SUPERVISIÓN DE LA IMPLEMENTACIÓN DEL PLAN INTEGR
3. EL REGLAMENTO DEL PLAN INTEGRAL DE REPARACIONES El extenso Reglamento desarrolla los siguientes aspectos:
The man most closely associated with the separation of church and state is Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. third president, and emulator of John Locke. In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802, Jefferson gave the most succinct definition of this division:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.48
This letter reiterates the First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”—and this in turn reiterates the principles in Article VI, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution itself:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Unlike theists, who believe in the revealed truth of the Bible, Jefferson was a deist; that is, he believed God set the universe in motion and left it to unfold without further interference. He considered Christianity to be a perverse superstition, and held the Bible in such contempt that he wrote his own version, The Jefferson Bible, to distill Jesus’ sayings from the embellishments of his biographers. As Jefferson wrote to former president John Adams:
The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful, that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it; and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right from that cause to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine: In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.49
48
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Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jan. 1, 1802, <www.au.org/resources/ foundingdocs/Thomas_Jeffersons_Letter_To_The_Danbury_Baptists.pdf>.49
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Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, Jan. 24, 1814, in The Writings of ThomasJefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. XIV, pp. 71-72, reproduced at
Jefferson was not alone in his distaste for Christianity: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Paine, to name a few, disparaged it unreservedly. Even George Washington recognized the danger of a state religion and declared that the U.S. was not a Christian country per se:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims]—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.50
So far as the Framers were concerned, religion was purely personal and none of the state’s business. Freedom of religion and freedom from religion were both respected. For the state to take a position in favor of Christianity would have been tantamount to discriminating against non-Christians, thus making the concepts of personal liberty and religious freedom mutually contradictory. Therefore, Jefferson denied any political role for the clergy: “The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”51
Jefferson’s definitive separation of church and state became accepted as the standard of the American republic, and it is still the standard of its constitutional law. One would have to conclude that any act to violate this separation would be unconstitutional. This brings us back to Kristol, and his essay “American Conservatism, 1945-1995:”
There has been the emergence, over the past decades, of religion-based, morally concerned, political conservatism. In the long run, this may be the most important of all. Though the media persist in portraying the religious conservatives as aggressive fanatics, in fact their motivation has been primarily defensive–a reaction against the popular counterculture, against the doctrinaire secularism of the Supreme Court, and against a government that taxes them heavily while removing all traces of morality and religion from public education, for example, even as it subsidizes all sorts of activities and programs that are outrages against traditional morality. The religious faith behind this reaction has
50
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The Barbary Treaties: Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Article 11, Nov. 4, 1796, <www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/barbary/bar1796t.htm>. Washington’s support for this position may be inferred from the treaty’s passage during his presidency. Further support comes again from Jefferson: “Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law,”Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814, reproduced at From Revolution to Reconstruction, op. cit., <odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl227.htm> and at The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XIV, p. 91.
51
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Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Jeremiah Moor, Aug. 14, 1800, reproduced in ThomasJefferson – Political Writings, eds. Joyce Appelby and Terrence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge
7. Unholy Trinity
129been steadily gaining in both intensity and popularity, especially among Protestant evangelicals, and may well now have a dynamism of its own. It is not at all unimaginable that the United States is headed for a bitter and sustained Kulturkampf that could overwhelm conventional notions of what is and what is not political.52
When Jefferson wrote about the danger of letting the clergy meddle in politics, it was this kind of religious arrogance and Christian conceit he had in mind.53 Kristol condemned the government for committing “outrages” against traditional morality, yet Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine went out of their way to separate law, morality and Christian tradition. “Doctrinaire secularism” is similarly bogus. As we saw above, Kristol condemned the Supreme Court for refusing to allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms, but the Court did nothing less than what the Constitution required. According to the Elementary School Act of 1817: “No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.”54
Kristol’s condemnation of the government for removing “all traces of morality and religion from public education” must be recognized as a deliberate assault on the Constitution. The sedition is confirmed in the second part of the excerpt where Kristol proudly proclaims the intensity and popularity of the rising evangelical movement, as if to endorse the overthrow of the Supreme Court and the government.
Clearly, “neo-conservative” does not accurately describe Strauss, Kristol or the Jewish elites. They are not “neo,” because their belief structure is an eccentric pastiche of pre-existing ideas, principally from Hobbes, Filmer and pseudo-Locke. They are not “conservative” in the traditional American sense, because they embrace foreign intervention, free trade and elephantine defense budgets. Traditional conservatives are isolationist and fiscally prudent.
Similarly, “democratic” seems inappropriate. Strauss and Kristol both professed to be acting in the best interests of the U.S. at the same time they were eviscerating the nation’s ethos. If you add up the sum of their beliefs— hyper-nationalism, demagoguery, religious chauvinism, heroic leadership, economic and moral elitism, and militaristic foreign policy—you end up with something familiar and frightening.
In these 1932 excerpts from Benito Mussolini extolling fascism, we hear the unmistakable voice of Leo Strauss:
52
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Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1945-1995,” Public Interest, No. 121, Fall 1995, Part I. 53.
“I am for freedom of religion, & against all manoeuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another,” Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Elbridge Gerry, Jan. 26, 1799, in FromRevolution to Reconstruction, op. cit, <odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl125.htm>.
54
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Thomas Jefferson, Plan for Elementary Schools, Sept. 9, 1817, in Bergh, Vol. XVII p. 425, t <www.constitution.org/tj/jeff17.txt>.Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage...
Fascism denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of ‘happiness’ and indefinite progress.
The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone...
In the doctrine of Fascism, Empire is not only a territorial, military or mercantile expression, but spiritual or moral… For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say, to the expansion of the nation, is a manifestation of vitality, and its opposite, staying at home, is a sign of decadence: peoples who rise or re-rise are imperialist, people who die are renunciatory.55