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Dec. 14, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:41
ARE WE A DEMOCRACY? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep476
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Coming up, we hear a lot about democracy, but I'm going to argue against the idea that America is a pure democracy.
I'm going to note that we don't have a parliamentary system like England or India.
I'm going to do some vote counting to see if Kevin McCarthy has the votes to make it as House Speaker.
I'll tell you the result. I'll show why Joe Manchin has, in West Virginia, no political future, in my view, except as a Republican.
And drawing on my work on Christian apologetics, I'm going to go a little bit in depth and show the Christian roots of the idea of religious freedom and also limited government.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
And I sometimes do this. I'll have a thematic title as opposed to a title that picks up on something in the news.
But the reason I do this is because we have these big words, these ideas that are used.
Democracy. Republicans are enemies of democracy.
Democracy is on the ballot.
Democracy is threatened.
These kinds of things.
I try to clarify what it is that we mean.
Now, there's a common habit on the right whenever I use the term democracy.
Even though I've thought a lot about the term and I don't use it easily or promiscuously, people say, well, Dinesh, I want to remind you that we're not a democracy.
We're a republic. And the people who say that are making an important point, which it's not that I don't agree with.
But I also don't agree that we should repudiate completely the concept of democracy.
We're not a pure democracy.
And we're not a pure democracy in two senses, which I'm going to explicate.
But at the same time, we do have a democratic form of government.
We do have a constitutional democracy.
A democracy that is hedged and circumscribed in important ways.
Now let's begin with simply...
The meaning of the word democracy.
It comes out of the word demos, the Greek word demos, which just means the people.
And, of course, the second part of the term means to rule.
So, rule of the people.
Now, in the ancient world, we had direct democracy.
This would be ancient Athens, for example, in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. The citizens themselves, or at least all eligible citizens, at that time they were male, they were citizens that had some stake in the society.
So even though Athens had a population of about 40,000, about 12,000 people were eligible.
But they would all show up, or as many of them as chose to, would show up and vote.
Vote on whether to go to war.
Vote on whether to raise taxes.
Vote on whether or not to build a temple to Athena.
And that is ancient democracy, which was direct democracy.
Now, we don't have that type of democracy in the modern world.
Not because we can't have it.
We actually have the type of technology today where you could actually give everyone a tablet.
Any important question comes up.
You know what? Citizens, just go ahead and vote.
And that decides the issue.
Why do you need somebody else to vote for you?
Well, we have the system.
Today, all over the West, and in fact, many other parts of the world, including places like India, countries in Africa, and so on, representative democracy.
So, this is the first way in which we are not a kind of direct or pure democracy.
We have a representative democracy.
But representative democracy also has two forms, and it's important to distinguish them, because the first form is Let's call it parliamentary democracy.
This is what the British have and this is what the Indians have in India.
And that means that you don't vote for an individual so much as you vote for a party.
And that party then becomes the winner of the election and its leader, whoever that is, becomes the prime minister.
That's the case right now with Rishi Sunak in England.
Kind of funny, you got an Indian who's actually the Prime Minister of England.
And then, of course, you have Modi, an Indian who's Prime Minister of India.
But nevertheless, they have the same system.
And let's remember that Parliament in these societies basically has virtually untrammeled power.
Now, India does have a constitution.
By the way, England, interestingly, does not have a written constitution.
England has what is known as the common law.
And so, yes, courts do have some say, but by and large, parliament has, you may say, almost unquestioned and almost final authority in deciding matters.
There's no check on the majority.
In that sense, what the founders feared, something that the founders called tyranny of the majority, tyranny of the majority does exist by and large in parliamentary systems.
Now, again, in India, there are rights and courts can step in.
But again, courts are generally a little intimidated to protect anything other than the most enumerated and specified rights for the simple reason that they are, you may say, pushed against the wall by the dominant power of the parliamentary majority.
This is all very different from the United States where we don't have a parliamentary system.
We don't actually have a prime minister at all.
We have a legislature which is elected separately, the House and the Senate, and the president who's elected separately.
So we have these ideas, separation of powers, checks and balances.
And so the system here is guaranteed not only to set power against power.
This is what Madison talks about in Book 10 of The Federalist.
But a system in which there are specified constitutional rights and courts are empowered to protect these rights against the majority.
