What Romney Should Say

The question is just who this God is, this God of the American public square. John McCain stumbled recently when he said that the Constitution had established the United States as a Christian nation, which it most decidedly did not. In fact the wondrous thing about the Founding of the nation is how consciously and how carefully the Founders went about securing liberty of conscience. Washington said that the government of the United States was "to give to bigotry no sanction … and to persecution no assistance." Jefferson said that his Virginia act for religious liberty was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination." And Madison said, "The religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man."

Romney ought to call on Americans to recover and respect what Benjamin Franklin called our public religion: the belief that there is a divine force at work in the world, by whatever name, and that we render homage to it by doing good to others. Acts of charity and grace need not be religiously inspired, but many are. Religious people can be intolerant, cruel and exclusionary; they can also be broad-minded, kind and welcoming. And the same can be said of people who adhere to no religious faith. Yet it is the case that many Americans are religious—or say they are—and that the fundamental promise of the Founding, that all men are created equal, is grounded in the divine, as the gift of the "Creator."

American history is checkered with stories of exclusion and intolerance. In 1808, Jacob Henry, a Jewish American, was elected to the state legislature of North Carolina, which refused to seat him unless he was A) a Protestant and B) conceded the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments. Here is what Henry said to them: "Governments only concern the actions and conduct of man, and not his speculative notions. Who among us feels himself so exalted above his fellows as to have a right to dictate to them any mode of belief?"

Sadly, too many people do feel so exalted, which is why it is incumbent on the rest of us to recall the work of the Founders. They are often dismissed as dead white men, which they are, but when they were living white men they saw further ahead than most. They knew religion was a perennial factor in the lives of men and nations, and they sought to respect it but to manage it—to make it one thread in the tapestry. Sectarian labels mattered little, doctrinal differences even less. Franklin may have put it best: "When a religion is good, I conceive that it can support itself, and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one." It is, in other words, a mighty poor faith that needs a politician to support it.

From the Revolution through the Civil War and the battle against Jim Crow, we have nurtured—slowly and sporadically, to be sure, but steadily—the rule of law and the supremacy of every individual soul. The story of expanding liberties, of our wars against tyranny and terror abroad and against injustice and discrimination at home, is a story that reminds us to be vigilant, for even the best-intentioned can commit, and tolerate, the very worst of sins in their midst. It is much easier to be self-righteous in retrospect than to do the right thing in real time—a good point for Romney, and all the other candidates, to make early and often.

© 2007