I haven’t done a fisk in years, but a friend linked to this article, and I had thoughts. I had so many thoughts that I decided to do a fisk rather than a long comment.

Then it kind of turned into a 10,000 word monster, so fair warning that this will be long.

I thought it worth addressing because I find this sort of article to be very typical of certain elements of the American Right: the shallow historiography, the fawning idealization of the Founding Fathers, the conviction that the solution to our current woes is a return to ‘our founding values,’ the inability to perceive the problems with those values, and so on.

The more I read it, the more I was also dumbstruck by how poor the logic and argumentation is. And this from an author with a Ph.D. in political science and a string of academic credentials.

And I tried to be polite, but some sarcasm made it in. One must do what one can.

The original will be in italics, my response will be in bold.

Religious Liberty and the Genius of the American Founding

Glenn Ellmers

Author, The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on September 29, 2024, during a conference on “Christianity in America.”

One of the most beautiful things written during the American Founding period is George Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Washington had visited Newport in August of that year, and shortly after his visit, one of the leaders of the Jewish community sent Washington a letter thanking him and congratulating him on his conduct as president.

Washington responded, in part:   

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. . . . May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

See what I mean about the fawning idealization? “One of the most beautiful things written,” etc. on a fairly standard piece of political communication from a leader to a constituent group.

We’ll pass over Washington’s letter, since this is going to be long enough as it is and we all like Washington anyway.

Washington here magnificently summarizes the principle of religious liberty, a principle at the heart of the American Founding and one of the greatest accomplishments in human history.

So many principles seem to have been ‘at the heart of the American founding,’ don’t they?

Though, as a side comment, giving religious liberty that crown is a massive stretch, considering that not even Thomas Jefferson could pretend there was a religious aspect to the Revolution, or that any religious liberties were being threatened by the Crown (given that he was reduced to citing things like “called assemblies at inconvenient times” as a grievance, I’m sure Jefferson would have killed for some religious persecution).

The only one of the colonial grievances even remotely tied to religion was the Quebec Act, and their complaint was that French Catholics were being given their own religious establishment. Any laws on the books restricting religious liberty in the colonies were ones the colonial governments themselves had enacted.

Not that Britain of the time was a bastion of religious freedom, of course. They’d gotten rid of good King James specifically to avoid that. I wonder what Dr. Ellmers would have to say about the Glorious Revolution?

Today, this principle has been under assault—think of the vicious antisemitism we have seen on many college campuses recently or the persecution of Christians by our federal government. The faith of American Christians and Jews has been mocked and increasingly threatened by an aggressively secular, even atheistic, ruling class.

We’ll come back to this, but watch for whether he ever considers the idea that aggressive secularism and religious indifferentism might be connected.

We are in danger of losing the precious gift of religious liberty, which took almost 2,000 years for the Christian West to put into practice.

Note also; the United States and Liberal government is what the Christian West has been longing for and striving for its entire existence. Oh, well; let’s see what he has to say.

***

To understand why it took so long for the principle of religious liberty to be implemented in practice, let’s turn to the ancient, pre-Christian world.

The actual answer is, “because in most times and most places across human history, people didn’t see religious liberty as we think of it as desirable.”

By the way, the term ‘religious liberty’ is going to be used to cover a variety of ideas in this piece, from simple religious toleration (that dissenters are permitted their own worship to a greater or lesser degree) to Liberal-style religious liberty (which teaches “What you believe does not matter, only that you be a good citizen”). It’s a very loose idea, so I apologize if there seem to be contradictions.

Short version is that my reading of history is that religious toleration of a sort has largely been the norm, and non-toleration is actually comparatively rare and usually limited to targeting specific sects during specific periods (usually only ones that are either small and new or regarded as particularly disruptive for some reason). This is because it’s usually more disruptive to public order to actively go after religious dissenters than it is to allow them limited existence.

So, in 18^th century England, Catholics were generally tolerated in the sense that they were permitted to exist and own property, but not to preach or to hold public services (see Alexander Pope), while in Japan at the same time they were not tolerated in that a publicly known Catholic would be subject to legal punishment for the fact of being a Catholic (so, Alexander Pope-san would have been forced to ritually stamp on an image of the Blessed Virgin or face execution).

Of course, this is still fairly regarded as a form of persecution, but the point is that it’s not a binary issue. We tend to have an image of countries without liberal-style Religious Liberty as all being like Japan, when the picture is in fact much more nuanced.

Dr. Ellmers, as we’ll see, seems to have little idea of these nuances.

Prior to Christianity, all religions were emphatically political. We can see an example of this in the following from the Book of Exodus:

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.

How does this illustrate the ‘political’ nature of Ancient Religions? The Hebrews were hardly representative, religiously speaking.

We read in the Old Testament of God’s special covenant with the Jews, who are repeatedly described as a “chosen people.” In fact, in the ancient world, all tribes or nations considered themselves chosen—and protected—by their gods. Whether it was Apollo and the other Olympian gods in Greece, Marduk and Nabu for the Babylonians, Rah and Isis and Osiris in Egypt, or Jehovah among the Jews—the gods of the ancient world were always the gods of a particular people. That is what it means to say religion in the ancient world was political.

Right off the bat, he has a mistaken idea of the ancient world. His thesis is that the Jews were a typical ancient people, and this is what he will rest his entire picture of the time period on. Except that, as I say, the Hebrews were emphatically not a typical ancient people in this regard.

The ancient peoples, by and large did not think of themselves as the ‘chosen’ people of their gods, certainly not in the same way the Hebrews did. Their gods were usually fairly indifferent to them. Ancient paganism, for the most part, was not thought of as involving competing gods, but the same gods being worshiped under different names and different rites. The Greeks called him Zeus, the Babylonians Marduk, the Egyptians Rah, but they were all the same god.

To think otherwise would assume that, say, the Greeks believed that there were multiple sky gods and sun gods, and that if they went to war against Egypt, Rah would be battling Zeus. Or that the Egyptians worshiped nothing at all, and only the Greeks knew the true gods. Only, if that were the case, one would expect the Greeks to be proselytizers, as their gods would obviously rather be worshiped by more rather than fewer people. But none of the ancient pagans were proselytizing religions, so this was obviously not the case.

