The Use and Abuse of Liberty

Ask most Americans what America stands for, and no doubt most would answer, in a word, liberty. It is no mere coincidence that the Liberty Bell and Miss Liberty are so named; nor that words we memorize as children include Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” For, as Lincoln put it, the United States was “conceived in liberty.” And for the sake of securing liberty, the men who met in Philadelphia 200 years ago this summer framed our Constitution.

This “supreme law of the land” was not simply a legal document, but a political document as well: the framers proceeded according to what one of them called a “science of politics,” which included such now-familiar principles as federalism and separation of powers. This science of politics was nothing less than a politics of liberty.

There can be little doubt that the politics of liberty, uniquely developed in North America two centuries ago, has much to offer Christians.

Unlike totalitarianism, the politics of liberty makes no claim on the soul of man. Moreover, it stipulates that everyone is guaranteed “the free exercise of religion.” Thus, America has seen the growth and development of an enormous variety of religions. And the rate of church participation, a matter not of state command but true private choice, is among the highest in the Western world. For the believer, America is indeed a “sweet land of liberty.”

Nonetheless, for the Christian, liberty cannot be as important as the uses to which it is put. After all, what does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world of riches or fame—in the exercise of freedom in a free country—and yet lose his own soul?

The substance of a life—its shape, its purposes, its ends—matters. Christians are hardly alone in holding this view. Most Americans have regarded liberty as a means rather than an end, and have evaluated a life by its substance in moral (if not also spiritual) terms. Thus, we remember Benedict Arnold as a traitor, but Nathan Hale as a patriot.

The reason we make such judgments lies in human nature. Our sense of right and wrong distinguishes us from other creatures, and drives us to make moral demands of our community and nation and to evaluate a society by the kind of citizens it produces. Human beings, by nature, are concerned about character, and whether it is “vicious” or “virtuous.”

In a society like ours committed to a politics of liberty, what place does virtue have? Does freedom mean only the freedom to act virtuously? Or is freedom a license to do almost anything a person wants, short of injuring others? And what about the law? Should it seek to shape the character of citizens? Or should it be less ambitious? These questions were addressed by the founding generation during the 1770s and 1780s.

The founders thirsted for a freedom they believed could be secured only by a republican government—a government in which all power was derived from the people. Further, in the 1770s, many of them thought, as John Adams put it in 1776, that “virtue is the only foundation of republics.” By virtue, Adams and others meant public virtue, an idea whose roots lie in ancient Rome and Sparta. Historian Forrest McDonald has summarized what public virtue entailed: “firmness, courage, endurance, industry, frugal living, strength, and above all, unremitting devotion to the weal of the public’s corporate self, the community of virtuous men.”

Without sufficient public virtue, Adams and others believed, a republic would rot from within and disintegrate. Because, in their judgment, public virtue sprang from private virtue, one was not free even to commit “private vice.” As McDonald writes, “One was free to do that, and only that, which was in the interest of the republic, the liberty of the individual being subsumed in the freedom or independence of his political community.”

Republican liberty was, in a word, totalitarian. No exercise of liberty, or at least none fraught with any moral significance, could be legitimate unless it contributed to public virtue. The fate of the individual—the purpose and shape of his life—was seen as inextricably linked to that of the republic. This political view had implications for law.

To keep the individual in check, and thus contribute to public virtue, Adams and others supported laws regulating religion and morality. It is probably the case that some who supported these laws did so more from their supposed usefulness to the cause of public virtue than anything else. Nevertheless, most advocates of these laws strongly believed in their rightness as well as their utility.

Consider, for example, a proclamation issued by the Massachusetts legislature a few months before independence. Few documents capture so well the spirit of what might be called “the party of virtue,” and of its understanding of the relationship between virtue and freedom. The proclamation stated: “That piety and Virtue, which alone can Secure the Freedom of any People, may be encouraged, and Vice and Immorality suppressed, the great and general Court have thought fit to issue this Proclamation, commanding and enjoining it upon the good People of this Colony, that they lead Sober, Religious, and peaceable Lives, avoiding all Blasphemies, contempt of the holy Scripture, and of the Lord’s day and all other Crimes and Misdemeanors, all Debauchery, Prophaneness, Corruption, Venality, all riotous and tumultuous Proceedings, and all Immoralities.” The proclamation continued, adding bite to its bark: “And all … civil officers, within this Colony, are hereby Strictly enjoined and commanded that they … bring to condign punishment, every Person who … shall be guilty of any immoralities whatsoever.”

Civil officers of Massachusetts heeded this edict, prosecuting “any immoralities whatsoever” until 1786. But the politics of virtue, so dominant in Massachusetts and other states, did not survive as the model for our nation. Extravagant living and an unwillingness of both individuals and states to pay legitimate debts demonstrated the scarcity of public virtue. The fiscal disasters resulted in Shay’s Rebellion and the suspicion that government could not mandate virtue. As the 1780s wore on, even some of the most ardent defenders of a politics of virtue came to change their minds. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was general agreement that a politics of virtue simply could not sustain the new experiment in self-government, and that some other politics must take its place. Self-interest, not virtue, seemed to many of the Founding Fathers to be the most conspicuous character trait of the American people.

The experience of the 1780s forced a reconsideration of human nature. George Washington spoke for many when he said, in a letter to John Jay in 1786, “We have, probably, had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.” From now on, he added, “We must take human nature as we find it.”

