buddenblog

Barak Obama's Commencement Speech

HERE is the first truly inspiring speech by a Democrat in years.  It is Barak Obama's commencement speech at Knox College in Illinois. 

http://www.knox.edu/x9803.xml

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Revolution of Values

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.  Here is a quote from him, painfully timely.  From The Daily Dig: Caffeine for the Conscience.

A Revolution of Values

               

Martin Luther King Jr.

               

 

            

Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world...

Yet it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities.

If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers around the world wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? That the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours.

  To this I would add that fanatacism is poisoning our public life as a nation.          

It really really really is the economy, stupid! (as well as almost everything else)

In case you haven't read either Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers" or the extract of his final chapter in a previous post, below you will find a summary.  In the US right now,  we live and act in a human-created economy, not in some supernatural system driven by mysterious, inexorable,  forces.  Thank God.  But pause here only briefly in gratitude.  We must examine and restructure our economic life prontito.  This means Democrats have to stop drifting around in the void looking for the right "message" as much as we have to disabuse the Republicans of the notion that they are royals.  Damn the Democrats!  This is as much their fault as it is the Republicans who at this point are very happily and easily filling the void.  The Democrats are sitting around, for the most part, like a bunch of cowardly ninnies sending out talking points and pleas for money and a lot of hot air, Barney Frank and a few others excepted.  They are trying to find the right clever words a la Lakeoff and Luntz to say absolutely nothing.

The world is changing rapidly before our eyes.  We can either look at it full in the face and learn from it and join it or crumple like Rome, only much, much faster.  Let's go for a few clichés: the deadly entanglement of corporate and government greed and right wing religion is driving us to our downfall.  A little extra on the right-wing religious danger: their anti-science attitude and the fake education they provide in their schools may be damning millions of our young people to an economically marginal existence.

Heilbroner and history are important because they put us in our place. If we can face our place, we can adapt.  If we want to turn into donkeys like Pinocchio and his buddies who found themselves trapped when they fell for the line about going to playland forever, then we can follow our current path.

A short summary of Robert Heilbroner's Final Chapter, "The End of Worldly Philosophy?" with liberties taken in the arrangement of material.

FIRST OF ALL; Heilbroner calls the present version of economics paraded before us by Alan Greenspan, et.al. "dessicated residue."  In other words, dead, dried up, useless for any decent purpose, Alan Greenspan's mumblings of mysterious mantras meant to magically channel our economy into smooth sailing waters notwithstanding.  This doesn't mean that economics, or various kinds of capitalism are useless: just what passes for them in the current Administration.

Economics, according to Heilbroner, is "an explanation system" for the purpose of enlightening us about the workings, problems, and prospects of the economy.  The economy in the modern world is a "complex social entity."  That is, it's not just numbers, it's not simply raising or lowering interest rates to prevent inflation.  It IS a system within which virtually all of us exist to meet our material needs and to provide them for other people.  It is COMPLEX because it is a bunch of interlocking systems which undergird our national and international lives.  It ISN'T all there is to life: there are spiritual, familial, creative, artistic, community sides -- sides more important to our identities and our ability to find meaning and hope in our lives.  But we cannot extricate ourselves from the economy as we pursue our greater endeavors.

Capitalism differs from previous social organizations.  American capitalism developed from English and German roots and Heilbroner traces our origins back through these societies.  It's important to note that there are other economic historians who are more expansive. This will be important in another post, if I ever get to it. 

In any event, in our own cultural sphere, capitalism differs from previous historical epochs because it depends on "the acquisitive drive as the principle means of organizing the production and distribution of society's material needs."  Previously, the dominating form of goods distribution was in the hands of kings and  feudal structures.  Rather than the general human "acquisitive drive" being important, power and custom were. 

In northern and anglo Europe pre-capitalism, only the wealthy could be wealthy.  And only the upper castes of society could be wealthy.  The sons and daughters of the wealthy who were left out by inheritance rules (primogeniture) and failure to marry became priests, monks and nuns with fair frequency.  The poor were in fact always with us by inherited position.  In the feudal system, serfs took care of the growing and making of stuff.  They didn't stand a chance to profit from it.  Later on, there was a lower middle class, urban dwellers often, who were craftsmen.  They had to rise through a guild system which was rigid and did not allow for much innovation and certainly not for making excesses of money. 