(More or less; for the most part the ancient peoples didn’t really have a clear theology, so they would often speak about ‘the gods of the Greeks and the gods of the Egyptians’, but if pressed they would generally say that they were the same gods worshipped under different names).

Each group thought of themselves as superior, of course, but more because of their specific achievements and culture. It’s heavily reductionist to say that they each thought of themselves as a ‘chosen people’ in the style of the Hebrews. The Hebrew religion was distinct for being exclusionary of other deities (so distinct that the Hebrews themselves struggled with this idea, as witnessed by how often they tried to import gods from neighbouring peoples).

In this respect, the Hebrews were like other ancient peoples. However, they were unique in one very important way: they were monotheistic, while other ancient nations typically had pantheons of gods. The Hebrew God was singular, mysterious, and omnipotent, and He was the God of the whole world. In this sense, Judaism prepared the way for Christianity, the first universal religion.

In this sense?! That makes it sound like Christianity and Judaism grew up independently, with Christianity just borrowing certain ideas from the Hebrews, instead of being a continuation and development from Judaism.

But the ancient Israelites did not proselytize or seek converts. No pre-Christian people, including the Jews, wanted to share its gods.

Again, because they didn’t think of them as being simply ‘their gods’ but as ‘the gods.’ There would be no point in a Greek trying to get an Egyptian to worship Demeter if they think ‘Isis’ is just the Egyptian name for Demeter. And again, the fact that they didn’t preach the worship of Zeus shows that they didn’t conceive of their different pantheons as being at odds.

The Hebrews didn’t proselytize because they had been singled out by God to be His chosen people; it wouldn’t make sense for the chosen people to try to preach to a non-chosen people. If the Hebrews preached to the Philistines it still would not make them the children of Abraham. There were converts and non-Hebrew worshippers of God (such as Naaman), but they were few and far between. An institutional conversion of a whole nation would be almost impossible under the Old Law.

All ancient nations were closed societies in which civil and religious obedience were identical. All law was divine law. There was no such thing as religious toleration or religious pluralism. Priests were public officials, and there was no distinction between church and state.

He’s half right here. In the ancient world, there was no distinction between ‘church’ and ‘state.’ Logically speaking, why would there be? If we actually believe in the gods, and that they must be worshiped and appealed to, surely it’s the duty of those who lead the people to offer worship on their behalf, and it’s the duty of the people or the state to see that this worship is done.

Though that’s not the same thing as ‘civil and religious obedience being identical’. Civil obedience was a religious duty, but the law against letting your cow block the street is obviously not a religious law in the sense that the law calling for a festival to Demeter on a certain day is.

And to say there was no such thing as religious toleration or pluralism is nonsense. Every village had its own particular god and, as noted, the gods of other nations were mostly regarded as the same gods under different names. Egypt had something in the nature of 1,500 gods worshipped in different places and different times: is that not religious pluralism?

But leaving that aside, what about the Persian Empire? They essentially had what we would call full-on Religious Liberty, since they allowed their peoples complete freedom of worship as long as they paid taxes and sent soldiers to the wars (that is, as long as they were “good citizens”). Even the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar permitted the Jews to practice their own faith during the captivity, minus a few brief instances of attempted persecution.

The example of the Persian Empire, by the way, pretty much single-handedly destroys his claim of Religious Liberty being an American, or at least modern invention.

To defeat another nation in war meant defeating its gods.

Again, do you think the Greeks believed that Zeus could have a fight with Rah?

‘Defeating a people’s gods’ meant something different for the ancient pagans than it did for the Hebrews. Pagan worship was usually centered around idols, which were called their ‘gods’ and treated as such. Part of the subjection of another nation is to take away its ‘gods’ by destroying or capturing their idols.

The problem is that the pagan mindset is very alien to us (a fact he fails to appreciate), so how they regarded this is a little vague. But as I understand it this was a matter of removing their connection with the gods, not literally destroying the gods themselves. If the Babylonians destroy the idols of Nineveh, this is not them rejecting the false gods of the Assyrians (they worshipped the same pantheon), but cutting off the Assyrians from the gods. If the Babylonians have idols and the Assyrians do not, the Assyrians can only reach the gods through the Babylonians. It’s a way of asserting authority over another nation and depriving them of independent existence.

This is why it was important for Aeneas to carry away the gods of Troy: not because they were the ‘true’ gods as compared to the gods of the Greeks (they worshipped the same gods), but because they represented the Trojans’ connection with the gods and thus their independence as a people.

Again, if his framing were true, then we would never see Babylonians destroying Assyrian idols or Athenians breaking Theban temples, but we do.

Even this militant aspect of ancient life appears in the Old Testament. Consider the following from Deuteronomy:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;

And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.

And this, also from Deuteronomy: “Ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.”

This is because the Hebrew God was set in opposition to the other gods and wasn’t considered just another name for one of them. But this largely wasn’t the case for the rest of the ancient world. God in opposition to ‘the gods’ was a distinctly Hebrew concept.

Again, his whole case is based on the assumption that the Hebrews were a typical ancient people, so that what is true for their religion is true for all. But this is nonsense, because the Hebrews were very much not a typical ancient people when it came to their religious ideas.

This kind of rhetoric was perfectly normal in the ancient world.

Then why don’t you cite a non-Hebrew example of it?

Every people saw its enemies as unclean heretics who had to be destroyed because they worshipped false gods.

No, they didn’t. As noted, they mostly thought they were all worshipping the same gods under different names.

And when, in fact, in the Ancient World, was there ever a religious war, apart from the Hebrews? Did the Egyptians attack the Assyrians because the Assyrians worshipped Marduk instead of Rah? Did the Persians attack the Greeks because they rejected the religion of Zoroaster? Of course not. Mostly these were contests for power, influence, and wealth with little or no religious component. Their theologies were not developed enough for that to make any sense.

Just as an example, the Hittites once invaded Babylon and carried off the idol of Marduk. Three hundred years later, the Babylonians successfully negotiated for its return. If there were anything to Dr. Ellmers’s thesis, the Hittites would have destroyed the idol long before.

