[Due to technical difficulties, two things have happened. This is the new site of SGM Magazine and our series on the American Founding was interrupted. We are back up and going. NOTE: The first 3 posts in this series are still avaliable on the old blog www.sgmmagazine.blogspot.com]

American Founding
Are there limits to the Puritan/Lockean Synthesis?

We introduced this series with the Zuckert view of synthesis. Yes the Puritans had a vision, but Lockean thought had invaded the view of the city of man. The Puritans had not abandoned Scripture but they came to accept reason as an integral part of the political process. There are those who reject a synthesis because there was no compromise to be forged. The Constitution was a completely godless document. Isaac Kramminck and R. Laurance Moore of Cornell in an essay entitled “The Godless Constitution” assert that God is no where in the Constitution and the founders were overwhelmingly deists. The lack of a religious test clause in Article 6 seems to be the lynch pin for the godless Constitution argument.

Yet, it is difficult to reject the notion that the founders, even if deists, realized the connection between religion and the health of the new republic. Even Kramminck and Moore admit:
Almost everyone who participated in the debates around the constitution shared a common concern about the health of religion. The success of democracy depended upon a moral citizenry; and for most American thinkers of the eighteenth century, morality rested on some sort of religious convictions.
Godless Constitution or not, even critics of the idea of a Puritan influence in the government acknowledge there was some sort of accommodation necessary between religion and government because of the positive influence religion has on the populace governed. This appeared to be accepted orthodoxy among the founding fathers.

Then we find those who admit a synthesis, but with limitations. In other words, one cannot deny Lockean natural rights and their affect on political thought. However, just below the surface bubbled orthodox Christian thinking and belief. One such proponent is Carey McWilliams. McWilliams espouses his position using such language as;
American ideas of what is rational or self-evident—incorporates teachings historically, if not necessarily, rooted in revelation.
And,
Those rights [from the Declaration], and endowment or trust, are explicitly unalienable, and entail on natural rights that must derive from the Creator’s endowing, since it is not evident from the rights themselves.
He offers up Nathanial Niles’s Two Discourses on Liberty as an example contemporary of the times who understood the synthesis but who did not champion natural rights.

There is not doubt that then, as now, there were those who held on to the old Puritan vision, but there was still a partnership with Locke evident and not as a mere sheen over Puritan orthodoxy. Locke and the Puritans were inescapably partners in the founding mixing reason with revelation. And, contrary to McWilliams, revelation may at best have been a junior partner.
Finally, there are those who claim the synthesis as a contemporary over realization of what actually happened at the founding. For them, it is flawed reasoning to assert that the Puritans wanted to transform Christian language to make it compatible with” liberal rationalism”. In that camp is Peter Augustine Lawler. Lawler contends:
…the founders did not aim to do justice to both reason and revelation…they used religion as little as possible in service to reason and liberty.
Using Tocqueville, Lawler argues that religious liberty is necessary for political liberty and that the abstract individual of the Declaration is neither rational nor liberal. There is no continuity or mixing of the concepts of natural rights political thinking with Protestant political thought for Lawler.

Even so, surely Lawler would be hard pressed to deny that even Locke had a deist dimension not visible in other Enlightenment thought. And, although it was far from Puritan political theology, it did coalesce in some way with Christian thought to form the Republic. While it is an error to overemphasize revelation in the founders and their actions, to limit religion to a minor bit part is certainly without justification.

Is there a limitation to the admixture of reason and revelation? Most certainly, but it is difficult to quantify. It is certainly beyond the evidence to eliminate religion as a founding factor. Nor is it justifiable to over or underemphasize the role of religion in this partnership with reason. The USA is neither a pagan nor Christian country. Zuckert’s synthesis is not suspect because of limitations. Limitations most certainly were entailed in the founding. But, it is unlikely that over 225 years later we modern and post-modern folk will be able to discern what they really were.