Krytocracy
Chapter 6:
Pouring Fuel on the Fire: The Immigration Mess
Chapter 7:
Swimming Against the Current: The Way Forward
Endnotes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A question that is sometimes asked an author upon his having finished a book is How long did it take you to write it?
The question is intriguing, especially when the book is one that, like a volcano, represents years of subterranean activity before the fiery blast erupts on the surface. One may as well inquire how long it took before Mount Vesuvius burst forth in fire and smoke over Pompeii. Who, besides God, really knows?
From a philosophical perspective this book has undoubtedly been in preparation my entire life. The sense of other times in American history, some of which I experienced personally and others vicariously, filled my mind as I wrote it. Tennyson expressed this truth in his epic poem Ulysses, I am a part of all that I have met.
While my education as a clergyman, attorney, and professor is reflected within the lines of each chapter, the experience of my youth on the Texas Gulf Coast is written indelibly large between the lines and will be clear to discerning eyes. Aside from the multifarious cast of characters, which richly blessed my past, there are obvious persons and institutions to thank for their role, direct or indirect, in the publication of this work. I am grateful to the Center for Religion, the Professions, and the Public at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where during the Spring of 2004 it was my privilege to serve as Senior Fellow in Law and to research and to write on American church-state relations. My colleagues and I attempted to explore the various facets of multiculturalism as well as constructive ways of delivering professional services to a multicultural populace. This challenge proved enlightening and, to borrow from the coinage of one legendary philosopher, helped to wake me from my dogmatic slumbers.
After completing this brief fellowship, I wrote a series of articles for academic journals, primarily law reviews. In these articles I sought to formulate and to develop some of my ideas, in which there is a vigorous interaction between religion, philosophy, law, and politics. I have drawn freely from these materials in this book. I am referring specifically to the xi following body of work: Constitutional Meanings of ‘Religion’ Past and Present: Explorations in Definition and Theory,
14 Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review 89 (2004); ‘Religion-Neutral’ Jurisprudence: An Examination of Its Meanings and End,
13 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 815 (2005); From Typology to Synthesis: Recasting the Jurisprudence of Religion,
34 Capital University Law Review 51 (2005); On Teaching Neo-Darwinism in Public Schools: Avoiding the Pall of Orthodoxy and the Threat of Establishment,
11 Roger Williams University Law Review 143 (2005); Religion, Politics, and the Establishment Clause: Does God Belong in American Public Life?,
10.2 Chapman Law Review 299 (2006); Religion Interfacing with Law and Politics: Three Tired Ideas in the Jurisprudence of Religion,
10.2 Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 14 (2007); and From Promised Land to Tower of Babel: Religious Pluralism and the Future of the Liberal Experiment in America,
45.3 Brandeis Law Journal 529 (2007). I am grateful for the time of research and reflection represented by these writings.
My publisher, Father’s Press, is a unique organization, tenacious and courageous. It is far more concerned with searching out and promoting the truth than with worrying about adverse public reaction to it. I am grateful to Mike Smitley, the owner of this remarkable enterprise, for the valuable assistance he has provided in the publication of this work.
Friends like Jacob L. Gottfredson and James E. Johnston have, throughout my research and writing, been supportive.
They have always been true friends with encouraging words and wise counsel, and have provided me both a springboard for and a respite from my work. I salute them with the words Let friendship continue to reign!
There have been many other encouraging voices, too numerous to mention. For their always gracious and heartening words I am appreciative. The American citizenry is indeed filled with those who are troubled, as I am, by the uncritical and unsuspecting course this country is traversing, a course eroding much of what we as a people have traditionally regarded as sacrosanct. In the intellectually vacuous 2008 Presidential xii Campaign, for example, scarcely a word has been uttered by any of the candidates about the steady erosion of American public faith and culture. As Rome burns, those like Nero fiddle.
Finally, to the companion of my life, Lynn, whose love shines as brightly as the sun, I owe whatever historical continuity, stability, inspiration, and temperance I may enjoy.
In her absence all would be for naught. Sie, mein Liebes, waren dort am Anfang und werden dort bis zum Ende sein.
L. Scott Smith
Corpus Christi, Texas
New Year’s Day, 2008 xiii xiv
PREFACE
This book is about the fading of America’s public faith, which is of vital importance to her cultural identity and national solidarity. Writing on the subject is bound to raise the hackles of many would-be readers. Some of them will be quick to ask, "Do you really believe that initiating a discussion of public faith will address the issues that face this country, such as pollution of our physical environment, global warming, campaign finance, term limits, an ‘immoral war’ in Iraq, and the crisis in healthcare? Others who may generally welcome the subject will balk when considering it from any perspective other than a religious one. They will question whether faith and politics should ever be joined in the way I suggest. I can hear their indignation now:
Have you never heard of the separation of church and state? How dare a theocrat profane the religious by allowing it to do the bidding of the civil and political!"
