Positive Liberty

Ben Franklin was friendly with George Whitefield of the “Great Awakening” fame. Franklin, though, didn’t share Whitefield’s orthodox Christian beliefs. As a theistic rationalist, Franklin supported “religion” in general (thought society was better off with it than without it), but thought most if not all world religious were valid ways to God. Franklin was involved in building a church in Philadelphia for public worship and offered Whitefield this venue to preach when others were not available. Here is how Franklin described the experience.

Both house and ground were vested in trustees, expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people at Philadelphia; the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general; so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.

To Franklin, apparently, Whitefield’s orthodox Christianity was equivalent to the Mufti of Constantinople’s Mohammedanism.

Great post by Ed Brayton on the little understood theological universalism of our key Founding Fathers. One Dispatches’ commenters aptly termed the Founders’ religious terminology as “pure syncretism.”

Dr. Gregg Frazer addresses the Founders’ universalism in his Ph.D. thesis. He argues that Joseph Priestly influenced the Founders in this regard as well. His section on Priestly questions the soundness of the Founders’ theistic rationalist theology. Given that Frazer is an orthodox Christian, one should expect such criticisms. Such criticisms, though, are only slightly peppered throughout his thesis, the overall tone of which simply describes the Founders’ belief system without “judging” it. Anyway Frazer writes:

Priestly…reflects a level of naivete also exhibited by the key Founders. Namely, everyone should simply be able to set aside their fundamental beliefs about the particular identity and nature of God and accept the Unitarian vision of God as a sort of universal supernatural entity who appears in various forms to those of various traditions.

I’ll let the theologians debate the soundness of the Founders’ theology. Their religion appeals to my sentiments more so than orthodox Christianity. But both orthodox Christians and atheists would remind me here that just because something sounds nice doesn’t make it true. Certainly though, the Founders’ theological universalism is not consonant with orthodox Christianity, which believes there is just one way to God.

I have some thoughts on conservatism and evolution over at Panda’s Thumb, which originated in my recent review of Larry Arnhart’s Darwinian Conservatism in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. You can read that review here.

The novelist Scott Turow has an article in the New York Times magazine making the argument that Justice Scalia has moved toward a more civil libertarian position in recent years because of his originalism. I find his analysis rather shallow and ill-informed. He’s certainly right to point out that Scalia has, from time to time, joined an unexpected majority in seeming conflict with his previously stated views, but that is going to be true of any justice whose rulings you examine over a long period of time. And he’s right to note that there is, in my view and apparently in Turow’s, that Scalia has proposed stricter limits on presidential authority than one might have expected. I’ll post a long excerpt below the fold sitting out Turow’s basic argument. He starts with some of Scalia’s recent decisions involving Bill of Rights issues and criminal defendants:
Continue Reading »

I have written at some length about the religious beliefs of the leading founding fathers (primarily Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Madison). We’ve already established that none were orthodox Christians, that all of them shared a common perspective that Gregg Frazer has best described as theistic rationalism. There’s one other aspect of their perspective that I thnk is important and I’m going to call that universalism, for lack of a better term at this point. And by universalism I do not mean merely the notion that all people will be saved and reconciled to God after they die (though I think they all likely believed that as well); I mean the belief that there was only one God and that all religions were speaking of that God even if their own cultural biases and traditions were laid over the top in terms of dogma and ritual.

One piece of evidence for this is that they typically used non-specific names for God that were minimalist enough that all religions could view them as speaking to their own particular religion. Thus in the Declaration of Independence you get phrases like Nature’s God and Creator and Divine Providence. George Washington, in particular, had a large number of phrases that all worked to the same effect, as a sort of lowest common denominator deity, including the great governor of the universe, the supreme disposer of all events, and the Almighty ruler of the universe. Thomas Jefferson likewise spoke of the Great Governor of the world.
Continue Reading »

Many libertarians have a problem with the social compact theory because of its reliance on “tacit consent”: that is, if government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, then virtually no government would be just, given that virtually none of us has expressed consent. (Assuming, of course, that the Pledge of Allegiance is not binding….)

Continue Reading »

Beneath this silly headline, I would like to discuss what seems to me one of the most profound passages I have read so far in Mises’ Theory of Money and Credit.

