NYC Letter: Under God

America is not a nation founded by athetists, though the genius of its founding leaves ample room for those accountable to nothing in the universe than private notions of moral order.

Unlike La Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (1789), where the French National Assembly gives a polite nod to a Supreme Being, who, fortuitously, happens to be in the room to witness its handiwork, America's Declaration of Independence (1776) explicitly -- and correctly -- identifies God as the origin of unalienable rights to be secured by its rebel government:

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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Among the irreligious, this notion of God as the author and guarantor of our rights is considered quaint and backward. Among civil libertarians it is paradoxically un-Constitutional, requiring a government predisposition to God in a subsidiary relationship. Yet there it is. Stubbornly, prominently embedded in the establishing document of the Republic.

And no other national commemoration recalls the Republic to God as Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was not instituted as a day of personal self-congratulation or for beeping up self-esteem.

Our first president, George Washington, made this clear in his first Thanksgiving proclamation, issued on October 3, 1789, here in New York City. He noted that Congress had requested that he recommend to the people "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God."

Washington set aside Thursday, November 26, 1789, "to be devoted by the people of these states to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be." In his Thanksgiving proclamation of 1795, Washington asserted that it is "our duty as a people, with devout reverence and affectionate gratitude, to acknowledge our many and great obligations to Almighty God and to implore Him to continue and confirm the blessings we experience."

The above is from a New York Sun editorial that recounts the Republic's longstanding tradition of invoking God in the business and fortunes of the nation:

John Adams kept up the tradition, issuing a Thanksgiving proclamation in March 1798 that explained itself by saying, "As the safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety without which social happiness can not exist nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed."

* * * * *

President Reagan, as he often did, displayed a deeper knowledge of the issues, writing, in his first Thanksgiving proclamation, "Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people." ... In his 1996 Thanksgiving proclamation, Mr. Clinton referred to "the genius of our founders in daring to build the world's first constitutional democracy on the foundation of trust and thanks to God." And in his proclamation yesterday, President Bush said, "On this Thanksgiving Day, we thank God for his blessings and ask Him to continue to guide and watch over our Nation." In so doing, he was not making a radical departure from the practices of his predecessors. Rather, he was keeping a bipartisan tradition that has now endured for centuries with harm neither to believer or atheist. It is a tradition that reminds us that the founders of America conducted their labors in the light of Sinai. Which in itself is something for which to give thanks.

The genius of America is that its secular order is derivative, it is not self-establishing, that ultimately it looks beyond its own institutions to an unimpeachable extra-human -- a supernatural -- agency, Who bestows the same rights on all and informs the nation's values.

This sort of God-talk gives modernists the creeps. God, the supreme being, has fallen on hard times. The drift of modernity is to have man take things in hand, to be the start point, the prime mover, to author DIY morality. But the history of man is an unbroken record of cupidity and moral failure. In our own times we need look no further than that repository of humanist ideals, the United Nations, to see the latest instance. And again. And again.

Acknowledging God alone does not guarantee His moral order. Man acts and his actions must be obedient to a moral order that God has put His stamp to. This gets the hackles up of modernists, whose conception of a supreme being is something along the lines of a 19th century colonial imperialist atop a pile of clouds. For man to bow under a moral order not of his making is oppression. And so it is. Everything important in our lives weighs down on us. Moral conduct is an obligation and it burdens us. We are not free to improvise.

What would the modernists suggest as an alternative? The Soviet utopia? The Great Leap Forward? The Big Man of History? Europe currently slights its Christian heritage but has no alternate denominator that unifies its multitude of states. It has no common identity outside of Christianity. French laïcité, that pretense that one's public life is indifferent to and independent of one's spiritual ordering, has advanced to chucking God altogether and entrusts its moral order to a jumble of fractious political jockeys. Oh the other hand, few want a universal caliphate. There simply is no secular component to Islam. And, well, to put it as nicely as possible, we find its moral order deranged.

Perhaps God is a fairy tale. Perhaps He is a dubiety that cannot be cracked. Perhaps His presence is missing. We cannot say to anyone's satisfaction. We are happy to enjoy the good fortune of living in a nation informed by a Judeo-Christian moral order and underwrit by something greater than political fashions. And for that every Thanksgiving, we make a little time to thank the appropriate Party.

Our best wishes to all for the holidays.