That’s not even considering the fact that most ancient wars were fought against people who shared pantheons. The Greeks mostly fought other Greeks, the Babylonians fought Assyrians, the different regions of Egypt fought each other, and so on.

And for goodness sakes, that’s not how actual religious wars work. The Muslims did not think the Christians needed to be ‘destroyed’ for not worshipping Allah according to the prophet: they thought they needed to be subjugated. The same with the Crusaders.

Perhaps the most famous example of the laws being absolutely sacred and binding is the story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai, carrying God’s commandments to his people. Every ancient people had divine commandments of this kind.

Oh, yeah? Name one. What were the Greek commandments? Which god gave them? What was the divine law of the Egyptians and who was the lawgiver?

Not that they didn’t have moral codes or laws, but that’s a very different thing from a Mosaic Divine Law based around a set number of specific commandments given directly by God.

This also meant that political authority—for Moses and every other ancient leader—came directly from God. Therefore there was no distinction between religious and civic obligations. Every ancient city understood itself to be a holy city.

Again, the ancient pagans, in general, did not think of themselves and their relation to the gods in the same way that the Hebrews did in relation to God. Athens was not a ‘holy city’ in the same sense that Jerusalem was, though it was ‘sacred’ in the sense that it was the city for the Athenians. But it wasn’t the ‘holy’ city: that was Delphi or Olympias. Likewise, Memphis was the capital of Egypt, but Thebes was the centre of worship.

And as I say, so far as I know there was no Greek or Egyptian equivalent of the Ten Commandments. There was no ‘Law of God’ in the Pagan world as there was in the Hebrew religion (shown by the fact that the law codes of the pagan world specifically came from men like Hammurabi and Lysander), just the broad moral customs handed down from time immemorial. These were enforced by the gods, but weren’t specific commands given by them.

I keep bringing these things up to show how superficial his understanding of the ancient world is. And I’m no expert; I’m sure an actual antiquarian would be pulling his hair out right now.

But it’s not just his lack of historical knowledge; it’s his incredibly poor argumentation that stands out. Again, his thesis is that the ancient world was religiously exclusionary. To support this, he only cites examples from the Hebrew scriptures. Even if we knew nothing about the Hebrews, the fact that all his concrete examples come from a single source would make his argument very weak. Add the fact that this one source is known to have been unique in its religious ideas and this entire section fails completely even before we introduce any further facts.

***

With this in mind, let’s consider the twelfth century confrontation between King Henry II and St. Thomas Becket. Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury—the highest ranking religious figure in England—and he and the King were close friends and confidants. But their friendship was strained when Becket refused to submit to the King’s authority over the church, a dispute that at its heart concerned the question of whether the church could be independent of the King.

When Henry II rejected any distinction between political and religious authority, he was relying on the old tradition. He thought that piety and citizenship go together because his authority came directly from God—that it was impossible to separate the obligations of piety from the obligations of citizenship. Good citizens obey the law, which was seen to be issued ultimately by God. 

Leaving aside the bizarre choice to jump from the ancient world to the twelfth century, this is a truly terrible summation of the dispute between Henry and St. Thomas.

First, notice how vague he is in this whole matter: “refused to submit to the King’s authority over the church,” “rejected any distinction between political and religious authority.” And the idea that the conflict was about the “distinction between political and religious authority” tells me he has no actual knowledge of the event.

The fundamental issue of the conflict was whether clerics could be charged in secular courts or only in Church courts (there were also a lot of other complicated disputes that seemed important at the time, mostly involving property and offices). Henry wanted criminal clerics charged in secular courts rather than in ecclesiastical courts to avoid what seemed to him a potential for abuse. St. Thomas opposed this as an infringement on the Church’s independence. It’s a political authority either way, the question being whose political authority: Church or Crown?

Dr. Ellmers frames the situation very strangely by saying “Henry was relying on the old traditions” of the ancient world. Does he mean the traditions from alien cultures that existed over a thousand years before Henry was born? The ‘old traditions’ that are the same ones every country in the world currently follows?

He also says that Henry “thought that piety and citizenship go together because his authority came directly from God—that it was impossible to separate the obligations of piety from the obligations of citizenship.” This is exactly what St. Thomas would have thought as well, and the obligations of piety had nothing to do with it; it was a dispute over legal jurisdiction.

Dr. Ellmers also seems to have no idea of the context for the clashes between kings and the Church during the Middle Ages. It was because, as the example of St. Thomas shows, the clergy were not just the clergy, they were also important state administrators. This was why there was often so much tension between the Crown and the Church throughout the Middle Ages; it wasn’t just a matter of the King or Emperor trying to control the Church, it was a matter of him trying to control his kingdom, which the Church was often essential to (doesn’t mean the King was necessarily in the right, just that it’s not as simple as it might initially sound).

I should also reiterate that neither King Henry nor St. Thomas would have understood or supported the idea of Religious Liberty or Separation of Church and State as practiced in the modern world.

The solution to this dilemma was an agreement that the king and the church would have their own separate spheres of authority. The king would oversee worldly or political matters, while the church would have sovereignty in the spiritual or ecclesiastical realm. Each would recognize the independence of the other, and this would lead to harmony and peace. This solution marked the beginnings of religious liberty, but only the beginnings.

This part is laughable: first, the idea that the distinction between the spiritual and temporal realms of authority began in the twelfth century (it was applied during the time of Constantine), and second that the separate spheres grew out of the Thomas Beckett affair and developed into what we have today.

Does the Church have its own courts in the United States, with exclusive rights to try the clergy?

If he did want to push this narrative, St. Gregory VII’s conflict with Emperor Henry IV would have been a better example. That came earlier, was more universally relevant (being the Pope versus the Emperor) and did indeed lead to greater distinction between Imperial and Papal authority, while the St. Thomas Beckett affair was limited to England and concluded in less independence for the Church (since Henry eventually got his way).

About 100 years later, St. Thomas Aquinas started to develop the philosophical distinctions between the ecclesiastical and political realms.

