ABSTRACT
Several tendencies have characterized conventional scholarship as it relates to America’s founding. One is to discount or downplay the role of religion in the founders’ and framers’ political thought. Another is its relative failure to grasp the unique manner, among religions of the world, in which both Judaism and Christianity presuppose the importance of freedom of conscience (as evidenced, for example, by Jesus’s teaching, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”). Central to the argument of this chapter is to observe the founders’ understanding of human nature – an understanding that countenanced in human nature both dignity and depravity. This understanding, in turn, helps us interpret their view of the role of government and politics. And it also sheds light on the two differing narratives of the American founding – one being the conventional secularist rendition of the founding and the other probing the wider religious presuppositions of the great majority of the founders and framers. A central issue in an accurate construal of this narrative is to make proper sense of the metaphor of the “wall” that is thought to “separate” church and state. The chapter, proceeding on the assumption that reflecting on the founders’ vision is instructive, concludes with Tocquevillian reflections on the possibility of a “majoritarian tyranny.”
