-
Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of
America by Ellis Sandoz (Columbia:
University of - Missouri Press, 2006).
230 pp.
SCOTT P. SEGREST currently teaches political science
at Berry College in Georgia. He is a former student
of Ellis Sandoz.
Ellis Sandoz’s most recent book brings all
his prodigious learning to bear on a
matter evidently close to his heart: the meaning
of America—in itself, and for the world.
As the title of the book suggests, Sandoz sees
religion as in some sense central to America’s
deepest identity. His earlier book A Government
of Laws was a meditation on the meaning
of American republicanism with its defining
features of liberty and the rule of law.
Sandoz there found that both features were
seen by founding-era Americans to be
grounded in spiritual freedom and higher
law, liberation from the dominion of base
passions, and freedom of conscience in serving
God. In Republicanism, Religion, and the
Soul of America, Sandoz probes the sources of
America’s founding more deeply and considers
more directly the continuing relevance
of the founding in today’s world, in particular
in the face of the new Islamist threat.
Thus, this second book can be seen as a
companion volume to the first.
Superficially, Sandoz’s concern in the
new book is captured in the questions raised
at the outset of Chapter Two: “What is old,
what new, about American liberty and constitutionalism?
What maladies most threaten
liberty and aspirations to rule of law regimes,
in America and elsewhere?” But liberty and
the rule of law, defining features as they are,
do not for Sandoz get to the heart of things
American. He wants to determine the underlying
experiences that make them intelligible.
On this fundamental level the book
asks: What is the secret of American vitality
in a Western world otherwise in serious
decline? How might this comparative robustness
be safeguarded and maintained?
The book is largely a collection of essays—
some new, some previously published—and
accordingly the current of thought is somewhat
discontinuous. The first half of the volume
is a searching meditation on the roots of
American political order, while the second
half is devoted largely to an analysis and
interpretation of Eric Voegelin’s philosophy.
What on a first reading seems an abrupt
change of subject, in hindsight looks like a
deepening of the initial inquiry. The first four
chapters deal with the foundations of American
life and politics and the forces threatening
to undermine them; the next four deepen the
inquiry by applying Voegelin’s ideas. Together,
these eight chapters prepare for
Sandoz’s assessment in the ninth chapter of
America’s place in the modern world and its
prospects for preserving the achievements of
its civilization.
The specific content of the book defies
summarization. As in A Government of Laws,
the material here is dense and the argument
tightly woven. This book demands the most
careful reading and alert sensitivity to
Sandoz’s method: “Silently underlying the
argument at every stage, in effect, is the
Socratic invitation to look and see if this is
not the case—then and still now the way to
truth is through the exercise of critical reason
in a dispassionate assessment of pertinent
experience.”
Early on Sandoz suggests that the reigning
secular ideologies of the American intelligentsia
are inadequate for understanding
either America or its Islamist adversaries.
Looking to the founding, Sandoz is “reminded
that, if war is too important to be left
to the generals, then history is surely too
important to be left to the historians—not to
mention political scientists, many of whom
blithely write as though the Enlightenment
dogma of their complacent persuasion has
rightly ruled for the past three hundred years
and seldom mention, except disparagingly,
religion as having much to do with the rise of
modern democratic republicanism.” Religion,
on Sandoz’s showing, had a great deal
to do with this development. “Advocates of
republicanism in the Anglo-American Whig
tradition (to be distinguished firmly from
French Jacobinism, which was both atheistic
and anti-property) assert[ed] liberty and justice
in resistance against tyranny and arbitrary
government and [did] so in the name of
highest truth.” That truth consisted of a
Protestant Christian understanding of reality:
“The imperfect, flawed, sinful being
Man, for all his inability, paradoxically yet
remains capable with the aid of divine grace
of self-government.” He has not merely a
right but a positive duty to resist tyranny as
he has a duty to resist evil.
Sandoz makes the historical case for the
specifically religious component of this attitude
with peculiar force in the first chapter of
the new book. He cites recent scholarship
showing that the series of revivals beginning
in the 1730s with what is called the Great
Awakening and continuing well into the
nineteenth century were pivotal in the formation
of the American community. As he
stresses, homonoia (likemindedness about what
is good and right) and corresponding fellowship
in common convictions are “fundamental
matters”: “it is not the institutional forms
that were decisive (if they ever are),” but
rather, forms are “‘auxiliary precautions’ of
consequence.” We must, therefore, recogniize
that the institutional forms of American constitutionalism
came out of and were meant to
reinforce a preexisting community of understandings,
values, and habits, in order to
understand the significance of those institutions
and the culture they help to organize.
The American community, Sandoz thus
maintians, was decisively shaped by Protestant
Christianity, as informed by Greek and
Roman classicism. The ideas of modern
writers such as Locke helped the founders
organize government and society, but that
arrangement of powers was put into the
service of a biblical view of human nature
and a classical-Christian ethics. The revivals
lived up to their name and revitalized the
culture.
