Aspen Ideas: A Shared Civic Gospel

0:00This week on Up First, President Trump heads to the NATO summit with a stark warning for Iran. make a deal or the U.S. will, quote, finish the job. We're tracking what the escalating tension means for energy prices. Plus, a critical Senate race upended as Democrat Graham Plattner faces sexual assault allegations. That's this week on Up First. Listen every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:31The Declaration of Independence marked the start of our American experiment just over 250 years ago. Does that document still hold central tenets of who we are as a nation? Deep political polarization has made that question murkier than perhaps ever before. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the What A Podcast. Last month at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I sat down with three people to ask what a shared civic gospel for our country looks like today and what still stands in its way. You'll hear that conversation right after this short break. Stay with us.

1:09This week on Shortwave, could your next ride to the airport be in a flying taxi? So you open up your Uber app and you've got UberX and UberPet and now there'll be UberAir. That reality may be only a few years away. But how is this futuristic travel possible? Find out on Shortwave NPR Science Podcast. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air. Catch my interview about the birth of the culture wars. Even breakfast cereals have become part of the culture wars. Author Isaac Butler takes us back to when the Christian right mobilized against provocative art.

1:49Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. The fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years. This is open in your face. How are there no answers? Our investigation has uncovered new evidence and witnesses who say they've never talked to police. Did police ever call you? Not once. Listen to We Keep Us Safe, a new true crime series on the Embedded Podcast from NPR.

2:41Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute and a professor of strategy and statecraft with the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He's also the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal. To start, I asked Jane what she means when she calls the Declaration of Independence a shared civic gospel. If we are a creedal nation, the Declaration is our creed, and we're interested at Monticello and at many other places in this semi-quincentennial year about what it means to renew our vows to that creed. So I think the declaration in the capacious way that my colleague Danielle Allen interprets it belongs to every single person in the world and also emanates uniquely from the United States is our statement of vision.

3:32So we hold these truths. What does it mean to hold them? I think that proposition and then asking that question and finding collectively those practices is what it means to infuse a new century with the Declaration as a civic gospel again. Well, Walter and David, I want to hear your thoughts on Jane's description of the Declaration of Independence as a civic gospel. Walter, I'll come to you first. Growing up, I grew up in the American South and not always a particularly good time. but I never met anybody until I think I went up north who told me they thought that the United States was a creedal nation.

4:15People would say, gee, well, why am I an American? Because I was born here, because there's no one else who would let me in, because this is home. And I guess I thought of myself as being an American in the same way somebody in Czechia would think they were checked. So I've always been bemused by things like the House Un-American Activities Committee, which makes sense if you have the idea of a creedal nation, that there are some actions that are congruent with who we are and some that are not. But it always struck me as a little strange. Now, I understand that for a lot of people, they do see themselves in this connection, that that's a kind of a way that people understand their American identity.

5:02I guess I've come to the place where I think Americans have lots of different ways of thinking about what it means to be an American, and that's part of it. David, what about you? I'm going to agree that I think most people don't actually spend a whole lot of time thinking about their own citizenship. But where the creed really begins to matter to an extraordinary degree is when you start to have those arguments about who is and who is not in the community, and who is and who should be and who should not be in the community. And I love the idea of that key language from the Declaration of Independence as being a kind of civic gospel.

5:46I also think of it as just a beautiful idea. And without this beautiful idea, America is simply not America. I think America would be a less just country, dramatically less just country. For example, if you're going to look at the American people, we are not better human clay than the human clay all over the world. We're just not. We're not a better class of human being. We are prone to engage in all of the worst oppressions that we have seen throughout human history, from slavery to the conquest of Native American lands, et cetera, et cetera. You can go and do the indictment all day long. However, one thing that we have had since 1776 was the beautiful idea with which to contrast the actions of the people.

6:34So you always have right there and buzzing in the back of your ear, in the back of your mind is, is this consistent with, we're endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And so all of those who've been aiming towards that civic gospel, that beautiful idea, have always had an advantage over the long term in these arguments about American identity. Because what is American identity? American identity is the ability to assent to and to agree with the beautiful idea. Jane, as we have this discussion about whether there needs to be or even can be a creed for our nation. How do you think we reckon with the reality that this nation didn't answer the original call of the Declaration of Independence?

7:27David just laid out some examples there. So the nation began to answer the original call before the ink was dry, right? The Declaration is a document of election, right? They are electing one pass over the other. But only certain people were allowed on that path. And that's what I'm speaking about. Only certain people were allowed on that path in the political world, right? The statement of universal equality, that was in the pre-political world, right? That's the state of nature. That's the human clay. Everybody is entitled to that equally. In the political world, while almost everybody was called upon to affect that revolution, including people who did not own themselves, including women, including poor men, not everybody could be electors under the constitution.