So America has majoritarian elements in our system and we have anti-majoritarian elements.
And so our system is a hybrid.
I think this is what people mean when they say, hey, we're not a democracy, we're a republic.
Another way to put it is we are a constitutional democracy in which the founders were just as worried.
I mean, by and large, democracy emerged in the modern era to replace the tyranny of one or the tyranny of the few, monarchy or aristocracy, and replace it with the rule of the people.
But the founders were worried just as much.
They were worried about the tyranny of the one, but they were also worried about the tyranny of the many.
They were worried about 51% or 55% of people in a country banding together and running roughshod over the dignity and freedom and rights and opportunities of the other 49% or the other 45%.
So the founders realized we need a system that protects the 51% and, yes, does give the 51%.
Through a constitutionally elected system, the right to rule, but the rights of the other 49% are also sacrosanct.
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I want to talk about the leadership struggle in the House for majority leader and specifically the candidacy of Kevin McCarthy.
Now, Kevin McCarthy, as you know, was the minority leader for the Republicans prior to the GOP taking the House.
And in about three weeks, The House is going to have a very interesting question of whether he is made the House Speaker.
Now, obviously, this is a Republican call.
The Republicans have the majority by, I don't know, seven or eight seats, something like that.
And so they get to pick the Speaker.
But here is where the problem begins.
Now, I was doing my locals Q&A yesterday.
By the way, I do a weekly Q&A on locals.
And if you want to be able to interact with me directly, This is a great way to To sign on.
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Debbie actually made a caviar appearance yesterday.
It was really fun. In the event, we're talking about Kevin McCarthy.
And somebody asked, you know, Dinesh, if we're up to you, who would you name as house speaker?
And I go, look, in an ideal world, if I were king of the world and I was picking a speaker, I probably would pick somebody like Matt Gaetz.
Because I think he's a fighter, and it would be a whole different house under Matt Gaetz.
But I also realize that, by and large, this is a decision that is made.
You need to have somebody who can appeal to the different factions of the GOP, someone who's sufficiently establishment, can also appeal to the moderates in the party, but ideally represents, if you will, the MAGA wing of the party. Now, Kevin McCarthy says, I will do those things, but of course, it's the credibility of that affirmation that is open to question.
Now, there are a handful, and it's only a handful, I think only five Republicans who have said basically hard no on McCarthy. We're not voting for this guy. And that group includes Matt Gaetz, but it includes also Andy Biggs.
It includes Representative Bob Good of Virginia.
It includes Matt Rosendale of Montana and Ralph Norman of South Carolina.
This is sort of the hardcore anti-McCarthy.
Now, this itself is a big problem because the Republicans don't have a big majority.
And moreover, there are other Republicans who agree with these guys.
In fact, there are 20 House Republicans, by and large, Republicans on the right edge of the party, and they basically said, look, we're not for McCarthy unless we get some very specific guarantees out of McCarthy.
And while McCarthy has been meeting with these guys and giving them generic assurances, it's It's not clear that these 20 Republicans, and this would be far.
More than enough to sink McCarthy's candidacy.
So, typically, if you don't get a majority, it goes to the second ballot and the third ballot and the fourth ballot.
But the interesting question is, what happens if you go to three and four ballots and McCarthy just doesn't have the votes?
Now, this is when things get really interesting because, of course, a rival candidate could emerge.
Right now, there does not appear to be a rival candidate who is close to getting the required What, 218 votes, I guess it is, to be able to displace McCarthy.
And I think what's really going for the McCarthy faction, the McCarthy people, is that, hey, listen, you can't fight something with nothing.
So you might grumble about McCarthy, but he's sort of all we got.
You gotta shrug your shoulders and go with him.
Now... The Democrats have been making some very interesting noises, specifically the one Democrat.
This is Ro Khanna of California.
By the way, this is the only guy who seems to care about free speech in the Democratic Party.
If you look at some of the revelations on the Twitter files, you see that this is the one guy that from time to time goes, wait a minute, don't people have the right to speak and say whatever they want?
And isn't it wrong for the government to be intruding and telling them what they can and can't say?
So, there's one half-decent Democrat on this issue.
Well, apparently, Ro Khanna has intimated or suggested that if Kevin McCarthy can't get the votes and if the Republicans can't agree on a speaker, there might be a few Democrats who might be willing to come into this and cut a deal, either with McCarthy or maybe even with someone else.
