Freedom in the Land of the E Pluribus Unum.

Sometimes it is difficult to know whether what you are thinking and writing is a thought-provoking philosophical accounting, or simply a crazed intuition transformed into rant-gone-wild. In this respect, sometimes philosophers are like crazed Dutch hairdressers (or at least the one that I know). This might be one of those equivocal times for all of us, for me the author as well as for you the reader.

            It also comes to mind that this reflection might be destined primarily for American readers; so if you are among those who find this ‘thought-provoking philosophical accounting’ cum ‘rant-gone-wild’ to be only of marginal interest, chances are good that you are a European who has government-organized and sponsored health care. Freedom, in the American sense of the term, does not concern such as you.

‘Freedom’ is the most abstract of concepts, even in moments of extreme philosophical lucidity. The Greek philosophers, for example, did not make the philosophical case for freedom… (Elevtheria!!!! I can still hear the cynical battle cry of one of my former racquetball partners ringing in my ears… he taught romantic literature, of course, in addition to beating me on the r-b court!); because Greeks of the ancient sort did not believe themselves to be free. Rather, they lived in a world tragically conceived, where powerful Gods dominate and control, as invisible and formidable causal forces. In such a tragic world the actions of Gods and men are inextricably intertwined, and although men like Achilles and Socrates understood themselves to be ethically autonomous, i.e., masters of their own choices within the confines of their restricted human knowledge, they did not conceive of themselves as ‘free’ players on the Divine Chessboard. In antiquity, Autonomy tempered by human ignorance as to what the Gods were up to, was not equivalent to this contemporary notion of Freedom.

            In that ancient world, which is explicit in the epic poetry of Homer and elevated to a metaphysical principle in the great tragic poets, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the actions of men could never be free of that external and all-determining causal environment created by the very presence of the unseen, active, and very powerful external causal Forces who/which necessarily controlled every aspect of the world of men.

            Freedom was a value created rationally by philosophers of the world become Christian (post-B.C.E.). In the Christian argument, Freedom is the keystone concept wedged in-between the idea of a God who, unlike any of the other Gods of Antiquity, is good, i.e., moral, and the idea of human moral accountability vis-à-vis this God. For this philosophical conceptualization and argumentation to work, the God can only make morally weighted demands on men if men are meaningfully free—i.e., uninfluenced by the God in their judgments and choices. This (new world) obviously isn’t Kansas anymore, Socrates!

So the philosophically minded in contemporary America might ask, what does it actually mean to be free? In the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave we believe in this Big Idea; we strive for it (because we tend to equate ‘it’ with happiness); we fight for it; we suffer for it; we die for it; and even more cynically, we encourage others to die for it. Yet what does Freedom mean in the good old (unofficial) E Pluribus Unum?

            I suppose it is best to start conversations such as this by asking the question, what can be known clearly about the idea of Freedom?, a question that is, in turn, perhaps best pondered by asking precisely the opposite question: in what ways are Americans not free? (For a justification concerning this convoluted approach to understanding the Universe at large, please see the above reference to sometime philosophers and crazed Dutch hairdressers…).

            In this American ‘Home, Home on the Plains’, which declared its Independence from British despotism in terms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we know for example that, while we may be free with respect to our own life, we are not personally ‘free’ to own our own death, yet. However, the ‘freedom to own our death’ discussion in America, which has the formal and somewhat pejorative tag, Assisted Suicide, is now fairly consistently on the national radar thanks to a variety of initiatives.

            There was Dr. Jack (a.k.a. Doctor Death) Kevorkian’s willingness to risk doing jail-time in the battle for Americans’ right to die. After multiple corpses began showing up at the entrances of Detroit area hospitals, in 1999 Dr. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison for 2^nd degree murder for physician assisted suicide, and he did 8 years of that sentence before being eligible for parole. Beginning right around the same time there was the national saturation coverage of the Terry Schaivo, case (1998-2005), which highlighted the Nation’s philosophical free-for-all in a desperate search to define what types of principles should be given priority in cases of prolonged life-support, where a third party, e.g., the husband in this case, but it could equally have been a doctor, or the State, or the insurance company, or…, makes a life/death decision on behalf of (read: in the place of) a person, who is no longer capable of making decisions for herself (e.g., who is in a persistent vegetative state). The husband won on the principle of legal next of kin; the parents lost, and the State lost.

