Endowed... By Whom?

President Obama recently slipped up while quoting the Declaration of Independence. Not once, mind you, but twice. Both times he committed the same error, stating that "all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights..." Notice what's missing? Three simple words: "by their Creator."

Is it merely coincidence that a president who is known for his intelligence and public speaking acumen would commit the same simple error on two separate occasions, merely a month apart? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Either way, this all got me thinking about something that's far more important than Barack Obama, or any other president for that matter. It got me thinking about the importance of those words, "by their Creator." Why were they put in the Declaration of Independence in the first place? And what happens if you take them away? All sorts of bad things happen, unfortunately.

The Declaration of Independence gave moral justification to America's separation from England by basing it in "nature and nature's God." At the time it was written, one didn't have to be a dedicated Christian in order to embrace that document. "Nature's God" could be understood in a number of ways, Christian, Deist, or otherwise. The same is true today: One doesn't have to be an evangelical Christian like I am in order to support the Declaration.

But one does have to acknowledge the same "self-evident truth": that the fundamental equality of all men, which is what ensures our liberty, derives from the Creator. The consequences of failing to acknowledge this, as many people (including our president) seem wont to do these days, are potentially disastrous. I flesh this out a bit in a recent article at the Colson Center, in which I ask Do We Still Hold These Truths?

In Support of Capitalism, America Style (part 3 of 3)

If you've stuck with me through part 1 and part 2, then here comes the payoff.

With moral influence now privatized and shunted out of public life thanks to the prevalence of postmodern thinking, the law is the only place to turn to when we see the need to regulate human behavior. And this situation undermines the essence of what America's founders called "self government." Here's why.

The way self government was designed to work can understood by the continuum below.


On the left is license, or the freedom to do whatever one chooses. This is good, obviously, to some extent, but the freedom to do whatever I want must be checked or chaos and anarchy result. On the right is the law, or the government's authority brought to bear to limit the actions of citizens. Now the key insight: in between, and buffering the two, is morality -- our internal sense of what's right and wrong. Self government works the best when public morality is strong:

Here, the "license" segment is small, meaning people don't fly off and do a massive amount of crazy, destructive, chaotic things. There are always exceptions of course, but generally this situation results in peace and stability. However, the "law" segment is also relatively small. Since people usually do the right thing even though the law doesn't technically require it, there's not as much need for tons of laws. This is a free society in which the government doesn't intrude excessively into the lives of the citizens. And the key to it all is a strong sense of public morality -- a shared sense of what's right and what's wrong. To put it another way, the more people govern their own behavior the less the government has to. This is why John Adams famously said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." He wasn't saying everyone should be forced to go to church on Sunday. He was saying a society which doesn't t have a moral base cannot govern itself and will thus have to be governed from outside, which is tyranny. Morality is essential to self government, and this is at the heart of the American ideal.

But when morality becomes privatized it loses its public influence. The result looks something like this:

Here morality's public influence has shrunk, and notice what happens: both license and law expand to make up the difference. License increases, meaning more and more people feel free to do more and more of whatever they want; even things that were seen as shameful a generation or two ago. And at the same time laws multiply, becoming more detailed and increasingly intrusive, because the law is the only hedge left against chaos once public morality is taken off the table. This is the kind of substantial government power that America's founders sought to avoid.

So, my conclusions...

1. The current economic crisis is not a failure of capitalism, and it is certainly not a failure of the American version of democratic capitalism. It is a failure of public morality.
2. Because the problem is moral, government is not the solution. This is why the supporters of socialism (even European-style democratic socialism) are wrong when they denounce capitalism as a failure. Ceding more economic control and authority to government institutions (or quasi-government institutions like the Federal Reserve) will only result in what America's founders would call tyranny: the government sphere becoming too large and dominating the other two, upsetting the delicate balance at the core of our way of life.
3. Finally, since the current economic crisis is at heart a moral one, the solution is also moral. While government always has a role to play in society as I've said previously, the fact is more laws and stronger regulation will not make better people. And without better people we won't face a better future.

And this is where I think our president, politicians, business leaders, and intellectuals (including church leaders) are mostly missing a huge opportunity. They should be calling us back from the brink of our irrational love affair with postmodernism and radical, atomistic individualism. What kind of impact would President Obama have, with his skill at oration and high approval ratings, if he were to urge Americans to get back to the lifestyle, worldview and morality that built such unprecedented wealth over the past 50 years? Instead he seems interested in the same thing most modern politicians are: tarring the other side and using his "political capital" make "his mark" on the nation.

And where are the church leaders? Largely silent, lost in the marginalized and privatized world too many of us have accepted. There are some notable exceptions: church leaders who are speaking about the failure of public morality and warning us against human and government saviors. Chuck Colson, who's been consistent in pointing to the moral roots of the problem, is one.

Well, for what it's worth let me add my meager voice to those who see the big picture, and who try to bring it out in the open even during difficult times when we tend want quick and easy answers. And the big picture is not several steps toward socialism. It is the need to return to a moral world: a world in which there is right & wrong, and where it's understood that violating that norm will have consequences. At root our current economic difficulties are symptoms of our own national worldview, and our insistence that clear standards of right and wrong are subjective, tyrannical, and have no place in public life.

