Reflection - April 16, 2014: Deneen, Smith, and the Founding

I often find myself thoughtful at the outset of the day, before my mind is "distracted and diffused", to borrow from Simon & Garfunkel. This is especially true if I have had a chance to peruse some of the more thoughtful blog posts from the various sites to which I subscribe. Therefore, I have decided to spend 10 - 15 minutes in the morning to set a few thoughts out for consideration - for those who might read, to stimulate my own thoughts and dialogue with others, and to get them out of my head and onto "paper".

This morning brings a review of a recent book by Stephen D. Smith, entitled "The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom." In his review, Luis Silva reveals that Smith argues that the American Founding was:

[N]ot a product of the Enlightenment born out of radical distrust for religion, as is widely believed. Rather, the American Constitution expresses continuity with a tradition that originated nearly 2,000 years ago when Christ said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” In Smith’s words, “American religious freedom was not so much a repudiation of and departure from the Christian past as a retrieval and consolidation of that past.

The appearance of this book (and review) comes at a...timely time...in my opinion. Recently, we have seen Patrick Deneen argue (placing himself in the latter school, below) in the pages of the American Conservative that:

For those in the Murray/Neuhaus/Weigel school, it’s simply a matter of returning us to the better days, and reviving the sound basis on which the nation was founded. For those in the MacIntyre/Schindler school, America was never well-founded, so either needs to be differently re-founded or at least endured, even survived. 

In a different post, bringing replies from bloggers Micah Mattix and Stephen Herreid, Deneen reveals his belief that:

I hope Hobby Lobby wins its case. But we should not deceive ourselves for a minute that what we are seeing is the contestation between a religious corporation and a secular State. We are seeing, rather, the culminating absurdity of what Polanyi called the “utopia” of our modern economic disembedding—the absurdity of a chain store representing the voice of religion in the defense of life amid an economy and polity that values turning people and nature into things.

For those more unfamiliar, Deneen contends (contra, apparently, writers like Smith) that modern liberalism, such as we find at the Founding, has a set of ideological commitments embedded within it that must turn it hostile to religious belief - commitments to be found in the basic ideas of the Enlightenment as espoused by figures such as Locke. Smith, I suspect, argues that there were turns made in American political action that destroyed the Founding belief in a religious separation of Church and State, thus turning commitments to religious equality and freedom to overt hostility to religion.

While I suspect there are truths to be found in both camps, and the practice of the history of ideas fraught with the difficulties of delving into individual and group motivation, the discussion is rather fascinating.