Three days before Christmas 1952 and a month before his inauguration as the 34th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the Freedoms Foundation at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. There, the president-elect declared that “our form of government [makes] no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Ike, no theologian, was subsequently mocked for his seeming indifference to the nuances of religious belief and their impact on public life; his comment confirmed to his cultured despisers their stereotypical (and quite false) view of him as a smiling dunce. In fact, Eisenhower was speaking an important truth, however inelegant his formulation.
Authentic religious faith reminds us that this world is not all there is — that the world as we perceive it is englobed in a larger, transcendent reality that gives meaning to the here and now. Authentic religious faith reminds us that human beings are matter and spirit and that, without the latter, our material selves are just an accidental conjunction of cosmic biochemical forces. Authentic religious faith reminds us that our obligations extend beyond “me.”
What does any of this have to do, though, with “our form of government”? A great deal, I suggest.
As even a cursory historical survey confirms, self-governance is not the norm in human affairs. One or another form of authoritarianism is. Nor is there anything given about a democracy’s success or longevity after it’s been constitutionally established.
The prime cautionary tale here is Germany’s Weimar Republic, set up after the collapse of the German Empire — the “Second Reich” — after Germany’s defeat in World War I and the German kaiser’s exile to Holland. The constitution of the Weimar Republic (so called because the national capital was moved from Prussian Berlin to the Thuringian city of Weimar) was designed by some of the finest minds of the time, including the great sociologist Max Weber. The designers got the mechanisms of democracy right: separation of powers, regular elections, an independent judiciary, etc.
But when the Great Depression brought unbearable pressures to bear on that nascent democracy (including an inflation so severe that people bought bread with banknotes carried in wheelbarrows), the Weimar Republic crumbled. Then Adolf Hitler’s “Third Reich” came to power in an election that wrote the obituary for interwar Germany’s brief experiment in democratic self-governance — and much else.
The crucial lesson to be drawn from that debacle is that “democracy” is not a matter of institutions and procedures alone. It takes a critical mass of citizens, living certain virtues and the convictions that undergird them, to make a democracy work so that the result is individual human flourishing and social solidarity. Respect for the dignity of every human person; openness to the possibility that others may be right about a contested policy; a firm commitment to the rule of law rather than the rule of brute force; the acceptance of electoral defeat or incremental legislative success — these democratic necessities don’t just happen. They’re the by-products of prior convictions and moral commitments that, for Americans, have typically been born from what Dwight D. Eisenhower called “a deeply felt religious faith” — or its analogues in the nation’s public philosophy.
If I may be permitted a brief lurch into philosophy’s technical vocabulary: Our politics today suffer from a want of metaphysics. And from that deficit has come a dangerously distorted anthropology. Which means: If a culture denies what classic western metaphysics (and biblical religion) taught for millennia — that there are immutable truths built into the world and into us — then false and even bizarre notions of what a human being is inevitably follow. So do equally false and bizarre ideas of what makes for human flourishing and social solidarity.
Public life then becomes, not an ongoing, rational conversation about how we should live together, but a power struggle in which those false and bizarre ideas of who we are and how we flourish try to impose themselves on society. And the pushback against such imposition gets ugly.
If all that has a familiar ring to it, it’s because it describes the situation in which the western world too often finds itself today. That is why it is serious bad news if religious communities embrace the distortions of the human condition taught by gender theory, critical racial theory, and other ideologies of power that deny the truths built into the world and into us.
As C.S. Lewis observed, our spiritual natures demand nourishment. Denied healthy food, they will ingest poison, to the detriment of both authentic religion and democratic public life.
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George you did it again! A fine,intelligible, well written analysis of our political system and its current flaws. Thanks and God bless.
After many years of contemplation on this subject, I have concluded that the Constitution, although devised by Protestant, is a Catholic document. I once took a class in Educational Philosophy which was taught be two Marxists. They admitted their ideology. One professor made this claim, that the Constitution was based on a “cynical view of human nature.” The Constitution separates the power government and specifically enumerates them so that the governors do not abuse their powers. That is, the Founding Fathers knew that people are flawed and cannot always be trusted to follow the moral law. In other words, they referred to Original Sin, even though the term never appears in the document. Communists and other utopians, on the other hand, dismiss the notion of Original Sin, and fashion ideologies totally in denial about what evil humans can do, even under the best conditions fashioned by them.
Eisenhower added the words “under God” to the pledge of allegiance. And openly prayed for a break in the weather before the Normandy invasion. He was a man of faith.
Eisenhower was spoken of as a ‘smiling dunce’, pretty much the same was said of Ronald Reagan.
With all due respect, or as much as I can muster – how does one describe the present occupant of The White House? In his graduation speech at Howard University a few weeks ago he gave us the breathless news that “The biggest danger facing America today is – White Supremacy.”
Which for some reason reminds me of my favorite t-shirt, which I have had since 2,000 – It states – “Only in America does a homeless vet sleep in a cardboard box while a draft-dodger sleeps in the White House.”
