GOD CREATES AND ENDOWS, GOVERNMENT SECURES (via Buttercup):

One Nation, Under Secularism (SUSAN JACOBY, January 8, 2004, NY Times)

In Campaign 2004, secularism has become a dirty word. Democrats, particularly Howard Dean, are being warned that they do not have a chance of winning the presidential election unless they adopt a posture of religious "me-tooism" in an effort to convince voters that their politics are grounded in values just as sacred as those proclaimed by President Bush.

On one level, the impulse to capitalize on the religiosity of Americans can be seen as transparently, and at times comically, opportunistic. Late last year, Ed Kilgore, policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council, earnestly advised his party's candidates to invoke "God's green earth" in supporting stronger environmental laws. Mr. Dean, the candidate stuck with the label (or libel) of being the most secularist Democratic aspirant, seems to be heeding the advice to get religion. He recently informed an Iowa audience that he prays daily, and in New Hampshire last week, he demonstrated his ecumenism by using the Muslim expression "inshallah," which means God willing.

On a deeper level, the notion that elected officials should employ a religious rationale for policy decisions is rooted in the misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority rather than human reason. When I lecture on college campuses, students frequently express surprise at being told that the framers of the Constitution deliberately omitted any mention of God in order to assign supreme governmental power to "We the People."

Dismissing this inconvenient fact, some on the religious right have suggested that divine omnipotence was considered a given in the 1780's — that the framers had no need to acknowledge God in the Constitution because his dominion was as self-evident as the rising and setting of the sun. Yet isn't it absurd to suppose that men as precise in their use of language as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison would absentmindedly have failed to insert God into the nation's founding document? In fact, they represented a majority of citizens who wished not only to free religion from government interference but government from religious interference.

Ms Jacoby can be forgiven her secularism; it's her ignorance that's unforgivable. As a secularist, she's forced to assume that the State is the primary human institution and that all else derives from it. The Founders thought quite otherwise:

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, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Governments exist then only in order to vindicate our God-given social rights. God never weighed in on what form that government should take and many different types can satisfy the requirement. The Founders chose a Republic as the best means of protecting our unalienable rights--a wise enough choice, though they'd have served us better had they included a king in the structure. And they explicitly stated in the Preamble of the Constitution that the Republic was to serve certain purposes that preceded its creation:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Note that Liberty is not an invention of the Constitution but a pre-existing Blessing that is being secured? Government, if it is to retain its legitimacy, must serve the purposes of the God who extended us the Blessings.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 9, 2004 03:29 PM