through six administrations—spanning forty years, from 1789 to 1829—to solidify and extend that secular commandment into the twenty-first century. Now, under Trump, we can hear the tablets cracking.
2
Heaven, Earth, and the Mind
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.
—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
When Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in Cleveland, Ohio, in July 2016, his peroration brought down the house. It consisted of four one-syllable words, starting with his favorite: “I am your voice!” At a minimum, the punch line rang of hubris.
The founders would have gone further: they would have sensed the acrid odor of tyranny. In a republic, citizens must retain their voices and exercise their right to think for themselves. That principle was at the core of the founders’ philosophy, and had been inculcated in many of them from their youth. They guarded it like a shield to the end of their days.
When Thomas Jefferson retired to his beloved Monticello overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia, he had a large collection of busts and paintings of his heroes in history. The English Enlightenment was well represented. High on the parlor wall, near the entrance, were three portraits: Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism; Isaac Newton, the father of modern science; and John Locke, the father of liberalism. Jefferson called them “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.”1
By dubbing these eminences a trinity, Jefferson might have been taking a sly jab at religion in general and Christianity in particular. After all, he was one of the more forthright figures of the time and took a dim view of spiritual dogma.
Jefferson was a latter-day proponent of a radical movement at the end of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth whose adherents came to be called freethinkers. They trusted reason and logic, questioned conventional wisdom, and resisted conformity, especially religious doctrine.2
Over the decades, British philosophers, scientists, and political activists claimed mastery over their minds. By the eighteenth century, that ethos had permeated the intellectual climate of the British colonies in America. Thomas Paine, the English-born political theorist and pamphleteer for the Revolution, put the matter succinctly: “My own mind is my own church.”3
The personalization of faith was crucial to the liberalization of politics—most consequentially, in what would become the United States of America. Many major founders were steeped in political and philosophical ancient Greece and Rome, but they also turned to their ancestral country and its reformers and scientists of the preceding century. A thirty-year-old John Adams asserted that the people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”4 He was making the case for the sovereignty of individual thought. Freethinking, which had begun on the fringes of the early Enlightenment, was transformed to be an essential element of an American credo.
Throughout previous periods, piety was often fused with patriotism, and ecclesiastical and secular orders reinforced each other. Rulers exercised their authority in the name of an all-powerful divine force that favored and protected their realms and thrones. The effect often galvanized and stabilized communities that became nations, enabling them to make great strides in science, philosophy, morality, civics, culture, education, and governance. But for millennia, the authoritarian symbiosis between princes and priests set limits on individual thought and teaching.
As the Enlightenment modernized and rationalized governance, it also constrained religion from influencing politics, laws, diplomacy—and war. The Protestant Reformation weakened Catholicism’s claim to being the “universal” church of Christendom and limited the papacy’s extensive temporal power. The Wars of Religion, starting in the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years War, in the seventeenth, left millions dead.5 Prompted by exhaustion, the combatants came together to end religious wars in Europe in a diplomatic marathon that led to the Peace of Westphalia between May and October 1648.
Intellectuals and scientists of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe were more likely to question reigning orthodoxy if there was little risk of the ax, the gibbet, or the stake. They distributed their ideas while absorbing or disputing those of their peers.
The result was an international network of knowledge, often called the Republic of Letters. The unfettering of reason and imagination created a vast, kaleidoscopic configuration of science, philosophy, literature, music, architecture, theater, art, and medicine. At its center was the presumption that if answers to questions about the universe and humanity were to be found anywhere, they would only come from the mind of Homo sapiens sapiens, “man who knows that he knows.” The human being is also Homo curiosus: before questioning, exploring, experimenting, and inventing, Homo sapiens yearns to know what is not known.
In searching for new knowledge and testing the old, these pioneering thinkers gave wide scope to inquisitiveness and skepticism.
One of them, Francis Bacon, was a devout Anglican who composed holy meditations and religious tracts, while his scientific work concentrated on phenomena that he could see, measure, and prove. Although Bacon believed in God’s existence, he acknowledged that his rational methods could not prove it. He worshipped the almighty, all-wise creator of everything, but he did not look to the scriptures as he sought a way to explain the machinery of the universe.
Bacon’s experiments worked inductively from a controlled collection of facts to general principles. Though devout, he emboldened some scientists and other freethinkers to question religious faith and put their trust in empiricism. Anthony Pagden, a professor of intellectual history, has written that those who made the transition to scientific and philosophic secularism were entering a “fatherless world.”6
Enter Thomas Hobbes, growling. In his youth, Hobbes served Bacon as an amanuensis. While learning much from the renowned scientist, the two parted ways over Bacon’s straddling of spiritual faith and rigorous logic. Hobbes was a staunch materialist, with the firm belief that matter, including gray matter, matters, and that conjuring incorporeal concepts, including God, was a waste of time.7 Heaven and its celestial beings, he believed, were figments of imagination or, worse, superstitions foisted onto gullible minds.
Hobbes comes across in his writings as a philosophic curmudgeon of Enlightenment noir. He perceived “the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and his own birth the arrival of “the little worm.”8 Even moments of joy and mirth are viewed as schadenfreude or mere relief from misery: “Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.”9
In keeping with his grim, unforgiving view, Hobbes considered nature selfish, cruel, and ruthless competition. He was fond of the Latin proverb “Man is a wolf to man,”10 and he translated Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, with its bleak implication that history itself is an epic of disasters.11
To fend off chaos and “the war of all against all,” he envisioned Leviathan—a gargantuan, authoritarian state—after the sea creature that swallowed an errant Old Testament prophet as punishment for disobeying
