Writing only a few months before the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, John Adams engaged in a perceptive and charming correspondence with his wife, Abigail. He was in Philadelphia drafting a new code of laws, and she had urged him to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.” After all, Abigail reminded him tartly, “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
Abigail was deftly pressing her husband to practice his own revolutionary principles and apply them more widely. In this case he did not follow her counsel. Nor, sadly, were other founders any more consistent when it came to their African slaves and to Native Americans. The consequences of such blind spots stain their record still and raise an insurmountable barrier against uncritical adulation of 1776. Adams was more consistent than most, but he was not so intoxicated with freedom as to be unaware that revolutions represent a decisive break with tradition and authority, create their own momentum, and are therefore an open invitation to follow the lure of freedom wherever it leads.
“We have been told,” he replied to Abigail, “that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere: that children and apprentices are disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent.” But her letter, he continued, “was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.”1
The revolution was “loosening the bonds of government everywhere”? “Another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest” was now discontented and pressing to be free? Seen that way, the history of freedom in America can be viewed as the shining story of one tribe after another loosening its bonds, staking its claim to its place in the sun, and cashing in on the Declaration’s “promissory note” of freedom and equality. But as we have also seen, many of history’s dreams of freedom have run to excess and courted disaster. They had roots that were a far cry from the founders, and many of them assaulted a boundary too far, while some pursuits of freedom proved to be only a mirage, and others turned into nightmares.
Doubtless if the founders could return to the republic they strove so hard to create, Adams and the great majority would surely welcome how Lincoln followed their better angels, reversed their Faustian bargain, and led their descendants to give freedom to the slaves that they themselves did not free. But what would Martin Luther King Jr. think of the way his declaration that the content of character mattered more than the color of one’s skin has been transformed into reverse racism and attacks on white privilege? How would Mario Savio, the fiery and passionate leader of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, respond to the state of free speech on American universities a generation after his struggle? The muzzling of the messiness of dissent, the provision of safe places as a coddled protection against the risk of offense, the practice of trigger warnings, the disinviting and no- platforming of speakers considered too provocative for fashionable opinion, and the arson and violence? The recruitment of masked and hooded thugs to beat up opponents in the name of “social justice warriors”? This is not exactly the freedom that Savio and his generation protested for in the universities—let alone the freedom of speech that John Milton and John Stuart Mill had fought for in their time.
And what would Roger Williams, William Penn, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson think if they were to hear elite opinion reducing their First Amendment’s free exercise of religion to “freedom of worship” between the ears and dismissing their first freedom as “partisan,” a “code word for bigotry,” a right that it is right to overrule, and merely a power play? Freedom, in those and other ways, can become its own worst enemy, and those who love freedom must never be blind to its ironies and never disown the children that it breeds in its profligacy.
Political revolutions explode into history packed with intended and unintended consequences like the long-running aftershocks of a powerful earthquake. Not even the most farsighted statesmen are able to see all that they have achieved, and much of the best or worst of the outcomes may have been brought about despite them. There is no question that John Adams could see far farther than most people, but even he could see only so far.
Yet as we have seen, there is more to America’s story today than ironies, unintended consequences, and unknown aftermaths. The seismic shifts accompanying the 1960s counterculture, and in particular the shift from the older classical liberalism to the new Left/liberalism, were deliberate. They represented a powerful counterrevolution that at numerous points has shown itself the true heir of 1789 (and 1917 and 1949) rather than 1776. The shift is closer to describing where the liberal Left appears bent on taking America. In his minor classic, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, historian Peter Gay recounts a bitter joke that Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian writer, used to hear when he was working in Berlin in 1932 in the last days of the Weimar Republic. It was doing the rounds of Ullstein, the Jewish publishing house where he worked. It captured the mood of the times perfectly and hinted at what was to come as the Weimar freedoms sputtered out and Hitler and the National Socialists plotted their path to power.
There was once, so the story runs, a Chinese executioner named Wang Lun, who lived in the reign of the second emperor of the Ming Dynasty. He was famous for his skill and speed in beheading his victims, but all his life he had harbored a secret aspiration, never yet realized: to behead a person so rapidly that the victim’s head would remain poised on his neck after he had died. He practiced and practiced, and finally, in his seventy-sixth year, he realized his ambition. It was on a busy day of executions, and he dispatched each man with graceful speed, heads rolling in the dust. Then came the twelfth man; he began to mount the scaffold, and Wang Lun, with a whisk of his sword, beheaded his victim so quickly that he continued to walk up the steps. When the man reached the top, he spoke angrily to the executioner,
“Why do you prolong my agony?” he asked. “You were mercifully quick with the others!”
It was Wang Lun’s moment. He had now crowned his life’s work. A serene smile spread over his face. He turned to his victim, and said, “Please would you just nod!”2
Such was the skill and precision of the executioner’s coup de grâce that his victim was dead before he knew it. So too, and soon, were the freedoms of democratic Weimar’s naive citizens and of all the unsuspecting victims of the National Socialist coup that led to the rise of Hitler. Milton Mayer’s celebrated study of the early 1930s captured the naivety perfectly: “They thought they were free.”3 The sorry end of the short-lived liberal republic of Weimar was said to be part murder, part wasting sickness, and part suicide. Could American freedoms be facing a similar fate if certain antidemocratic trends are allowed to run their course? Today’s choices must be made with eyes wide open. Once when Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, he explained his legendary realism to a colleague, “My father was a good man in a world in which goodness had no meaning, and I will never make the same mistake.”
