Could America Survive without Religion?

Can freedom survive in a society in which most citizens believe that human beings, who are supposed to have inalienable rights, are merely material beings inhabiting a universe of purely material and efficient causality?

virtue is one cultural condition of freedom, and it is necessary to the establishment and preservation of freedom’s other cultural conditions. Beyond that, there are other social goods—essential aspects of the common good of any political society—that require virtue among the people. When freedom degenerates into what the Founders called “license”—a counterfeit of true freedom—these goods, too, are placed in grave peril.

All of this may be common sense, but it was a sense that was by no means common when Adams and his fellow Founders launched what they themselves understood to be an “experiment” in republican government and ordered liberty. And it is a common sense that, as the conditions of contemporary intellectual life have made all too clear, can be forgotten. Indeed, it is a common sense that can be derided and mocked by people who regard themselves as too worldly, sophisticated, and enlightened to believe in things like morality and virtue. So in the face of modern nihilism (sometimes, paradoxically, masquerading as the most high-minded moralism) the defense of Adams’s proposition takes on a kind of urgency.

Reason itself, and experience, teach us not to pin our hopes on virtue ungrounded in, or unsupported by, faith in God. Washington, like Adams, believed that reason, given man’s fallen condition, was a bit too uncertain a trumpet, and that human passions of the sort that compete with virtues and lead us into error and sin are too powerful for reason to reliably prevail over them.

Washington and Adams were, to be sure, men of the Enlightenment—believers in the power of reason. And their Constitution was one that would test whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” to quote Hamilton’s famous line from the first Federalist Paper. What’s more, they certainly did not believe, as many ignorant people today seem to believe, that faith is the enemy of reason. But they did believe in the power and importance of faith and, indeed, in the harmony of faith and reason, when faith and reason are rightly understood.