Continue Reading »

More on Mises, particularly concerning the definition of money, with a detour by way of Aristotle.

Continue Reading »

Regarding Christopher Hitchens’ assertion, I don’t see anything in the historical record to indicate Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. The Straussian argument for Jefferson’s atheism — that he had to publicly proclaim belief in God, else his reputation be ruined, but didn’t really believe it — is, as Ed Brayton notes, contradicted by the fact that Jefferson claimed to firmly believe in God even in his private letters which contain the harshest anti-clerical rants, rants which, if publicly known, would have ruined his reputation.

I disagree with Sandefur that Jefferson may have written in code in his private letters to John Adams. I interpret their correspondence as showing that the two were almost entirely agreed on their personal religious creed. Call it “unitarianism,” call it “theistic rationalism,” you could even call them “Priestlians” because Joseph Priestly — the discoverer of oxygen — was probably the most important influence on both Adams’ and Jefferson’s (and other key Founders’) religious beliefs. Both Adams and Jefferson (and Franklin) commonly referred to “the corruptions of Christianity.” Priestly coined that phrase and it had very specific meaning. Priestly wrote a book entitled A History of the Corruptions of Christianity which caused masses of Trinitarian Christians to burn his house down in England, where he then fled to America for refuge.

Priestly was thought to be so “notorious” as deserving to have his house burned because the “corruptions of Christianity” turned out to be the heart and soul of orthodox Christian doctrine: “a trinity of persons in the godhead, original sin, arbitrary predestination, atonement for the sins of men by the death of Christ, and … the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the scriptures.” (That quotation by the way, is sourced by both Gregg Frazer and Brooke Allen). So when Jefferson, Adams and Franklin referred to the “corruptions of Christianity” — as they often did — they signified they disbelieved these doctrines central to Christianity. Both Jefferson and Adams, let’s not forget, called themselves “Christian.” But this is not unlike Mormons calling themselves Christian, and then explaining, “but here is what we believe…,” and upon hearing the details, evangelical Protestants and Catholics react, “no, you aren’t Christians.”

Finally, while it may be true that Jefferson (and Madison) were outliers in the way they desired Church and State to be separate, Jefferson was not an outlier regarding his personal religious beliefs. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, Washington, Wilson, G. Morris, and Hamilton (before his end of life conversion to orthodox Christianity) were all likely agreed on the central tenets of their personal religious beliefs.

Update: Before any of you call me on this, many websites state that whereas Priestly’s book, “A History of the Corruptions of Christianity,” was official burned in 1785, his house and church were burned in 1791 because of his support for the American and French Revolutions.

As an enthusiastic admirer of both Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Hitchens, I’m interested in the question of whether Jefferson was, in fact, an atheist. I must first say that I don’t believe Hitchens explicitly calls Jefferson an atheist. (I listened to the audio version of his Jefferson book, so I may have missed it.) Instead, he argues that Jefferson was what in his day was called a “unitarian,” and expressed the hope that some day all Americans would be unitarians. The term “unitarian” back then isn’t to be confused with the modern Unitarian Universalist Church—instead, the term reflected a much more reasoned, watered-down version of Christianity, and a good case can be made that most Americans are, indeed, what Jefferson’s generation would have called “unitarians.”

Continue Reading »

A few weeks ago I mentioned a blog post I’d come across claiming, based upon Dawkins’ new book, that Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. Since I’d given away my copy of that book, I asked my readers to provide the actual text of the book on this point and many of you were helpful enough to do so (I will have that book back in my possession in a couple weeks and will probably do a more complete analysis of it then). But one thing that came out of that discussion was that apparently Dawkins relied primarily on Christopher Hitchens’ recent biography of Jefferson in making that claim.

