Religious Freedom Discussion Series: International Center for Law and Religion Studies

1. Freedom of Conscience and the American Identity David M. Kirkham* Senior Fellow for Comparative Law and International Policy, International Center for Law and Religion Studies Professor of Political Science, Brigham Young University July 10, 2013 *I am indebted to faculty of the BYU American Heritage Program for their thoughts and contribution of slides to this presentation. Religious Freedom Discussion Series:International Center for Law and Religion Studies

2. With the German Luftwaffe

3. At the United Nations

4. UN in Africa

5. What duties do we owe each other as human beings? How can law and government, conscience and religion, be helpful towards those ends? How can they be destructive? Questions for the Ages

6. AmericaN Responses

7. What is it to be an American? • Has the answer fundamentally changed over time? • How do we perceive ourselves historically and now? Are these perceptions healthy? • How have law, religion, and conscience complemented each other in forming our identity? • How do modern issues in freedom of conscience affect who we are and who is the voice of conscience? Raises other Questions

8. Higher law American character Conscience and religion Recurring themes

9. Americans are traditionally religious • Civic religion and conscience have been conspicuous in the public square. • Sense of “higher law” comes through open debate combined with unique American circumstances. • Every turning point in American history has a strong conscientious element. • Has the meaning of America changed with time? freedom of conscience and the idea of america

10. How do Americans perceive themselves historically?

11. Good guys with the white hats? Shane John Wayne Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush

12. Conscience has played a part in every watershed moment in American history • The Puritans and the City on a Hill • Revolution • Constitutionalism • Abolitionism • Manifest destiny • Progressivism • Women’s suffrage • World War I and the world safe for democracy • World War II – legacy of international law and human rights • Civil Rights Movement • New frontiers: space, stop communism, terrorism American conscience and the higher law

13. Columbus • Early English Settlements • Corporate Communities • Covenant Communities • City upon a Hill • Land of Opportunity • Groundwork for a Good Society *I wish to thank my colleagues in the BYU American Heritage program for their contributions to a number of the slides that follow. *Starting Points

14. Columbus: Hero or Villain

15. 15th century Europe was tired. • Corruption, dishonor, violence. • Writers and artists dreamed of mythic utopias beyond the sunset. • Columbus discovered a new land that actually appeared utopia-like. • Columbus believed that God was guiding him. • Had miraculous “luck” in getting to the New World and back. Columbus

16. “Our Lord unlocked my mind, sent me upon the sea, and gave me fire for the deed. Those who heard of my enterprise called it foolish, mocked me, and laughed. But who can doubt but that the Holy Ghost inspired me?” --Christopher Columbus

17. Could a good society take root here? • Its unspoiled nature increased the odds. • Unspoiled in two senses: • Physical—pristine and abounding in untapped resources. • Social—free of powerful, entrenched institutions. Columbus Discovers a Utopia?

18. Conscience and the evolution of the notion of American Exceptionalism: A Divided Legacy: New England or Virginia? Puritanism or the Enlightenment? (Do we imprison convicts to punish them or to reform them?)

19. 1607: Jamestown (John Smith) • Corporate community • Church of England (Anglican) • 1620: Plymouth (William Bradford) • Covenant community • Separatist (Pilgrims) • 1630: Massachusetts Bay (John Winthrop) • Covenant and corporate community • Puritan Earliest English Settlements

20. Colonial Influences Legacy of Jamestown • A corporate community • Individualism • Representative government • Royal governor but local House of Burgesses. • Slavery • A good deal of local autonomy. • Perceived insignificance • Distance from rulers in England.

21. English Puritans and the “City on a Hill” “For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. Soe that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.” - John Winthrop, 1630

22. Plymouth: Covenant Community Mostly Public Virtue • Separatists. • Motivated by desire for religious freedom and to create kingdom of God on earth. • Harsh conditions, barely survived.

23. Plymouth: Covenant Community Mostly Public Virtue • Established a social compact while still at sea; a move toward democracy and self-government. • Established a two-fold covenant community. • Covenant with God: His chosen do His work. • Covenant with each other: self-government.