Where is America now? Has America reached the stage where wider and wider freedoms are all the fulfillment of the founders’ “promissory note”? Or have unforeseen and ill-considered consequences taken the founders’ republic off course? Or could it be that America is nearing the end of 1776 and republican freedom, in a fate long envisioned by some Americans and worked on with an executioner’s precision that needs only its victim’s nod to show that the head has already been severed? America today is torn between its competing views of freedom, and the two main competitors are approaching their high-noon showdown. They cannot both be right, for 1776 and 1789 are profoundly contradictory and are on a collision course with each other over issues that are decisive for the American future— including the character of freedom itself.
After going through a checklist such as the one set out here, the question Americans must decide is, Which view of freedom answers the foundational questions in ways that are best and true and essential? Which one most suits the American republic as it was set up by the founders, and which one serves the different requirements of American freedom today, whether freedom for individuals, freedom for groups, or freedom for the republic itself? Conversely, which of the competing views of freedom is most likely to betray the trust and hope of those who champion it? Just as Lincoln in his “house divided” speech in 1858 warned that the United States would not stay “half slave and half free” but would become “all one thing, or all the other,” so the open tensions over freedom by the forces of 1776 and 1789 are bound to come down on one side or the other, but which is it to be?4
Such is the chaos and poisonous confusion of the current culture warring, through the airwaves and the social media, that any description of the competing forces would instantly become part of the raging disagreements itself. But as I have argued throughout, the deepest issue is not just between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Left and Right, rural and urban, red states and blue states, religious believers and secularists, heartlanders and coastals, or between the globalists and the nationalists—the “Davos men” who favor the perspectives and benefits of globalization and the “Main Street guys” who champion local and national priorities. The conflicts at their core swirl around two principal sets of forces, which I have described as the spirit, the heirs, and the allies of 1776, and the spirit, the heirs, and the allies of 1789.
Both sides are fighting for freedom, but with different views of what freedom is and how it may be attained. On one side, there is the classical liberal understanding of freedom championed by the Jewish and Christian faiths and by many believers in other world religions. On the other side, there is the Left/liberal understanding of freedom, championed by the forces of progressive and postmodern secularism, challenging all customs, conventions, and tradition, and transgressing all unwanted boundaries and taboos.
To describe the showdown in terms that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans would have understood, the contest is between the forces of federal liberty (foedus being the Latin for “covenant”), the freedom to act freely but within the terms of traditional moral life and the American Constitution and its ways, and the forces of natural liberty, the freedom for Americans to act as they please so long as they do no harm to others and they can survive the consequences. Or to describe the showdown in the terms argued by sociologist Philip Rieff, the dispute is between those whose views of freedom stem from faith and those whose views of freedom stem from fiction, in the sense that the latter reject any view of objective truth or a given moral order and openly acknowledge that their views are self- devised and self-constructed. Or again, in the terms put forward by Rabbi Sacks, the clash is between the forces of the will to life (“Choose life” being the greatest biblical command) and the forces of the will to power (relativism and a rejection of objective moral standards being the foundational assumption of postmodernism and social constructionism).5
Whichever terms are used, the contest is far deeper than other levels of the culture wars, and the result will not be a clear and reasoned debate between two opposing sets of pure ideas. Indeed, the battles will not be fought on even ground. There are numerous reasons why the contest is confused and skewed: These range from the distorting impact of whichever worldview has the better voices in universities, the press, media, the law, and the social media; to the breakdown of the rules of the contest; to the mounting fear that the world beyond America’s borders will not wait for America to finish its debate; and to the intensification of all such issues during election campaigns. There is also a titanic difference between the two sides: the voices in support of 1789 are in full cry, but there is a striking absence of any twenty-first-century equivalent of Abraham Lincoln speaking on behalf of “the better angels” of the American experiment.
Now is the time when American citizens should pause, step back from their immediate quarrels, and review their answers to the foundational questions in the checklist and make their judgments as to which view of freedom offers the best responses.
First, which view does justice to the way America was set up to be?
Second, do Americans care enough to examine the issues and offer adequate answers?
Third, which view defines freedom best, doing justice to all the different aspects of freedom that are essential?
Fourth, which view does justice to answering the central paradox of freedom, that freedom is the greatest enemy of freedom?
Fifth, which view is the most realistic in facing the difficult task of sustaining freedom?
Sixth, which view best guarantees freedom while doing justice to today’s increasing diversity?
Seventh, which view offers the best philosophical and moral case for justifying the vision of a free, open, and stable society? And which can achieve the necessary alliances for accomplishing this goal?
Eighth, which view provides the most solid grounds for undergirding and expounding human freedom itself?
Ninth, which view is most vigilant in terms of the institutions that are crucial to freedom today?
Tenth, which view is the most vigilant in terms of the ideas that are crucial to freedom today?
The battle between the competing views is close to the decisive stage when the consequences will become clear and irreversible. To be sure, the American experiment was never a covenant with God, as the Jewish covenant at Mount Sinai was, but it is no longer what it has long been: a covenant or constitution under God. Today, following the rapid post-1960s secularization of public life and the determined efforts of organization such as the ACLU and individual activists such as Michael Newdow, the American experiment has increasingly become a constitution without God.
This move away from “under God” sounds purely verbal and therefore trivial, but it has two major consequences. First, without a standard higher than the human, the search is on for an ultimate human power for citizens to look to and reach for—the state, the market, science, technology, or—of course—a human leader with self-deifying pretensions. The result is a ceaseless competition for control of this power, a competition in which the strong prevail, the weak fall behind, and economic and social inequalities are widened. Second, without “under God” and its standard that is higher than the human, social criticism will never amount to more than an expression of the competing power plays in society—criticism in the interests of the dominant power or those who wish to dethrone the dominant power and put themselves in its place.
When “under God” is respected as the standard of final accountability, the moral commitment that forms the covenantal or constitutional pledge automatically becomes the standard by which citizens can assess and correct the condition of the country. In that sense, prophets, whether Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to the Jewish people or Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. to Americans, are the social critics who hold the country accountable to the covenant or constitution that the citizens and their ancestors have made. When that covenant or constitution is rejected, so also is the shared standard of critique. The result can be a cacophony of public accusations that is anything but constructive, an expression of social and political power plays rather than standards of truth and justice.
