The Values that Dare Not Speak Their Names
There’s another little bit of President Sarkozy’s speech I thought was interesting. In it, he invokes The Values That Dare Not Speak Their Names.
America’s strength is not only a material strength, it is first and foremost a spiritual and moral strength….
Fundamentally, what are those who love America asking of her, if not to remain forever true to her founding values?
What, indeed?
The counter question would be: Fundamentally, what can you say of those who are demanding that America discard her founding values?
How manifest must those values be to be noticed and applauded by a leader whose nation, and the nations around him, have worked very hard to purge spiritual and moral values from public discourse? How critical are those values that they are lauded by the President of the country that gave us Diderot, Voltaire, Camus, Helvetius, and Sartre and in whose country the term “atheism” originated (and later spawned the Culte de la Raison)? How destructive would it be to decouple our nation from those founding values to satisfy some wool headed notion of a secular utopia?
Please know that I am not, as has been suggested in the past, trying to form some sort of “Christian Theocracy” nor am I calling for an “American Taliban”. I am saying that America was founded on certain principles, most of which are undeniably spiritual or moral and from which the spirituality and morality is essential and inseperable. We have spent decades trying to detach those principles from their roots only to find that we’ve made things worse instead of better. The answer, as Sarkozy insightfully noted, is not to keep going the way we have been but to remember what got us here in the first place.
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Category: Gimme that Old Time Religion, Our Friends, The Europeans
This is a comment ("America was founded on certain principles, most of which are undeniably spiritual or moral") that parallels similar ones I have heard before. I would like to ask what, specifically, those principles are.
There was not a lot of commonality among the signers of the Declaration or the Constitution in terms of moral or spiritual beliefs. There were as many Deists as Puritans. One reason for the wording of the First Amendment was to avoid the disputes of the previous 200-odd years of colonial history, not to mention the still-raw scars of European reformation/ counter-reformation/etc.
Don't get me wrong. There was a lot of moral/spiritual uplift going on in colonial and revolutionary America. But neither the doctrinaire Puritans of New England nor the hopeful Methodists and Baptists of the Great Awakening nor the dour Anglicans/Episcopalians of the Southern Ascendancy can really be said to have achieved any sort of national outlook that informed the new government.
On the other hand, there was a rising mixture of cultures, races, and religions in the cities and seaports like New York and Philadelphia that if not atheistic was at least irreligious, and that would portend the new nation equally as much as the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.
If there is a single, common moral/spiritual value held by the framers, it would be religious tolerance–a value that came directly from Voltaire via the Enlightenment to inform the American Republic.
However, I could be wrong. If there is are certain principles, moral and spiritual, that are the bedrock of America, outside of and predating the secular principles of the Age of Reason as set forth in the Declaration and the Constitution, I'd like to know what they are.
Bob, you could refer to the opening of the Declaration of Independence for a pretty good summary of those moral and spiritual values. There is a lot that can be unpacked from just a few words.
But there is nothing in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration that wouldn't be vehemently be supported by Messrs Voltaire and Diderot–or Messrs Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes. In fact, the Declaration of Independence is a quintessence of a century of Enlightenment thought; the single great example of the Age of Reason put into political practice.
What the Declaration does not call for, and the Constitution specifically denies, is the establishment of a state religion (as opposed to to faith, morals, or spirituality). While the founding fathers probably intended this to avoid the primacy of a particular Protestant denomination and didn't envision legal protections for American Muslims, Wiccans, or atheists, the natural extension of their rule has had that result.
So, I would ask you how you would put into practice a re-establishment of America's founding morals and spiritual values that does not, in effect, reinforce the primacy of a state religion?
There is no "probably to it". The founders explicitly said that their intention was that no one church would gain primacy.
Let's start by reversing the current course of government when it comes to religion. Instead of ejecting real religion (as opposed to platitudes that sound religious but are little more than a facade of religiosity) from the public discourse, let's encourage all religions to give their best parts to society. One could hardly argue that a society that functioned, for example, with the Golden Rule as an exemplar of public behavior would be worse than the society we have now.
Then let's openly and honestly accept that religion did in fact play a fundamental role in founding the nation. If it were not for people acting on their deeply-held religious beliefs, most of the societal advances we have today would likely not have happened.
I am not saying that we should institute mandatory prayers nor that we should force everyone to go to school, but we'd be well-advised to allow their communities to hold up the religions they find important to them (or no religion at all, if that is what they choose) and use the guiding tenets of those religions to enrich us all.