These two groups of critics, according to anyone’s reckoning, are sufficiently formidable to intimidate an author, but there are other critics who are determined to hammer one last nail into my coffin. Their wrath will seethe over the commingling of faith with social conservatism. While they may initially demonstrate an alacrity to read the book and to do so with an open mind, they will sooner or later become disappointed and angered by what they surmise to be the tired and tattered thesis that faith justifies a social reality that was or is rather than will be. A faith that smacks of the status quo, they contend, lacks the courage of a Reinhold Niebuhr, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or a Norman Thomas. This group of critics will sniff, Has the man never heard of religion as ‘the opiate of the people’?
Acknowledging such criticisms in this Preface will I hope show, if nothing else, that I have been mindful of them, as well as others, throughout the writing of this book. I will nevertheless seize upon this moment to respond substantively to my inquisitors.
First, to those who view the subject of faith as an irrelevancy, there is not much that I can say other than to deny xv their claim by insisting that faith is central to who one is as a person and, similarly, to who a people are as a nation. I have been particularly influenced by two writings on this subject.
One is William James’s masterful essay, The Will to Believe.
¹ The other is Paul Tillich’s little book, Dynamics of Faith.2 They approach the subject from two distinct perspectives, which some may regard as hopelessly at odds with each other. There is a point, however, at which their respective views intersect. It is a point that yields the following truth: faith is indispensable. Tillich speaks of it as ultimate concern
that is a centered act of the personality.3 By that, he means that there is actually a concern that integrates the self. It need not be the same concern for everyone but, without it, one’s personhood breaks down. Being a human being means having a
personality and thus a faith. James, on the other hand, is a bit more reserved in his treatment of the subject but, in existential terms, his claim amounts to much the same thing. He speaks of options,
and he labels some as living,
forced,
and momentous.
⁴ He invites us to think of ourselves as standing on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do?
‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . .If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.⁵
His point, as I understand it, is that in this snow-blinding mountain pass we call life,
either we stand still, or we journey xvi in one direction as opposed to another. In either case, what we do is represented by a concrete decision. A suspension of judgment and belief is not a luxury available to us, and the decision we make in response to our circumstances is crucial to whether we live or die. This point is not only relevant to one’s personal life, but also to our national life.
Regarding the first group of critics, who discount the importance of faith, I would assert that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of human life, both on a personal and a national plane. Life is urgent. Perhaps it is more appropriate to analogize it to a shipwreck than to a snowy mountain pass.
Some of us in the midst of the wreckage decide to tread water while waiting for assistance. Others of us decide to swim with the current, and a few against it. But, in no case, is a decision – a decision of faith – avoidable. One’s faith is related to his circumstances, and a nation’s faith is related to its circumstances as well.
To those who remonstrate with me that, by correlating the civil with the religious I am doing the latter a disservice, I ask them, respectfully, what kind of faith they want to see reflected in the national public sphere. I caution them against naively assuming that communism, fascism, and other political ideologies are not faiths. Each promises redemption in its own way, does it not? The kind of aggressive, positive secularism that surfaced in America during the last quarter of the 19th century and that has a strong following today, as well as the reverential attitude of political correctness
that has accompanied secularism in recent years, reflects a religious attitude. About this there is hardly a doubt. So, again, we should banish the thought that public faith is avoidable. It is the belief and ritual of the collective individual, or the state. I challenge my second group of critics to observe any political landscape in the world or, better yet, in the history of the world, and then to assert against Rousseau that politics and religion are not bound up with each other.
For those who complain that I am using faith to support positions often identified as socially conservative, I could advance what in legal circles was once called a demurrer
and xvii tantamount to a big So what?
Maybe I could be more gracious than this and inquire why the combination of faith and social conservatism meets with my critics’ disapproval. I suspect that it is because they are supporting positions on the opposite end of the social and political spectrum. If that is the essence of it, then I counter as follows: Why should your positions commend themselves to the reader more than mine?
There is at least one excellent reason why they should not: there is a traditional public faith in America that is at odds with the mandates of liberalism, secularism, multiculturalism, and relativism. It is bound up in a distinct, concrete culture, called in Samuel P. Huntington’s words Anglo-Protestantism.
⁶ If supporting it amounts to social conservatism, then I respectfully plead guilty.
