"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."1 The man who made that statement, John Adams, served under our illustrious Constitution as the second president of the United States. Born in 1735, John Adams' life spanned the decades of religious and political evolution—and revolution—that resulted in the birth of a free nation. Reflecting at the age of eighty years, Mr. Adams wrote, "What do you mean by the revolution? The war with Britain? That was no part of the revolution; it was only the effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington."2 This was indeed a time of preparation for liberty, a period of political and moral progression preparing the colonist to define, defend then live within a free system of government.
Mr. Adam's bold statement begs for justification on two counts. A moral and a religious people? Such a statement, if made today by a prominent public actor like an American president, would stir a firestorm of controversy. Who's definition of morality must we apply? And which religion?
The founders lived in a largely Christian society. The foundations of law that they passed down to us do have their basis in Judeo-Christian religion and history. These are facts of history. However, my honest response to these two questions includes a liberal dosage of flexibility. I will address that; but first we must consider why a moral people? And why a religious people?
Last month, I attempted to define for my readers the concept of individual rights in terms of moral restrictions. Every right can be expressed in terms of moral restriction upon the agency of other persons who might otherwise abrogate the right. For example, my right to live places a moral restriction upon the behavior of every other person who might otherwise take my life from me.
Subsequently, the law of the land, if it recognizes the right, adds the force of arms to the pre-existing moral restriction. Applying my previous example again, a good government will attempt to protect the life of individuals with laws to punish those miscreants who would otherwise choose to disregard the moral restriction. Those who are not internally bound by their own sense of morality will therefore (hopefully) feel restrained by a fear of punishment.
This definition of rights also explains the source of the individual duties that arise in a free society. My right to live implies a moral duty in me to respect every other person's similar right. This is the foundation of true liberty. As this principle ripples through the magnificent range of noble rights that we claim for ourselves, we see an ordered and peaceable social structure emerge. A structure in which every person's right is safe. Where peace settles naturally in the heart of every person, without defense and without fear. If we do not live in such a society, it is because of immorality.
Remember that liberty is more than freedom. It is freedom properly organized and structured. There must be restraints upon our freedom — upon the natural man whose too natural tendencies lead to harm and disorder. But it is freedom tempered by wisdom, by internal constraints upon the heart, that removes the need for external restraints. Edmond Burke expressed this simple truth with clarity.
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites--in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity;--in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;--in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere: and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters."3
In the words of John Adams, "our Constitution was made only for a moral . . . people" precisely because it requires a self-governing people. And self-government really does begin in the grass roots of the land. Nobility, character and jealousy for the continuance of liberty within the government must spring up from there.
Now, what about religion? Why a religious people? Is it not precisely because religion is the wellspring of morality? President George Washington admonished, "let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles."4
Religion informs the moral sense. It maintains a rational framework for moral living while vitalizing the profession of virtue with the expectation of reward or punishment in the hereafter. You can not legislate a respect for life, or for property or for any of the rights that we recognize in one another. You must instill that respect through the teaching of morality. And you can not instill lasting morality without the influence of religion and the transcendent.
Without a fixed moral anchor in God, human virtues succumb to relativity. The differences between honesty and dishonesty become lost in a quagmire of situational ethics. The contrast between sexual virtue and fornication are lost in "wonderful contentions"5 over the relative virtues of heterosexual versus homosexual self-identification. Gradually, our families decay, criminals become heroes and the masses bend over backwards to defend the lawlessness of their political leaders. Truly, all contentions for a fixed morality must ultimately rest upon faith in God. God's word provides the only secure, the only solid foundation for such belief.
Nevertheless, in a free nation the sect or even genre of religion must be left open and ambiguous. Alexis De Tocqueville noted in his legendary work Democracy in America, "There is an innumerable multitude of sects in the United States. They are all different in the worship they offer to the Creator, but all agree concerning the duties of men to one another. Each sect worships God in its own fashion, but all preach the same morality . . .."6
All who place their continued hope for peace, prosperity and for liberty in the character and morality of the people (and that is the only place where that hope can survive) must join in a common cause of defense. As we speak out on current important moral issues (like the recent defense of marriage initiative in California for example) we are not simply supporting a single principle of virtue. We are in fact defending the very foundations of virtue against the ravishing tide of moral relativism.
I raise my voice with Father Washington. "Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports — In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens."7
- C.F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little Brown Co., 1851), 4:31.
- Quoted in Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution, Boston: Little, Brown and Company (1959): xiv.
- Edmund Burke, Works, 4: 51-2. Quoted in Jerreld L Newquest, ed., Prophets Principles and National Survival (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1964), 33.
- George Washington, Farewell Address
- Book of Alma, 2:5, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints, The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Salt Lake City (1989): 211.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed., translated by George Lawrence, (Harper Perennial, Harper Collins Publishers, 1988), 290.
- Washington, Farewell Address