Capitalism as it developed differed in that people didn't produce by custom or fiat or because that's how it was always done or because the king said that's what was needed.  Instead, individuals of whatever rank who were fortunate enough to be ingenious or to have a bit of extra cash or something to buy and sell goods with and the smarts to use these assets imaginitively could make more money than he (and sometimes she) needed.  The provision of life's necessities came to be through systems of "competitive buying and selling."  I want to add here, as Heilbroner does in his book, that these systems, too, have led to many dreadful iniquities which were of great concern historically as well as they should be right now.

The guidance of capitalist societies, according to Heilbroner, historically has been in the hands of what are supposed to be two separate authorities.  The public authority, the government, "wields force and establishes law."  It doesn't itself carry on production and distribution.  On the other hand, private, profit-seeking individuals do just this, though, theoretically at least, under a watchful public eye.

In sum, the making, selling and buying of goods in modern capitalist societies is in the hands of the none-government. Law and justice and protection of rights and conflict resolution and the general maintenance of the common weal -- the common good -- is seen to be in the hands of the government, which of course is supposed to mean in our hands, the hands of us the people.

SO....what's gone wrong with economics (not to mention the economy):

First of all, we give economics much more credit and power than it deserves.

1. Economics "is ultimately...an explanation system whose purpose is to enlighten us as to the workings, and therefore to the problems and prospects of that complex social entity we call the economy."
2. Economics is not mathematics.  Mathematics' "ever-growing presence" is not "the crucial change in the economics of our time....While there is no alternative to using mathematics...to elucidate many of the analytical purposes for which economics exists...this is not to say that mathematical models reveal how best to act on the information that bombards us: the predictive capacity of econometrics .. the modern combination of statistics and economic theory -- is by no means notable for its accuracy," Alan Greenspan, present day business economists and our government notwithstanding .  [Italics mine]
3. The most significant recent change in capitalist economics is the substitution of the "vision of science" for that of Capitalism.  This should not be confused with the notion that economics is a science, because it is not.  But by thinking of it as Science, we give it a lot more weight than it deserves -- and ask far fewer questions than we should, generally because we think we can't understand what's going on and because we think it's boring. Come on, folks, wake up!!! Situation boring but critical, to paraphrase an old European saying.
4. Economics/capitalism should not be confused with science because human beings are a lot more complicated than the consistency of apples falling to the ground..  There are some generally predictable stimulus-response relationships in human economic behavior, but, as Marshall, cited by Heilbroner, pointed out, "economics cannot be compared with the exact physical sciences for it deals with the ever-changing and subtle forces of human nature."  Heilbroner goes on, "When scientists explain the phenomenon of, say, light, with reference to the behavior of electrons, no one supposes that each electron has 'decided' whether or where it is to move.  In contrast, "when economists explain the phenomenon of price changes by the behavior of buyers and sellers, they cannot describe their object of study without assuming that each individual person has decided to act as he or she did....Human behavior cannot be understood without the concept of volition--the unpredictable capacity to change our minds up to the very last moment."
5. "Social life of humankind is by its very nature political."  Crucial economic matters such as wealth distribution and income are not determined by immutable laws as gravity is.  "They are highly mutable determinations of the sociopolitical order in which we live."
6. The idea of a scientist's objectivity falls apart in economics.  There is no "objectivity" in social arrangements:  there is nothing inevitable or preordained or replicative about social arrangements.  The existence of a growing class of poor people does not have to be accepted as a scientific truth. One can't take an objective stance about poverty.
   
7. Power and obedience exist in all "stratified societies" (and I would suggest non-stratified ones as well). 
8. Current economic thinking and activity does not take into account power and obedience...politics, if you will.
9. We must pay at least as much heed to politics, social science, REAL science, ethical formulations, and diplomacy as to economic insights for our society to survive.  Capitalist economists CAN add insight about how the market system currently functions.  It CAN examine historical and current capitalisms (there are many, from Scandinavia and Europe to the United States and increasingly China and India) and bring to light what practices lead to what outcomes: for instance, in the US we have a culture of "greed and social indifference."  We have forgotten that capitalism has previously and successfully existed as a "bifurcation of power into two interpenetrative but still independent sectors: public and private.  But for the well-being of us, the independence and oversight of the public is equally important as the independence and creativity of the private.  Historically, in Europe government has functioned to keep the market as prosperous as possible in the context of maintaining the well-being of the common weal, or common good.  Where government has been pushed out of this role, countries have gone broke and the gap between rich and poor has grown into a gaping hole. Not to speak of what we are doing to the planet....
   

Two seemingly unrelated selections

When Silence is Betrayal
Martin Luther King Jr.
"A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world."   