            There have also been a variety of right-to-die organizations, such as the Hemlock Society (although its name has since been changed), whose stated mission is to inform about the rights of the dying, as well as to back any type of legislation that will advance the right to die of Americans.

            Finally, it might come as some relief to some to know that straightforward, self-determined suicide in the United States no longer carries the Common Law penalty of ‘Forfeiture of all the goods and chattels of the offender.’ This piece of information, however, would not have relieved the narrative tension in the reasoning of Arthur Miller’s disheartened Death of a Salesman protagonist, Willy Lomen. For purposes of theatrical tension, Lomen decides not to commit suicide because this would not help his family, but would instead simply invalidate his life-insurance policy—no breadwinner and no life-insurance money would not be an improvement for the family finances. For purposes of real-life tension, this also happens to be generally true about life-insurance.

In the Land of Independently-minded Americans we also know without a shadow of a doubt that we are not ‘free’ to act outside the structures provided by the Constitution and the Laws of the Land. So, for example, it would come as no surprise to normally reasoning Americans that the Bush Administration should come under scrutiny by legal minds for issues regarding torture, which has been illegal for a very long time now, both by US law and by a variety of UN conventions, from 1948, 1975, et al, to each of which America affixed her signature. If we recall that the individual who assumes the mantel of the office of the President of the United States swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, the conflict of ethico-legal interest becomes obvious.

            Constitutional constraint (non-freedom) in America also takes the form of Selective Service, or the draft, the legality of which has repeatedly weathered a variety of legal challenges (1918, 1919, 1920, 1968, 1971, and 1981). Idem the persistently sustained legality of the American government’s right to impose an income tax upon its free citizens, a fact in which all Americans undoubtedly rejoice.

More abstractly, in this Land-of-the-Free we Americans can also know clearly, if we just think about it for a little while, that we are not ‘free’ not to conform to social demands (ok… a double negative, but at least the infinitive is not split!). This type of non-freedom is a bit more philosophically lofty, so we can turn to Friedrich Nietzsche for clarity on the question – Kultur is like a prison, he might say, or a cookie-cutter. Following through on this second simile, when we are born we are dropped like so many pieces of dough into a (cultural) baking bowl (called America); and from the very first day we enter into the bowl we are all pressed together and kneaded into a homogenous ‘plop’ of American dough. From this sameness, the various cultural cookie-cutters, i.e., family, language, friends, school, etc., transforms individual bodies into an enculturated entity called An American human. Within a demonstrable range, we Americans all dress similarly (because we all have access primarily to the same clothing stores); we all speak similarly, having the same range of vocabulary (12-20 thousand words, depending on the source), which is actually pretty limited (read: restricting, constraining, non-freeing) when one considers that by most counts English has about three-quarters of a million words at its disposal; we all read roughly the same books, use the same money, think within the same value parameters.

            In other words, we are not ‘free’ to ‘be’ without culture (a-cultural), because Kultur defines the very thing each individual is beyond its human-ness—this is an American human, this a Dutch human, this a French human, etc. And although former President Bill Clinton reminded us in a 2000 White House speech that 99.9% of Human Genome is the same, which is to say that there is statistically speaking no significant racial or material difference among the peoples of the world, there are nonetheless very real cultural differences between them.

           

In another example of non-freedom, we can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to choose to live without an economic framework of some sort, whether money or barter or trade. We may be free to own cars, if we can afford to buy them, but we are not free not to pay the local Secretary of State for the license plates, or not to have insurance, or, perhaps, depending on the state, not to have regular inspections that the individual must pay for. Idem for our homes, guns, education, and any other of our possessions that we may ‘freely’ own, albeit in a regulated sort of way, if we can freely afford such things.

We can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to function outside the confines of our biology – remember in the film Birdy the protagonist was so distressed by the world of men with their insane wars that he wanted to join the world of his beloved, and peaceful, birds; but his own biology did not allow him that freedom, and in the face of his insistence, his society locked him away in a lunatic asylum. Our only freedom from our biology, and this has little to do with being culturally American, would be for us to understand the use of technology, perhaps in an Avatar kind of way, and the (new and different) constraints to our freedom that they carry with them. P.S.- Scuba divers tend not to forget to take underwater breathing apparatuses on their dives!