Now, the problem with this is that, obviously, if Democrats are involved, they're going to have their own conditions.
Here's Ro Khanna talking to The Hill.
He goes, this would require some shared subpoena power.
Whoa! Some commitment to legislating, meaning Democratic bills making their way through the House.
And it would have to be the right candidate.
So I don't think the Republicans are going to be on board with any of this.
They don't want to give up their unilateral subpoena power.
Nancy Pelosi never did.
She never gave Republicans a share in governance.
Why would Republicans do that now?
So this is why I think Marjorie Taylor Greene has endorsed Kevin McCarthy, not merely to increase her influence with McCarthy, but also because she believes that, listen, McCarthy is the best we have.
And we don't want to take the risk of McCarthy's candidacy going down.
And then a more moderate or more liberal Republican gets picked.
Why? Because a handful of Democrats jump in.
I mean, I think, quite frankly, if a handful of Democrats jumped in with their own candidate, that candidate would be toxic and completely lose support in the Republican Party.
But none of this, by the way, has happened in 100 years.
So the idea that we could have a guy come forward for House majority, for Speaker, not get the votes first, second, third, and fourth time, things go now into kind of an open field of candidates.
This would be all very interesting.
Obviously, our goal is to have a real fighter and a real leader in the House, but there are some pitfalls.
And so whenever I'm asked a question, what would you like to see?
I always say, in the ideal world, I like X. But sometimes in the real world, we have to settle for the best we can get.
Some would call that the lesser evil.
But nevertheless, the best option that is practical is the option that in the end I have to go for.
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We were all startled to hear recently that Kristen Sinema had decided to leave the Democratic Party and become an independent.
And I've talked about why she might do that and what she might be up to.
But I now want to turn to her, well, I can't call him sidekick, but maybe her partner in crime, the other unpredictable Democrat, and that is...
Joe Manchin.
Now, some would say, Dinesh, really, Joe Manchin is predictable.
He always flirts with the right.
In fact, he goes and raises money in places like Texas with right-wing sources and right-wing billionaires.
And then he cuts some sort of a deal at the last minute with the Democrats.
And he did this with the Build Back Better So even though he scaled a very bad bill that was $3.5 trillion down to $1.5 trillion, you've got to give him credit for doing that.
Nevertheless, he ended up sort of succumbing and signing that very expensive and still wasteful bill.
So this is Joe Manchin.
This is how he is.
And this is what he is.
Well, Joe Manchin is facing a very precarious situation now in West Virginia.
He's up for re-election in two years.
Now, it has to be said that he was opposed by a pretty good candidate in 2018, and he managed to pull through.
And so you can't underestimate Joe Manchin.
Joe Manchin has shown that even in a A red state, West Virginia, by the way, used to be reliably Democratic all the way in certainly the second half of the 20th century.
It only started moving into the conservative camp, into the Republican camp after that.
But it's now Trump country.
I mean, Trump won. I have the number here somewhere.
Trump beat Biden by 39 points in West Virginia.
So West Virginia is now red and getting redder.
And a guy like Joe Manchin should have no chance in West Virginia.
Now, as I say, he proved the doubters wrong in 2018, in part by saying, hey, I'm a really likable guy.
I'm Mr. West Virginia.
My opponent is a flawed candidate.
And moreover, I'm an independent thinker.
I don't play by anybody's playbook.
I will defend the interests of West Virginia.
But the real question is, has he?
Has Joe Manchin been defending the interests of West Virginia?
And the answer is no.
He's been selling them down the pike on the issue of coal.
So he has been allowing the Democrats, who are the deadly enemies of the interests of West Virginians, to run roughshod or to run amok.
And so he doesn't deserve to be re-elected.
And the question is, does he know that?
Already candidates are jumping into the race against him.
So Congressman Alex Mooney, actually a guy I know from my days in D.C., Alex Mooney has decided I'm in.
And then right after that, another guy, this is Moore Capito, a state legislator and son of the Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito.
So this guy is like, I'm running.
And then the state treasurer, a guy named Riley Moore, is like, I'm going to be running for Alex Mooney's seat.
So you can tell the Republicans sort of smell blood here, and they smell opportunity here, and they want to get in early to...
To start beating the drums and building what they will need.
