John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” However, I think he would express the sentiment differently today. My reason lies in a conversation Monday evening between Bill Maher and Rob Reiner. It was prompted by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Without understanding their exchange, we won’t know why Adams’s statement means so little to so many today or the way forward.
This exchange between Maher and Reiner on “whether right and left should still talk with each other” feeds into why I think Adams would express himself differently today:
Reiner: ”Before you have the exchange, you have to agree on certain facts.”
Maher: "No, you don’t. You can’t. Once you start down that road… you just have to talk to people.”
Reiner explained that you should try to talk, then added this critical observation:
“But if somebody says two plus two is four and the other guy says, ‘No, it’s not,’ how do you begin the discussion?”
In his book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, atheist and influential 20th century historian Carl Becker posed a hypothetical conversation a modern man might have with Thomas Aquinas and Dante. It was about law and the law of nations. Decker says that after hearing from them, “the discussion would no doubt drag heavily.”
The problem, says Becker, “is not bad logic or want of intelligence, but the medieval climate of opinion in which they are sustained . . . those instinctively held preconceptions in the broad sense, that Weltanschauung or world pattern—which imposed upon Dante and St. Thomas a peculiar use of the intelligence and a special type of logic.”
That preconception or worldview made their arguments intelligible to their audience. It was a belief that “existence was . . . a cosmic drama, composed by the master dramatist [the God of the Bible] according to a central theme and on a rational plan.”
Now, says Becker, propositions drawn from that conception of the cosmos don’t make sense. “With the best will in the world it is quite impossible for us to conceive of existence as a divinely ordered drama . . . . For good or ill we must regard the world as a continuous flux. . . . [W]e have no first premise.”
Because there is “no first premise,” Becker says conversations must “start with the irreducible brute fact,” such as Reiner saying we must agree that 2+2 equals 4. We are “no longer permitted, in Becker’s words, “to fit [facts] into some . . . assumption that the pattern of the world is a logical one.”
Reiner’s mathematical analogy is meant to say that dialogue based on a belief in the God of the Bible and a divinely ordered cosmos is like having a conversation with someone who denies 2+2=4. A conversation with them would be as unintelligible, unhelpful, and unfruitful to a person like Reiner, and others like him, just as Becker said a conversation with St. Thomas and Dante would be today!
Adam’s famous statement was made in a letter. It was written at a time when the understanding of the cosmos was changing. His statement was based on the assumption, expressed in the letter, that “our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World.”
Adams was referring to the French Revolution. Its unbelief in God “makes a break with the Church and the whole of the past.” James McClellan, Joseph Story and the American Constitution. This break is what Becker was saying: There has been a cosmological change—a change in what kind of place we think this world is and how it works. That changes how we will understand each other.
For example, without clearly stated premises about the nature of the cosmos, discussions about capitalism vis-a-vis socialism may accomplish little to nothing. If scarcity is the true nature of the cosmos, not fruitfulness, some will see capitalism as some getting wealthy at the expense of others.
Being a moral and religious people is inescapable, as Adams surely knew. But we can change our religion and, thereby, change our morals. In fact, the former requires the latter.
Thus, this cosmological breach with the “whole of the past” had to shift the way the words and phrases in the U.S. Constitution would be interpreted. It has been remade by the new cosmology adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court and infused into its constitutional interpretations.
The Constitution has been remade for a people who accept a non-Christian understanding of the world. It is now “made” by SCOTUS for a people whose “moral and religious” convictions are without any first premise but the autonomy of the individual self.
For the foregoing reasons, I believe Adams would now write:
Our Constitution was made only for a people who believe the cosmos is a divinely ordered drama according to a central theme, revealing the glory of God. It is wholly inadequate for the government of a people who have no first premise other than the autonomous self.
I submit that this cosmic divide must begin to inform our policy discussion. This 3 minute video of my testimony to a Tennessee House subcommittee on why churches must remain open during COVID is demonstrative. I encourage you to watch.
For those who don’t, my remarks began with the following words, modeled after the Apostle Paul’s argument that if there is no resurrection of the dead we should eat and drink because tomorrow we die (1 Corinthians 15:32):
If I believed that matter itself is ultimate reality, worship would be nonsense.
If I believed ultimate reality was an impersonal mind or spirit, as some do, then I would not know why worship would be essential or even who or what to worship.
And, finally, if I believed God were divorced from what he created, or even divorced from civil government, as some do, then what you do here is none of God’s concern.
With all of these worldviews, the rights of the majority should prevail if corporate worship might work some disadvantage to them. But……
I believe this cosmological divide must be acknowledged if conversations are to be more than two ships passing in the night or each ship simply trying to torpedo the other.