Started?! Is Dr. Ellmers not aware of The City of God by St. Augustine from the fifth century? There are numerous other examples of Christian political philosophy and writings on the respective roles of Church and Crown, but this is the most obvious, being among the most famous and influential books ever written and one of the foundational texts of the Medieval world.

But his efforts were very preliminary, strictly theoretical, and would not have any practical effect until the American Founding.

I’m not sure what specific distinctions he means, or how they qualify as ‘preliminary’ or ‘theoretical’, because he once again doesn’t bother to cite them (and St. Thomas wrote so much and so extensively that it’s pretty hopeless to get at what exactly Dr. Ellmers is talking about without a citation). Though it should be noted that St. Thomas was very clear that all human authority comes from God and he certainly didn’t teach anything akin to the liberal notion of separation of Church and State or religious indifferentism.

And St. Thomas Aquinas’s writings weren’t put into practical effect until the American Founding? Are you serious? The most influential Catholic philosopher in history, and no one applied his political ideas except for a bunch of protestants and agnostics five hundred years later?

To be clear, so far as I know the Founders never read St. Thomas. Jefferson certainly hadn’t, and I doubt any of the others did (except for the Carrolls; they almost certainly did so, but they didn’t have much influence overall), so trying to link him with the American founding is highly disingenuous.

What Becket and Aquinas had in common was that they were wrestling with problems that did not exist in the ancient world. They were confronting problems created by Christianity.

This is actually true, though I don’t think in the way he means it. The Church, being a society both human and divine, headed by Christ, but staffed on Earth by imperfect men, creates complications that simply did not exist before. In the pagan world, the community serves the gods, therefore the head of the community leads them in this service, along with those whose special job it is. Simple enough. But in the Church, the priests who are the heirs of the Apostles are one thing and the princes who are leaders of the people are another. But the princes are themselves members of the Church hoping for salvation and thus subject to the priests, while the priests are often, in worldly terms, the prince’s own subjects.

The only thing parallel to it was, unsurprisingly, the Hebrew priesthood and monarchy which preceded it.

The solution was the doctrine of the Two Swords, in which both the Church and the Crown were recognized as representing Christ and being His instrument on Earth. One wields Spiritual, the other Temporal authority, but the Temporal ought to be subject to the Spiritual. Only, the exact distinction between the two, where one ended and the other began, was never finally worked out.

I am not suggesting that the Christian faith is a problem. Rather, I am arguing that it is problematic from the point of view of how political obligation had previously been understood. The problems were in fact caused by not one but two monumental events: the spread of the Christian monotheism of the New Testament and the rise of the Roman Empire. 

Why not just say ‘spread of Christianity’?

When Julius Caesar brought an end to the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire that took its place became “the universal city.”

The Republic was already pretty universal beforehand. But let’s not get distracted with his ideas of Rome

Many tribes and nations that had previously been independent were incorporated into a single empire. Then, when Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380, the ancient unity between citizenship and piety was restored: one regime, one God, one law.

Wait a second: he skipped a whole lot. The Romans, as noted, did not impose ‘their religion’ on others; they adopted the pluralistic stance of most ancient pagans and simply demanded incense be offered to the Emperor and laws of the state be obeyed (or, to put it another way, the Empire “requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support”). This led to persecution of the Christians because they would not offer the incense of the Emperor and were urging the overthrow of the old gods.

So, there was always the unity between citizenship and piety, since being a Roman citizen also meant giving your pious offering to the Emperor. And even the Christians boasted of piously praying for the Emperor like good Romans.

In any case, he didn’t describe how this ‘ancient unity’ was broken, so why is it now being ‘restored’? I suppose he means broken by among the Christians, but he skipped that.

However, after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, three dilemmas emerged.

First, there was one God, but many regimes. For the first time in the history of Western Civilization, religious and civil authority were separated.

That’s not the first time: the first Christian kingdom was Armenia, which was not part of the Empire, so the Church already had experience of multiple polities under one God. And all the Emperors from Constantine onward were recognized as separate from the Church hierarchy, so this issue didn’t arise after the fall of Rome.

He seems to be implying that before this there was never a situation where the same religion prevailed over multiple regimes. But as I pointed out above, that’s obviously nonsense. The Greek city states all worshiped the same gods and freely made war on each other. They also had a common religious tradition independent of their individual civic governments in the form the Olympic games. The Germanic pagans had the same pantheon and warred with one another. Even the Jews made war on each other during the division of the kingdoms. Religion divided among warring states is a common thing in human history.

As noted above, the distinction between religious and civic authority doesn’t have anything to do with having many different regimes, but rather with the nature of the Church.

To put it another way, divine and civil law were no longer the same. All of Europe belonged to one church, but it was split into many principalities. Citizens confronted the challenge of dual allegiances for the first time: they were required to obey both their king and their pope. But what if the king and the pope disagreed? This was something new.

How is this ‘for the first time’? Citizens in Persia had to decide whether to obey their Satrap or the Great King. Citizens in Rome to obey the Emperor or their local ruler. Or even just the high priest or the king in any given polity. This is a common thing in human history. Christianity introduces now layers of complication, but dual allegiances are nothing new.

It is also extremely reductionist to say ‘divine and civil law were no longer the same’. As noted above, there are obviously laws that apply to religious matters (e.g. paying the tithe) and those that don’t (e.g. road tolls). This has always been the case in all places. Just because the Pharaoh was also high priest doesn’t mean that people regarded his curfew laws as holy obligations. Obedience to the law is nearly always regarded as a religious obligation (still is), but that’s not the same as saying divine and civil law are one and the same.

What I think he’s getting at is the fact that the Church was an independent international body with its own set of laws (and, as noted above, its own courts). But those laws applied specifically to the clergy, not to all Catholics.

Besides which, the Church wasn’t the only such body: there were also the Guilds, the various merchant leagues, religious and knightly orders, etc. Not to mention the age-old issue of local versus national authority. Medieval Europe was a decentralized patchwork of competing loyalties, of which the crown was only one. Once again, he is massively oversimplifying this entire subject and misses the real complications.

Second, following the split between divine and civil law, what was the source of political authority?