            It is clear that Americans, and perhaps one or two others as well, struggle culturally and philosophically with the question, what does it mean to be free? That this is a generalized question in culture, American and other, is clear from such film phenomena as The Truman Show, or The Matrix (1999), this latter of which, according to the Internet-God, received a number of awards and achieved a number of record-breaking financial objectives, thereby demonstrating its importance culturally and philosophically. The premise of the film, of course, is that the entire framework of our perception of reality (and not simply our enculturation) is an artificial environment—that we are everything (someone Else wants), except Free.

So, we have been reflecting on some of the ways in which we Americans are not free; and yet all who are America-minded continue to be deeply stirred by Reverend King’s famous words reminding us of our historical calling to American Freedom:

“This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"”

These are moving American words about the promissory note of Freedom in the Land of E Pluribus Unum, and they continue to speak to our guts when we hear them anew. But the ‘job’ of the citizens in contemporary American does not end in inspired feelings of Freedom—the task has now become ours to discover how these words of Freedom might speak to the minds of this generation of American people, so they might be translated into real-world actions.

On Faith in God; or, The Character of God…

Let us suppose, for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, that it were possible to reflect on things such as God and the Gods without facing accusations of being an atheist or some other sort of evil human being. This is not simply a theoretical question of possibility, nor a Straw Man, because I was once invited to participate in a formal Public Debate with a church pastor, who absolutely assured me, a university professor of Ethics, that it was impossible to be moral without also believing in God. His insinuation, of course, was unmistakable—that because I challenge the traditional ideas about God, I cannot be moral; but he only strongly implied this during the Debate, so I deduced that some sense of common decency must have been keeping him from just shouting out in this public venue that I was an infidel and destined to burn in the lowest fires of where-ever….! This church pastor was in fact arguing for a world in which any Human Reflection, when pointed toward the Idea of God, is and should be considered an immoral act!

Anyway… our present Reflection on the character of God and the Gods is ‘immoral’ in precisely this way. In the sense of our church pastor, though, I am probably even a worse infidel than one who simply questions whether He/She/It/They exist—such questions hold little interest for me at this point because, at the end of the day, conversations about the existence of things invisible, such as souls and demons, gods and angels, are conventionally typecast and therefore wearying in their predictability. Rather, I think I must be for my church pastor an infidel of an entirely more pernicious sort, which is due, I am sure, to a Nietzschean sensibility deeply rooted in my education; because I dare to wonder (in an Aristotelian kind of way) about one of the ‘accouterments’ that has long been associated with religious thinking—about one of the qualities of character that has been traditionally wrapped around the Concept of Deity—about Duty. The conventional conversation revolves around man’s duty to God; but my wonder is whether Gods have any Obligation to the world of men? Do Gods have a sense of Duty vis-à-vis men?

It is amazing to me how much our respect for the Idea of God has diminished since the High Middle Ages. The Idea of the new-world God, the One which is articulated for the ‘three great monotheistic religions’, and which we have conceptually identified as titular Supreme Being of the modern world, is both pampered and immoral, and therefore ultimately unsatisfying.

We pamper this new-world God-Idea in that we refuse systematically to make him carry the burden or blame for any of the ‘bad stuff’ that happens in the world, i.e., disasters, devastating illnesses, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, great storms, and other formidable crisis-events of nature. Religious thinkers, in a twist of sophistry worthy of the great Scholastic-era pedants, like generally to blame such events on the Evil One, thereby blaming One invisible ‘critter’ and acquitting Another. It is obviously too difficult for a simple philosopher and infidel to tell the difference between all these invisible ‘critters’… For the run-of-the-mill, generally thoughtful but not necessarily religious kinds of thinker, though, who have learned to ‘secularize’ natural events, we seem to have acquired the populist knack of thinking of men as Nietzschean camels – as beasts of burden; and our burden is to lug around on our metaphorical backs the ‘bad stuff that happens in the world’ as moralized baggage—the world is become a morality tale, a day-time soap opera replete with the eternal questions: what did you learn from this crisis that happened to you? what from that? I guess that will teach me to…! Every moment of our time spent in the new-world is a teaching/learning moment, because we are functionally alone to walk through the days of our lives. If we can- will- are not able to detect the Hand of God (either the good One or the bad One) in the world, thus tracing the causal burden to He/She/It/They, and if we do not learn some point of moral edification from the events and circumstances of our own life, then we will be left with simply having to endure in complete ignorance and impotence the ‘bad stuff’ that happens to us.

