The Founders – Not Godly, But Wise

Tonight’s A Prairie Home Companion impressed me as a pure and joyful celebration of the election of Barack Obama–perhaps the best expression of that joy that I have heard thus far.  In the opening minutes, Jearlyn Steele and Garrison Keilor teamed up for a rousing rendition of “America the Beautiful,” and as they sang, I found myself thinking back, impressed at the genius of our Founding Fathers.  Against some pretty steep odds, and after an uncomfortably long period of foundering, the ship of state has righted itself, but not through any random miracle or massive act of violence; it has righted itself through the foresight and devotion to reason shown by that intrepid group of 18th century philosopher-poets in their attempt to create a utopia and bequeath it to the generations yet to come.

If you need something to cheer you up, you really should hear the show, and it might be available by the time you read this.  Check HERE

The recently deposed Republicans have, in the past, tended to refer too much to those same founders’ supposed religiosity.  Luckily for us, the founders did not leave the future of the new country they created in the hands of any supreme being; they took responsibility for that future themselves and put in place a self-correcting system, one that could absorb some abuses, even a decade of abuses as we have just seen, and right itself at last.  True, the founders’ documents mentioned God from time to time, but the deism that lay at the heart of their religious belief had little to do with doctrine, blind belief, or the power politics that became the stock in trade of the Church in Europe.  They tended instead to create a God in their own image, a busy deity with an entire universe to manage.  The god of whom they conceived would do as they had done–set up an overarching, self-maintaining process, based on the reliable tenets of reason, and then leave the day-to-day operations of that universe not to chance or even to worthy stewards, but to the accurate, verifiable predictions of the scientific mind.

The founders were at a disadvantage to this god of reason in that the prediction of human nature and behavior can never be precise.  Within limits, however, a certain kind of mathematics, one that leaves space for intuition and insight, can lead to some fairly reliable prognostications.

So, despite the protestations of 21st century evangelicals, the Founders were not terribly religious; they had seen the effects of a wayward hyper-religiosity on their own soil in the form of the Salem Witch Trials.  Even without that example, it was relatively easy for them to arrive at a sound judgment as to the problems inherent in a government based on “divine” principles; they needed only to consider the persistent trend of European history to see where that generally leads.  Instead, they looked to reason as their guide to a better world than the one they had left behind on the continent, and reason appears to have served them well.  It continues to do so in the 21st century.

I freely admit to having been a Hillary Clinton supporter at first.  I preferred the known quantity going forward into a very uncertain future, and the Clinton team had shown a real talent at reversing the mess left to it by Bush I.  It is comforting to see so many of the Clinton team working in the new administration.  I don’t know that the prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration would have brought forth such a celebration as the one we have seen this week.  It may not be scientific, but it certainly is reasonable to feel very good, very optimistic about a future not dominated by the backward-looking, divisive politics of Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al.

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