ALTERNATIVE HISTORY?
1. When it became known that Hitler’s government began euthanizing disabled German adults and children, the Catholic bishops publicly condemned this in 1941 and forced Hitler’s goverment to cease its euthanization program. I’ve heard it is the only time that the Hitler dictatorship ever backed down to public pressure from the German people.
2. But in 1935 when the Hitler government passed laws terminating the citzenship of Jews in Germany (even if they and their families had been good German citizens for many generations), the Catholic bishops made no protest.
3. It was this removal of citizenship of German Jews that made it legal for the Hitler government to ship German Jews to concentration camps for extermination. Without citizenship, German Jews could not appeal to courts or police for protection.
4. If the Catholic bishops had publicly protested ther termination of the citizenship of German Jews, maybe there never would have been a Holocaust.
5. Of course, in 1935 no one knew that the Hitler government would carry out mass murder of German Jews and Jews in other countries.
6. Even so, the sheer injustice of having citizenship of millions of people terminated simply on the basis of race, with no other country for these people to go to, should, I think, have been enough to move the German Catholic bishops to speak out on behalf of the German Jews who were left without a nation and without the protection of the German laws.
7. Of course, today, bishops and the pope would protest and condemn any mass cancellation of citizenship in any country.
8. What’s the difference now as compared to the 1930s and 1940s?
9. First, everyone knows that the Holocaust occurred, right in the heart of Europe.
10. Second, the Vatican II Council charged the Church with being much more outspoken regarding human rights and social justice.
11. I think this indicates that a big driver of the Vatican II Council was the recollection of the Holocaust, along with the specter of a global Holocaust by means of nuclear war.
12. All this leads me to some speculations: What if the German bishops and popes had more strongly condemned Hitler’s government? Maybe Hitler’s rule would have ended earlier. Maybe World War II would have never happened. Maybe World War II in Europe would have never happened. And then the Vatican II Council, with all its deleterious effects, would have never happened.
13. Is this wild speculation? Yep.
14. Still, I just wish the Catholic bishops would have protested loudly and forcibly when Hitler took away the citizenship of the German Jews. That might have change everything.
All of your premises are false. The Nazis never ended their euthanasia program. Many bishops in Germany did condemn the denial of citizen rights to Jews, including the future Pope Pius XII, and if you think even greater forcefulness would have made the slightest difference to the orchestration of the Holocaust, you’re trying very hard to live with a superficial understanding of the social, cultural, and political reality of Nazi Germany.
The cold reality is that nothing would have stopped the Nazis other than what was done. Except an out and out miracle. I am not saying people should have done nothing except pray for a miracle. I am happy for people like Corrie ten Boom and her family who did what they could.
Ike wouldn’t recognize the place today.
Now, if can only get George Weigel to face the real consequences for Catholic moral witness 60 years after VII to have a Pope who has unambiguously denied immutable truth, maybe he can become as productive in his public commentary as his skills would allow him to be.
“There, the president-elect declared that “our form of government [makes] no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.””
Eisenhower must have been very ignorant concerning Islam. If Muslims were a significant power in this nation they would institute Sharia “Law” and non-Muslims would be, at best, second class citizens.
But there are other false religions which are of great concern as well. It is possible that Eisenhower didn’t, in his heart, identify as Christian, but rather a form of “anti-Christianity.” (To not be too explicit.) Conspiracies do happen.
Eisenhower’s statement above is a prime example of philosophical/religious liberalism. Error has no rights, so neither to people have a right to embrace error.
The Catholic Church has always taught that it alone is the path of salvation. It is the domination of The United States by the Catholic faith which will save it materially and spiritually.
“Public life then becomes, not an ongoing, rational conversation about how we should live together, but a power struggle in which those false and bizarre ideas of who we are and how we flourish try to impose themselves on society.”
Better wording is “HOW WE OUGHT TO LIVE.” As for “false and bizarre ideas,” these things don’t “just happen.” Until effective lawsuits or law enforcement start to “roll back the curtain” and expose/punish what is likely secret machinations and until we give up the public worship of “free speechism” (i.e. license of speech) then the country will be powerless against the demoralization of the country by means of those who have access and control over the dominant idea transmission institutions.
And talk is just the beginning in this matter. Talk that leads to no effective action (i.e. punishment) is a part of the problem.
“Our politics today suffer from a want of ‘metaphysics’.” I doubt that the implications of that statement are often fully digested by the reading audience. This is a topic that John Paul II described in CROSSING THE THRESHOLD OF HOPE. The men of the Enlightenment followed the philosophy of thought, while turning their backs on Aquinas’ philosophy of existence — of metaphysics. Their behavior is mirrored in today’s conflict in Ukraine, where another dictator pursues the philosophy of thought, while being far removed from an understanding of metaphysics — that is, while suffering from a want of metaphysics, as our excellent and perceptive Mr. Weigel turns the phrase. (I’m slowly making the long trek through your superb biography of John Paul II, WITNESS TO HOPE. I highly recommend the book.)