The present war is not a war between a secular nation and a Muslim nation. Ours is not a secular nation. We are the single-most religious of all the advanced nations, and the third- or fourth-most religious of all nations anywhere on Earth.
Our Founders’ religion, in case you want to know, is predominantly Christian and Jewish. And a good thing, too. I have yet to see journalists point out the political implications of the prevailing Christian view of eternal union with God, and its Hebrew analogue. These implications are many and profound. First there is the dignity of the individual. A sense of our individual and inalienable responsibility in the face of God gives Jews and Christians our bedrock conviction in the immortal value of every single woman and man. Our Creator made us so, gave us such responsibility, holds us alone accountable for it. No other person, agency or institution dares to interfere with that responsibility.
“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” Jefferson instructed. There is a second political point. Whereas, for the Greeks and Romans--and for virtually all other peoples--it is the inequality of humans that is the natural law, for Hebrews and Christians every man and woman is made in the image of God, is of incommensurable value and is in God’s eyes equally needy and equally precious. This very idea of equality owes its origins to belief in human immortality before the judgment seat of God.
In God’s eyes, every boast of humans, insofar as it is true, owes its reality to Him. No human being huffed and puffed his own way into existence.
We are dust, and unto dust we all return. The third political point is that eternity is to be imagined as a communion with those we love, with all who have extended friendship to us, and we to them.
It no doubt seems odd to other people that we Americans, when danger looms, do regard one another as friends. (Did you watch the Americans in the first hours of the World Trade Center disaster?) We freely form one will.
Spontaneously we adjust to one another, see what each of us can do, and set to doing it without waiting for orders from on high. As Cicero wrote, the essence of a republic is friendship.
Perhaps I am taking things too far, making too much explicit--but this is also why Christians regard God as more like a community of persons, a Trinity, than like the solitary nous that Aristotle imagined. Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est, runs the medieval chant: “Where charity and love is, there is God--That unites us in one, that love of God.”
To think of Americans as materialists is to get things all wrong, upside-down, crazy. There are a few materialists among us, very few. Mostly, we believe.
To think of us as secular is to mistake the most vocal 8 percent for the religious whole.
“The first political institution of the American Republic is their religion,” De Tocqueville wrote--I paraphrase. And our religion teaches us that at its pure root is the conscience of each. Though we are all called to one community, the roads by which we journey to it are many, and to be traversed by each, and each community of faith, at an individual pace, in an individual way. For conscience, therefore, more than tolerance is due--respect is due. The same respect the Creator lavishes on it, with infinite patience for all.
All of us know in our ancestral memory--often not further back than two or three generations--what it was like to have lived in other lands. We know we would have been scarcely half as free. We would have had less than half the opportunity.
Here, we know we have no excuses. Here in America is the fairest place that ever was. We each have our chances. If we don’t use them, blame us. Don’t blame America.
Don’t call us secular, bin Laden. Don’t call us unbelievers. Don’t call us infidels. God shed His grace on us and crowned our good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.