I mean, the Republicans are going to need a big war chest because Manchin does have money.
In fact, ironically, in the last few years he's raised some money right of center by Republicans who have basically been, you can almost say, We're good to go.
And Jim Justice, I think, if he ran, would annihilate Manchin.
He's an extremely popular governor.
He also happens to be the wealthiest man in the state.
Sometimes people joke that he's sort of the bank of any activity that occurs in the state.
So this is a guy who has not only the name and the popularity.
It's kind of funny. He also has the name Justice.
But more importantly, he can bankroll his own campaign.
He's not going to run out of money.
He probably can produce more money than Manchin can produce.
So Manchin is going to be basically finished if Jim Justice jumps in.
But Jim Justice is the governor.
He may decide, I like being governor.
I'm not going to run for the Senate.
And in that case, the question is who else can beat Manchin?
Well, according to the former head of the Republican Party...
This is a guy, he makes the point that anybody can beat Manchin.
He basically says, look, this is a case where Manchin is out of step with the state, and if Republicans don't sort of mess it up, he goes...
He goes, it's kind of a done deal.
Here's a GOP chairwoman out of West Virginia, Elgin McArdle, saying the following.
In West Virginia, she says, we hold 31 of 34 state senate seats.
We have 88 of 100 delegate seats.
We have every board of public works seat.
We have both congressional seats.
The only seat we don't have is mansions.
It's clear he needs to go.
The question is, will Manchin realize this and realize that the best way to protect himself, the best way for him to stay in the Senate, his best chance at survival, is to become a Republican?
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This is a bit of a lighter and more amusing story that I'm titling Too Much Baggage.
Too Much Baggage. What am I referring to?
Well, I'm referring to this guy, and he's apparently...
Well, I mean, he's a non-binary...
Biden appointee.
So let me explain. What is non-binary, Dinesh?
What are you talking about? Well, non-binary is this new category of people who supposedly have been emerging lately.
This is not something we really heard about in previous decades or perhaps previous centuries.
And these are people who claim that they are neither male nor female.
Now, a more accurate way to put it is they don't identify So we have this, again, this new concept of identification, as if to say that I can become something by identifying as it.
If I identify with a character in a novel, do I become that character?
If I identify with my dog who's sitting forlorn in the corner of the room, do I become a dog?
No. But in our woke environment, identification is somehow seen as establishing a particular type of, in this case, biology.
Well, we've got this non-binary character.
His name is Sam Brinton, B-R-I-N-T-O-N. And he was kind of a very flamboyant, theatrical character showing up at events in long dresses and kind of flared skirts with all kinds of jewelry and makeup.
And it seems that the Biden administration was very proud of him.
In fact, they issued a statement.
Claiming that he was a, quote, well-known advocate for LGBTQ youth and that he was, quote, active in helping to secure protections against the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy.
Now, first of all, right there, we have to stop because if you are what you believe you are, if you can, in a sense, become something by merely identifying with it, shouldn't people who are, let's say, gay and want not to be gay be allowed to pursue those paths?
So this is what is so-called conversion therapy.
Is there a way to convert out By choice of being, let's say, gay.
And apparently the Sam Brinton, who's all for identifying one way or the other, thinks that it's really bad that anyone should do that.
This would appear to be contradictory, but we will leave that for another day.
The more important thing is that Sam Brinton appears to be a thief.
At least he's been arrested for stealing.
Stealing what? Stealing luggage at airports.
Not just one time, but on two separate occasions.
And how do we know it's him?
Let's go to the videotape is the answer.
In other words, you can see it.
And I've seen this on social media.
You see these bags going around the carousel.
And then you see a guy, quite clearly this guy.
Now, interestingly, in the description when he was first spotted on the...
On the videotape, they describe him as a male.
And I'm now just, you know, just quoting, Well, as it turns out, the Sam Brinton character is Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy.
So our nuclear operations are partly in charge of this clown.
And apparently he was caught at the Las Vegas airport making off with a $320 bag containing more than $3,500 worth of jewelry, clothing and makeup according to police.
Now, I'd seen that actually on social media.
And then I noticed that...
That Brinton was arrested for a completely separate incident.
And it turns out that this is in Minneapolis.
At the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, Brinton is accused of snatching a woman's Vera Bradley suitcase with items inside valued at $2,325.