As noted, there wasn’t really a split between divine and civil law, the whole issue of which he’s enormously oversimplifying. But as for the source of authority, all Medieval writers are very clear; it comes from God.

In the ancient city, laws came directly from God. But where did, for instance, the Prince of Bavaria get his authority?

He got it from God.

The solution the Europeans came up with is the theory of the divine right of kings, which was an attempt to reconnect civil and divine authority as in the ancient world. 

No, it follows directly from Scripture: “Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.” (Rom. 13:1). I don’t think Dr. Ellmers has ever read any Medieval thinkers (and if he has it wasn’t very attentively); he’s only read other people writing about them.

Divine Right of Kings can mean several different things; in later stages, it means a specific theory of government in which the King is the direct representative of God’s law. In the early and high Middle Ages, it was more an understanding that all authority is from God and so must be respected.

In practice, however, the divine right of kings means hereditary monarchy.

Hereditary monarchy long predates Divine Right doctrine. And…so what? That’s a pretty successful governmental model.

If the king’s ancestors received their authority directly from God—as the idea of divine right holds—then only the king’s direct descendants can exercise that authority.

Not exactly; it’s more complicated than that. More that God commands human affairs, so He calls whom He will to be King. There was also an elective element in the early and high Middle Ages if the issue was unclear (e.g. Hugh Capet was chosen by the French nobility after the last Carolingian king died without an heir), but that’s getting too far afield.

This causes enormous succession problems. What if the king has no legitimate heirs? What if the only heir is utterly unqualified to rule? What if a nephew or a cousin has a partial claim on the throne and is far more qualified?

Ah, hello Mr. Thomas Paine; you’ve come to bother me againe.

Very familiar, very cheap anti-monarchical rhetoric that operates largely on shock value. Only that value has worn off since we’ve have two hundred years of republican government to show that such issues are not solved by removing monarchy.

Hereditary monarchy doesn’t not ‘cause’ succession problems; it’s one way of solving them. The issue of succession is one every government must face, and passing authority along a family line is one means of solving it. Like any other human institution, it’s imperfect and can break down, but as a rule it works and has many advantages. But that’s a discussion for another time.

In fact, we know what happens because it did happen, over and over again, as anyone familiar with the history of England and Shakespeare’s history plays can tell you. Civil wars happened.

Yes, civil wars happened. So what? Civil wars happen in every form of government. Take a look at, say, Mexico, or South America or, hey, the United States for how well republics do in preventing them.

In any case, his entire argument for this seems to be:

“Authority derived from God leads to Divine Right monarchy. Divine Right monarchy means hereditary monarchy. Hereditary monarchy is bad because it may lead to bad or unqualified kings taking the throne, which may result in civil wars. Therefore, authority derived from God is bad.”

This is such a shallow summation of the whole topic that it pains me.

And if your goal is to avoid civil wars and internal strife, the historical example to beat is Japan, which enjoyed nearly 250 years of internal and external peace (that is, they were at peace for about the same length of time that the United States has existed). Guess what kind of government it had during that time.

The third dilemma was that the content of belief, or doctrine, became incredibly important in a way it was not in the ancient world. There was little investigation into matters of conscience prior to Christianity. It was the outward expression of piety—demonstrating loyalty to the community and its gods by obeying the divine law and participating in the public ceremonies and rituals—that mattered in the ancient world. It is only with Christianity that belief becomes paramount. And this opened the door to persecution.

So, what does that do to his earlier statement:

Every people saw its enemies as unclean heretics who had to be destroyed because they worshipped false gods.

If there was little care for content, then how can they have ‘heretics’? Do you even know what that word means?

And the fact that his conclusion of ‘belief becomes paramount’ is ‘this opened the door to persecution’ says quite a lot about his attitude toward religion.

Even before the Reformation, which ushered in centuries of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, the problem of doctrine manifested itself in terms of heresy. The church spent centuries hammering out the precise content of the catechism. Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, and many other heresies were investigated, declared to be errors, and stamped out.

Does he think this a bad thing? It sounds like it. I’m always curious about this approach: do they expect the Church not to care about the content of what exactly it believes? Or do they expect the Church not to prefer truth to error in matters relative to salvation?

So many complaints against the Church seem to amount to the idea that not only is Christianity false, but the Church is at fault for not acting accordingly.

These three dilemmas emerged because Christianity was the first non-political religion in the West.

Non-political is the wrong term. Super or trans-political would be better: Christianity claims to be above earthly rulers, but not separate from them, as it still expects earthly rulers to serve the faith. Non-political would be something more like Buddhism, where (as I understand it) spiritual progress is wholly unconnected with community or social institutions.

Being a Christian was not a question of what political community you belonged to, it was a matter of faith or belief. While that was incredibly liberating—because it meant salvation was open to every human being—it created unprecedented challenges for politics and citizenship.

Salvation wasn’t on the table for previous religions; there wasn’t an idea of salvation. And again, pagan religions were generally not competitive or exclusionary.

And, up until the Protestant revolt, everyone understood that being a Christian was a matter of belonging to a community: the Church. Which, again, was conceived of as being above, but not unconnected with earthly polities. It was certainly not non-political. Heck, Protestantism wasn’t ‘non-political’ either because it too sought the support and conversion of the State and held that secular rulers ought to act in support of the faith.

***

In order to establish republican self-government, the American Founders had to solve these complicated problems.

Side Note: I hate the term ‘self-government’. What does that even mean? Did the English, or the French, or the Russians not govern themselves? Was their aristocracy somehow a foreign body? Does it just mean the independent government of a nation? In that case, how is America an ‘experiment in self-government’, as we so often hear?

Regardless, the problems he brings up are irrelevant to republican government. The three ‘problems’ are divine versus civil law (which, again, he doesn’t seem to understand), source of authority, and content of doctrine. Content of doctrine just means having an established church that the government acknowledges as the mouthpiece of truth; a republic can have that just as well as a monarchy (see Venice, or ancient Rome). Divine versus civil law, in the sense that the Church can order something the state forbids and vice-versa can exist in any state, but is much more likely in one without an established religion, and the source of authority is God, perhaps expressed in the laws of the Republic. So, none of these were necessarily an obstacle for a republic.