We have also morally neutered this new-world God, making Him, finally, immoral. There is no moral accountability that we attach to this Creature-Idea we have named God; so “It” can use all the resources of knowledge, the unfathomable power of the world and all the planetary systems, to move and manipulate the world of men without giving Itself away.  Unlimited power and no need to render accounts, and still It fails to indicate clearly to Men either what It wishes to achieve with all the Sound and the Fury unchained on this planet, or what the more general game plan is for Men and this their world. In this respect, the new-world God is significantly inferior, both conceptually and morally, to the old-world pagan conception of God and the Gods.

In 468 B.C. a lyric poet named Bacchylides, nephew of the very famous poet, Simonides, wrote a splendid celebratory ode (Epinicia 3) for Hiero tyrannos on the occasion of his chariot-race victory in the Olympic games. By way of honoring this King Hiero, Bacchylides tells the story of another, former great king, called King Croesus. It is this Croesus story ‘behind’ the Hiero story that is relevant to our present reflection; because like this victorious Hiero of Syracuse, the historical Croesus of Lydia was both a princely contributor to the temple of Apollo in Delphi, and he was also clearly rewarded by the Gods in exchange for his generous support of the temple. In other words, we learn in this story that the old-world pagan Gods, Zeus and Apollo to be precise, actually reach out to and reward really and truly the pious conduct of Croesus, who has been an active supporter of the Apollonian temple. There is the premise of a fundamental duty-based reciprocity from Gods to men.

            In the story, Bacchylides tells us of Croesus and of the fall of his empire, Lydia. We learn that Zeus had destined Sardis (a city located in Lydia) to be captured by the Persian army, and that instead of waiting patiently for himself and his family to be captured and lead into slavery by the Persians, King Croesus had a great pyre built up in front of his palace; and climbing up upon the pyre with his ‘inconsolably weeping’ wife and daughters, Croesus orders a slave to kindle the wooden structure. But even as the slave is setting spark to kindle, Croesus has not yet finished with the God; for he lifts his hands and his voice to the ‘steep’ heavens and bitterly ‘screams’ at the God, specifically Apollo, about His personal failure to uphold justice in the relationship between Himself and this pious king, i.e., the ‘I got your back and you got my back’ sort of justice—(the Greek is lovely, and you can download Greek fonts here for free): Ὑπέρβιε δαῖμον, ποῦ θεῶν ἐστιν χάρις? (Hyperbie daimon, pou theon estin charis?). Of course, the narrow bond of obligation between Apollo and Croesus also bespeaks the broader duty-bound relationship between Gods and men, not just from men to Gods, but more importantly in the light of this reflection, from Gods to men.

            So ode-ifies Bacchylides: “‘Outrageous deity, where is the thanks (recognition of duty or obligation) from the gods? Where is lord Apollo? [40] …What was hated is loved. To die is sweetest.’ So Croesus spoke, and he bid the slave with the delicate step to kindle the wooden structure. […] But when the flashing force of terrible fire began to shoot through the wood, [55] Zeus set a dark rain-cloud over it, and began to quench the golden flame. Nothing is unbelievable which is brought about by the gods' ambition.”

            Now what is exactly happening here in this story? Croesus holds that Apollo, the God, has a debt toward him, a man, because this man had not only recognized his debt toward the temple of the God, but he had always been faithful to pay that debt. Unfortunately the story goes that Apollo was off busy somewhere else, perhaps neglecting other faithful supporters, so in a deus-ex-machina moment, Zeus steps in with his dark rain-cloud and saves the day. Then, says Bacchylides, after Zeus has squared the justice issue, Apollo finally decides to show up, “and brings the old man to live among the Hyperboreans, [60] along with his slender-ankled daughters, because of his piety, since of all mortals he sent the greatest gifts to holy Pytho.”

The old-world idea that the Gods have a duty-bound obligation to men is not limited to the pagan Greek poets, however, but can also be also found in the Hebrew Bible, for example in Psalm 82. In this intriguing Psalm, Asaph gives us something rather unique in the history of poetic literature—a job description for Gods.

            The narrator begins by setting the song-plot: God takes his place in the council of the Gods in order to pass judgment. In this song it is clear that the Judging God is displeased with His divine Companions, and so He asks them a fairly blunt (some might say, blatantly ill-mannered) question: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?” Not dissimilar to the neglectful Apollo of Bacchylides’ ode, these Canaanite Gods are clearly not very nice either, or else They have just had a very poor work ethic. It is at this point in the song that the Judging God delivers Himself of the ‘job description’ for Gods in Their relationships with men, which has four parts.