Beyond that, the most important question after the collapse of the covenant is: Will the center hold, and in America’s case, will the US Constitution do what it was designed to do? Will the covenant remain the unbreakable framework that protects and perpetuates American freedom? Can American freedom survive and thrive independently of the faiths that were decisive at its birth, as the progressive, liberal, secularist, and constructionist side insists? Or will the center fail to hold, and an increasingly elastic Constitution finally withers into insignificance, so that American freedom and the republic itself inevitably decline, as supporters of the Jewish, Christian, and classical tradition have warned?
The core issue must not be confused, as it is in several common confusions that swim like red herrings through many current debates. First, the question is not whether America was once a Christian nation, but no longer is. The United States was never a Christian nation in any official, formal, or established sense, as Catholic Spain and France, Anglican England, and Presbyterian Scotland were. The First Amendment firmly and decisively disestablished religion at the federal level in New York in 1791, and slowly the states followed until there were no established churches left at the state level either. From then on, much of America’s uniqueness and vitality have flowed from that momentous act of disestablishment. It is true that most of the early Americans were Christians, and most of the ideas that shaped early America were distinctively Jewish and Christian. But the relationship was indirect, creative, and consciously contained an element of a wager. In the words of the Williamsburg Charter, which celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution and the First Amendment,
The founders knew well that the republic they established represented an audacious gamble against long historical odds. This form of government depends upon ultimate beliefs, for otherwise we have no right to the rights by which it thrives, yet rejects any official formulation of them. The republic will therefore always remain an “undecided experiment” that stands or falls by the dynamism of its non-established faiths.
The question, then, is not whether America was or is Christian, but whether the nonestablished faiths current at any moment in America’s history are strong enough to support the ideas and ideals that are required for America’s flourishing.
Second, the question is not whether people can be good (and in this case, remain free) without God. Of course they can. Jews and Christians have always held that because humans are made in the image of God, they are capable of countless expressions of truth, beauty, justice, goodness, compassion, and altruism, whether they believe in God or not. The question is whether entire societies can be just and free without faith in God, whether societies can stay that way without a shared moral framework, or whether they must increasingly rely on coercion to compensate for the lack of faith and virtue.
It is beyond question that in recent history societies that have been officially or predominantly secularist, such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and North Korea, have been totalitarian and notoriously oppressive—and it is also an undeniable fact that almost all the greatest mass murderers in modern history, such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, have been atheists and saw their atheism as central to their political vision. But we are talking of secularist societies that claim to be democratic, and there is always a crucial difference between individuals and the societies they live in, as Reinhold Niebuhr argued famously in his classic book Moral Man and Immoral Society. Many consequences flow from Niebuhr’s important distinction. A key one is that while individual people commonly act better than the philosophies they believe, societies commonly act worse.
The question then is whether the American republic can remain just and free without a definite, though unofficial, commitment to the importance of faith and the importance of freedom of conscience as citizens engage in public life.
Third, the question is not whether the founders of the American republic were right on every issue or not. As we have seen, their Faustian bargain over slavery and their glaring hypocrisies clearly show that they were seriously wrong in places, supremely over slavery, women, and Native Americans. But that does not mean the founders’ work should be thrown out, baby, bathwater, and all. On certain issues, such as freedom of religion and conscience, they got things almost nearly perfectly right from the beginning, and on these issues they did a far better job than Americans have done in the last half century. The truth is that no generation in history has attempted such a daring, brilliant, and ingenious project to create and sustain a free society that can reasonably hope to remain free. At the very least, to reject this attempt because of certain of the founders’ flaws would mean starting again from scratch. And it would court the mediocrity and fate of history’s series of failed exercises on behalf of freedom.
As we saw earlier, there are four main ways Americans dismiss their founders today—rejecting them for their evils and hypocrisies, accusing them of a hidden agenda, charging that history and events have rendered their ideas outmoded, or simply forgetting them altogether. These dismissals are all very different, but their combined effect has been to cut the American republic from its roots, so that like Western civilization in general, America has become a cut-flower society and political culture.
The question, then, is whether Americans today have the understanding, the respect, and the will to repair and continue their founders’ great experiment. It bears saying again: All these ideas are thinkable and debatable, and ideas that are debatable must be debated. But not all ideas are livable, either for individuals or for nations. Thus, it will not do for people to consign to the dustbin of history what they consider unwelcome ideas and then dismiss them as indefensible and a waste of time to debate. The first part of that attitude is often born of chronological snobbery, the second of arrogance, and both are recklessly foolish for a free society.
Fourth, there is no proposed way forward that would provide a silver bullet solution to the present crises. A good proposal could be a vital and necessary part of the answer, but no single solution would be the sole or sufficient answer. As many have noted, the challenges facing the American republic today are infinitely complicated, like a gigantic Rubik’s Cube. One problem leads to another problem, and to another and another. To remedy one thing you have to solve something else, and to solve that, something else in turn, which leads to yet another problem demanding yet another solution. Just so crime, murders, broken families, mediocre schools, blinkered universities, alienation, epidemic addictions, porous borders, disrespect for the flag, an angry Main Street, a greedy Wall Street, an out-of-touch Hollywood, and a thousand other issues are all inextricably related so that none can finally be fixed apart from the others. But certain things at least are clear. Politics alone can never solve the problems, as politics is downstream from the major sources of the problems. The deepest remedies require a reordering of American society and a restoration of its wellsprings. No solution to America’s crises is likely to succeed if it does not take seriously the code of America’s constitutional (and covenantal) DNA.
I write as a resident alien and a longtime, though deeply concerned, admirer of the American republic. For me, at least two conclusions are almost beyond dispute.