I’ve already pointed out that the real complications created by Christianity are not the ones he cites, and the same can be said for the Founders. The actual problem facing the Founders in this regard was that their fragile new nation was to be comprised of thirteen religiously and culturally distinct states, so whatever common law they established would have to be acceptable to all of them, lest they split apart into squabbling individual states. They weren’t trying to correct the problems of the past so much as they were trying to solve the issues of the present.

(As an aside, I find that problem much more interesting and a much better measure of the Founders’ political savvy than the largely-theoretical one that Dr. Ellmers describes).

That meant figuring out how to create moral and political legitimacy for the new nation.

He is correct; creating legitimacy is crucial to any state. Every state needs a transcendent idea of itself and its place in the world, and with it a fixed idea of the Good by which to orientate its laws and justify its enforcement of them. As Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas all stated, a community is always organized toward some good.

This is why, technically, it is not possible to have a non-religious state. You can have a state with a non-supernatural religion, but it must have a philosophical framework which it enforces through law and which it considers beyond debate. The United States, for instance, does not ask its citizens’ consent to enforce election results because part of its state religion (so to speak) is that the ‘will of the people’ is absolute.

It also meant establishing the sacredness of the law—which alone can command the citizens’ devotion and obedience—while avoiding the religious conflict and persecution that had plagued Europe.

I’ll leave the irony of that bunch establishing the ‘sacredness of the law’ for another day. And again, avoiding religious persecution was not the primary goal; keeping the country together was. This also makes it sound like Europe was a non-stop cesspool of religious conflict and oppression: a problem for America to solve.

There’s a reason the rest of the world often finds us to be so obnoxious.

The solution they came up with is famously stated in the Declaration of Independence: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This revolutionary truth, combining human reason and divine revelation, provided the basis for establishing religious liberty for the first time in human history.

What revolutionary truth? This one vague, under-defined phrase in the middle of a sentence?

How does this combine human reason and divine revelation? The restriction to ‘nature and nature’s God’ pretty clearly excludes any supernatural revelation.

And once again, this is hardly the first time in human history that what you could call ‘religious liberty’ was established: what about the Persian Empire? Or the Roman Empire (barring that pinch to Caesar)? What about the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem? Depending on how you define ‘religious liberty,’ the Ottoman Empire might qualify. What about Maryland and Pennsylvania, which both had religious liberty long before Jefferson was even born?

By looking to the laws of nature (or laws of reason) and nature’s God as the ultimate justification for their revolution, the Founders were asserting that there was an objective moral order in the world because that world was created by a benevolent and reasonable God. Since our minds are a gift from God, and He intended us to use them, we can perceive much of this moral order through our own rational faculties.

We can’t know through reason alone those things that only come directly from revelation, including five of the Ten Commandments. Aristotle, who lived hundreds of years before Christ, could not know about keeping the Sabbath holy. But he could know that one should honor one’s parents and that theft and murder are wrong. That is why Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics is almost perfectly compatible with the morality proclaimed in the Bible. 

Okay, here’s the big point of the article: the genius of Rationalism and laws based on natural reason.

Which contradicts what he said in the previous paragraph about ‘combining reason and revelation’, since, once again, this explicitly excludes revelation. If you say “I accept everything Brad says and everything Janet says as long as it’s also said by Brad,” then you’re only accepting what Brad says (it really amazes me that he keeps missing this glaringly-obvious fact for the whole rest of the essay).

(By the way, I’m not sure which ‘five’ of the Ten Commandments are only known through revelation: even taking the Protestant counting, it should only be four on the first tablet).

He says: “By looking to the laws of nature (or laws of reason) and nature’s God as the ultimate justification for their revolution, the Founders were asserting that there was an objective moral order in the world because that world was created by a benevolent and reasonable God. Since our minds are a gift from God, and He intended us to use them, we can perceive much of this moral order through our own rational faculties.”

This is what we call Rationalism. It is the idea that “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil; it is law to itself, and suffices, by its natural force, to secure the welfare of men and of nations,” as Pope Pius IX described it in the Syllabus of Errors.

(You may cry foul that it is making reference to God. It is, but not as a source or arbiter of truth, but only as the justification for why human reason should be considered the sole arbiter, etc.).

Here’s the problem; he asserts that man’s reason can perceive much of the moral order. This is true. But there’s nothing to say that it will in any given case.

This makes Rationalism utterly useless as a source of legitimacy or common ground.

Political legitimacy requires logical certainty, because it gives the right to command obedience. You can’t command obedience on grounds that a citizen can legitimately dispute and therefore legitimately disobey.

This is not the same as being based on something true, only something that, if granted, creates a logical certainty:

All kings rule by the will of God (S A P)
Louis is king (S A P)
Conclusion: Louis rules by the will of God (S A P)

Or:

Just authority comes from the Consent of the People (S A P)
The US government comes from the Consent of the People (S A P)
Conclusion: The US Government is a Just Authority (S A P)

Once grant the premise, the conclusion is certain. To dispute it would be to dispute the philosophical framework of the nation itself.

(There is, obviously, a lot more to say on this, but that’s for another time)

But something being reasonable does not create a certainty, because any given man’s judgment on whether it is reasonable or not is subject to doubt.

A man may determine by reason whether a law is just or unjust (S I P)
Thomas Jefferson is a man. (S A P)
Conclusion: Thomas Jefferson may determine by reason whether a law is just or unjust (S I P).
Corollary: He may not determine by reason etc. (S O P)

Resulting in:

Reasonable laws are legitimate laws (S A P)
This law may be reasonable (S I P)
Conclusion: This law may be legitimate. (S I P).
Corollary: This law may not be legitimate (S O P)

It is not possible to reach a certainty from an uncertainty. Individual reason is an uncertainty. Therefore, legitimacy based on individual reason can never be more than an uncertainty. But the nature of legitimacy requires it to be based on a certainty, so legitimacy cannot be based on individual reason or ‘rationalism’.

This fact is going to undermine everything else he says.

