2 of 3

In your book I see suspicion about a lot of American institutions. What do you celebrate in America?

First of all, I celebrate the American system, this marvelous constitutional system that we have.

I also celebrate opportunity. America is still a land of opportunity. I come from a family of Norwegian immigrants, and here in America I was the first one in my family on either side of the ocean to get a university degree—a Yale degree. That kind of opportunity is staggering. I hear the stories of my students at ITC, how they come from the 'hood, get a college degree at Morehouse, and go on to do Ph.D. work.

America is the land of opportunity, but I want to be just a little bit cynical because it's not opportunity for everybody in an equal way.

I also celebrate the incredible living standards in America. The way you and I probably live is just staggering in terms of the wealth and the leisure. But it's not that way for everybody. So let's be cynical about it.

What else is good about America? There are a lot of thriving families. There are a lot of schools that are still working.

You know, as a Lutheran, I am a proponent of the theology of the cross and I always say, "There ain't nothing so bad that God can't make good out of it."

You ask us to think paradoxically about human nature, just as the architects of the American experiment did. Is there something in your Lutheran heritage that leads you to this paradoxical emphasis?

To be sure, the whole Lutheran tradition is dialectical and paradoxical. However, I would not want to emphasize that fact in this book, precisely because I'm doing politics. Remember, one aspect of the Lutheran paradox is the two-kingdom ethic. And so I am really working in the city of man, not the city of God, to use Augustine's categories.

So, yes, I'm paradoxical, but I don't think you have to share my Lutheran commitments to see the American situation as I see it, precisely because the founders themselves have a paradoxical notion in the system they created. You have both the Madisonian and the Lockean strands. You have a strand that concedes with Witherspoon that people are concupiscent and selfish, and at the same time you have the founders talking about virtue and the need for virtuous leaders. So while this paradox converges with my Lutheran commitments, it is fundamentally American.

Is there something about the American temperament that doesn't do dialectical thought well, that needs to think in a straighter, simpler way?

That's true of human nature in general. It's part of our concupiscence that makes us want to level out that paradox.

I think it would be fascinating to write an American history in light of this question of which of these two strands prevails when—the more Lockean, optimistic strand or the more Madisonian, Augustinian strand? I think you can really understand a lot of the dynamics of American history that way.

How can we recover the Augustinian strand?

My book takes its bearings from the constitutional system and, in the course of that, discovers the happy circumstance that our Constitution is very Augustinian. That has implications for all the struggles we've had about the separation of church and state. Would school prayer be such a big deal if we were really getting across in the public schools the Augustinian character of the system, that the founders really thought people were selfish? Under First Amendment interpretations of the Supreme Court, it would be perfectly appropriate to talk about how the American system is founded on the sense that people are basically selfish and sinful, and to tell students that this insight has a lot to do with Christian understanding.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47