The American government was a bold and radical statement against theocracy.
Here's what Walter Berns of the American Enterprise Institute says about it:
“The American Founders insisted on a separation of church and state not primarily because they wanted to accommodate the varieties of religious beliefs, but because they held it to be self-evident truth that all men were endowed with the natural rights of life, liberty, and the idiosyncratic pursuit of happiness. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, government is instituted by men (not God) in order ‘to secure these rights,’ and a government so instituted is indeed one founded on ‘genuinely secular moral presuppositions.’ I would go further, the very idea of natural rights is incompatible with Christian doctrine, and by its formulators, was understood to be incompatible. In fact, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were enemies of all revealed religions.”
“...To repeat: The foundation of this new politics, which we know as liberal democracy, was wholly secular. To what extent its philosophical and political founders (Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquie, et alia, and Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, et alia.) expected this new order to have to depend on organized religion to perform a civilizing role in it (to teach morality to its citizens) is a complicated subject I cannot explore here. I must say, however, without any supporting argument, that to a great extent it was expected that the commercial society, built on Lockean principles by way of Adam Smith, was intended to be a substitute for morality....”
Steve |