24. Combined business with religion. Puritan towns, like Plymouth, were democratic and self-governing. Calvinists Massachusetts Bay: Covenant and Corporate Community

25. The republic is formed as a covenant between the rulers and the people of God. • State does not dominate nor do the people of God withdraw. • Calvinists stress the mutually supporting relationship between government and religion. Calvinist Thought

26. City on a Hill “A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.” - Ronald Reagan, 1984

27. City on a Hill “During the last 60 days I have been engaged in the task of constructing an administration…. I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella [sic] 331 years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a government on a new and perilous frontier. ‘We must always consider,’ he said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.’ Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, State, and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their grave trust and their great responsibilities.” – John F. Kennedy, 1961

28. “America has tended to think of itself as special, like a city on a hill. We want to go in and help other nations; but we don’t understand what we are getting in to.” --Walter Mondale, 2007

29. Winthrop’s new society: • Built on holy principles. • A Good Society with order, prosperity, a vibrant culture, peace, common goals, and liberty. • Civil liberty in place of natural liberty. • Natural liberty: men do whatever they want, eventually becoming worse than beasts. • Civil liberty: men are free to do what is “good, just and honest”.  Moral self-governance. • An example for the rest of the world. • As close to perfection as is possible in a sinful world. City upon a Hill: Winthrop

30. Its virtues made liberal democracy possible and its vices made liberal democracy necessary. • What are the virtues? • Increased emphasis on individuality. • Cherish liberty from corrupt institutions. • Devote labors to building a heavenly kingdom on earth. The Puritan Founding and Democracy

31. What are the vices? • Communities could generate a spirit of intolerance. • No systematic way to separate church obligations from civil obligations. • “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.” Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Mainstreet”) The Puritan Founding and Democracy

32. Seeking to ground a notion of individual liberty and consent in Reason through Nature and not in religious doctrine. • Legacy for the American revolution • Reasonable motives and for the good of the people. • Certain rights, considered fundamental, could never be abolished. • Many of the ideas come from the English Puritans, without the deeply religious component that we saw in the Puritan community. Enlightenment Legacy

33. Break with England

34. “[Government by kings] was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” “[M]onarchy and succession have laid…the world in blood and ashes.” “…[T]he Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.” “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Thomas Paine’s Common Sense

35. “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…. Higher law in the Declaration

36. John Adams: “A Republic can only be supported by pure religion or austere morals.” George Washington: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” Higher law and the founding

37. Patrick Henry: proposes a public tax to support Christian teacher • James Madison: opposes, writes Memorial and Remonstrance • Thomas Jefferson: opposes, crafts Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom Enlightenment meets Puritan legacy in Virginia in 1785

38. expansion and manifest destiny:From western frontiers to space

39. Did westward expansion and the democratization of politics create an American character? • Self Reliance. • Individualistic pursuit of happiness. • Upward Mobility. • Democracy. • Continues notion of country with a mission. An American Character?

40. Civil War and the end of slavery:- Test- Reinforcement

41. “American abolitionists and secessionists both admitted a higher principle than the maintenance of the Union. [Both would have] sacrificed the national government to higher purpose.” -Lord Acton, British Historian

42. Lincoln’s speeches and actions refoundAmerica with a “new birth” of freedom and charity

43. “ Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” At Gettysburg, Lincoln Reworks Jefferson

44. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

45. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, April 1865

46. Progressivism, 1880-1920

47. Dehumanization • labor unions/reg. of working conditions • Imperfect Information • FDA • Monopolies • Break them up: Sherman Anti-trust Act • Regulate them: FTC Progressive Reform

48. Industrialization Immigration concerns Urbanization Government corruption Progressives Reacted to: Muckrakes and crusaders: e.g., Carrie Nation

49. First World War: Wilson - Making the World Safe for Democracy

50. Nuremberg Second World War “The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.” – Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor and US Supreme Court Justice