This natural moral order exists outside of our will—it exists whether we like it or not. We are born into both a physical and a moral world that we do not create. Today’s Leftists think they can alter human nature—for example, by allowing children to choose “gender reassignment surgery”—but this will never work and will never lead to true happiness because we cannot change our nature.

And he provides his own counter-example: we live in a world where a large part of the country, claiming to be guided by reason, believe that the existence of male and female is not objective. You’d be hard pressed to find a more obviously irrational position.

But if each man can determine for himself what is right and wrong based on natural reason, then who are you to say that these Leftists are wrong? Are they not following their own rational faculties? They would say so.

If you say they are not, who are you to judge, and by what grounds?

Again, it doesn’t matter what arguments you bring or even how correct you are; you have no authority and no one is under obligation to accept your conclusions. But, at the same time, the open-ended nature of rationalism requires that any position whatever may be held and advocated, meaning that we as a nation are obligated to permit Leftists their position.

Rationalism is a purely negative position. It can only ever be used to permit ideas (however destructive), never to prohibit them.

The whole theory of rationalism is that there is a certain baseline of moral truths that all can and will agree on, guided simply by own own understanding, removing the need for any kind of corrective or prohibitive element. It is pretty clear at this point that there is not any such baseline.

Only now it’s gone so far that a prohibitive force would be likely more dangerous to the remaining vestiges of sanity than it would be to any further corruption. Such is the legacy of this “revolutionary truth.”

In the Founding Fathers’ defence, this was not nearly so obvious in their day. Whatever their own beliefs, the vast majority of the population they presided over were Christians and the world they inhabited was still culturally Christian. There was very little difference between the different Protestant groups, or even between Protestants and Catholics or Christians and Jews regarding ethical questions, so a common ethical framework could be assumed.

But that is very much not the case any more, and will not be again any time soon.

In other words, Rationalism only appeared to be functional for as long as it did (and to the extent that it did) because it was able to coast on the habits born from a religious framework. It cannot serve as a replacement for that framework.

By contrast, the laws of nature and nature’s God are fixed and unchanging.

Says who? What are they? Where are they listed and enshrined, and by what authority are they enforced?

Also, so what? Who dictates that Americans must believe in these fixed and unchanging laws of ‘nature and nature’s God’?

And if we do declare that Americans must believe in fixed and unchanging laws created by Nature and Nature’s God, or that at the very least the American government will follow it, then aren’t we establishing a kind of religion? Aren’t we saying that there are certain beliefs that are not acceptable? Wouldn’t this exclude atheists or materialists from government?

They serve as the ground for political authority and supply conventional or everyday law with sacred and transcendent authority.

Again, a ‘may be, but may not be’ cannot serve as a ground for political authority, because a certain obligation to obey cannot be based on an uncertainty.

And how is something that every man is free to disagree with invested with ‘sacred and transcendent authority’? Does any American think that the laws that send him to the DMV, or the income tax laws are invested with a ‘sacred and transcendent authority’?

In establishing this foundation for American politics, the Founders addressed the three problems mentioned above.

First, they solved the split between piety and citizenship by supplying a common ground for morality.

HOW THE HELL IS INDIVIDUAL REASON A ‘COMMON GROUND’? What is ‘common’ about it?

Again, this guy has a Ph.D. in Political Science. That says a lot about our education system.

Since we can understand virtue and vice through our own rational faculties, the law can enforce moral precepts that are acknowledged by both political and ecclesiastical authorities.

And the law couldn’t do this under an established religion? How is this a feature of Liberal government?

And what if the religious authorities say one thing and the political ones say another? Well, we all know the answer: tough for the ecclesiastical authorities.

Once again, ‘can’ does not mean ‘will’. Communist China can enact laws compatible with Thomistic political philosophy: does anyone think they will?

In other words, because the morality of the Bible and the morality of reason are compatible, one can be both a pious believer and a good citizen, while avoiding the contentious sectarian disputes that tore Europe apart. 

The ‘morality of reason’ is whatever the individual says it is. It can mean anything or nothing. There is no authority of reason to determine it.

And if you want to argue that there is supposed to be some kind of common body of rationally-derived truths guiding the country, then the question, again, is who determines it, on what grounds, and why that person?

He just mentioned a sectarian dispute that is currently dividing the nation: the gender issue. What happens to being ‘both a pious believe and a good citizen’ if the government sides with the left and orders, say, a Catholic therapist to recommend mutilation for a confused teenager or lose his license?

His constant use of ‘can’ to mean ‘will’ or ‘does’ is really annoying.

We also had a rather serious sectarian dispute some years ago, one that tore the United States apart, and in which both sides claimed moral authority based in reason. One side said it was morally certain that they had the right to leave the Union, the other side said it was morally certain they did not. They were each morally certain to the tune of half a million lives.

Rationalism is essentially just Sola Scriptura applied to morality, only absent Scripture. And it has the exact same problem; that there is no authority to arbitrate disputes. Therefore, if disputes arise and the parties can’t reach an agreement, there are only two options: A). Decide the issue isn’t important or B). Declare the other person’s Reason / Connection with the Spirit to be invalid and thus his position to be illegitimate.

You may notice, first, that neither of these options actually resolves the question, and second that B is the option that gets taken most often. Dr. Ellmers took it with regards to the Leftists, and they would presumably take it with regard to him. The North took it with regard to the South in the aforementioned sectarian dispute, and vice-versa.

Which means that Rationalism as a way to escape sectarian disputes only works on disputes that the parties don’t actually care about.

Second, this common ground of morality makes it possible to delineate in a clear way the political and religious realms.

Wouldn’t the old common ground of morality – Christianity – also have made that possible? Especially given that this was an actual common ground. Again, Mr. Ellmers clearly has a very limited knowledge of pre-modern history and thought, so he seems to simply assume such a distinction didn’t exist then, but does now.

That the separation of church and state becomes possible for the first time can be seen most clearly in Jefferson’s Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom.

That doesn’t show that separation of church and state ‘became possible for the first time,’ it only shows that Jefferson was trying to enact it at that time. A specific bill enacted at a specific time can’t show anything about the history of an idea. This either shows a staggeringly lack of logic or sloppy writing (or both).