1.     “Give justice to the weak and the orphan;

2.     maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.

3.     Rescue the weak and the needy;

4.     deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

Then the Judge proceeds to remind the heavenly Cohort that although they are Gods (verse 6), and children of the Most High, if They do not want to ‘do the God-job’, then, He says to Them, “you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.” This One imagines no reward for a (God-)job poorly done.

Those days are long gone when a man could understand and respect the Idea of a Self-respecting God—a God with character. Instead, in our world-become-modern all we have to play with is an anemic cardboard cut-out character/caricature Deity; and this One is never far from His band of earthly authoritarians, who are neither Gods that they should understand the generous nature of the job (per Asaph), nor respectful of the type of duty-bound obligations that once bound Gods to men and vice-versa (per Bacchylides).

            The only way to demonstrate that the titular Supreme Being of the modern imagination is not a God of the pampered and immoral cardboard cut-out sort, and therefore not inferior to the old pagan conception of God and the Gods, would perhaps be to do the following…

·      Every time something bad happens to us, let us ‘scream’ out at God and put the blame squarely at His feet. We should then look for a black rain cloud to pass over and put out the fire.

o   Nota Bene: Bring your own watering can just in case.

·      For the vulnerable and defenseless, let them raise their hands to the sky and ‘scream’ out at God, and remind Him that He has a responsibility toward us men to protect and defend, for we wander the world in darkness. We should then look to be hidden in a cleft in the rocks.

o   Nota Bene: Wear climbing shoes and bring your own ropes.

·      Let us remind ourselves that God is in the business of looking after our interests, if we have looked after His interests.

·      Let us hold God accountable for the things, great and small, that are good and evil in the world.

If this does not persuade us of the emptiness in our ‘steep’ heavens, then nothing will.

Torn Shreds... Heraclitus on G/god

A Torn Shred from Heraclitus… “To the G/god all things are beautiful, good, and right [suitable]; men, on the other hand, have supposed that, while some things are unsuitable [wrong], others are suitable [right].”

This passage has the following reference [If you wish to, but cannot read the Greek Font, you may download the font from the internet onto your computer.]: B. 2, 1.1.102.1; PORPHYR. zu D 4 [I 69, 6 Schr.] tw◊i me«n qew◊i kala» 2 pa¿nta kai« aÓgaqa» kai« di÷kaia, a‡nqrwpoi de« a± me«n 3 a‡dika uJpeilh/fasin a± de« di÷kaia. 

·      Grammatical Comments: this is the perfect form of the verb of hypolambano (uJpeilh/fasin), commonly meaning to suppose, assume, to have as a working hypothesis

In Heraclitus’ view, it would seem that men and the G/god/gods have very little in common. They are, quite literally, worlds apart. The Divine Gaze sees everything at a glance, and grasps all things within the weft of a streaming together-ness; the Divine Gaze sees in “things” (from mosquitos and flies to ideas and imaginings) no quality other than the fact that they are. And by virtue of their being, which means being what they are, all “things” are beautiful, good, and right.

            Men, however, do not have the Big Gaze that sees everything at a glance; from countless and always-partial ‘points of view’ they only catch a glimpse of fragments of things. Furthermore, in addition to our Fragmented (and therefore incomplete and finally uninformed) Gaze, Heraclitus also says that the Human Gaze is further degraded by preconceived ideas and notions, which are moral in nature, and which we seem to ascribe naturally to ‘things’ that enter into our field of view.

From this Heraclitan shred it is clear that the G/god is not moral in the way that men are moral, because to the G/god nothing is a‡dika, or unsuitable. The term ‘unsuitable’ is commonly understood in Ancient Greece to connote a violation of law (compare Xenophanes, Herodotus, Aristotle, Plutarch). This would mean, therefore, that there is no-thing grasped in the Divine Gaze that is a violation of law; so either the G/god is a-moral, or It conceives of no Law in its Gazing, and therefore also knows no justice. These are probably all correct conclusions, because each is consistent with the civilization that gave us Epic Poetry and Greek Tragedy.