The economic indicators that get so much press are like the harsh buzz of an alarm clock. I say, let's stay away from the snooze button. Time to wake up from our postmodern dream.

Or has it been a nightmare?

In Support of Capitalism, America Style (part 2 of 3)

As I wrote previously, the pragmatic genius of America at its founding was more than three branches of government. It was in dividing the entire life of the nation into three separate "spheres," and working hard to make sure each sphere could perform its natural function without undue interference from the other two.

Of course each sphere is influenced by the others, such that the three spheres I illustrated last time aren't completely isolated. They interact.

• The political sphere ensures many things (security, stability, justice, etc.) that both business and religious/artistic/philosophical institutions need to exist.
  
• The moral/cultural sphere provides the raw material for public policy, as well as the guiding principles that regulate the doing of business.
  
• The economic sphere provides the resources and practical know-how to fund and shape much of what happens in both political and moral/cultural institutions.

So the key point to all this is America works when each of these three spheres is able to influence and shape the other two without undue interference from the other two. It's a beautiful balancing act - one that is no longer happening.

In fact the Moral/Cultural sphere is all but neutralized in public life. There are many reasons why this is so, but I think the main one is postmodern privatization. By that I mean that postmodernism is now the common view, along with its its insistence that no one can know truth. In other words no one is thought to have any real insight into morality (what's right and wrong); all they have is their opinion. The result is that morality has become "privatized": you have your view of right & wrong, I have mine, and that's all there is. It's assumed there is no morality that applies to everyone, and consequently the moral/cultural sphere has no power to influence society any longer as it should (and as it once did). So what we have now looks more like this, with morality privatized off to the side and thus playing virtually no role in public life:
And what are the consequences of privatizing morality and removing its influence? Breakdown. Since the moral sphere provides the guiding principles for both law and business, if we remove its influence we cut ourselves adrift as a society, and business, being less restrained, is more likely to give in to excess. Which is exactly what is currently happening. As I wrote when this whole mess started the decimation of moral/cultural influence is why we have an economic crisis to begin with. The issue at the root of our financial woes is greed (on the part of millions of Americans, incidentally, not just a select few scapegoats) and greed is a moral problem. Unable to identify the immoral nature of their actions (or unable to restrain themselves from doing what they knew wasn't right) millions of people went for short-term profit, drastically over-inflated the economy, and now it's correcting. Hard.

So the economic failure is a failure of shared public morality, NOT the failure of capitalism as an economic system. But with the moral/cultural sphere in tatters only two spheres remain: government and business. So when people perceive a problem with business, where do they turn? To the only option they think is left: government. And with one final post I'll note why I think turning to the government for long term answers is the worst thing we can do.

In Support of Capitalism, America Style (part 1 of 3)

Hugo Chavez needs to zip his lip.

I've never heard Venezuela's bombastic president say anything that wasn't boldly anti-America, so I'm not surprised to see him criticizing us yet again. But his recent rants about capitalism being dead and socialism, of all things, being the answer for the future (yes, he really said that) are completely out of touch with both history and reality. Still, I don't normally pay much attention to goofball thugs like Chavez so why even mention it? Because Chavez, sadly, is not alone in his anti-capitalist furor. And some of those who are joining the capitalism-is-dead chorus are right here in the good ol' US of A.

I've been frankly stunned to see the number of newspaper articles, Op-Eds, blogs and even polls that are hinting or outright declaring that the whole American capitalist experiment is a failure, simply because of the current recession. I think most of them have incorrectly identified the problem, and thus they've incorrectly identified solutions (such as long term government intervention at many levels). All of which leads to a misguided reflection on American capitalism, and the mistaken notion that it has somehow "failed."

Now, I do not confuse my love for America with my love for Jesus, and my passion for our nation takes a firm back seat to my passion for the Kingdom of God. However, that said, I'm an unashamed believer in the principles that founded this nation, and I'm sad to say I didn't learn many of them until long after graduating from high school. So even though this blog is mostly about Christian theology and comparative worldviews I want to spend a few posts hammering out some of the many thoughts that have swirled in my head over the past few months. I've been consistently frustrated as I watch the talking heads miss the point, the citizenry unknowingly abandon core principles, the president squander a colossal opportunity, and everyone look for easy scapegoats. I'll explain all this in the next couple posts, so if you can stand my rants and ruminations then sit back and enjoy a defense of democratic capitalism, America style.


3 Spheres of American Society
When they created this nation our Founders were engaging in an experiment -- an attempt to order a society in a way that had never been tried before. Most of our civics classes taught us that this boiled down to three separate branches of government with a system of checks and balances. That's true, but the experiment was much larger than just the structure of the federal government. The Founders actually divided the whole of American society into three spheres: the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural.

The political sphere exists for maintenance of law & order, national defense, the enforcement of justice, etc. It is made up of all the institutions of government: courts, legislatures, executives and law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels.

The economic sphere exists to generate the wealth (money, products, services) that both the citizens and the government need to survive and to thrive. It is made up of all the institutions of business: factories, corporations, farms, stock exchanges, shops, banks, etc.