Now, you can tell the Biden administration was really reluctant to fire this guy.
They were doing their best to protect him.
Why? Well, quite simply, Because he is non-binary.
And so you can see here that we're in a country now where, at least as far as the Biden regime is concerned, non-binary is a form of privilege.
If Sam Brinton were anything other than non-binary, boom, he'd be out of there.
But as it turns out, they're like, well, let's wait and see.
Let's see what happens. They initially put him on leave.
But I think once the second arrest, when that shoe dropped, they realized this is a little too much And Sam Brinton has been fired.
By the way, he's facing this kind of theft is not a small matter.
He's facing five years in prison for the Minnesota theft, up to 10 years for the Las Vegas heist.
So this guy may actually go off for some years.
And my advice to Sam Brinton is that when you show up at prison, you don't need to bring your suitcase.
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We're discussing, drawing on my book, What's So Great About Christianity, how Christianity is the foundation of the idea of separating the spheres of God and government.
I mentioned last time Augustine's great work called The City of God.
And not only does Augustine distinguish these two spheres, the city of God, which is the heavenly city, The obligations that we owe to our Creator.
But from the city of man, which is the, well, let's call it the human or the political sphere, the rules that we make to get along, or not get along in some cases, with each other.
But you see here in Augustine also the germ, the embryo of the idea of limited government.
Limited government. Why? Because think about it.
If you've got these two spheres, it means that the claims of the earthly sphere are limited.
They're restricted. They can only go so far and no further because then you can say God's domain begins.
And so the implication of Augustine's city of God is that there is a sort of sanctuary for human conscience inside every person that is protected from political control.
That even kings and emperors Or elected majorities, for that matter.
However, Grand cannot usurp the sphere or the authority that belongs rightfully to God.
So this is... The spectacular, you may almost say, theological origin of what the American founders would then pick up on and put into the Constitution as the idea of limited government.
So let's remember that throughout the Middle Ages, the church was not merely a sort of spiritual institution.
It owned property.
It had armies in some cases.
It was a temporal power.
And yet, the point is that even in those times, even when the church functioned like a state and could deploy troops, could conduct sieges and warfare, nevertheless, even in those times, there was a distinction maintained between the sphere of the state and the sphere of the church.
Let's look, for example, at the heyday of the Church as exercising temporal power.
And this would be, for example, during the, let's say, the Spanish Inquisition in the early modern period.
But even in the Spanish Inquisition, if you committed...
You may say the crime of heresy, you were tried by the church.
Why? Because that was a violation of canon law, of you may say spiritual laws.
But if you committed murder or theft, you were tried by the state.
So there were kind of two completely separate judicial offices in late medieval Spain.
The offices of the church judiciary and the offices of the secular or state judiciary.
And so, in Western civilization, you begin to see something that I think has had a huge impact through the centuries.
And this is, you may say, the separation of the spheres of the state and society.
So, the state is the official centralized government.
Society is the non-governmental or private sphere.
And think about how much of our lives...
Now, government has grown tremendously, particularly since the New Deal.
It has, I would argue, usurped functions that belong to state and local governments, but it's also usurped a good deal of the private sphere.
We live at a time when the government, you know, regulates energy companies.
It It basically controls the banks.
It orders auto companies what to do.
And it exercises, I think, an excessive and unhealthy degree of control even over our ordinary lives.
But nevertheless, it doesn't exercise complete control.
Think of the difference, for example, between America and China.
In China, the government can tell you, you can't live over here.
You need to go live over there.
Well, our government, at least until now, doesn't have that kind of power.
Or the Chinese government can tell you, you can't go into this particular business.
We want you to work over here or start this kind of business.
And that's not the case in America.
So, Christianity has contributed greatly.
In developing this concept of not just religious freedom, that's part of it, and that's a key part of it, but also a whole sphere of private conduct outside the orbit of the state.
Now, when we talk about religious freedom, let's remember that in ancient and medieval times, and this is even during the sphere of Christianity...
You didn't really have a developed notion of freedom of conscience.
What you had is, well, under the Peace of Westphalia, which was basically 17th century, 1648, the idea was that the religion of the people follows the religion of the king.
If the king is a Protestant, England is a Protestant country.
If the king of France is a Catholic, France is a Catholic country, and so it's officially Catholic.