Some readers may actually find themselves in general agreement with most of the ideas that I express in this book, but they will wonder whether I have exaggerated the various threats and am given to hysteria. Why am I, for example, exercised over liberalism and secularism in America, when these movements are nothing new? Am I not crying Fire!
about a century and a half too late? To this criticism I reply that the effects of philosophies can be, and often are, insidious, and many years in the making. Miniscule and seemingly innocuous changes can occur in a nation over a span of years such that a strange, new reality seems suddenly to break forth upon the scene, provoking surprise and disbelief. We ask ourselves and others, Where has this Cyclops been hiding?
Although a person seldom goes to bed one night and the next morning wakes up to an Orwellian horror, it may seem like it. When small changes occur year in and year out but escape notice and public attention, leviathan can, and sometimes does, appear abruptly.
Added to this psychological insight is the vast ocean of difference between the social and political realities of 19th century America and those of its successor state in the 21st century. The population of the country is no longer broadly homogeneous. The simplest transactions between citizens are increasingly burdened, and once unspoken conventions that xviii were conducive to an easy camaraderie are eroding. This fact has the effect of bringing to light vulnerabilities that were threats to America’s structural integrity, but which were once considered only cosmetic, hairline fractures, barely visible and scarcely worth the mention.
The problem I elaborate in this book penetrates to the heart and soul of this nation and is first and foremost a spiritual one, afflicting the collective individual of which we all are parts.
Our country lives and breathes according to a faith. It is not to be confounded with those of a sectarian variety. It is America’s public faith,
and it is that which will occupy us in the pages that follow. It is a faith that is under siege. If and when it irretrievably breaks down, the country as we have known it will be no more.
My purpose in writing this book is not to try to understand all the reasons why America’s public faith has been, and is being, assaulted. I am content to point out some of the leading antipodal influences and to turn a sharp searchlight upon them.
With this goal in mind I examine, in the first chapter, the historical and philosophical connection between our public faith and national solidarity. The chapter will help the reader to understand what I mean by public faith
and what its importance has been throughout the history of our country.
The second chapter can actually be placed anywhere in the book. Its purpose is to explode the idea of a godless Constitution.
This idea, very fashionable in the academic world, represents the culmination of liberal and secular thought about the American experience. Professors Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore, as well as many others, confidently argue that our godless Constitution
is the one and only tie that binds the republic together. I have chosen to place the chapter in its present location, because it deserves attention as early in my analysis as possible. All else in the book points backward and forward to it.
The tsunami of secularism that flooded into America during the last quarter of the 19th century and thereafter is the story of the third chapter. It highlights the fact that American institutions capitulated to intellectual and professional leaders who, it now xix appears, were far from having a corner on the truth. Most were transparent power-mongers, opportunists, and in some instances cowards, who desired to aggregate authority to themselves. We continue to live under the influence of their legacy.
The fourth chapter is a brief analysis of liberalism, which is America’s first tier public philosophy. The goal of the chapter is to deconstruct some of the formative ideas of the philosophy, especially in connection with religion, exposing the philosophy for what it really is.
The philosophy of liberalism has been driven and implemented by the United States Supreme Court. The fifth chapter attempts to explain this state of affairs and to provide what I trust is a straightforward, albeit at times tedious, legal and philosophical analysis of the same.
The sixth chapter describes the catalytic effect of immigration trends after 1965 upon the decline of American public faith and culture. Even fans of this book may be tempted to ask sotto voce What in the world does immigration have to do with America’s public faith?
The relationship is a most compelling one and cannot possibly be ignored. A nation is primarily its people, and the mix of people has been drastically altered during the last 40 years.
Finally, in the seventh chapter, I discuss three visions according to which America can journey into the future, and I commend one of them in particular to my readers. I do not claim that the solution, which I am urging, will be easy to adopt or to put into action. But, to those technocrats who would fault my proposal for a lack of practicality,
I would echo a tidbit of political wisdom that I learned from the German-American neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse: "Demandez l’impossible!"
This book is intended to be descriptive and analytical in nature; yes, but also polemical. Maybe the best way to understand it is as a lament, written in grief and despair. I have had continually to remind myself, and now I hasten to remind you my readers: this is a war, and it is not over; there may still be time to steer the ship of state back on course if we act now.
Such is our challenge and hope.
PREFACE
1 William James, The Will to Believe, in WILLIAM JAMES, ESSAYS ON FAITH
AND MORALS (Meridian Books 1968) (1896) [hereinafter JAMES].