8:13But before the ink is dry, people who are not meant to be included in its political community begin using it as a tool in their rights struggles by petition, by lawsuits, by social movement. For women, especially in evangelical churches at the very beginning, organizing under this statement of rights which they want to take into the political world and say, I want me some of that. So the tension obviously is there from the beginning, right? I don't know. I'm not a quantitative political scientist, but maybe one in 10, one in 20 people in the self-declared United States could exercise the franchise.

8:54Maybe fewer, right? One in a thousand could go to college. It's not an equality of condition statement, but it is like the green light at the end of Gatsby's doc and people start reaching for it from the get-go. Walter, I'd love to hear your thoughts as well, because it seems like you're a little more skeptical about the idea of the Declaration of Independence as a civic gospel. Well, maybe some of it is an allergy to the language civic gospel. The country, absolutely the idea of equality is a part of American culture that in many ways antedates the revolution and that they were expressing. I would agree that this sort of drive to a flattening of hierarchies and of seeing inequalities, legal inequalities as a problem is very much there.

9:51I'm not sure how much it comes from the actual document or from the sentiments behind the document. There are lots of countries who have extremely noble founding documents and glorious constitutions. I think the Stalin Constitution of the 1930s might be the most idealistic document ever produced. But it was so far from the genuine conditions that made it that over time it just fell flat and people walked away. So I wouldn't want to say there's, I love the words, I love the Declaration of Independence, but I wouldn't want to say that there's a magic in some ways in that document. Rather, that document was capturing something that was already there in the American people.

10:40Jefferson says so, right? It's only an expression of the American mind. Yes, exactly. David, how is our modern understanding of civics related to faith in this country? It's extraordinarily contentious on every front. And so, you know, we are living in a time where we're locked in the middle of battles over history. And unfortunately, a lot of these battles over history are not being conducted in good faith necessarily. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to enlist history into your present cause. And history is messy. It's difficult. There's a lot we still don't know and understand.

11:15I mean, one of the things we're seeing as the Supreme Court is wrestling in a very difficult way with the history around just the Second Amendment and gun laws in this country. It's very, very complicated. So we're in this moment where we're trying to yank history into our side. But I think that one thing that is very important is we absolutely cannot be afraid to talk about and we cannot be afraid to deeply dive into the role of faith in the American founding and how it played a role. And because I think that we have sort of viewed it as like, okay, if we're gonna say that faith played a big role in the American founding, well, that's gonna code right.

11:51And if we're gonna say that, no, no, no, you're totally exaggerating how much of a role that the faith played in American founding, well, that's gonna code left. That's the overlay on the whole conversation that's kind of silences or intimidates or often leads to ignorance. And so I think we have to embrace the idea that this was, that faith was an absolutely critical aspect of the debate around the American founding. However, the way in which that debate played out is not the way we're debating faith very much now. Just as sort of a naked public square devoid of religious discourse would be utterly alien to the founders.

12:34Also, they would look at a lot of modern Christian movements and they would be confounded by those, just absolutely confounded. They were their own thing and they were different things. you can't just say what was the faith of the founders which founder at which period of in their life are we talking only about americans are we talking about the british and you know the the enlightenment thinkers say from from the uk john locke he his argument was suffused with faith so the way i have long thought about faith and the civics and the civic history of the american founding is you're just not going to know it unless you know the faith-based arguments behind it, but the faith-based arguments behind it actually don't bear a huge amount of resemblance to a lot of our contemporary fights.

13:24And yet it's something, as you said, that we're still debating. So Walter, do you think it's important at all, as we're trying to figure out the next hopefully 250 years of this country, to be at all connected to what the founding fathers intended when it comes to faith and its role in the formation of this country? I think we're a lot closer to them than we think sometimes. You know, culture, the language that we express our ideas changes more rapidly than the underlying culture that shapes our ideas, I think. So for example, a lot of the big religious differences between the founders at that time, where you had people who believed than what I would think of today.

14:10We might call today salvationist Christianity. Humanity is so deeply flawed that only a miraculous intervention by God becoming man or just in some other way, it takes a deep shakeup and without that, nothing works. And then sort of ethical Christianity, which is the moral teachings of the New Testament can provide a society with enough of a glue to hold it together. And I think many people in their daily lives, even today, sort of tack between these in various ways. They're not entirely mutually exclusive, but they're different emphases. And I think the sort of ethical Christianity became, particularly in the 50s and 60s, a kind of a civic bond.