This homonoia or community of shared
understanding and conviction is the “soul of
America” mentioned in the book’s title. That
soul, Sandoz suggests, was formed by religion
and disciplined and supported by a
government of laws. “The great secret” of
American republicanism is “that a sound map
of human nature (as John Adams insisted)
uniquely lies at the heart of the Constitution
of the United States and its elaborate institutional
arrangements…. All of this would have
been quite inconceivable without a Christian
anthropology, enriched by classical political
theory and the common law tradition as
uniquely embedded in the habits of the
American people at the time of the founding
and nurtured thereafter.”1
Sandoz’s conclusion about the founding,
quoted from his own Government of Laws, is
that “the founding was the rearticulation of
Western civilization in its Anglo-American
mode.” The context of this rearticulation
was American resistance—in the spirit of
Edward Coke—to the drive to absolutism
that was sweeping Europe and
appeared to be infecting the
British system. In Britain this
took the form of increasingly
arbitrary governance: claims
of absolute sovereignty by Parliament
(signaled menacingly
in the Declaratory Act, in which
Parliament asserted the right to
“bind the colonies in all cases
whatsoever”) and the willful
opposition of King George III.
In the U.S. Constitution and
Bill of Rights the framers reformulated
and codified the
Anglo-American common law
tradition, which itself was consciously
grounded in the older natural law tradition.
The elaborate checks and balances and divisions
of power in a government of, by, and
for the people owe an especial debt to the
biblical view of man as dangerously corrupt
despite bearing the divine image. Madison,
taught and tutored at Princeton by that
staunch old Presbyterian philosopher-statesman
John Witherspoon, captured the balance,
and the heart of Christian republicanism,
in Federalist 55: “As there is a degree of
depravity in mankind which requires a certain
degree of circumspection and distrust:
So there are other qualities in human nature,
which justify a certain portion of esteem and
confidence. Republican government presupposes
the existence of these qualities in a
higher degree than any other form.” These
understandings of man, of the Anglo-American
legal tradition, and of republican government
were inculcated into the leading
founders through a college education steeped
in the classics of Greece and Rome and
Britain (Chapter Three) and nurtured in
founders and people alike by widespread and
constant Bible-reading and congregational
religious practice (Chapters One and Three).
The final result was “Americanism,” as
Jefferson called it—”the ‘common
sense’ of the country’s
founding generation”2 (Chapter
Four).
The chapters on Voegelin
are also pertinent to the American
question. Although Sandoz
has contributed notably to
Voegelin scholarship, here he
reads and analyzes Voegelin in
order to apply his scholarly and
philosophic breakthroughs to
a consideration of the truth of
Americanism and its essential
elements. This is clearly no
mere historical enterprise, or
at least not history in the vulgar sense. Sandoz
really wants to know: Who are we, and how
shall we live together?
One of Sandoz’s most provocative and
profound suggestions is that the American
experiment, in so many ways unprecedented
and exceptional, was nonetheless fundamentally
anti-modernist in spirit and substance.
American resistance to the rising tide of
absolutism was in fact a resistance to modernity.
This is the great paradox of our country.
America, at once so strikingly modern
on the surface, and in all its instrumentalities,
is at the same time profoundly anti-modern
beneath, in moral and spiritual orientation.
The spirit of modernity is atheistic and
absolutist (see Chapter Seven), but it was in
the French Revolution, not the American,
that modernity first made its grand (and
terrifying) appearance. The secret of American vitality, it seems, is its unique blending of
Christian piety, a sense and belief of being
grounded in a source beyond ourselves (God),
classical theory and praxis, and modern mechanics
of government.
It is not adequately appreciated how much
the Islamist mindset has partaken of the
modern spirit. It has rejected atheism but has
surrendered to a totalitarian will to power, in
this case the will to impose its fantasy visions
on the world. Sandoz has this ravenous,
restless evil much in mind as he considers the
possibility that we enter a new epoch in
world history. We are seeing “the collapse of
ideologically identified power structures”—
most recently, the Soviet communist empire
(following the Nazi and fascist imperialist
ventures)—and “the rise of fledgling democratic
states” in the aftermath. This is a time
of opportunity for American-style constitutionalism,
but it is also a time of great peril,
because ideological “pneumopathologies”
[Voegelin’s term] still live both in the West
and among our current adversaries. Thus
Sandoz ends with a challenge that echoes the
last lines of his Government of Laws: “We still
have a republic, if we can keep it, but now as
it did then, that takes faith no less than
intelligence.”3 More specifically, he suggests,
the survival and spread of free government
will require a renewal of those deeper
sources, those spiritual experiences of faith
and reason,that made our republic possible in
the first place.
NOTES
- RRSA, 50. Italics in original.
- Ibid., 105.
- A
Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the
American Founding (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1990).
