Walter Lippmann “The New Republic”—whose founding editor Walter Lippmann outgrew radical “new psychology” to found a conservative “public philosophy” based on natural reason—graced the Fifth of July with a breathless review of some new books arguing that the American founding fathers were flaming “free thinkers.” The purpose of this agnostic bombast was, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, to stick a finger in the eyes of conservative Christians who see the American founding as a sacred event. In truth, most of the Founders were moderate Deists, meaning that they believed in a benevolent but removed deity who crafted the universe’s natural laws. They had left behind dogmatic Calvinism, but were far removed from the authentic atheism of radical Enlightenment thinkers like Julien Offray de La Mettrie who wrote L’homme machine or “The Human Mechanism” (c. 1750). At the popular level, the American Revolution if not the Constitution was rooted in evangelical religion. There might have been a Revolution without freethinking Tom Paine (who nevertheless admired Quakers), but it would have been impossible without the religious enthusiasm unleashed by George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and the First Great Awakening that convinced many colonists that George III was the Antichrist. After the Revolution, the Jeffersonian Republican Party relied on the popular support of anti-religious establishment Baptists and Methodists. This is not so surprising given recent scholarship showing that Jefferson himself was not a Deist but a Unitarian who believed in a large moral agency for a heroic if not divine Jesus. After Deism went into eclipse, Unitarianism and “the New England conscience” remained a powerful spur to reform movements including both temperance and antislavery. This history matters because, as far as I know, there has been no human rights movement in American history without a religious dynamic. This was true of Progressive social reform of the early twentieth century and of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. It might seem not to be true of the labor movement of the New Deal Era, but even that had a serious theological component in Reinhold Niebuhr and the Catholic Worker Movement. (more…)
Haim Nahman Bialik “Commentary” and other outlets are condemning the “New York Times” for distorting the clear meaning of Haim Nahman Bialik’s poem, “On the Slaughter” (1903), about the Kishinev Massacre to slander Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu called—contrary to the “Times”—for foregoing revenge in the wake of the kidnap-murder of three Jewish teenagers. He quoted the lines: “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.” The full verse—“And cursed be he that shall say: avenge this! Fit revenge for blood of small children on earth Satan has yet to bring forth”—makes clear it is an injunction against vengeance not for it. Later, in “The City of Slaughter,” Bialik wrote: “The sun shone, the acacia blossomed, and the slaughterer slaughtered.” We might add “And the ‘New York Times’ lied and lied” by commission and omission about the Holocaust—and continues to do so about Israel.