15:06A lot of it was about integrating Catholics and Jews into kind of the American leadership system, because before that time, they really were sort of on the outside looking in. But there was a lot more agreement in, say, the 50s about what ethical standards meant. In France in the 1950s, the Catholic Church and the Communist Party of France were pretty much in agreement on social mores. Divorce is bad. Homosexuality is unspeakable. You know, the left was actually socially, on the whole, pretty kind of conformist. And so now that we have profound differences over what an ethical code would look like and what it means, it becomes much harder to think about what is an ethical generic bond that can hold the country together.

16:03I think this is one of our big problems today. I think it is to Aspen's great credit that I get to be the leftmost and least churched member of this panel, where this morning I was the rightmost and most sort of virtue ethics member of a progressive man. So I'm center left and I represent the home of the guy who coined the phrase wall between church and state in his letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802 who were fighting religious establishment under the banner of the First Amendment and so wrote to Jefferson who is an ardent proponent of freedom of conscience. and Jefferson agreed that a religious establishment was anathema in the United States and it only took the great state of Connecticut 30 more years to come to that conclusion.

16:54That said, I think every founder, every founder had a kind of small F faith in their common purpose and in the nation and that faith was moral. And I think it's a serious problem for the left in civics, for the center in civics, to avoid the language of virtue and values. So I'm really interested, as a lot of the work I do is as a civic educator, I'm part of a coalition called Educating for American Democracy, which is a pluralist, I would say it's a Bush to Obama coalition in political terms. So 80 % of our political spectrum. and we believe that it is important to embrace the language of national virtue and that language originally has a Christian substrate, just absolutely, or an Abramic substrate.

17:50Jefferson is also a person who collects the Quran and thinks very seriously about Hebrew scripture. So I think civically, the reason civics left the classroom in the late 1960s was because it was thought to be religion. and it was thought to be capital F faith. It was thought to violate by agitators on the left, the wall between church and state. Isn't that like religion? And therefore, shouldn't that be taught at home? Not unlike some of the current culture war tactics from the right now about gender or about divisive concepts. And civics is value-laden language because it's treating us, if not to speak a common creed or a common gospel, to affirm the virtue of belonging to a nation.

18:39We're listening to my conversation from the recent Aspen Ideas Festival on our founding documents and faith. We'll be back with more right after this break.

18:52For three weeks in 2020, part of my Seattle neighborhood was taken over by a protest occupation. We were here to protest police brutality. But it ended in tragedy. The whole space felt darker and angrier. Join me as I investigate the unsolved killing of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. Listen to We Keep Us Safe on the Embedded Podcast from NPR.

19:33Backyard Barbecue. Listen every week to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

19:41Back now to our conversation from the recent Aspen Ideas Festival about the role of faith in our nation's founding and whether our Declaration of Independence can serve as a unifying document for our future. Let's dive back in with my question to the panel about our nation's founders and morality. I want to just circle back to Jefferson for a moment because when we talk about him and other founders as men of faith or men who were trying to create sort of a moral foundation for the country, that lives alongside the fact that they were enslavers. And so I think for some people, when we talk about the founders, there is a friction there that is difficult to reconcile.

20:24That at once we're looking to them to provide a roadmap to morality when from the foundation of this country, there were deeply immoral things happening. And Walter, do you think there is a way to grapple with it, to come to some shared truth about it even? Well, I think one thing would just be that the founders were utterly normal in holding enslaved people, and that for thousands of years, that was the norm of human civilization. So that every great moral teacher you can think of either owned slaves or lived reasonably comfortably in a society in which slavery was a fact of life. Without slavery in ancient Athens, there's no Parthenon, there's no Plato, there's no Aristotle.

21:15And so the American Revolution came at this sort of amazing time when technological progress was getting us past the need real or perceived for any kind of civilization and cultivation to rest on forced labor. At the same time, there was a more systematic market-focused exploitation of people, which added new layers of cruelty and horror to what was already a very bad thing. So they're living in this period. You know, Alexander Hamilton was an abolitionist and joined an abolition society. Ben Franklin, this is the beginnings of a principled move to say that the institution of slavery is absolutely immoral and must be destroyed.

22:07So I think if we can read that history and see how different people, how they respond, we can learn from that. I think there are plenty of things that happen today that people a few hundred years from now, assuming that things continue to get generally better, you know, like really you guys could wear t-shirts that were made by people on starvation wages in Bangladesh and you talk about yourselves as moral people? Maybe our thinking about the founders and and then applying some of this logic to our own situation, I don't think it gives us an automatic, what's the moral path forward? Because it's really difficult.