But what the American founders did is they developed this new idea.
By the way, not just religious toleration, because toleration implies I don't agree with you, but I'm going to hold my nose and put up with you.
And so toleration implies a degree of condescension.
But religious freedom is a more radical idea.
Religious freedom means that each person has a kind of inviolable conscience.
And the state is not going to intrude on that.
So there's not going to be an official state church, and the state is not going to tell people in the private sphere when it comes to the rights of conscience what they can and should believe.
This incredibly powerful idea is one of the foundation stones of Western civilization.
As I said, it took some time to reach its full development, which it did in America.
In other words, the idea of freedom of conscience going beyond the idea of tolerance.
But we do have it. In some ways, it is imperiled, even now, imperiled from the left, imperiled from the secular Democrats.
But it's an idea that we should cherish and fight hard to protect.
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I'm continuing my discussion based on what's so great about Christianity of the idea of...
Limited government, but also the idea of religious freedom.
Now, interestingly, we sometimes make the casual comment that the early settlers who left Europe came to America in search of religious freedom.
And that is both true and misleading.
It is true in the sense that you had, by and large, You had Huguenots and you had Puritans in England who are being oppressed by the Anglicans, by the way.
Interestingly, not by the Catholics, but oppressed by the Anglicans in England and they decided to flee.
Many of them fled forever.
First, to other parts of Europe, places like Holland.
And then many of them decided over time, let's go to the New World and come to the United States.
And so when we think, for example, about the Puritans and we think about the pilgrims, they came to America and yes, they wanted religious freedom for themselves.
In other words, freedom from Anglican control.
But at the same time, they did not believe in religious freedom for others.
They wanted to establish in America a Christian commonwealth, and quite honestly, the Christian commonwealth would be intolerant in the sense that it would reflect Puritan orthodoxy.
So how did we go from the Puritans and their idea of America, city on the hill, Puritan commonwealth with an enforced orthodoxy, how did we go from there to a century and a half later, the American founding and this remarkable concept of the rights of conscience or of religious freedom?
Well, the answer is actually quite complicated.
It's not the result of some kind of And here's really what I mean.
Separation of religion and government develops in the United States because you have all these denominations, each of which would have been happy to impose its own denominational point of view, but none of them were strong enough to do it across the country.
So, here we go. The Puritans dominated in Massachusetts.
But the Anglicans were the majority in Virginia.
And there was a very strong Catholic stronghold, if you will, in Maryland.
So what happens is all these denominations are jostling one with the other.
And of course, if one group is dominant over here, there are members of another group that are under their control.
And so out of this emerges this idea that, look, let's sort of leave it alone.
Let's not have a central orthodoxy.
The writer John Courtney Murray, who writes about this, says that the First Amendment and its protections for religious freedom emerge not as an article of faith, but as an article of peace.
And what he means by that is it emerges as a kind of treaty in which I'd like to dominate you over here, you'd like to dominate me over there, but ultimately we decide that live and let live is the best way to kind of get along.
And so this Christian idea, as I say, comes right out of Jesus' mouth in the Bible.
But begins to now manifest itself in this new country, America, in our Constitution.
And the idea here is for the government not to establish a national church, but I would argue even more broadly to separate the domains of theology from morality.
So let's explore that a little bit.
The American founders were, for the most part, Christians.
I say for the most part because some of them were not what we would call Orthodox Christians.
They didn't accept the full lineup, you may say, of the Christian creed.
Some of them were deists, although there's an ongoing argument about who really is a deist and so on.
Even in the philosophical front, Locke is sometimes called a deist.
Locke himself, I think, would have rejected that description.
But what the founders do is that they decide, let's not have a national religion.
Now, this is not to say that we can't have public days of prayer, not to say we can't have chaplains for Congress and the armed forces, not to say we can't promote religious values through education in the Northwest Territory.
You have the founders doing all of those things.
Was there a kind of tall wall being erected between church and state?
Absolutely not. I don't want government to be enforcing that.
But that is completely different from morality.
Why? Because morality concerns the rules by which we live.
Morality concerns the practical precepts for ordinary life.
So by separating the domains of theology, which is outside the realm of government, and morality, which is within the realm of democratic debate and government and law.
You've got to remember this when sometimes people say, you know, abortion is a religious issue.