2 PAUL TILLICH, DYNAMICS OF FAITH (Harper Torchbooks 1958) (1957).
3 Id. at 1-8.
4 JAMES, supra note 1, at 34.
5 Id. at 62.
6 SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON, WHO ARE WE? xv-xvii (Simon & Schuster
Paperbacks 2005).
"This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things
they hold in common, not the things they hold separately."
G. K. Chesterton
A culture is above everything else a faith, a set of shared convictions, a spiritual entity.
J. Paul Williams
CHAPTER 1
STARTING AT SQUARE ONE:
PUBLIC FAITH AND NATIONAL SOLIDARITY
Momentous Questions
On the Great Seal of the United States the bald eagle holds a scroll in its beak proclaiming E Pluribus Unum – From Many, One.
The words were, at the time of their adoption as America’s national motto in 1782, an audacious affront to conventional political wisdom. The sagacious French philosopher Montesquieu had rendered it a widely accepted axiom in the science of government that a republic, in order to survive, had to be a small, compact territory with a homogeneous population.i As historian Joseph J. Ellis notes, [N]o republican government prior to the American Revolution, apart from a few Swiss cantons and Greek city-states, had ever survived for long, and none had ever been tried over a landmass as large as the thirteen colonies.
ii But the American eagle, rising like a phoenix from the dust heap of history, was proclaiming a new truth, one never before told in the history of the world: that from many peoples in an expansive new land could emerge, in Hector de Crèvecoeur’s words, a new race of men
iii who constitute the citizenry of a robust and thriving republic. Throughout American history, this newfound truth has challenged, even ridiculed, old world wisdom. Yet both new and old command pregnant pause today and cause us to ponder anew questions well nigh forgotten: On what does this nation’s unity depend? What accounts for the solidarity of its citizens? Can people from diverse nations and ethnicities, with disparate traditions, customs, and mores, speaking their own languages, form a republic? These questions are more compelling now than ever.
Ties Binding the American People
Cokie Roberts, a radio and television personality and the daughter of the late congressional majority leader, Thomas Hale Boggs, Sr., in a discussion of term limits for congressmen observed, We have nothing binding us together as a nation – no common ethnicity, history, religion or even language – except the Constitution and the institutions it created.
iv The founding fathers would not have understood the statement as a reason to celebrate. They would have been profoundly troubled by it. They considered the homogeneity of the American people an asset, even a national treasure. It was acknowledged by all of them, even those impressed by sectional differences, as a positive condition, one trumpeting strength rather than weakness.
Captured by the political wisdom of Montesquieu, some colonial observers were skeptical about the Constitutional Convention’s work product. As James Winthrop of Massachusetts maintained,
The idea of an uncompounded republick [sic], on an average, one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six millions of white inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, or habits, and of laws, is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.v
Winthrop was doubtful that a single legislature could represent a vastly heterogeneous population, as he believed America was. Diversity throughout the length and breadth of America would, he feared, result in confusion frustrating the legitimate goals of republican governance.
Another colonist, pseudonymously identifying himself only as Brutus,
expressed similar misgivings. The manners, sentiments, and interests of the people,
vi he argued, were too dissimilar to insure the success of a republic. The manners and habits [of the different portions of the union] differ as much as their climates and productions; and their sentiments are by no means coincident.
vii On this basis, he reasoned, a free republic cannot long subsist over a country of the great extent of these states.
viii
These arguments, as theoretically sound as they were, failed to win the day, because they were factually inaccurate. A diverse and pluralistic people spread out over a large landmass would unquestionably spell failure, but who could really think America was that diverse and pluralistic? Not John Stevens, Jr., whose family roots were in New York and New Jersey. He was convinced that the proposed government would work well in America and that Montesquieu himself, if he had been an American, would have realized it. Had he [Montesquieu] been an American, and now living,
Stevens insisted, I would stake my life on it, he would have formed different principles.
ix A national legislature elected by the American people could, this colonist argued, represent all citizens’ needs and interests without succumbing to the danger, all too prevalent in a small republic, of a single faction overturning the government.x
One may wonder why Stevens was so sanguine about the success of a national legislature in America, when no such venture had ever before been attempted elsewhere. The reason is not far to find. A representative government over a large landmass presupposes consensus among the people on many levels. Not only the elected representatives, but also the citizens represented, must share a common faith and culture, and America did!
David Ramsey of South Carolina clarified what was at best implicit in Stevens’s discourse, pinpointing a truth that even a blind man could not ignore. The truth was that the homogeneity of the American people safeguarded their well-being.
Examine the new constitution with candor and liberality. And indulge no narrow prejudices to the disadvantage of