22:50But I think we can and must enrich our understanding of the past to see how many of its dilemmas are actually much closer to our own experience than we might like to acknowledge. Jane, how are you dealing with that as you're doing your work at Monticello? Yeah, so that's our bread and butter, right? Is that we are given, if not perfect, perfectible things by imperfect men and women. That to me is the human condition. I first must say Jefferson's turning in his grave so much these days, but I think he can't be called a man of faith. I don't think that's a thing that he would have called himself except in the vaguest way.

23:31I think that he had a lot of wisdom on this question of exemplarity, right? If the core contradiction is, how can these guys be exemplars when they were so human and of their times? He was one of the great voices of, look not to me, but to you. He was not a builder of statues to himself. I want to recommend to the audience a magnificent and truly obscure book by Tracy McKenzie out of Wheaton College called We the Fallen People, you must know it, the broadly shared sense among the founders that they were making an imperfect offering because they were people born after the fall and of the fall. So we shouldn't give them a hubris that they didn't possess, right?

24:17I think it's important for us to live in the tension of imperfect men, and I think also Walter's baton pass to the present of what is the how could you that people will ask of us because it will come. One quick thing, because this reminds this very argument about the founding documents and their confrontation with slavery was part of the argument between Frederick Douglass, the great founder of the second founding, some of the more radical white abolitionists who wanted to just sort of chuck the constitutional system because the system that could coexist with slavery was illegitimate to its very roots.

24:55And Douglass was very emphatic that no, no, no, actually what this constitutional system does is it rebukes slavery. And that many of the founders who were the architects of this constitutional system knew that tension as they were writing these words. And so Douglass, like so many other representatives of pressed, marginalized people in American history, he was able to say, look, you put in the founding documents, the indictment for the reality of this country. And so therefore, what ends up happening is I get to be the patriot here. I get to be the one calling us to our highest ideals. And if you want to preserve the status quo, you are in contradiction of the actual creed of this country.

25:38And that has been a powerful argument for 200 plus years. And, you know, and so I think that this debate over could men who were full of vice also produce works of great virtue? Absolutely yes. Does the fact that they created a work of great virtue mean that they were not men of vice, that we should idolize them, that we should worship them? Absolutely not. See with all of our eyes open. And one of the things that was so frustrating to me in the recent past is we had this 1619 project that was answered by a 1776 project. And I was thinking, why are we saying one or the other? The history of America is the brutal reality of 1619 and the beautiful idea of 1776 and the collision between these two things for 250 years.

26:30And by God's grace and through the courage of a lot of people, we are a lot closer to the vision of 1776 right now than we are to the 1619 oppression. And I think it is no coincidence that we have a nation in which our founding documents indict oppression with every turn of the page. I'm the daughter of a minister. And so when I hear the word gospel, it means something very specific to me. It is innately religious. It is deeply held. It is something you share. But a 2023 survey from Pew Research found that about 28 % of U.S. adults say they are religiously unaffiliated. And that's compared to 16 % in 2007.

27:12So if we're calling the ideals that underpin the country's founding document a shared gospel, does it have to have religious underpinnings or can it be entirely secular? Walter? First of all, I would say that the idea that in the 18th century people were extremely religious and over time have gradually gotten less so is not a very good picture of the history of religion in America. In fact, the founding generation, I would say, was less religious than their parents and more religious than their children. You had the Kentucky Revivals, the evangelical waves that come early in the 19th century. In the 50s and 60s, the United States was a much more, at every level, we were more organized and fond of organizations as a people than we had been before.

28:05So American membership in religious congregations is at historically unprecedented levels in those days. Since then, we've become less affiliated. There are fewer members of Kiwanis clubs, perhaps, or, you know, bowling alone. There's a lot of disaggregation in American life. And that is actually more like a lot of our past. And many of the places that we think of as being the most religious, say the low country Tidewater South, right, part of the Bible Belt, actually has historically had very low levels of church membership. So I actually, I kind of think that a purely secular approach to the civic gospel is unlikely to last less because people might refute it than because I think human experience seems to show a deep sense that people need and want to feel connected to something transcendent and that their sense of what gives a political order legitimacy has something to do with it being in some way consonant with that sense of the transcendent, whether it's connected to a particular organized faith or any form of faith.

29:27But we live in a religiously pluralistic country and some of the most powerful voices in U.S. politics today identify as Christian. But we're also seeing this rise in white Christian nationalism and its influence in policy, in politics. And so David, I'm wondering what are some of the religiously based barriers you see to moving to a place where we have a shared civic gospel? That's a really good question. One of the barriers that we see actually, honestly, is a misconception that I see amongst a lot of my fellow evangelicals, that somehow an embrace of the Declaration, somehow an embrace of small-l liberalism, is a compromise with authentic Christianity.