Dr. Glenn Ellmers, pictured above, is a research fellow at The Claremont Institute, the stated mission of which is to "restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life." In the December 2024, edition of Imprimis, published by Hillsdale College, an essay by Dr. Ellmers was titled as follows: "Religious Liberty and the Genius of the American Founding."
You can click that link to read the entirety of what Dr. Ellmers has to say. He is in favor of religious liberty, of course, just to cut to the chase. However, Ellmers does go back quite a ways to document what religious liberty is really all about, and I was particularly struck by one sentence, near the very end of Ellmers' article:
The American Founders' invocation of the transcendent moral authority of nature is one of the most remarkable acts of statesmanship in human history (emphasis added).
It is Ellmers' contention that "religion" and "politics" used to be, essentially, the same thing. "Gods" went with the territory. Every nation, or people, had their own god, and so there was no tension, really, between divine and civil law, between "religious" demands and the demands made by the political leaders of the nation. Christianity changed all that.
Here is how Ellmers outlines what he identifies as a major problem:
After Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, three dilemmas emerged.
First, there was one God, but many regimes. For the first time in the history of Western Civilization, religious and civil authority were separated. To put it another way, divine and civil law were no longer the same. All of Europe belonged to one church, but it was split into many principalities. Citizens confronted the challenge of dual allegiances for the first time: they were required to obey both their king and their pope. But what if the king and the pope disagreed? This was something new.
Second, following the split between divine and civil law, what was the source of political authority? In the ancient city, laws came directly from God. But where did, for instance, the Prince of Bavaria get his authority? The solution the Europeans came up with is the theory of the divine right of kings, which was an attempt to reconnect civil and divine authority as in the ancient world.
In practice, however, the divine right of kings means hereditary monarchy. If the king’s ancestors received their authority directly from God—as the idea of divine right holds—then only the king’s direct descendants can exercise that authority. This causes enormous succession problems. What if the king has no legitimate heirs? What if the only heir is utterly unqualified to rule? What if a nephew or a cousin has a partial claim on the throne and is far more qualified?
In fact, we know what happens because it did happen, over and over again, as anyone familiar with the history of England and Shakespeare’s history plays can tell you. Civil wars happened.
The third dilemma was that the content of belief, or doctrine, became incredibly important in a way it was not in the ancient world. There was little investigation into matters of conscience prior to Christianity. It was the outward expression of piety—demonstrating loyalty to the community and its gods by obeying the divine law and participating in the public ceremonies and rituals—that mattered in the ancient world. It is only with Christianity that belief becomes paramount. And this opened the door to persecution.
So, says Ellmers, in order to establish republican self-government, the American Founders had to "figure out how to create moral and political legitimacy for the new nation, and to establish the sacredness of the law—which alone can command the citizens’ devotion and obedience—while avoiding the religious conflict and persecution that had plagued Europe." They brilliantly found a way to do that, he says, and memorialized it in the Declaration of Independence, by using the following words to provide both a religious and a purely "political" foundatiion for the laws that would guide the nation:
"The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Ellmers calls this a "revolutionary truth," combining human reason and divine revelation, and provided the basis for establishing religious liberty for the first time in human history. Here is his more extended explanation:
By looking to the laws of nature (or laws of reason) and nature’s God as the ultimate justification for their revolution, the Founders were asserting that there was an objective moral order in the world because that world was created by a benevolent and reasonable God. Since our minds are a gift from God, and He intended us to use them, we can perceive much of this moral order through our own rational faculties....
This natural moral order exists outside of our will—it exists whether we like it or not. We are born into both a physical and a moral world that we do not create....
By contrast, the laws of nature and nature’s God are fixed and unchanging. They serve as the ground for political authority and supply conventional or everyday law with sacred and transcendent authority. In establishing this foundation for American politics, the Founders addressed ... three problems....
First, they solved the split between piety and citizenship by supplying a common ground for morality. Since we can understand virtue and vice through our own rational faculties, the law can enforce moral precepts that are acknowledged by both political and ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, because the morality of the Bible and the morality of reason are compatible, one can be both a pious believer and a good citizen, while avoiding the contentious sectarian disputes that tore Europe apart.
Second, this common ground of morality makes it possible to delineate in a clear way the political and religious realms. That the separation of church and state becomes possible for the first time can be seen most clearly in Jefferson’s Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom. The Declaration’s teaching about the laws of nature and nature’s God establishes a kind of political theology, a non-sectarian ground of legitimacy that makes the laws “sacred” without getting the government involved in theological disputes about the Trinity, faith versus works, etc. According to many Protestant ministers of the Founding era, this also allowed true Christianity to flourish for the first time because Christianity could be practiced by choice rather than by coercion.
Third, the Founders solved the problem of religious persecution. Because the government and the churches can agree on a moral code that is compatible with both reason and revelation, each can operate in its proper realm without intruding on the other. It becomes possible to institutionalize religious liberty by prohibiting religious tests for office and keeping government out of the business of punishing heresy.
Let me alert readers who may not know this that Dr. Ellmers is what I might call a "right winger," and that I have excised from the quotation above his diatribe against "leftists," whom he denounces as trying to suggest that there is anything "natural" about those persons who don't conform to his personal views of what "gender" demands. What I found interesting was not his right-wing views of politics (views shared by Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute), but the idea that there are, really, two different "worlds," as I like to say. The world of "Nature," and then the world that we create ourselves, a "Political World."
The way I see it, appreciating this way of understanding the world is important, and what's important is not what "religion" has to say. What is important is that our human actions and activities, our "political actions," are, on the one hand, totally "free." We can do virtually anything in the "political" world that we create, and in that world nothing is "inevitable," just because we are "free" to take actions that may never have ever been thought of before.
But... despite our political "freedom," in which we can choose to do wonderful things, or to perpetrate horrors (and the holocaust is, of course, is our go-to example of the extremes to which we can go), we are, ultimately, dependent on the "World of Nature," the "World That God Made." We are completely dependent on "Nature," which we know, firsthand, as Planet Earth, and we must love it, and live in accordance with its requirements, or we will not survive. Our "politics" is always subordinate to "the transcendent moral authority of nature.
To the extent that Ellmers has made me see that those who created this nation, the Founders, really did understand this, though they did not articulate this truth in the way I have been doing, I am comforted that what I have decided to believe is true is true, in fact.
I revere those who founded this nation, who could write out and then sign our "Declaration of Independence." That Declaration binds us still, and motivates us, still.
It is, I firmly believe, our task, now - today - to live up to the demands that the Declaration of Independence makes upon us - and to dedicate ourselves, "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," to advancing the hope that it should inspire in us.
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