First, there is little question that it is the assumptions and ideas of 1776—the American revolution, with its essentially Jewish and Christian views, and not the assumptions and ideas of 1789, the French revolution with its essentially progressive and secularist views—which fits the founders’ understanding of freedom and the requirements of a free republic as the founders established it. That by itself is unsurprising, because the American Revolution was not the French Revolution, and almost all the founders and their generation subscribed to the Jewish and Christian understanding of freedom. But it is a significant conclusion, for if there is such a close fit between the biblical view and the American founding, then the outright rejection of the biblical view will lead to an equally emphatic rejection of the American founding as it was.
Second, and more importantly, there is little question that it is the assumptions and ideas of 1776 that answers the checklist of questions comprehensively, adequately, realistically, and constructively.
It is the biblical view, and not the progressive secularist view, which puts freedom and responsibility squarely at the heart of its view of humanness, politics, and a free society. While America has increasingly become a cut-flower culture, there is no question that it was 1776 and not 1789 that provided and nourished the roots of the American understanding of human dignity, freedom, equality, constitutionalism, separation of powers, and a score of other foundational elements of the republic.
It is the biblical view that insists on the essential place of truth, rejecting the dangers of the post-truth, power-driven world, and therefore provides a secure basis for freedom and for trust in society as well as a standing critique of the constant danger of the abuse of power.
It is the biblical view that sets out a way of life in which true freedom can flourish and there can be both liberation as an event and ordered liberty as a way of life.
It is the biblical view that provides for the freedom of conscience for all, without exception, including all those who differ and dissent from the biblical view.
And it is the biblical view that is fully realistic about the crooked timber of humanity that provides the ultimate check and balance on human power, the abuse of power, and utopianism.
Seen in that light, we may say that 1776 answers freedom’s questions better than 1789, and that 1789 and its way of thinking represent a disordered view of freedom that spells political suicide for the American republic—exactly as Lincoln warned. But to stop there is too casual, though I tremble before the momentous stakes at a deeper level. Freedom and the American future may be the immediate issue, but the ultimate decision lies even deeper than the difference between 1776 and 1789. It raises the grand question for the human future and for such notions as singularity and transhumanism. Is faith in God the highest form of life affirmation, and does humanity have a better future “under God,” as 1776 and the West have long believed? Or is faith in God the worst form of life negation, and does humanity have a better future “as God,” as 1789, 1917, and 1949 and their heirs and progressive allies now assert? (Nietzsche: “Life is at an end where the kingdom of God begins.”)6
Needless to say, these conclusions are arguable and this grand question is debatable. In the consumerist world, such issues seem a heady irrelevance, and in the fractious political climate of today many people will reject them without a moment’s thought. But my own conviction after several decades of observing American public life is plain: The key to the remedy of the American crisis of freedom lies in a fresh exploration of the Hebrew notions of creation and covenant that lie behind both American freedom and the US Constitution. It is arguable, theoretically, though unlikely to the point of unthinkable, that the progressive secularist account of freedom could create an even more just and free society than America has known so far. In two and a half centuries, it has failed to do so anywhere—not France, not Russia, not China, and not anywhere else. But the outcome will not be decided on paper or through words alone. It will be decided in the crucible of life and history, and that crucible is relentless in its demonstration that choices have both costs and consequences.
In terms of consequences, one foreseeable result is obvious. The open rejection of the Jewish and Christian roots of the American Revolution will mean that all the flowers that grew directly from those roots will someday die. Notions such as human dignity, freedom, justice, equality, Constitution, the separation of powers, and forgiveness have been cut off from their roots. Sooner or later they will become unrecognizable and die. But there is an even deeper consequence for America, as the precedent of Jewish history shows. For as with the story of the exodus from Egypt, the liberation of the American Revolution highlights three possible responses to the original role of faith in achieving freedom.
One response is to appreciate and celebrate the role of faith in freedom, and so to remember it and to hand it on from generation to generation. Such a living memory leads in turn to gratitude that keeps faith and freedom fresh, and an ongoing commitment to strive for the justice and freedom of other peoples who are oppressed now as Israel was in Egypt and the American colonies were under the British. If America responds in this first way, America would remain a powerful and appealing force for freedom down through history and throughout the world.
A second possible response would be for America to turn a blind eye to the original role of faith in freedom, or to turn against faith in moderate ways, and so to distort a living faith into a conventional religion that is used as justification for the status quo. Religion then becomes what Karl Marx criticized rightly as the “opium of the people.” This abuse has been the constant temptation of American civil religion when faith was publicly praised but smoothly domesticated in the decades after the Second World War. By idolizing the role of religion in binding America together, civil religion is essentially a form of American self-worship, which in the end brings on its own self-destruction.
A third possible response would be destructively radical if it rejects the role of faith in freedom altogether, both in terms of its place in the exodus and the American Revolution, and its importance for today. By default such a rejection of the role of faith in freedom would create an antireligion that denies freedom and grows authoritarian in its place. Karl Marx, along with Spinoza and Freud, was one of the three great Jewish titans who rejected their own Jewish faith and created an idol out of antireligion. The irony is inescapable. As the eminent sociologist David Martin often expressed it, Marx argued that the beginning of all criticism was the criticism of religion, only to create a political pseudoreligion that ended all criticism and made a god of the state. The warning is clear.
At the present moment, it is plain that America’s Left/liberal advocates appear intent on greasing the skids for a repeat of that third option. In the great crucible of life and history, one last great contrast between 1776 and 1789 is likely to prove telling. The Achilles’ heel of the progressive secularist view of freedom, as with numerous failed views of freedom before it, is its lack of final accountability.
