Review
Michael Novak: On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001.
Originally published in The Washington Times, January 30, 2002.

In arguing for a renewed recognition of the religious dimension of the American founding, the eminent Catholic scholar Michael Novak navigates a rocky coastline, Although the Founders explicitly and repeatedly refer to Nature’s God, our Creator, and divine Providence, readers of their correspondence know that some of them defined `God,’ `Creator,’ and `Providence’ in decidedly heterodox ways. Many of the founders unquestionably remained faithful to Christian teachings–the Reverend John Witherspoon of New Jersey and the philanthropist John Jay of New York being among the finest examples. But Thomas Jefferson privately denied the divinity of Christ and defended materialism, and the logic of Benjamin Franklin’s portrait of the great preacher George Whitefield inclines toward blasphemy.

Even if one argues, as Novak does, that the orthodox outnumbered the heterodox, probably among the Founders and surely among the people they represented, how should one understand this, especially today? If the founding was a Christian event simply, does that not leave Jewish, Moslem, and other non- and un-Christian Americans on the outside looking in, at odds with their own country? In redeeming the founders’ Christianity do we undermine their authority among too many Americans now?

Fortunately, Novak proves a skillful pilot. His carefully-drawn navigational chart features two coordinates one religious and one philosophic. Together, they guide us home.

The first coordinate consists of a spirited but never overly sectarian religious polemic, determining biblical points obscured by secularist weather. For example, Novak rightly observes that the founders do not simplistically set Biblical revelation against human reason. They knew that Jesus Himself commands His followers to exhibit the prudence of serpents as well as the harmlessness of doves. The Founders’ Enlightenment was not the Enlightenment of Voltaire; it was the Enlightenment of Locke, a man ever at pains not to tread heavily on Christian sensibilities. The spiritedness that spirituality lends to reason gives strength to the quest for liberty, which might otherwise run to anarchy, on one extreme, or curl up in terror at its enemies, on the other. Christian faith honors the marriage bond, providing stable homes for the inculcation of virtues that free men and women will need, given the dangers of living in freedom. Christians hold themselves under the scrutiny of an all-seeing God; insofar as they do, they are likely to behave better than citizens who suppose that they have no stern if forgiving Judge.

To skeptics who might reply that such a defense of Christianity smells more of utility than piety, Novak has a ready reply. No less a Christian, and no less a mathematician, than Pascal deems faith a prudent wager. What is more supremely useful than the one thing most needful for the salvation of your soul? And where is the impiety of acknowledging such utility?

This religiouse-polemical coordinate of Novak’s chart, taken by itself, might navigator and crw off course. Novak too easily overlooks the radical, Machiavellian challenge to Christianity embedded in the writings of such modern natural-rights philosophers as Hobbes and Locke, to say nothing of their march-of-history descendant-critics, Hegel and Marx, who do not merely secularize Christian providentialism but transform it into a vast and (as it turned out in practice) disastrous attempt to conquer God’s creation and eradicate religion itself. So, to say that the Founders share the biblical understanding that something called `history’ undergoes something called `progress’ entirely misses a simple fact: neither the Bible nor the Founders speak of `history’ as an ontological object. The Declaration of Independence speaks of “the course of human events,” not `history.’ For the Founders, history remains what it was for Aristotle: a literary genre, distinguished from poetry (for example). History is not a process moving inexorably toward the realization of Utopia–an illusion prepared by Machiavelli’s tempting suggestion that one might conquer Fortune. If it were, Leninist fanaticism would have taken firmer hold here, and Washingtonian common sense would have disappeared long ago.

Other examples of religious-polemical overstretch may be seen in such claims that “the very form of the Declaration was that of a that of a traditional prayer” (rather more a logical syllogism and a legal indictment, actually); that faith better than reason fortifies us in performing those acts of virtue no one else can see (that depends upon the nature of the soul performing the acts); that Alexander Hamilton’s refutation of the materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes implies or requires a Christian understanding of natural right (several non-materialist philosophical doctrines will do). The worst of these distortions comes in the charge that pre-Christian philosophers saw no foundation for equality in nature, that previous human thought on natural right justified conquest and slavery. A careful reading of Aristotle’s teachings on slavery and just war belies this claim, and the philosopher’s understanding of political life as reciprocal ruling and being-ruled contradicts it as well. The Founders could find equality and hierarchy in nature, rationally, even as the ancient philosophers had done.

Novak’s second navigational coordinate corrects such excesses of zeal. The philosophic dimension of his study refines and redefines the meaning of faith. “I am using `faith’ for all propositions about God,” he writes, “even those that in earlier times would have been reached by pre-Christian `pagan’ philosophers who wrote of God.” That is, Novak intends to recover for reason the terrain philosophers imprudently ceded when they cut themselves off theoretically from metaphysics and practically from the commonsense reasoning of classical ethics and political science. The dogmatic atheism of the continental Enlightenment and of German historicism left their proponents stranded on the shoals of tyrannical fanaticism–from Robespierre to Pol Pot. Novak would reclaim the saner reaches of political reasoning.

Doing so yields excellent results, two of which speak to a familiar dilemma in contemporary American politics. Our political landscape has been wracked by storms caused by the icy wind of secularism meeting the warmer wind of religiosity. School prayer, church-state separation, abortion, and censorship of pornography all seem matters of insoluble controversy between determine and irrational partisans. Yet, as Novak indicates, the Founders saw their way clear of such perils.

First, recognizing that no sectarian appeals could persuade many of their fellow Americans (then as now given to diverse religious opinions), Christian statesmen in and out of the pulpit had recourse to that part of the Bible all denominations honored: the Jewish part, the `Old’ Testament, whose eternal newness they acknowledged. “The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation”; one need not agree on, say, the relations among the persons of the Trinity to revere the virtues of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, those wise and courageous nation-builders. Then as now, American could offer political participation to all `the peoples of the Book.’