That came as a bit of a surprise for me. I’ve always rather liked Hitchens as a writer and respected his work even when I disagreed with it. I have not yet gotten a copy of that book either, though I plan to, but based on his exchange with Lenni Brenner I have to say things are looking pretty grim for Hitchens on this question. Brenner, himself an atheist like Hitchens, wrote a review of the book and took Hitchens to task for engaging in wishful thinking in regard to Jefferson being an atheist.
Continue Reading »

I recently listened to two very unenlightening talks by Justice Steven Breyer, centered around his book, Active Liberty. I haven’t read the book, but if the talks are any indication, I’m not missing much. I was particularly impressed by how effectively Justice Breyer gets the most basic element of the Constitution wrong in the very beginning of his talk at Princeton University:

Continue Reading »

That’s the title of Chris Rodda’s new book. I don’t have the book but have read some of its excerpts at the book’s website (indeed, much of it is excerpted, including a whole chapter on The Northwest Ordinance. Currently, I am reading Brooke Allen’s “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers,” which is a great book, eloquently written and meticulously researched. I do have a few problems with Allen’s analysis. Mainly, she lumps the key Founders — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton — in with Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen as “Deists.” Unlike David Holmes’ book which notes that deism had many varieties and the key founders were more deistic than strict deists, Allen goes so far as to assert that the key Founders believed the same as Paine and Allen. This is a common mistake that secular leftist scholars make, even the very good ones like Allen. I’ve got a few other issues with her analysis that perhaps I’ll mention in a subsequent post.

Allen’s book doesn’t tend to name the “Christian Nation” figures against whom she argues. Rather she (accurately) takes note of their thesis. And then meticulously researches the historical record — letting the Founders do the talking — and shows that they (the key figures) were not pious orthodox Christians seeking to “found” the nation on “Biblical principles,” but rather were Enlightenment rationalists, cut from the philosophical elite. And it was their Enlightenment worldwiew which provided most of the ideas for the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.

As I said, her book is excellently researched and is worth buying for the wealth of quotations and detail of primary sources she unearths.

Chris Rodda’s book takes a different approach. She specifically targets the “Christian Nation” crowd by name. It’s mainly David Barton, William Federer, D. James Kennedy, and Tim Lahaye (who, many folks don’t know, wrote a really bad book on The Faith of the Founding Fathers). Her book specially examines what they have written and (again from what I have seen on her site) refutes it in detail. (Similar to what I do on my blogs).

Given that the title of her book is “Liars for Jesus,” it has the tone of a polemical attack and at times seems unduly harsh. But given the abysmal level of scholarship that has come from the above mentioned “Christian Nation” figures, her attacks are duly harsh.

As I have noted before, there are plenty of serious scholars who question modern Supreme Court Establishment Clause jurisprudence and the ACLU’s ideal interpretation of it — Philip Hamburger, Daniel Dreisbach, Phillip Muñoz, James H. Hutson, Mark Noll, to name a few. At times, going after Barton, Kennedy and Federer may seem like knocking down straw-men when there are serious arguments on the matter to be engaged. But, as long as millions of people believe their twaddle (and they do) scholars like Chris Rodda (and myself) have a legitimate job to do.

The inspiration for the Kramer character — Kenny Kramer — speaks out on the Michael Richards controversy. I found this part interesting:

The real Kramer, who initially lobbied to play himself on the program, subsequently met with Richards on several occasions. His insight after the actor’s meltdown during a stand-up comedy appearance: Richards had little in common with his off-kilter “Seinfeld” persona.

“I know the guy,” the real Kramer said of the faux Kramer. “He’s not this outgoing ball of fun that people would expect Kramer to be. They think he’s be exciting, lovable, laughable. But he’s quiet, introspective, even paranoid. He’s a very wound-up guy. But I don’t think he’s a racist.”

If you remember, in season four, they parodied what actually happened to Jerry Seinfeld (and Larry David) — NBC planned on making a show about Jerry’s real life, with actors who would play his friends. And Kramer insisted on playing himself. Apparently, that happened in real life, and they wrote it into the episode.

But also remember the actor who actually got the part of Kramer. He wasn’t some laid back kinda guy, but a real uptight, moody prick who threatened to beat the crap out of George, after he stole a box of raisins and George noticed. Maybe Larry and Jerry were hinting on the persona of the real Michael Richards.

Just a thought.

If you have never worked with a chainsaw before, let me just tell you — wow, it’s some really hard work. I can barely type right now, so further posts in my “Twenty Questions on Mises” series will have to wait until later. In the meantime, there’s an active discussion at Liberty and Power regarding indifference curves, ordinal marginal utility, and what exactly Murray Rothbard meant in the introduction to The Theory of Money and Credit.