Speaking of Faith | The Religious Roots of American Democracy | Krista's Reflection

If you get a chance to hear this program, it sounds like it will be excellent and timely. From this brief quote, it is interesting how the founding father's defined terms like happiness and how most Americans today define it.

A few years ago I came across this fascinating observation by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville from his famous report of 1831, Democracy in America:

"Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith and religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society."

These days, there is a new discussion building in our culture — in both public and private spaces — about the role of religion in American life. As we began to prepare this program on the religious roots in American democracy, I wanted to probe something de Tocqueville saw that I find underrepresented in our contemporary dynamics: a religious sensibility in the origins of our national ideals that goes deeper than our modern debates, and transcends them.

I found a modern de Tocqueville in philosopher Jacob Needleman, and our conversation felt like an adventure. Needleman spent several years tracing the spiritual and intellectual content of the American founders' thought. Spirit and intellect, he says, always worked in concert in the formulation of American democracy and the writing of the documents that define American identity even today. Rights implied duties. Happiness was an inalienable right, but it was not synonymous with pleasure, with having or acquiring what one wants. It meant "well-being." It was linked with conscience. In the "idea of America," Needleman asserts provocatively, democracy is not just a set of laws and societal structures. It is also inner work.

Needleman enlarges the notion of America's founders to include important thinkers who helped form the virtues of our republic beyond revolution and constitution. So in this week's program, alongside Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, we have wonderful readings from Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman. In the context of conversation with Needleman, I heard what each of them had to say with new interest and insight. I came away feeling that we can invoke the religious sensibility of the founders precisely as an antidote to the confusion and excesses of religion in American life today.

This serves to illustrate the need for careful hermenuetics. Whenever we are dealing with an historical text, we must seek to understand what the authors original intent was. We must define the words the way the authors did.

Perhaps we rely too much on reader response today.