AND ANOTHER THING
The 21st-century problem: bringing back God the Policeman
PAUL JOHNSON
It is odd that an American, and a distin- guished historian too, should imagine that democracy and a firm belief in God are somehow incompatible. The British colonies in America were originally found- ed, in part at least, for religious purposes, and the Great Awakening — talking-to- God religion at its most intense — was the emotional and spiritual engine of the American Revolution, which created the United States. The overwhelming majority of the men who shaped it believed that their country had come into existence as a direct result of providential intervention.
The day after the House of Representa- tives passed the First Amendment, guaran- teeing religious freedom, it gave a two-to- one majority to a resolution appointing a day of national prayer and thanksgiving. It read: 'We acknowledge with grateful hearts the many signal favours of Almighty God, especially by affording [us] an opportunity peacefully to establish a constitutional gov- ernment for [our] safety and happiness.' That was the origin of the American public holiday of Thanksgiving, which President Washington inaugurated with the words: 'It is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful to His mercy [and] to implore His protection and favor.'
These sentiments were not merely spiri- tual but utilitarian. The Founding Fathers believed that their Republic would not work without religion, and the need for faith and morals became all the greater as the elites shared power with the people. James Madison, chief author of the United States Constitution, imbibed the philoso- phy of his Princeton teacher, John Wither- spoon, that politics could not be ethical (as opposed to Machiavellian), except on the basis of religious distinctions between vice and virtue. As Benjamin Franklin wrote to Tom Paine, rebuking him for dismissing the need for religion: `If men are wicked with religion, what would they be without it?' Hence the United States was a secular state born and nurtured in a society where reli- gious belief and practice were virtually uni- versal. That is why Tocqueville, analysing it half a century later, concluded that 'reli- gion . . . must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country'. Americans, he said, held religion `to be indis- pensable to the maintenance of republican institutions' — above all, democracy itself.
The truth is, religion is the principal ally of democracy — I speak of course of reli- gion in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Philo Judaeus, the first-century philoso- pher, specifically equated religion with `democracy', which he described as 'the most law-abiding and best of constitutions'. He defined democracy as a form of govern- ment which 'honours equality and has law and justice for its rulers'. Here he put his finger on a central point of constitutional government. No system, least of all democ- racy in the one-man-one-vote sense, can function without the rule of law, and as Philo says, that rule is itself religious in ori- gin. Religion is essential to democracy for functional reasons, both crude and subtle. Locke reflected a general belief that those who kept God's commandments prospered, as a rule: 'Virtue', he wrote, 'is now visibly the most enriching purchase, and by much the best bargain.' But he also noted that the stronger the religious restraints on man's bad behaviour, the less needful were harsh secular laws. After his day, this view was confirmed when the decline of God-fearing in the 18th century obliged parliament to enact scores of statutes imposing the death penalty for a variety of offences.
I wish it were more generally understood, on both sides of the Atlantic, that strong religious sentiment makes good government infmitely easier, and that it pays all those in authority to do everything in their power to hear that the unspeakable hired the unelectable.' support religion and institutionalised moral- ity. I may be a bad man — I sometimes think I am — but I would be far worse without my religion. Faith and the morality it enjoins make me far more likely to observe the law than fear. And this is true of most of us. Essentially, we keep the law because we believe it is wrong, rather than dangerous, to break it. Our law-abiding springs from a reli- gious impulse. Fear of the Lord, as the Bible (almost) says, is the beginning of good citi- zenship. It is the origin of civic wisdom. How fortunate for us all it should be so! For the alternative to fear of the Lord is fear of the law, and that means huge police forces, vast prisons and an infinity of laws. Moreover, while fear of the Lord is intangible and therefore immune to human weakness, the police are corruptible and usually inefficient, prisons are more likely to be schools of crime than reformatories, and human laws are often unjust, ineffectual or produce con- sequences the opposite to those intended. Thomas Hobbes rightly observed that 'the freedom of the subject is the silence of the law'; and laws are at their most silent when there exists, in the minds of the people, a Leviathan `to keep them all in awe'. What better Leviathan than God and His commandments?
In the 20th century we have liberalised the penal system without doing anything to strengthen the religious impulses which form an alternative to harsh laws. The fig- ures speak with a powerful voice about the results. Between 1857 and 1901, a period of strong religious belief, the annual rate of indictable offences fell from about 480 per 100,000 of the population to 250. During the 20th century, a period of declining religious belief and legal liberalisation, it rose from 250 to a staggering 10,000 in 1991 — a forty- fold increase. It is likely that by the end of the century people in Britain will be propor- tionately committing 50 times as many offences as they were at its beginning. It is a horrible fact that, beyond a certain point, an increase in crime makes democracy, or any other civilised system of government, unworkable and insupportable. I wish that Professor Schlesinger, and the Anglo-Amer- ican liberal elites who think like him, would recognise that a strong religious impulse, however distasteful they may personally find it, is indispensable to an orderly society, especially a free and democratic one. The real problem for the 21st century is: 'How do we bring back God the Policeman?'
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