            If, though, this is a theoretically correct way to envision the G/god, then how can the Religious Man justify reasoning or acting morally, which is to say in direct contradiction to the G/god he worships? What argument can the Religious Man make, and based on what possible anchor of reason or ‘point’ of theology, that would allow him to condemn morally anything at all? This is the question that is at the heart of Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue, and for which Socrates finds neither reason no response. This Religious Attitude is the world become Irrational, and leaves Socrates, at last, speechless with wonder.

            On the other hand, however, although nothing may be a‡dika (unsuitable) to Heraclitus’ G/god, should men, with their moralizing ways, actually attempt to imitate the G/god? Should we try to exclude from our thinking about the world the framing of ‘things’ morally, in terms of suitable/unsuitable, legal/illegal, good/bad, etc.?

            Finally, what if there really is no moral ‘bottom’ to the world, where moral thought can be truthfully and finally grounded? What if, should we ephemeral creatures be moved to imitate the gods, we were to leave behind moral framing and begin to see that all the things of the world are in fact beautiful, and good, and right. What would happen in and to the world if we were to construct a human ethic based on the Beautiful, the Good, and the Right? What if, seeing all things as a ‘right-ness’, as di÷kaia, we were to incorporate only the Beautiful and the Good (kala» and« aÓgaqa») in our understanding and interpretations of the world?

America’s Founding Fathers

Toland's (1696) Deistic Tract

Why is there such continued interest in showing whether or not America’s Founding Fathers were Christian? Does it really matter, to anyone anywhere (even to the odd revisionist or  orthodox scholar of US history---really?!), whether George Washington was a deist, theist, Christian, or just all-around better than average military leader? (This is the question my wife woke me up with this morning, instead of just bringing me coffee in bed like I had hoped!).

            But the web is abuzz and atwitter with the question, ranging from the scholarly to the much less scholarly – provoking even simpler grass-roots, tea-party loving Americans to a non-sequitur defense of their much-loved deist/theist/therefore-Christian, Thomas Paine. In this grass-roots link the distinction between deist, theist, and Christian is initially important to the Washington argument, because Lillback (the above revisionist [sic] historian) is apparently somewhat “too” arbitrary in defining his terms; but then our grass-roots guide to American history assures us, textually, that Thomas Paine, who was a deist of the theistic persuasion believing in the God Providence (one of the five deities of Christianity) and founding the Church of Theophilanthropists, by virtue of being a deist/theist, was therefore also Christian, because anyone who believes in Providential Deity in a Thomas Painean kind of way is de facto Christian. It’s enough to befuddle even the clearest-minded among us.

            Well, what is my pre-coffee reflection on this question? It seems like my first and only-a-little snide response is pretty simple – it certainly doesn’t matter to George Washington himself, who, at this point, has already had a fairly decent amount of time to make his peace with his belief choices. Less snidely, though (because I’ve gotten up to make my own coffee! Sigh…), while George Washington was a fine military man, no one, historian or lay, has tried seriously making the case that Washington was an intellectual beacon among the Founding Fathers. So I think it is pretty safe to say that the philosophical framers of our constitution – who were for the most part our American version of the French philosophes-- called on Washington when they needed a swift sword and a winning military strategy, but not when it came to sweating out the ideas, words and phrases that would become, “We the people…”

            Which brings us back ‘round to the crux of my wife’s question. What is gained by the debate about whether or not the Founding Fathers were Christian? For the record, while I certainly concur that the vast majority of the American Fathers (even Thomas Jefferson) were church-goers (they are listed on the church rolls, paid tithes, etc.,), evidence suggests that this is more significant from a societal point of view than from an informed philosophical conviction of metaphysical reality. No one would dispute the fact that (1) church pews are replete with church-goers, nor that (2) many of those who occupy the pews do not necessarily do the work of the church, nor that (finally!) many church-goers find comfort in attending church (a social event) but not necessarily in believing the church stories (a philosophical event). So my concurring that America’s Founders were church-goers, although not necessarily Christian believers in a modern evangelical kind of way, should pose no inordinate problems.

