The Nation That Forgot What It Was Built On

There is something almost comically ironic in the modern progressive's position.

There is a curious modern habit of calling a thing secular precisely when it is merely Christian with the Christianity removed. We build our courts upon the idea that men are equal before the law, and congratulate ourselves on our magnificent neutrality - never pausing to ask why, if men are simply arrangements of atoms jostling toward entropy, any one arrangement should be thought equal to another. We erect our schools on the principle that truth exists and can be taught, and then solemnly declare that no particular account of truth shall be permitted through the door. We have kept the furniture of a Christian civilization while evicting the family that built it, and then we wonder why the house feels strangely hollow.

Noah Webster, a man who knew something about the precision of words - he having spent a rather long time defining them- understood this problem with a clarity that shames us. He wrote that education limited to the arts and sciences, while rejecting the aids of religion in forming the character of citizens, is essentially defective. Note the word he chose. Not incomplete. Not imbalanced. Defective. A thing with a flaw built into its structure, like a load-bearing wall made of sand.

The fashionable objection will arrive here on schedule. Some reader, educated at great expense in a very fine institution, will point out that religion divides, while reason unites. This is precisely backwards. Reason, unmoored from any account of why human beings matter, divides magnificently - it has divided us into producers and products, into useful citizens and inconvenient ones, into the healthy and the expensive. It is precisely the stubborn insistence that each man carries within him something that no committee appointed by the state has the authority to revoke- a soul, an imago, a dignity that precedes and outlasts every empire- that has served as the one reliable brake on tyranny in the Western story.

Webster saw this clearly enough when he wrote that before a standing army can rule, the people must first be disarmed - and that the arm which matters most is the moral one. A people who have been taught that there is no authority above the state are a people with no argument against the state. They are, in the precise sense, unarmed. And the despot, whatever flag he flies, has always understood this better than his victims.

There is something almost comically ironic in the modern progressive’s position. He has- quite rightly - inherited a horror of tyranny, a love of the poor, a suspicion of concentrated power. These are Christian instincts. He carries them with the fervour of a convert. He simply cannot explain where they came from, or why, if the universe has no author, oppression should be considered anything more than the natural order temporarily disturbed. He is, to borrow a Chestertonian observation about a related type, a man who has broken with his philosophy while keeping his values- which is rather like keeping the clock while smashing the spring, and then being indignant that time has stopped.

The great irony is that the men who built the institutions we now invoke against religion were themselves men of religious conviction who thought they were making room for genuine faith to breathe - not performing a quiet euthanasia upon it. Webster did not imagine that Christian morality could simply be pumped out of the walls and replaced with a colourless civic gas. He wrote that the moral principles and precepts contained in Scripture ought to form the basis of all civil constitutions and laws- not as a theocracy, but as the only honest account of why those laws have any claim upon anyone at all.

We are left, then, with a choice that is not really a choice between religion and reason. It is a choice between the religion that built the house, and the various other religions now competing to renovate it- among them the religion of the market, the religion of the state, and the religion of the self, each with its own priesthood and its own inquisition. The last of these is perhaps the most demanding, requiring as it does a constant and exhausting reinvention of one’s fundamental identity, and offering in return nothing more permanent than a hashtag.

What Webster knew, and what a great number of very clever people have spent the last two centuries furiously unlearning, is that a free republic is not a machine. It is a moral achievement, and moral achievements require maintenance of the moral kind. The citizens of such a republic must be formed, not merely informed. They must be given not only knowledge of their rights but the habits and convictions that make rights worth having- the willingness to extend them to others, the courage to defend them when inconvenient, the humility to recognize that they were not invented last Tuesday.

A people taught that the good is whatever the majority votes for, or whatever the market will bear, or whatever makes one feel most fully oneself, is a people with no good at all - only a preference. And preferences, however loudly asserted, have never held a tyrant at bay for five minutes.

Webster, who was not a gloomy man but an enormously practical one, put the consequence plainly enough: if citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; the laws will be made not for the public good but for selfish purposes; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. He did not write this as a prophecy. He wrote it as a description of a mechanism - as simple and as remorseless as gravity.

The only surprising thing about gravity is how long it takes, in particular cases, to reach the ground.