country must keep its special identity. Let us imagine Honduras, a poor country in Central America. There is nothing basic to Honduran society that would prevent it from adopting the three American values. Indeed, with a commitment to Liberty, that is, a free economy and all the other freedoms enumerated here, there is every reason to believe that Honduras would begin to prosper. Of course, with that freedom, Hondurans—just like Americans—would also have to embrace In God We Trust, meaning that God, not government, is the source of liberty, and that each individual is morally accountable to God. And Hondurans would have to commit to E Pluribus Unum, meaning that blood-and family-based cronyism would be abandoned, that all citizens would take on one primary identity—Honduran—and that each individual’s ability, not family ties, would determine Hondurans’ ability to succeed or fail.

With the adoption of American values, nothing specifically Honduran would have to be given up—not its culture, its music, its religion, its language, its flag. On the contrary, given the nationalist aspect of American values, the more Honduran that Hondurans felt, the better their chances for success—providing, of course, the other values were also affirmed.

Now, Honduras provides a particularly easy example because it is already a Western country, and its religious base is Christian.

But what about a non-Western, non-Christian country? Could American values work there?

Absolutely.

No Muslim country would have to give up Islam. They would have to give up Islamism, the desire for a Sharia-based government, but not Islam. The individual Muslim would be free in such a state to lead as Sharia-observant a life as he wished. Would freedom mean that some Muslims would opt out of a religious life? Probably so—just as millions of Jews and Christians have chosen to do. But that is usually the fault of the respective religions. If a religion needs a ghetto or state coercion in order to keep its followers, it is not a respect-worthy religion. Religions need to sell themselves in free societies, not rely on an absence of freedom.

Nor would any Asian society have to give up its national, religious, or cultural traditions. Look at South Korea, which has only begun to adopt American values (without calling them by that name).

The tragedy is that the greatest value system ever devised cannot be exported if the would-be exporters no longer manufacture it. If Americans stop believing in the American Trinity, the future of humanity is dim indeed. No other system exists to promote liberty, let alone all the other values discussed here.

One might say that the United States of America has a cure for moral cancer. This book has been about that cure. A pain-filled world awaits.