Secular Europe, religious America

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Brian C. Anderson

Even Jefferson, the most secular of the men who signed the Declaration, was no Danton. The Virginian grasped the public importance of religion. "No nation," he pronounced, "has ever existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be." As president, he supported with public money the church services, including Christian communion, held in various public buildings in Washington, D.C., and he signed a treaty (ratified by the Senate) with the Kaskaskias Indians that mandated federal funds to maintain a Catholic church among them.

Inner tensions

Some scholars have argued that the "natural rights" theory of the American founding is ultimately antagonistic toward Jewish and Christian faith. By putting the individual and his free conscience at the heart of the social order, the argument runs, liberal society erodes the claims of duty made upon men and women by any transcendent order. Indifference toward religion, even a relativistic indifference to all human goods, say some, are the all-but-inevitable byproducts.

The Founders would not have agreed. In speaking the Lockean language of the "natural rights of mankind" in the same breath as professing fealty to God, as they so often did, they clearly saw no contradiction. Indeed, they held that natural rights, including the right to religious liberty, found their ultimate source in God.

Whether there may be a serious tension where the Founders mainly saw compatibility remains an open question, of course. Contemporary America may exhibit intense religious activity, but it also has its relativistic currents, its individualist tendencies, its prurient enthusiasms, its civility-eroding "rights talk." To blame these phenomena, which have grown powerful since the 1960s, solely on secular elites seems too easy, though those elites have surely played a major role in promoting them. It is far more likely that such phenomena represent permanent temptations for all modern democratic societies.

What can be said with more certainty is that the Founders sought not to diminish and degrade religion but to help it flourish. And on that score, they succeeded. George Washington once said that a nation's "first transactions" form the "leading traits in its character." With regard to the relations between religion and democracy, anyway, this dictum has held true both for America, a republic founded in deep religious convictions it still largely affirms, and for Europe, where democracy was forged against religion and citizens have become less and less pious.

A free market of religions

America's lack of an established state church and its religious pluralism together may point to another, related reason why America has diverged from Europe in matters of faith. It was not Tocqueville but his Scottish predecessor Adam Smith who first described the process at work.

In his classic treatise of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued for the existence of what one could call a religious market. Just as in the economic sphere, where monopoly breeds stagnation and decline while competition tends to encourage striving and generate wealth, Smith believed well-established churches would lose their appeal over time since their clergymen, having no real incentive to make their message compelling to the population, would grow complacent. Religions facing competitive pressure, however, would work harder and thrive.