No, it's not. Yes, you can have a theological perspective on it, but abortion is fundamentally a moral issue.
It's a moral issue that concerns, by and large, when is it right, if ever, to kill another human being?
That's the issue raised by abortion, and so it can be disentangled from theology and presented simply as a moral issue in which we decide when killing is to be permitted and by whom.
Now, what happens in America is you have a new development, religious freedom that produces a flowering of religion.
And when I come back, I'm going to discuss the impact of that in this new country.
I'm talking about religious freedom and separating the spheres of religion and government, and I've made the point in the last segment that we need to make a distinction between theology and morality.
Here's George Washington in his farewell address.
"'Let us, with caution, indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.'" So, Washington is saying that religion may well be and is the source of morality.
I think as a practical matter, that's true.
Most of us sort of learn our moral precepts.
Think of the Ten Commandments.
It is a set of moral rules.
Now, the first two or three commandments are, I would say, theological because they concern our relationship with God.
But the rest of the commandments concern our relationship with each other.
They fall into the moral domain.
And most people who aren't Christian or even secular, not even religious at all, would agree with most of those commandments.
Why? Because they appeal to the inner voice of conscience.
And so, what Washington is saying is that morality is in fact the business of government, but let's remember that for many people, if not most, morality has its anchor in religious conviction.
And John Adams goes on to say, picking it right up from Washington, Why?
Just for the reason that Washington gave.
If religious belief is the foundation of morality...
Then if you have a non-religious people, I think Adams is saying, then the kind of moral anchor of Christianity becomes tossed aside and the society begins to experience, well, a little bit of what it's experiencing now, which is a good deal of moral confusion and even moral chaos.
Here's Thomas Jefferson.
Arguably one of the less religious of the founders, nevertheless you find him in complete agreement that religious faith is the foundation for liberty itself.
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God, that they are not to be violated but with His wrath?
So Jefferson recognizes the foundation of liberty in the idea of a creator, in the idea of religious conviction, and he quite explicitly states that the liberties come from the creator.
Where else? Where else do we get this human dignity, these human rights, if not from the God who created us? Now, fast forward about 50 years and here comes Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, really a young Frenchman in his 20s, comes to the United States and he looks around and what does he see? Well, he sees the America that the founding created. He sees religion flourishing, so he notices that the First Amendment and the constitutional
structure is no constraint on religious belief and practice.
In fact, on the contrary, it seems to have supported a kind of flowering of different types of religious sects.
Now, they're all Christian. And nevertheless, they have different names and they have different outfits.
They conduct their services a different way.
But guess what? Tocqueville says they have the same morality.
So interestingly, they have different variations of theology, but they have unanimity on the issue of morality.
Here's Tocqueville. The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable, And then he goes on to say, quote, all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.
So this is the way in which the United States could have, and this may seem a little paradoxical, religious diversity.
And I don't mean religious diversity in the extreme sense.
There weren't really... You know, Hindus and Jains and Confucians.
No, it's a religious diversity by and large within the Judeo-Christian framework, but a kind of singular and uniform moral law that provides the basis for having moral agreement across the wide swath of society.
Interestingly, in my view, this kind of moral agreement, which Really began around the time of the founding or even before, continues all the way through the 18th and 19th centuries and the 20th century for the most part, and only starts beginning to crack in the second half of the 20th century.
And we are living with the trauma and the fruits of that, the bad fruits, of the dissolution of that shared moral framework.
Now, a lot of courts today interpret wrongly separation of church and state to mean Religion has no place in the public arena.
I will say that the new Supreme Court majority, the 6-3 majority we have now, appears to have a very sound understanding of religious freedom, although we'll have to see how that plays out in individual cases.
But really, for the past 50 years, we've had courts that have wrongly interpreted freedom for religious expression to mean freedom from religious expression.
In other words, the government has to become completely somehow disentangled from any kind of support for religion.
You can't even have like a...
A Christian club at a public school, for example, because wait a minute, that would violate separation of church and state.
No, the clause in the Constitution is not separation of church and state.
It is the no establishment clause.
And having a Christian club at a school, no different, by the way, from the athletic club and the Republican club and the Democratic club and so on, It's hardly an establishment of religion.
So here we have an idea that has been distorted, but note, it's a profoundly Christian idea, an idea that we render separately to Caesar and to God, the respective obligations that we have to both.
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