ROGER KIMBALL: Easter Reflections: George Washington’s Farewell Address in Today’s America.
We modern sophisticates tend to blush when the subject of religion is broached. We mewl about “the separation of church and state” and wait for the moment we can utter the word “fundamentalist” to dismiss our opponents.
George Washington, however, was not a member of that anti-Christian church. Indeed, in one of the most famous passages of the Farewell Address, he stipulates that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” In case we didn’t get it the first time, he proceeds to drive the point home. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”
Okay, he says we ought to have regard for morality. For such an Enlightenment figure as George Washington, morality surely does not encompass or stand upon religion.
But it does. “Let us with caution,” he writes, “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Well, that was then. We’ve made such progress since 1796. We have embraced our hatred and antipathies with uncommon zeal, to the point where the words “secession” and “national divorce” are once again circulating in earnest. A snarling partisan spirit is alive and rancorous. We have in all essentials transformed ourselves from a republic into an oligarchy, trampling on such quaint guardrails as the separation and disbursement of powers. We have loaded ourselves—or, rather, we have been loaded—with eye-watering, incomprehensible mountains of debt. And we have loudly rejected the claims of traditional morality and religion as so many otiose and unprogressive holdovers from a discredited past.
Like those crosses outlined in light on the Manhattan skyline at night, George Washington’s exhortations and admonitions are residues of a lost and probably unrecoverable past. What that means for us now and in the future is sobering to contemplate. But this is Easter, a holiday commemorating a miracle. That is good, because we are going to need one.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Speaking of those “crosses outlined in light on the Manhattan skyline at night:”