            So, on to our crux… Why might it be important for Modern America to re-discover or to re-invent for itself a Christian foundation? The question itself suggests to me that there is a not-so-subtle theocratic or religious junta afoot in American, an attempt to control or influence the social voice of the people by imposing upon (or inserting into) the American foundation myths a supposedly ‘original’, and therefore truly American, religious heritage, which is Christian. Yet, I teach in my Introduction to Philosophy classes that America was never/is not a Christian country – not because I particularly care about any America’s (Early or Modern) religious convictions, but because it is important philosophically to understand that the architects who framed the American Constitution (1) very deliberately avoided allowing any type of power to be consolidated in the various institutions of state (hence the separation of powers), and (2) argued for the absolute separation of the church from the state, to avoid establishing a religious-political entity, which is to say a theocracy (a god-powered state), with a Deity as head of state. Nor can one dispute that the supreme philosophical contribution of the Founding Fathers to the western thought tradition was the disestablishment of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. This is just history. The very framing of the American political structure is, philosophically and fundamentally, anti-theocratic in nature!

            When we consider Iran, for example, or other religious states such as the Vatican, they are theocracies, which means that acts of state, i.e., political and legislative decisions, are dictated and controlled by the Keepers of the sacred text (such as the Koran or the Bible and/or Papal Tradition). In theocracies, questions of right and wrong are grounded in absolute and unchanging metaphysical truths, which are pronounced and announced by the Religious Interpreters; so ethical questions are not in the least influenced by political, social, or international expediency (ethical philosophers call this moral absolutism).

            In democracies, on the other hand, which are people-powered states, questions of right and wrong have no permanent or absolute answers; instead, the answers to ethical questions are grounded in the flow of social and political consensus, which evolves with the changing convictions of the ongoing generations (this is called moral relativism). Understanding this concept of a people-centered government as morally relative, is also useful in explaining Jefferson’s emphatic devotion to education-- to educate the public is the sacred duty of a state governed by the people, because education is the last redoubt for the American citizen against the permutation of power into all types of tyranny, political as well as religious (see Jefferson’s letter to Joseph C. Cabell, 1818, FE 10:99; for a reference to Papal tyranny, see Adam’s letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 2, 1813, CAPPON, vol. 2, p. 404).

            This is the type of enlightenment government, grounded in reason and reasoned argument, that was established by the American Founding Fathers, and which all political players are called upon to protect when they are sworn in to office. According to this source, in Article 6 of the US Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

In enlightenment democracies of this American type, then, relativist consensus building looks a whole lot like public involvement, ballot initiatives, elections, and voting. Thus, to use a provocative example, up until 1973 it was criminal in the United States for a woman to have an abortion, but in January of 1973 the right to abortion became written into the American Constitution, thereby becoming an inalienable constitutional right for all Americans, until another generation should be persuaded to vote differently on the question. So unlike in a theocracy, in a morally relativist political state like America the truth-value of any specific ‘act’ (like abortion, or gun control, or individual health care, or any other issue-act) ebbs and flows with the changing will of the voting public. It is for this reason that I tell my students that it does not matter what their/my private opinion is about the act of abortion- we the people have the private right to our private convictions, and it is so intended and so designed in American that we citizens should be engaged in the public arena to try to persuade other citizens to our view. But any politician or political entity who/which erects a political campaign formally committed to overturning inalienable constitutional rights (in my provocative example the pro-choice platform), is engaged in some type of religious or personal proselytization that is clearly opposed to, actively committed to subverting by any and all means, and unwilling to uphold, rights guaranteed to all Americans under the constitution (specifically those broad rights as defined in the 9^th and 14^th Amendments). And such politicians, I tell my students, to whatever degree they fail to give adequate reason and argument for their position, should therefore be voted out of political office as quickly as possible so they can assume their rightful calling among the religious voices of America.

            For the record: In secular (read: non-theocratic) America, arguments grounded in reason do not begin with anything resembling the following phrase: “The Bible says…” or “God…” If this enlightenment axiom were respected, it would take some significant degree of philosophical ingenuity and persuasion to make an ethical case against abortion (as opposed to a medical case, or other). This is why most pro-life politicians who take a public/political stand against abortion, simply issue a statement either that they are morally opposed to “it”, giving no reason for their opposition, or they issue a statement that their opposition is based on moral reasons, but then there is bewildered and confused argument when it comes to stating those reasons for the record. Yet, from my philosopher’s point of view, in this American Republic there should be no shame or fear in taking a philosophical stance against a given position; shame should only be present when American politicians’ private religious convictions override their public/political and moral duty to defend the rights guaranteed to all citizens protected by the American Constitution.

            This, it seems to me, is the reason for all the fuss about whether or not, or which of, the Founding Fathers were/were not/might have been/could have been Christian.