Religion and the American Founders

Christopher Levenick and Michael Novak, over at National Review Online, take on the claim Brooke Allen presented in a recent essay in The Nation: that the American Founding was based Enlightenment principles, not on Christian principles.  There are secularists who reject altogether the idea that the Founding Fathers drew to any significant degree from Christianity.  But there are also Christian thinkers who, without going so far as to deny Christian influences, argue that the Enlightenment edged out Christianity as the intellectual workhorse of the American Founding.  Other Christian thinkers argue that in some ways the Enlightenment was able to expressed Christian truths that, for a variety of complicated historical reasons, some Christians overlooked in their own tradition. Levenick and Novak’s piece is a contribution to the ongoing discussion.

Comments

[Sean Cain]

This essay (found here: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0212/articles/lawler.html) on Orestes Brownson by Peter Lawler on a similar subject is illuminating. Here's a quote from the essay: "For example, he informs us that it is appropriate to view the influence of Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence on the United States with a degree of ambivalence. While Brownson affirms the political conclusions of the document, he rejects the Jeffersonian or Lockean way of reaching them. It is certainly true, he argues, that "under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as men." But the reason that "one man . . . can have in himself no right to govern another" is that a "man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere belongs to his Creator." That is, we can reasonably affirm that the natural law originates with a Creator, and that we are dependent on Him for all that is and all that we are. It is this affirmation—the virtual antithesis of the Lockean principle of self–ownership—that provides the proper foundation of human equality, or the doctrine that we have "equal rights as men.""

[Mark Brumley]

Of course one can and should ask how one can be understood to "own" oneself. Even granting, for the sake of argument, the validity of the notion of "owning" a person and granting its application to oneself, if the right to property is an endowment of the Creator, then to the extent it can be said that one "owns" oneself, such "ownership" would itself seem to be a function of something one owes to God, i.e., the right to property.

The whole idea of "owning" oneself is problematic, to say the least. The kind of being capable of truly owning seems to be the kind of being incapable of being owned, whether by another or oneself.