Does Truth Matter?

I came across an excellent speech by Rick Santorum, given in 1999 at The Heritage Foundation’s Conference on Religion and Political Leadership.  It is well worth the read.  It’s source is The Heritage Foundation (website below), where the speech can be read in full.

The Necessity of Truth by Rick Santorum

 “Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville, foreign observers have consistently noted that the United States is one of the most religious countries on the face of the planet. Year after year, Gallup polls reveal that nearly 90 percent of all Americans consider religion either “very important” or “fairly important”–and even those who don’t regard themselves as conventionally religious generally profess to believe in a Supreme Being. On any given Sunday, more Americans are to be found in church than the total number of people who attend professional sports events over the course of an entire year. Although Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued, a century ago, that “God is dead,” here in the United States He appears to be alive and thriving.

Yet, at the same time that Americans confound secularist predictions about God’s imminent demise, we are increasingly reluctant to make critical moral distinctions, when necessary. Whether things are true or false, right or wrong, good or evil doesn’t seem to concern us very much any more–so long as we are all pleasant to each another and do nothing to call into question our collective self-esteem. Social critic Michael Novak writes, “I don’t know if `judgmentaphobic’ is a word, but it ought to be. Where conscience used to raise an eyebrow at our slips and falls, sunny non-judgmentalism winks and slaps us on the back.”

In my remarks to you this afternoon, I will examine the paradox of a people that strives to be both religious and non-judgmental. How is it possible, I wonder, to believe in the existence of God yet refuse to express outrage when His moral code is flouted? To have faith in God, but to reject moral absolutes? How is it possible that there exists so little space in the public square for expressions of “faith” and the standards that follow from belief in a transcendent God? How is it possible to be a theist and a relativist, a traditionalist and a post-modernist, a believer and a “judgmentaphobe”–all at the same time? How is it possible to mantain liberty while banishing from the public square any reference to a transcendent moral code?

My answer to these questions is that it simply is not possible. In the view of our country’s Founding Fathers and our greatest moral teachers, religion–and the truths to which religion points us–is essential to the success of the American experiment. The Founders believed that God is the source of truth–and that it is through religion that the light of self-evident truth will guide Americans in their lives, order their national affairs, and protect their liberty. If we are to resolve the problems that currently threaten to overwhelm us, I am convinced that we first must recover this traditional understanding of religion as the way in which we determine commonly agreed-on moral precepts–an understanding that has clearly been present throughout most of our history but has somehow grown obscure today–and make room in the public square for this discussion.

To illustrate the traditional American understanding of religion, I’ll begin with the Pennsylvania experience, not merely because I harbor a certain partiality toward that great commonwealth but also because, as Paul Johnson rightly argues in his splendid History of the American People, “Quaker Pennsylvania was the key state in American history.” And the principal reason for Pennsylvania’s importance is the charter of government that William Penn gave his fellow Quakers in 1682, making religious freedom the law of the land. In his famous Frame of Government, Penn pledged that

all citizens who believed in “One Almighty and Eternal God…shall in no way be molested or prejudiced for their religious persuasion or practice in matters of faith and worship, nor shall they be compelled at any time to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place or ministry whatever.”

This charter of religious liberty made Pennsylvania a magnet for victims of religious persecution of every sort, with the result that, in short order, it simultaneously became, in Johnson’s words,

the center of Quaker influence throughout the world, a stronghold of Presbyterianism, the headquarters in America of the Baptists, an Anglican center, a place where many important German religious sects–Moravians, Mennonites, Lutherans, German Reformed–established their headquarters, and yet a place where large numbers of Catholics and Jews were tolerated.

Given the stereotypes about religion that prevail in America today, one might have expected that a state throbbing with so much religious enthusiasm would rapidly become a haven for bigotry and radical fundamentalism–a kind of 17th century Tehran. In fact, Pennsylvania became a center of liberty and learning, the seat of the American Philosophical Society and the home of some of America’s finest colleges and universities–most of them church-founded. And it is from within Pennsylvania that we were given both the symbol of America’s struggle for independence–the Liberty Bell with its exhortation from Leviticus to “proclaim liberty throughout the land”–and the classic statement of the American Creed, the Declaration of Independence.

How is it possible that a state filled with so much religion yielded such a bountiful harvest of freedom, tolerance, and reason? The answer to this question lies in Penn’s charter of religious liberty. With no faith enjoying state support, the fires of religious persecution, which burned so fiercely in Europe, were quickly and decisively extinguished; and with each faith thrown back on its own resources, a free competition of religious beliefs ensued, with every church and sect striving to put its best foot forward.

Pennsylvania’s successful experiment in religious disestablishment was eventually emulated by all the other states of the Union, and has come to typify America’s approach to religion. But it’s important to remember exactly what Penn–and all those who followed his example–actually set out to do, and what they did not set out to do. They did seek to sever all connections between a particular church and the coercive power of the state. They did not seek to exclude religion and expressions of faith from the public square and from public debate. In contrast, our country’s founders acknowledged that religion, and the moral code it reveals for us, is necessary for the success of the American Experiment.

First, religion protects us from tyranny.

The impossibility of government’s being neutral in the matter of religion and irreligion, morality and immorality, was clear to the Founders. As historian Allen C. Guelzo observes,

The American revolutionaries were convinced that the root problem in their great quarrel over self-rule with England was corruption. They eventually concluded that the whole British system of monarchy was built on corruption, and that it was held together by bribery and self-interest.

To prevent the new United States from being similarly corrupted over time, its institutions had to be founded on the solid rock of “self-evident truths.”

Consider the famous words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident”: “Truths”–not “opinions,” not “premises,” not “assumptions,” not “collective myths,” not “accepted rules of procedure,” not “value-judgments,” not “working hypotheses”–but “truths.” And what made them truths was that they accorded with what the Declaration calls the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” To the Founders, these God-given truths–that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”–are no more open to discussion or debate than the laws of gravity. They are simply there, part of the created order. And because they are divinely sanctioned, it followed that even if a wicked and depraved majority tried to subvert them in the name of “democracy,” the moral minority would be obliged to resist the majority’s wishes in the name of moral truth. Or, as Abraham Lincoln put it in 1858 during one of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas,

The real issue in this controversy–the one pressing on every mind–is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong…. They look upon it as being a moral, social and political wrong; and…they insist that it should as far as may be, be treated as a wrong.

Second, liberty depends on religion.

The Founders hoped that the majority would never become so misled as to reject the existence of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” For that reason, they constantly stressed the centrality of a divinely based moral code in instilling Americans with a sense of virtue. Listen to how George Washington made the case for religion and morality in his Farewell Address of 1796:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure; reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. ‘Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

But Washington was not the only one who stressed the importance of religion to the well-being of the republic. The Founders regarded the newly created United States as an “experiment in ordered liberty.” Experiments, by definition, can fail–indeed, most of them do. For the American experiment not to fail, it was necessary for the power of government to remain limited, for only under a regime of limited government could liberty flourish. Yet how could government power remain limited if people regularly lied and stole, cheated and killed one another? If only to maintain minimal standards of order, sooner or later a lack of virtue among the people would force the state to expand its reach. Only among a virtuous people could limited government–and liberty–flourish. As Edmund Burke put it in 1774, two years before the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed,

Men qualify for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power is put somewhere on will and appetite, and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.

Hence the Founders’ almost obsessive insistence on the role of religion in keeping Americans virtuous–and therefore more free.”

The rest of this excellent article can be found at:  http://www.heritage.org/Research/Religion/HL643.cfm