Again and again, as the question about the paradox of freedom demonstrated, freedom has proved to be its own greatest enemy because it is unable to restrain itself. Freedom is never a greater enemy to freedom than when it becomes freedom as power or freedom without principle. Look at faith one way and you highlight trust and reliance. Look at it another way and you highlight the fear of God that is a standard for moral integrity, civil respect, and accountability. Both faith and the fear of God have been vital for freedom, but the latter especially so, for without accountability freedom corrupts itself and degenerates into mere power, as we have shown in the postmodern thinking and politics of Nietzsche, Foucault, and today’s left-wing activists.
Such a collision of claims about accountability is unavoidable, and no one can have it both ways. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche stated flatly that the rejection of accountability is the heart of atheism. “We deny God. In denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.”7 The challenge to accountability in that statement is clear. From the three branches of government to the golden triangle of freedom, to the Electoral College, the founders tried to devise history’s most ingenious system of checks and balances in order to prevent the abuse of power and hold leaders accountable. But “under God” in the national motto and “so help me God” in numerous oaths were always freedom’s final, if unofficial, check and balance. The most common expression of accountability is the citizen’s Pledge of Allegiance, the highest is the presidential Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution, but there are numerous others in between, all once powerful with meaning. Not only are these words the highest true standard for the oath taker, they are also the standard for the ongoing prophetic critique that covenantal freedom always required.
All freedom requires restraint, and the greater the freedom the greater the restraint and the stronger the accountability it requires. So what is adequate to restrain freedom at its most powerful and prosperous? What could possibly be adequate when progressive intellectuals put their faith in the utopian fallacy that technological progress also means moral progress? Or that improved management can devise systems so brilliant and smooth running that no one needs to be good? Edmund Burke highlighted this problem in the eighteenth century when he wrote to a member of the French National Assembly in 1791. The essential qualification if civil liberty was to flourish and endure in any society was the people’s capacity to put “moral chains” on their own appetites. “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”8
Lord Acton underscored the same point in the nineteenth century in his famous judgment that Athenian democracy foundered for lack of such accountability. The Athenians, he wrote, were the only people of antiquity who grew great through democratic institutions. But they were never able to overcome the tyranny of the majority when the majority became unaccountable.
But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs, exercised its demoralizing influence on the illustrious democracy of Athens. It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. . . .
It follows that the sovereign people had a right to do whatever was within its power, and was bound by no rule of right or wrong but its own judgment of expediency. On a memorable occasion the assembled Athenians declared that it was monstrous that they should be prevented from doing whatever they chose. No force that existed could restrain them; and they resolved that no duty should restrain them, and they would be bound by no laws that were not of their own making. In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their Government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients.9
Americans should ponder Nietzsche’s assertion, Burke’s comment, and Lord Acton’s summary of the conclusion of the ancients: “They understood that for liberty, justice, and equal laws, it is as necessary that Democracy should restrain itself as it had been that it should restrain the Oligarchy.”10 This point cannot be stressed too strongly, yet it is blithely ignored in much of America today when accountability is slighted or has collapsed. As Harari admits, “Yes, we moderns have promised to renounce meaning in exchange for power; but there is nobody out there to hold us to our promise.”11 If faith, character, and personal integrity are vital for sustaining freedom, they are equally, if not more, vital as the moral limit to power. It is easy and all too fashionable to dismiss ethics when we are talking of virtue and freedom, as with the golden triangle of freedom. But it is dangerous in the extreme to dismiss ethics when we are talking of the moral limits to power.
Only right can counter might. Only truth can prevail over lies. Only integrity can counter America’s spreading corruption. Only a conviction of justice, compassion, and humanity, grounded in the fear of God, can prompt a civil disobedience prepared to stand against Leviathan. Science progresses inevitably, but morality can go backward as easily as forward. Tyranny is wrong and always wrong, but its wrong is compounded explosively when it is not accountable. Both the best and the worst chapters of the long struggle for freedom agree: From the conscientious objection of Pharaoh’s midwives who rejected his command to kill Jewish babies, to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and his stands at Selma and Montgomery, the accountability of right, of truth, of the fear of God, and of the moral limits to power is precious and indispensable for freedom, and to reject it spells a death sentence for the American republic.
If that is so, the fate that befell Athens is likely to be the fate of the heirs and allies of 1789, and the reason why their “victory” would be pyrrhic. Progressive secularist elites have grown accountable to no one. They have thrown off restraint for themselves and respect for others. They have decided they are the rulers, and all others are the ruled. They have rejected the role of faith in the American founding, repudiated the place of faith in public life today, and are now intent on stifling the free exercise of faith wherever they can. But in doing so, progressive elites will find that they are fostering a loss of accountability that will be their undoing. They are no longer accountable to God, they are not accountable to others, and they are not accountable to the future—they are accountable only to themselves.
If progressive secularism were to triumph completely, America’s cut-flower ideals would reach the limit of their lives and wither rapidly. The American falcon would lose contact with the falconer altogether, and the center would not hold. Losing its grand conductor, the orchestra playing the great American symphony would grind toward a raucous halt. Intellectuals who all their lives have been living off the whiff of an empty bottle would suddenly realize the bottle was empty. The founders’ great experiment would come to an inglorious end. And in the meantime, certain clear and unavoidable prospects would have become plain.
First, with the death of God and the postmodern dismissal of truth in private and public life, there will be no true freedom. Freedom requires truth and a solid grasp of reality, beginning with the freedom to speak the truth, to challenge political correctness, and to dismiss the fog of gossip, rumors, and lies—and then to provide the grounds for positive freedom. If Americans continue to deny truth, then the crisis of the post-truth world will accelerate the diminishing trust in American institutions. Eventually, social capital will be impoverished, and all relationships, and politics in particular, will be about power and only power. Truth-free power plays and manipulation without end will characterize all relationships. What will still be called freedom will be merely the lifestyle perks of the rich, the famous, and the powerful. Justice will be whatever legal outcome serves the party or people in power. And more American leaders will prostitute the access that their public service provides for fame, money, and power, whether during or after their term in public office.