The moral/cultural sphere exists to provide meaning, purpose, and direction to the society (the "soul of the nation," so to speak). It is made up of many different institutions which traffic in ideas, meaning, theology, and philosophy such as churches, schools and universities, the press, the arts, etc.

These three spheres were identified, separated from, and protected from one another with a great deal of intentionality. In his challenging but masterful book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Michael Novak puts it this way:

"What the founders of democratic capitalism most feared is the gathering of all power into one. No human being, they believed, is wise or good enough to be trusted with undivided, unitary power. For this reason they separated moral-cultural institutions... from the state. But they also separated economic institutions from the state.

"In earlier eras, clergymen and aristocrats alike had much to say about economic life. Bureaucrats of church and state controlled economic activities, bestowed licenses, imposed taxes and tariffs. Similarly, clergymen meddled in politics and political leaders in religion. Both censored intellect and the arts. It is a distinctive invention of democratic capitalism to have conceived a way of differentiating three major spheres of life, and to have assigned to each relatively autonomous networks of institutions." (emphasis added).

The separation and interrelation of these three spheres form the superstructure, or skeleton, of America. Next: how these three sets of institutions were to influence, and yet remain protected from, one another.

My, how things have changed...

The text of President Washington's original Thanksgiving Proclamation, signed October 3, 1789 follows. Interesting to see Congress and the President reflect their shared sense of God's providential hand over the nation so soon after the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the US Constitution - a sense that our increasingly secular government seems to have forgotten. Read with pleasure - and happy Thanksgiving!

General Thanksgiving
By the PRESIDENT of the United States Of America
A PROCLAMATION

WHEREAS it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favour; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a DAY OF PUBLICK THANSGIVING and PRAYER, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

NOW THEREFORE, I do recommend and assign THURSDAY, the TWENTY-SIXTH DAY of NOVEMBER next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war [i.e. the American Revolutionary War]; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed;-- for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish Constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted;-- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge;-- and, in general, for all the great and various favours which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also, that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions;-- to enable us all, whether in publick or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wife, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us); and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

GIVEN under my hand, at the city of New-York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

(signed) G. Washington

Free flowing thoughts on a bittersweet celebration

Today is America's 232nd birthday, and I'm one of the many who still think "The 4th" is about more than grilled beef and bottle rockets. Not that parties are bad; birthdays are certainly a time to celebrate, but celebrations don't mean much unless we know what we're celebrating. And America's birthday is no different. So, what follows are a few random musings on a couple of the feelings that seem to arise in me every year about this time.

This nation meant something when it was founded - it stood for something. I majored in colonial and Revolutionary American history in college, and while that doesn't make me an expert it did afford me the opportunity to immerse myself in the thoughts which forged this republic. I think the Founders understood various forms of tyranny better than we do today, and they were outraged by it because tyranny violates basic human dignity and value.

But this creates an immediate question: what is human dignity and value, and where does it come from? One thing was certain: the Founders believed it came from someone "up there." Now, let's be clear: many of these guys were not modern-day evangelical Christians. Perhaps I'll post later on the question of whether America is or ever was "a Christian nation" - that's a question I'm not addressing here. But the fact remains that even a miracle-denying son of the Enlightenment like Thomas Jefferson willingly penned America's formative words, the nation's first cry in the delivery room:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

There is something true and beautiful in those words, and even now I can't read them without becoming emotional. The appeal, which is quite broad and has been embraced by Americans of nearly all religious persuasions for generations, is the grounding of our way of life (and thus our government - a secondary consideration) in a higher source, from which human dignity and rights flow. In the American vision, government is dependent on the consent of the governed, but rights are not. If the latter were the case the majority would always dominate the minority - another form of tyranny.

In the American vision, absolute truths are held to be above the power of even the government to violate. Perhaps that's why our 2nd president John Adams famously said "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In America, citizens are to adhere to higher truth (which protects everyone's rights) based on their own internal morality, not because the state forces them to. Adams was saying that virtue in America will survive only to the extent we choose to be a virtuous people. America is a grand call to live for a higher purpose by our own choice, and to enjoy the liberty to do so.

Yet my celebratory feelings are mixed with twinges of sadness and concern because the age of postmodern relativism presents a real problem to this grand political vision in my view. We're fast becoming a nation enamored with blurring distinctions of every kind. But if, for example, humans are really no different than apes, whales, and cockroaches (as in the Naturalist worldview) then where do our rights come from? If meaning and truth are merely social constructs (as postmodern philosophers teach) then our cherished "rights" are really just figments of our imagination, which can be altered or eliminated as those with power see fit. The further we push into postmodern relativism, the further we drive a sawblade through the very branch our Republic sits on.

Still, it's a thick branch and I'm optimistic that history isn't yet through with America and it's unique vision of representative republican government. And I can think of no better day on which to remind ourselves who we are and where we came from. So on this 4th of July I salute not only America, but the grand vision of truth, meaning, and purpose upon which this nation's social fabric and governmental structures were built.

The original Declaration of Independence, the first cry of our nation at it's birth.
(now badly faded due to poor document preservation techniques in the 19th century)