The Declaration’s teaching about the laws of nature and nature’s God establishes a kind of political theology, a non-sectarian ground of legitimacy that makes the laws “sacred” without getting the government involved in theological disputes about the Trinity, faith versus works, etc.

That’s a lot of work for one phrase with barely any definite meaning (which is not a ‘teaching’, by the way). Sure, Aquinas is “’very preliminary,” but half-a-sentence from Jefferson establishes a “kind of political theology.”

Again, the laws are not ‘sacred’ if any individual can theoretically decide for himself whether they are legitimate or not.

According to many Protestant ministers of the Founding era, this also allowed true Christianity to flourish for the first time because Christianity could be practiced by choice rather than by coercion.

Witness messianic Americanism again: America doesn’t just save the world from religious oppression, it allows ‘true Christianity to flourish for the first time.’

This couldn’t possibly be an example of clerics sycophantically fawning after the approval of those in power, could it? That sort of thing doesn’t happen in ‘free societies’, of course.

Yes, Theodosius, Charlemagne, Benedict, Edward of England, Louis of France, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Sienna, Ignatius of Loyola, Theresa of Avila, all posers: true Christianity was waiting for Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

I love my country, but there are many times I wish it had a face so I could slap it.

Third, the Founders solved the problem of religious persecution.

Just ask the Mormons. Or the Catholics, for that matter.

And keep in mind what he said at the beginning:

Today, this principle has been under assault—think of the vicious antisemitism we have seen on many college campuses recently or the persecution of Christians by our federal government. The faith of American Christians and Jews has been mocked and increasingly threatened by an aggressively secular, even atheistic, ruling class. (emp. Mine)

So, apparently they didn’t solve the problem of religious persecution, since according to Dr. Ellmers, the government they founded is currently engaged in it.

This raises the question of whether we actually still have the same government that the Founders created.

If we lost the original form of government and what we have now is not the same as what the Founders created, then that means it was not, in fact, a successful form of government. If we still have the government created by the Founders, then, according to him, they did not in fact solve the problem of religious persecution. I really don’t care which one you pick, but that seems the only way to reconcile these two statements.

And how is an ‘aggressively secular, even atheistic, ruling class’ contrary to rationalism? What do you think happens when you exclude religious doctrine from the public sphere, or reduce it to a subordinate place? Why would the ruling class continue to value it?

Because the government and the churches can agree on a moral code that is compatible with both reason and revelation, each can operate in its proper realm without intruding on the other.

The government supports abortion, homosexual ‘marriage’, no-fault divorce, contraception, usury, and spreading transexual ideologies across the globe. How is that ‘agreeing on a moral code compatible with both reason and revelation?’ And again, you’ve rejected revelation as a factor once you appeal to reason alone, so stop bringing it up.

It becomes possible to institutionalize religious liberty by prohibiting religious tests for office and keeping government out of the business of punishing heresy.

Once again, what does he mean by ‘becomes possible’? James II had a plan to do that back in the 17^th century based around loyalty to the King. The first of the American colonies to have religious liberty was Maryland in 1632 (albeit they lost it from democracy about the 1680s), followed by Pennsylvania in 1681, long before Jefferson was even born.

Not to mention that Protestant ministers served Catholic governments in France and the Holy Roman Empire (at the very least) well before this, so, no, a lack of test acts or exclusion from office does not require rationalism.

Though there is also a discussion to be had of whether certain religious tests for office are not desirable. For instance, should the United States impose a test of whether something believes in “The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”? If not, then how is such a thing to be maintained and enforced? And if it isn’t, then his whole position of this being the bulwark of religious liberty collapses (again).

Punishing heresy only means enforcing a guiding philosophy, something every state must do in some way to maintain itself.

The American Founders’ invocation of the transcendent moral authority of nature is one of the most remarkable acts of statesmanship in human history.

A single phrase that means next to nothing objective is among “the most remarkable acts of statesmanship in human history?”

This is the sort of hyperbolic Americanist idolatry that annoys me so much and tends to make mainstream Conservative political thought so shallow.

Because I think we all know that Dr. Ellmers isn’t judging this to be a ‘remarkable act of statesmanship’ because of its observable effects. As far as that goes, he’s determined not to see them. It’s ‘one of the most remarkable acts of statesmanship in human history’ because it was done by the Founding Fathers.

The question which we and all American patriots confront today is whether we still understand and appreciate this incredible gift of religious liberty bequeathed to us by the Founders. Do we still have the knowledge and courage to keep alive the sacred fire of liberty?

And the typical conservative call to arms: let’s get back to the founding principles, because those are in no way to blame for our current predicament. There is no way that “each man guided by his own reason” could lead to Communism, or Fascism, or racism, or transgenderism, or the sexual revolution, or critical race theory, or any of that. Because I see that’s all so clearly irrational.

Though I’m not sure what he thinks he is calling ‘American patriots’ to do. Think rationally? By his understanding they already do. Advocate for the ability to make laws based on ‘reason’ rather than religion? That’s what Leftists say they are doing. Push to maintain ‘religious liberty through rationalism’? But religious liberty is under assault by the consequences of rationalism. As I said, rationalism only worked to the extent it did because it was enacted in a cultural context that doesn’t exist any more.

He treats the idea that people can discover truth rationally absent revelation as some great insight. As if it weren’t known from time immemorial. As if it weren’t taught in the Bible (e.g. Roms. 1: 19-20). That was never the issue. Yes, men can discover a large amount of the truth by reason. But most people do not, or not consistently, and we all know that. Any given person, even the most brilliant man who ever lived, may be wrong on a given point. So individual reason cannot be a source of political legitimacy.

You cannot preserve a tradition – such as Christianity or the American culture – without authority. Authority requires legitimacy. Legitimacy cannot rest on an uncertainty such as individual reason. Rationalism, therefore, is useless for Conservatives.

This post has run on long enough, so I’ll just leave you with the following question, which is simpler way to summarize the problem with rationalism:

Say Person A strongly wants to do X. Person B tells him that X is contrary to “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

What would motivate Person A to value Person B’s interpretation of “the Laws of nature and nature’s God” over X?