The man who took human nature “as we find it” and was largely responsible for fashioning a new political science—the politics of liberty—was James Madison, who is justly remembered as the Father of the Constitution. For Madison, freedom did not need to be identical with virtue for the republic to survive. Indeed, Madison feared that trying to enforce virtuous conduct would damage freedom and the whole experiment in self-government. It was better, he concluded, to let people act freely, according to their self-interest, as he believed most would. In effect, Madison sought to liberate human beings to pursue their own happiness—and then to protect them from themselves by designing, not laws to regulate personal morality (as the politics of virtue would prescribe), but appropriate political institutions.

So the Constitution ratified in 1789 assumed that men would act primarily from self-interest. And notably missing in the Constitution are the kinds of provisions frequently found in contemporaneous state constitutions and statutes that sought to improve the character of citizens. Rather, the Constitution provided for a government structure designed to protect rights and liberties by channelling self-interest for the sake of the common good.

Thus, the framers divided power between the national and state governments—federalism. They separated the power granted the national government into three branches—separation of powers. And they designed these three powers such that they could check and balance one another. As for the legislative branch, the framers divided it into two houses, one representing the states, the other the people—bicameralism. And they provided for an independent judiciary that, through the novel power of judicial review, would ensure the supremacy of the “intention of the people” (Hamilton’s phrase for the Constitution) whenever legislative enactments or other laws conflicted with it.

These were the institutional arrangements of the politics of liberty. But where did this leave virtue? Plainly, the Constitution represented a rejection of the politics of virtue once so acclaimed by Adams and others. Public virtue was not the foundation of the new republic. Liberty was not identified strictly with virtue. And the law—the Constitution—did not attempt to regulate all kinds of moral and religious behavior in order to control private vice and contribute to public virtue.

Moreover, while the principle of federalism left most moral and religious issues to the states, and thus left open the possibility that individual states might design their governments in accord with the politics of virtue, this did not happen. In the first decades of the new republic, the politics of liberty proved influential at the state level. The last leg of the last state establishment of religion collapsed in 1833, and laws regulating moral and religious behavior gradually were struck or fell into disuse. More to the point, the whole project of public virtue was not regarded as a live option for a state’s politics.

Nonetheless, while the politics of virtue fell from favor, virtue itself did not. Even Madison, at the Virginia Convention in 1788, said that government cannot secure liberty or happiness unless there is “virtue in the people.” And Washington, in his famous Farewell Address, asked rhetorically whether “providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its virtue?”

By virtue Madison, Washington, and others meant both public and private virtue, and plainly they linked virtue to the health of the republic. But they did not have a comprehensive politics designed to produce virtue. Some of the leading intellectuals of the time—especially Madison—believed that commerce would be a source of such private virtues as industry, honesty, punctuality, and fairness, among others. And certainly all of the founders believed that virtue would be cultivated and preserved in families, churches, and schools. In sum, the founders believed, if not in a politics, certainly in a sociology, of virtue. That is why the theme of virtue so persists in our greatest stories and songs; why, for example, the second stanza of “America the Beautiful” concludes with the command: “Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

In the two centuries since the framers convened in Philadelphia, liberty and virtue have remained dominant themes in our nation’s life. There is continuity, but there is also change. Significantly, the moral consensus of the founding period that was rooted in natural law and natural rights, and in the religious beliefs of the people, has broken apart. If there is a moral consensus today, it is moral relativism.

This change has had consequences for the idea of virtue. While there still are partisans (I am one myself) of traditional views of virtue informed by Christian and classical sources, there are also (especially in the more elite sectors of society such as politics, education, law, and journalism) strong advocates for a much different view of virtue. In this understanding, morality is in most cases a strictly private matter to which neither the larger community nor any objective standards (for there are none) may speak.

Another important change involves the law. The federal courts, in many instances going far beyond the limited role envisioned for them by the framers, have tended to enforce the modern view of virtue. The Supreme Court’s 1973 abortion decision is perhaps the most obvious example. Here the Court nationalized a view of abortion that effectively leaves the decision with the mother. Thus vacated were the laws of 50 states, all of which reflected a more traditional understanding.

Still another change involves education. Public schools were originally public only in the sense that they were supported by states and local governments. They acted, however, almost as private institutions, inasmuch as they were controlled by their communities and reflected their (typically traditional) morality. But, as a result of changes in the teaching profession as well as a broad variety of court decisions, public schools have lost much of their community-oriented character. They are no longer quasi-private, but truly public. With this change has occurred a change in the kind of morality usually transmitted to children; instead of “right and wrong,” “values” are discussed, and these values justify “lifestyles” and promise “self-fulfillment.”

For those who dissent from these trends, as I and many other Christians do, the politics of the American founding is an appropriate ground upon which to stand. For while the framers rejected a comprehensive politics of virtue, they nonetheless recognized that politics is the arena in which human beings will by nature express moral concerns. The framers, we must point out insistently, did not foreclose legislation on moral issues; indeed, the Constitution itself contains a number of substantive moral propositions.

Christians, no less than non-Christians discomfited by modern trends, can and should take their case to the courthouse, the statehouse, and the Congress. This is not to suggest that the politics of virtue be resurrected, for it would almost certainly fail—and besides, on its merits it cannot be recommended. It is rather to say that a defense can be mounted against the aggressive secularism of our own time that bids to enforce moral relativism upon our culture. The politics of liberty leaves us free to do this much, and we should.

And it leaves us as Christians to do more, much more. We are free to spread our faith, love our neighbors, and care for the weak and helpless. And if by doing these things we also contribute to the nation’s stock of virtue, private and public, which many have believed necessary to sustain our experiment in self-government, then so be it.

Terry Eastland is director of the office of public affairs, U. S. Department of Justice. He is coauthor with William Bennett, now secretary of education, of Counting by Race: Equality from the Founding Fathers to Bakke and Weber.

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