Third Way: America’s Primary Document

Conservatives are inclined to appeal to America’s three founding documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—as virtually canonical. They believe that it is only by returning to these sources that we will save the democratic republic that is America.

Their arguments make sense, too. We do need to rediscover and return to first principles.

What did the Framers believe? Three points stand out. First, good government should serve the people, and not the opposite. It thus had to be balanced and limited, lest it become too dominant and coercive.

Second, good government should protect and preserve the freedoms of the people, which were eventually spelled out in the Bill of Rights.

Third, good government should depend upon the goodness of the people. It was the people themselves who had to make it work. In the end the success of a democratic republic did not rest on the shoulders of a document or ruler or army or ideology; it rested on the shoulders of the people themselves.

Which introduces us to the other part of the story. The Framers wrote the Constitution and added ten amendments. They assumed that people would govern themselves wisely and exercise restraint because they knew what was right, and they knew what was right because they were Christian. Thus they spelled out the Bill of Rights. But they never thought to include a Bill of Responsibilities.

Still, they did make their convictions clear. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people depended upon the quality of people themselves. It was not a system that would run of itself. It needed a mature, moral, and religious citizenry.

There was universal consent on this point. Not all Framers were orthodox Christians. Far from it. Thomas Jefferson, for example, rejected much of the NT, and Joseph Priestly believed that the divinity of Christ was an invention. “The idolatry of the Christian church began with the deification and proper worship of Jesus Christ, but it was far from ending with it.” These two were not alone either.

Still, there was nearly universal agreement that a generic Christianity—they more often used the word “religion”—was indispensable.

In an address to the military in 1798, John Adams said, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Virtue had to start at the top, with leaders. There could be no contradiction between public and private conduct. In a letter to James Warren, Samuel Adams offered an explanation of how a doctor friend of his, Benjamin Church, Jr., could betray his country. Adams linked the doctor’s treason to his reputation as an adulterer. “He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life, is, or very soon will be, void of all Regard for his country.” “There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his Country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connection. . .”

The French aristocrat, Alexis deTocqueville made the same points 50 years later. Traveling to America in the 1830s, he observed the important role that the Christian faith played in the success of the American experiment. The Bill of Rights handed freedom to Americans. But Christianity restrained their use of it. “Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.”

He believed that democracy needed Christianity to succeed more than any other political system. “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more needed in the republic they advocate than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics most of all. How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened? And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?”

No one thought the American experiment would succeed without the influence of Christianity. America’s democratic republic needed good and godly people whose lives were governed not by a Constitution or Bill of Rights or President or Congress or Supreme Court but by transcendent beliefs and convictions. In short, by God.

Times have changed. So have Christians. Our theology may be more “orthodox” than the Framers. Our behavior decidedly less so. No wonder why the system we treasure is imperiled. It is imperiled because of who we have become.