An Alternative to the Secular Myth of America’s Creation

ON TWO WINGS

Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding

By Michael Novak

Encounter Books

$23.95, 236 pages

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When students are introduced to the Founding Fathers, they learn from the textbooks that men such as Jefferson, Franklin, Washington and Adams worshiped at the altar of reason and eschewed religion. To this day, students learn that one of the foundations of American democracy and liberty is the separation of church and state. And to this day, says Michael Novak in “On Two Wings,” they learn the wrong lesson.

“This picture of the United States,” writes Novak, “is partly correct, and, therefore, wrong in the most dangerous way--it is partly wrong. What is truthful in it makes the rest seductive.” Novak acknowledges that the founders had a healthy respect for Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Montesquieu, but he contends that, contrary to popular belief, they had a healthier respect for the Bible and for the God of Abraham and Moses.

Novak is no stranger to controversial arguments. An impassioned conservative thinker who has written steely defenses of the corporation in American life and manifestoes about the link between free-market capitalism and the examined life, he is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank.

“On Two Wings” is billed as the perfect complement to David McCullough’s magisterial biography of John Adams and Joseph Ellis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the founders. More of an extended essay with ample footnotes and a long appendix offering sketches of prominent Americans of the Revolutionary War era, Novak’s book offers an alternative to the secular myth of America’s creation. And it is indeed a myth.

Novak is not the first to make the point that the generation that led the Revolution and wrote the Constitution was closer in spirit to the Massachusetts Pilgrims and Puritans than to the secular liberals of the 20th century. From time to time, scholars have published monographs that have excavated the rich legacy of biblical quotations and sermons that were as much a part of the world of Jefferson, Thomas Paine and James Madison as the treatises of Locke. But Novak, by producing a voluminous set of quotations in this book-length pithy essay, has certainly made it harder to overlook a fact that has been, well, overlooked.

“The record shows,” he concludes, “beyond a shadow of a doubt that

The founders believed in God’s infinite power and in human free will, and they had a vision of liberty that placed individual free will in the context of God’s divine plan. Novak also shows that the much-lauded separation of church and state stemmed from an opposition to the official, state-sanctioned establishment of religion and not, as many think, with any animus to religion as a powerful imperative in local community life. The founders were hostile to religion established by the federal government, not to state establishment of religion. They concluded that when a strong central government is placed in the position of enforcing religious morality, both morality and that government suffer.

The founders recognized that religious dissenters often channel their animosity toward the central government, as they had during the English Civil War of the 17th century, and religion can easily become corrupt when too closely aligned with political power. They separated the two for the good of both.

Not even the most fiery of the revolutionaries, such as Paine and Patrick Henry, eschewed religion in their adamant defense of liberty and freedom. Paine wrote that “all the principles of science are of divine origin,” and that “religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.” Henry, meanwhile, angrily defended himself against charges that he was not a good Christian and retorted that “religion is of infinitely higher importance than politics.”

Although Novak gives us a much needed corrective, he is also guilty of overstating the case. Such is the danger of polemics, and Novak flirts with replacing one unbalanced story with another. After reading “On Two Wings,” it would be easy to conclude that the founders were devout Christians who saw the task of gaining independence from Britain as a religious mission first and foremost.

The reality is, of course, more muddled and ambiguous. The problem is that no one in 18th century America or Europe understood “religion” quite like it was thought of in the late 20th century. Nor did they have a clear sense of “secular.” Secular society, as we know it, is a product of the mid-19th century. To claim, as Novak does, that the religious dimension of the founding has been given short shrift is both defensible and valuable, but to imply, as he seems to, that the founders were men of religion as we understand religion today risks replacing one myth with another.

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Zachary Karabell is a contributing writer to Book Review and the author of “A Visionary Nation: Four Centuries of American Dreams and What Lies Ahead.”