Second, unchecked truth-free power politics in America will lead to ever greater inequalities between the powerful and their victims, with victory going to the strong and the weak going to the wall. Without a positive nonutopian vision of the desired alternative society, all efforts to bring it in will prove negative and destructive, leaving a wasteland of deconstructed ideals and institutions, such as the family and voluntary associations considered to be in the way. Such a wasteland will do great harm not only to the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the left behind, but to countless ordinary citizens across American society.
Third, an American generation, long made soft by the unrestrained freedom of feelings and boosted by the politics of self-esteem, entitlement, and identity, will experience these inequalities as insufferable abandonment, until its wounded grievances are stoked into an even angrier politics of resentment that will fuel the flames of social conflict, violence, and a mounting refusal to play the American game. The narcissism of identity politics and the victim culture has already become a politics of hypersensitivity, suspicion, offense, insult, resentment, hate, and vengeance, all fanned by activists and a partisan media. It eschews all compromise and reasoning together, and ensures that politics will be as feverish as the image that Americans carried of themselves was inflated. To this contemporary stoking of factions and frustrations will be added countless grievances from the past, as generations with no personal experience of the injuries and injustice suffered by their ancestors seek to settle the score for them and fight their battles all over again in our time. Ruinous divisiveness and vengeful demands for reparation and redress will become destructive and insatiable. As the annus calamitosus of 1968 warns, envy-fueled politics is likely to rise to a climax of violence, scapegoating—and assassination.
Fourth, the philosophy of constructionism will betray its promise of freedom and objectify human beings and turn them into objects of usefulness and expediency. Humans themselves have always been the subjects and not the objects. But now when humans routinely “construct” themselves too, they will become objects to themselves. So they will even judge themselves as products by their usefulness. Women have rightly protested how they are objectified in pornography and in advertising, but in the brave new world of radical constructionism and the sexual revolution, everyone so constructed will be objectified. And those so constructed will be their own products, objects of their own chosen constructions, and therefore assessed according to their usefulness rather than their intrinsic dignity—death by a thousand objectifications and dehumanization in another form.
Fifth, the basic rejection of truth and the commitment to ever more linguistic and socially constructed realities will lead to a greater estrangement and alienation from reality, the very definition of madness. If the Jewish, Christian, and classical views of reality are correct, there is a natural and created order, so the greater the attempt at pure social construction, the greater the estrangement and alienation from reality. Just as the impossible pretentions of Babel ended in confusion, and just as Icarus flew too close to the sun for the wax in his wings, so there are aspirations to self-creation and to transformations in the name of expanded freedom that will flout reality for a while but then crash and burn in eventual despair and self-destruction—first in the case of individuals, then with entire movements and philosophies, and finally with the once-great American experiment itself. This kind of self-made individual, as it used to be said, has relieved God of the responsibility. They alone are responsible for their fate.
Culturally and linguistically constructed worlds within the world are a feature of our creative capacity as human beings. Even the most far-fetched of them may make a world of difference for a time, but they cannot defy reality forever. There is reality. Every thought is thinkable, but not every thought is livable. Not even the greatest heroes and supermen, from Hercules to Nietzsche’s dream superman, could leap the chasm between the earth and heaven and attain a new form of immortality.
Truth is in fact the lifesaver, for without truth there can be neither freedom nor sanity. George Orwell wrote in 1984, as his protagonist Winston fought for his sanity against the politically correct doublethink of the ancestors of today’s Left, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”12 Or as philosopher A. C. Grayling warns bluntly about the spin masters of the post-truth world, “You don’t need facts, you just lie.”13 At a certain point, there can be only one result when Americans close their eyes to facts, shut off their minds from admitting the consequences of what they are doing, and mistake their fantasies for freedom: the madness that comes from being at war with reality.
Sixth, there will be such personal and psychological confusions bred by the radical constructionist views of freedom that the outcome will deepen America’s psychological confusion, social lawlessness, political chaos, and economic debt, all serving to reinforce the decadence and decline of the American republic. “Be careful what you wish for” has always been sage advice. King Midas was given the golden touch he longed for, and Achilles gained the glory in battle he hoped for, but neither achieved what they really desired. Just so, many of today’s Americans, and America itself, may well accomplish the novel, nature-defying freedoms they aspire to, but then wake up to rue the results.
Seventh, the rejection of the Jewish and Christian faiths does not mean the end of religion, as the radicals hope, but the resurgence of not one but two ancient religions in their place. From one side, we are seeing a return to paganism, and from the other, social constructionism and the technological revolution fosters the rise of a new gnosticism. Wilhelm Reich’s revolution gained its energy through its vaunted “liberation” from all repressions, whether moral, social, or religious, and its glorying in the “vitality” of the life force. But the result is neither novel nor revolutionary. It is merely a return to nature and the worship of the sum of the forces of nature that was at the heart of the pagan world and is now reemerging with the idolizing of naturalistic science. The Greeks, the Canaanites, and many ancient societies would have recognized this religion at once.