Second, recognizing that not everyone is a person of the Book, but that unbiblical persons may still bring considerable virtues to public life, the Founders established their new regime “in carefully modulated language, which could be understood by freethinking atheists in one way by `broadminded’ Unitarians such as Jefferson in another, and by devout Presbyterians such as Witherspoon and partially secularized Puritans as John Adams in yet others.” “While the American eagle rises on both wings, some individuals use both wings comfortably, but others feel at home only on the propulsion of one or the other.” One might add that the eagle’s head, which commands both wings and gives them direction, cries out in the accents of the Declaration of Independence, the accents of a reason that encompasses parts of Revelation.

Natural right, understood as the gift of the Creator-God (however conceived in the privacy of conscience) will be secured by citizens who prudently deliberate with one another about the political institutions and policies they pursue and courageously defend against tyrants who deny and defy natural right. On this point the American Founders can continue to teach us, even as their Constitution, amended, governs us. On this point too, Novak navigates well, so that we can better govern ourselves.

Article published September 1982

NOTE: In August 1982, about 18 months into the Reagan Administration, former president Richard Nixon published an article titled “Hard-headed Détente” in the New York Times. The following response was distributed to newspapers by Public Research, Syndicated. 

Remembering their years in office, retired politicians bask in nostalgia’s warming rays. The golden afternoons when they wielded power seem so very much finer than the present, where dawn, noon, and twilight all come in shades of grey. Political memoir invite us to share the glory, on condition that we too remember those days as glorious, those men as masters of statecraft.

Richard Nixon partakes of this understandable tradition. He prefers not to dwell on domestic misadventure, of course. But foreign policy, always his greater enthusiasm, still mesmerizes him. He hopes that his account of his conduct will inspire us to similar action today. Such inspiration would guarantee him his coveted redemption in `history’ and, he doubtless believes, advance the interests of his country.

This requires Mr. Nixon to defend his principal foreign policy, détente with the Soviet Union. In a recent article in the New York Times, he argues for détente much as he did during his presidency.

He claims that détente reduces “the danger of nuclear war,” and of all war. At the same time, it “engag[es] the Soviet Union in those fields in which we have an overwhelming advantage”: the rich fields of economic and intellectual liberty. “Those critics who would have us scuttle détente and return to narrow confrontation are urging a form of unilateral disarmament,” by “depriv[ing] us of many of our most effective diplomatic weapons.” Although he scorns what he calls “soft-headed” détente, which would tempt the soviets with carrots while leaving the stick at home, he celebrates “hard-headed” détente, his détente, whereby trade and cultural exchange dovetailed, as it were, with military deterrence.

He admits that détente turned out badly, citing the resultant American disadvantage in land-based nuclear missiles, Soviet domination of southeast Asia, Angola, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, “and the cruel snuffing out of Poland’s flickers of freedom.” But he insists that “The failure was not of détente but rather of the management of détente by United States policy makers,” the sadly inadequate men who always seem to follow any retired politician’s incumbency. With his memories Mr. Nixon also offers a promise: today, “in the broader context of détente, with an intricate mixture of both positive and negative incentives, the Soviet Union will respond. As it did in the early 1970’s it will moderate its behavior.”

We too must tie today’s policies to our memories. But we cannot afford Mr. Nixon’s understandable nostalgia. Détente failed because it misconceived not only the nature of the Soviet Union but the nature of America. The disasters that overtook Presidents Ford and Carter issued from Mr. Nixon’s policy, not only from mere clumsiness in carrying it out.

It was during the Nixon Administration that America gratuitously promised to refrain from building missiles that would threaten the Soviets’ land-based arsenal; in return, the Soviets accelerated their plans to do exactly that to us. It was during the Nixon Administration that the Soviets organized guerrillas in Africa and the Middle East, drawing a circle around our major oil supplier. It was during the Nixon Administration that the Soviets increased their exploitation of trade and cultural exchange for purposes of espionage. The harvest came later, but the crop was irrigated then.

More important, “hard-headed” détente encouraged an atmosphere in which “soft-headed” détente could thrive. Mr. Nixon remembers when he and Mr. Brezhnev “regularly clinked champagne glasses to celebrate agreements.” “We smiled at one another in public,” he writes, after “bargain[ing] hard” in private. True, but in America the public event eclipses the private one; Americans see the appearance, and hope for the best. In the Soviet Union, the hopes of the audience mean little, and no one believes public appearances, anyway.

A political atmosphere that encourages “soft-headed” détente allows “soft-headed” politicians to gain electoral victories. One need only remember Mr. Carter, and his naïve dismissal of his predecessors’ “inordinate fear of communism.”

Economic realities mirror these political ones. Mr. Nixon fails to cite even one example of a Soviet military concession in the face of an economic sanction , threatened or enacted. (He cites military threats). He argues, reasonably, that we cannot force the Soviet economy to collapse by refusing to trade, as some of today’s optimists suggest. But he ignores the fact that we cannot significantly influence the Soviets by trade, either, and for the same reason: their economy runs on command, not demand. Within limits, they can do much as they please, come feast or famine. Because our economy runs on demand, we find that our corporations resist economic sanctions, and they thereby contribute to the very “soft-headed” détente Mr. Nixon abhors.

Détente, as conceived by Mr. Nixon, was mismanaged by American presidents for a simple reason: it was unmanageable. The nature of the American political and economic system exerted pressures on our presidents unequal to the pressures exerted on the Kremlin. By weakening America and strengthening the Soviet Union, détente may have brought us closer to war, or to capitulation without war.