At the same time, there is a growing chasm between the subjective I, which decides what identity it will create for itself, and the objective body that is worked on as the product to achieve these ends. The unwitting outcome is the renewal of the religion of gnosticism, with its own special elite of priest/experts, today’s technocrats and scientist kings. These are the people that philosopher José Ortega y Gasset described as “totalitarian scientists” because they expand the prestige of their real knowledge to pretend that it covers the whole of life. From the creation of the pill to the latest advances of the scalpel, cosmetic surgery, and radical enhancement, to the near- and far-term dreams of biogenetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and cyborgs, technology has long aided and abetted the promise of infinite and endless possibility. But now the I and its feelings are hailed as sovereign, and the biological body we were born with loses its integrity and becomes mere spare parts for its starry-eyed constructor man-gods. At best, bodies will be “disposable escape pods that will have done their job if they keep us alive just long enough to achieve electronic immortality.”14
Body bad—mind good. Biological body unwanted—newly minted identity desirable and possible. Body limited—digitally enhanced mind infinite, soaring, and unstoppable. Together, hi-tech innovation, social constructionism, the gender revolution, bioengineering, the internet, and the feelings culture are collaborating to build a shining launch pad for the new gnosticism. Already they are advertising their free ride to immortality and the stars. Little wonder that its devotees call such heady optimism the “new religion” of Silicon Valley, the “religion of humanism” or “the religion of dataism.”15 “Eventually,” Harari writes, “the Internet-of-All-Things may become sacred in its own right”—the Tower of Babel in its advanced modern form.16
Early aspects of these seven trends and developments are already coursing through American society, and the leading progressives who pursue these goals need to be reminded how the naivety of such utopian revolutionaries usually ends in the revolution devouring its own children. The world too should be put on notice as to where they are leading “the land of the free,” for the first words of the writing on the wall are already visible. If the drive for so-called natural freedom proceeds unchecked, America will be rushing lemming-like to a state of nature somewhere between Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Weimar Germany, and the Israel of the book of Judges when “there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg 21:25).
Under that scenario, the prospects for the once-great American republic and for the world are grave. The degeneration of America and American leadership over the last few decades is all too evident, leaving a yawning vacuum for the strong man or the powerful elite. What matters is who or what takes over from 1776. Berthold Brecht wrote prophetically in 1941 in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the word has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.” All who love and admire America should ponder the ancient maxim: The worst is the corruption of the best.
Visitors to the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, often tread on one of the most interesting exhibits without ever noticing it. It is embedded in the floor of the Hall of Biodiversity. The exhibit is arranged around a plaque that notes that there have been five major extinction events on the earth since complex animals emerged, each extinction surrounded with the remains of the victims. It then announces, “Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.” Among supporting quotations is a statement of Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist from Stanford University, “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.” What Homo sapiens did to other animals and to the rest of nature, our own advances and developments are threatening to do to us. “Looking back, humanity will turn out to have been just a ripple within the cosmic data flow.”17
In her Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert reflects on the fact that if a visitor stands at the edge of the exhibit, the only place from which to see it well, “you are positioned right where the victims of the Sixth Extinction should go.”18 The point is as plain as it is poignant. We humans are both the dangerous species and the endangered species. We may deny that we humans are made in the image of God or have any special status as anything more than another animal species, but in doing so we have achieved our own dark special status as the one species that can threaten all other species—though the victims will also be us. People may argue over how Homo sapiens arrived at this point and what we should do to avoid mutually assured destruction, but the point is becoming unassailable. With the grand issues of the global era converging to create an enormous crunch of questions and problems, the coming generation is the crunch generation whose choices will be critical to the future of humanity and to the earth that is our home.
It is a paradox that the same people who take this issue seriously when the focus is the future of the earth often appear astonishingly careless when the focus is the future of freedom—though a similar warning resonates through the Bible, the classics, and down the centuries of history. Freedom has always been the greatest enemy of freedom. Powerful free people are brought down by no one but themselves. America still stands before the inescapable truth of Lincoln’s prophetic comment: “As a nation of free men, either we shall live free for all time, or die by suicide.”19 Americans must therefore ask themselves, What have we done that makes the danger so possible, and what can we do in our time to make the danger impossible?
There is of course a more hopeful possibility: the recovenanting of America, or the renewal of the American covenant of freedom, which could lead to a genuine new birth of freedom and justice. Without a renewal of the American ideas and ideals, America will never become great again, however prodigious the effort. As with other covenantal societies, the truth is that the United States goes forward best by going back first. It must return to its roots in constitutional or covenantal freedom, renewing the ideals that made it possible, and righting the wrongs where America has betrayed its founding promise. By recovenanting and going back first, the United States is in fact able to go forward.
Properly understood, recovenanting is progressive. Covenantalism and constitutionalism acknowledge the past with gratitude, but they do not remain in the past. There is no golden age they wish to return to. Renewed by the wellsprings of the past, they are partly conservative, but as they strive for a future that includes the best of the past that is still to be achieved, they are partly progressive, in the best sense of the word. Never simply people of the past, they are not yet fully people of the future, so there is always more to do, always more to strive for.
Humans do not keep promises well, so covenants can be broken and betrayed, and constitutions can be destroyed. But both covenants and constitutions can be restored and renewed, and mistakes and evils acknowledged, confessed, and put right. Over against the unquestionable reality of today’s spiraling cycle of racial injustice, grievance, and resentment, for example, there can be national repentance, forgiveness, and rededication to freedom and equality for all. America can return to its right mind. America’s abiding curse of racism can finally be resolved and not perpetuated forever. Hard though it may be for the proud to swallow, there are times when a covenantal nation requires penitential citizens, and without it there is no way forward.
Strong renewal is always possible, and repentance and forgiveness are realistic and can lead to a genuine return and true homecoming. No one who knows the history of the Jews can be anything other than awed by the near-miraculous way their covenant kept them intact down the centuries, across the continents, and in spite of the most the most extreme scattering and the most vicious persecution. In the words of Rabbi Sacks, “Covenant renewal defeats national entropy. A people that never forgets its purpose and its past, that reenacts its story in every family every year, a nation that attributes its success to God and its failures to itself, cannot die.”20
For those Americans who agree with Rabbi Sacks, the words “God keeps faith” contain a double truth. God keeps his word, yes, absolutely. Behind the universe itself, behind all that is, all that has ever been, and all that ever could and will be, there is one whose word truly is his bond, a promise maker who is the ultimate promise keeper. Life itself, the existence of the universe, and science all depend on that covenant. That is the immediate truth in the words, but there is an ultimate truth too. God keeps faith with his people and with humanity. So we have faith in God. But God also has faith in us and, despite us, keeps faith with us.
God keeps faith with humanity? There is an immensity of hope in that second covenantal truth. Contemporary descriptions of post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, pre-singularity humanity tend to be dark and fearful, and the present state of the global affairs offers meager grounds for revising the estimate. “Man has very few friends in the world,” Rabbi Heschel remarked dryly. “The Lord in heaven may prove to be his last friend on earth.”21 Or, as he put it in an unforgettable image, humanity is “the knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced.”22 Many Americans have no concern for God, but the good news is that God still has a concern for Americans and America.
History shows beyond a shadow of doubt that it is utopians such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Wilhelm Reich, and Mao Zedong who cause the greatest havoc. They start out seeing no problem in humanity, only certain chains restraining natural human goodness and freedom. But in trying to remove the chains, they end in producing history’s most egregious evils, most dismal failures, and most murderous regimes. They attempt to storm the stubborn gap between the real and the utopian dream, and end in violence. By contrast, it is the one who knows the worst about us from the start, who understands the radical inclinations of the human heart, who takes into account the crooked timber of our humanity, who still keeps faith with us despite everything. In spite of all that we humans have done to each other, have done to our fellow creatures, and have done to the earth that is our planet home, God still keeps faith with humanity. That is the covenant that the original rainbow affirms. That is the truth that ensures that no situation is beyond hope and no crisis should ever be written off as hopeless—even America’s today.
Will a covenantal and constitutional renewal take place in America as the century unfolds? Is there an American leader with the vision, the courage, and the knowledge of history to be the covenant restorer in the land? Is there a statesman who understands the genius of the American republic, and knows the challenges and failures of the American experiment, who can appeal to the better angels of the American character, righting what was wrong at the start and rebuilding what has been lost or destroyed in its recent history? Is there a champion who has the courage to alert the country to the siren seductions of false freedoms and call America to a “new, new birth” of freedom? And if such a leader were to issue such a call, would it still have the resonance to rouse the American people from their anxiety, apathy, and anger even now? Could there be an American renaissance on the horizon? Could America rise to be a partnership-for-freedom nation again?
Both commentators and gamblers would agree. The present odds of American leaders leading and American followers following, so that there is a successful restoration of the ideals of the American republic, are long—very long. The repudiation of the past is too hardened, the present wounds are too deep and raw, the alternative options are too entrenched, and many Americans simply prefer to keep their heads down and muddle through as best they can. But freedom is never a matter of the odds. If it were, Lexington, Concord, Yorktown, and the “miracle at Philadelphia” would never have happened in the first place. Freedom is a matter of leadership, choice, and courage, whatever the odds, and also a matter of faith, for the last freedom is always the freedom to pit personal determination against circumstances, however dire they seem. As we have seen with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, genuine leadership could change the landscape almost overnight.
Daniel Elazar did more than anyone to rediscover the influence of the covenantal tradition that is the missing key to American freedom. He liked to remind his readers that covenants originated in a culture of oases. What characterizes an oasis is that it is centered in a spring that is the source of its water and its life. No oasis is ever larger, more luxuriant, and longer lasting then the strength of the wellspring at its center—and neither is the nation whose form of government is a covenant or a constitution. If America is to be made great again, it will only be through remembering what made America great in the first place and renewing both the covenant and the relationship to the faith that was and is its wellspring.
The challenge of the present moment therefore confronts Americans with a titanic choice: covenant, chaos, or control? Renewal or decline? Wellspring or social and cultural desert? The coming generation will be the crunch generation for freedom, just as they will also be part of the crunch generation for the future of the world. Will Americans return to their right minds, remember what freedom is, and rededicate themselves to shoulder the responsibility that freedom requires of every citizen?
It is therefore time for Americans to pause and to think. The gravity of the present kairos moment lies not just in its stakes but in its singular uniqueness as a moment. The freedom of the American experiment hangs by a thread. The present moment is singular as well as momentous in its significance. There is a decisive parting of the ways over freedom, and the present generation has to make its choice. Freedom is never a fait accompli or a “mission accomplished.” “If not for this very moment” (and the choices Americans make now), future generations will say, the story of freedom would be different.
All who came before you in your history, all who will come after you, including your children and your children’s children, and all across the world who long to live in freedom as you have, call on you to consider things well and to rise to the challenge of this hour. America, your striking genius for freedom has become your Achilles’ heel and now threatens your premature and quite unnecessary decline. Ponder the choice between 1776 and 1789 with care. Think again and look to what needs to be restored before the darkness falls on your great experiment in republican freedom. This is your hour, the American hour, and a moment on which everything turns. There is a way before you that can lead to renewal and restoration, or one that leads to decadence and decline. The choice that you must make is yours and yours alone. So also will be the consequences.
Choose, then, America, whether you wish to stay true to the better angels of your founding promise and shoulder the burden of being the world’s beacon of responsible and enduring freedom. Choose whether you desire life or death, blessings or curses, freedom and flourishing or chaos and decline. Choose as the Jews chose before you and your early American ancestors chose in their turn whether you will again be “a city on a hill” or become “a story and byword throughout the world.”
America, America. Do you know what time it is? Do you understand the meaning of this moment? Freedom is at stake. Act worthy of yourselves, your great experiment in freedom, your unfinished story, and the challenge of the hour and of humanity. God, history, and the watching world await your answer. In the words of your greatest president, will you as a free people do what it takes to live free forever, or will you die by your own hand? Will you listen, reflect, and turn around, or will you continue to rush headlong toward, like Rome, a fall beyond belief? The hour for your decision is now.