On the duties of government to its people:
Article V, Section II, Massachusetts State Constitution, Encouragement of Literature, etc. (sic)

Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the

people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as

these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the

various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall

be the duty of legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this

Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all

seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and

grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public

institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts,

sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to

countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public

and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their

dealings; sincerity, good humour, and all social affections, and generous sentiments

among the people.

Take a look at your own state's constitution!

So Did Our Founding Fathers Want Us To Be a Christian Nation or Not?

Introduction

This past summer in my advanced Spanish Conversation class at UNAM here in San Antonio,  our profesor, el doctor Mario Melgar, brought us an article called “The Hispanic Challenge” (www.foreignpolicy.com) by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington, famous for having written "The Clash of Civilizations."  Now Samuel Huntington was a very interesting writer with very interesting, provocative and worthwhile ideas that I have distant memories of from his pre-Clash days (see Huntington posting soon) so I was startled to read that he felt that Hispanic immigrants of today reperesented a threat to the nation because they rejected “the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.”  He went on to say that “America was created by 17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British and Protestant…. They initially defined America in terms of race, ethnicity, culture and religion.”  The religion, says Huntington, was overwhelmingly Protestant. 

He goes on to say that this “creed” of Anglo-Protestantism was set forth in the Declaration of Independence in which Thomas Jefferson refers to our rights which we obtain by reason of “The Laws of Nature and of God” and that we are “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable Rights…”

Huntington continues,

[m]ost Americans see the creed as the crucial element of their national identity.  The creed…was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers.  Key elements of that culture include the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law…; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’

(This last, the goal of creating a “city on a hill” is a distinctly Calvinist notion.)

I read this in the heat not only of San Antonio summer but of this very bitter 2004 presidential campaign in which I had repeatedly heard Christians from the right assert that this nation was in fact established by its Constitution as a Christian nation and that the Founding Fathers did NOT advocate separation of church and state.

As someone who has embedded in HER version of the American creed that foundational in our identity IS the separation of church and state, I found myself flooded with indignation.  But the bases of my belief lurk in shreds and tatters in memory

I started a search for answers and found confirmation of my old certainties, with lots of new information lighting the way.

The Founding of Fathers indeed did deliberately keep God out of the Constitution and did deliberately keep religious belief as any sort of requirement for anything out of the framework of our Federal Government.  Unlike the shadowy authors of the Bible, Hamilton and Madison and Jefferson and Adams and the rest left plenty of evidence of their ideas and intentions.  It’s worth delving into: letters, speeches, The Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, state law, and so on and so forth.

I also found one short book, an author-described polemic, entitled, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. (You can find a link to the Amazon site for it under the Democracy Matters segment of this blog.)  This book is particularly useful for having been written from the perspective of authors who value the role of religion in public life rather than from the point of view of complete secularists.

For those of you who also find your memory of the role of church and state in our Constitutional history fuzzy, I present below a brief synthesis of information mostly derived from The Godless Constitution, but  mixed with bits from other sources.  I have to apologize: I haven’t done footnotes except for direct quotes from the book and from one web site.  Everything I’ve cited as fact is, I believe, easily verified.

Article Six, the only place where religion is mentioned in the Constitution (clause is italicized)

All debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
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.

Some demographic points about religious and ethnic identification in 18th Century America 

In New England and the Southern Colonies, English heritage dominated.
In the Middle Atlantic colonies, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the presence of the Dutch in New York, Germans in Pennsylvania, Swedes in Delaware, and Irish throughout, diluted the English population to less  than half of the total.
Maybe 4/5 of the slave population lived in the South.  In the North, most slaves were household slaves.  In the northern South, slaves also worked in fields and at the crafts necessary for farm and plantation maintenance.  In the Deep South there were large numbers of field slaves, the lowest class, the worst treated, a kind of faceless group in the eyes of the white ruling classes.  It should be noted that these Africans came from a broad range of cultures and geographical regions.
Indentured servants, Anglos for the most part, made up a significant part of the population.

I had a hard time easily finding demographic info on Native Americans on the web for the eighteenth century, but certainly they outnumbered Anglos for awhile and were decimated in Anglo-America as they  were in Spanish America.  It has been estimated that prior to the arrival of Europeans, there were between 1.5 million and 8.0 million Native Americans in a large variety of ethnic groups.  The difference in estimates is due partly to the fact that they are estimates and partly to the fact that there was an ebb and flow in population size over the centuries.  Apparently, by 1900, there were only roughly 258,000 Native Americans in the U.S.  This population has since grown.

Religious affiliation of late 18th century America excluding non-whites

Compared to Spanish America, there was little proselytizing, little interest in carrying religion as an official arm of the expanding governments.
Perhaps 10 to 15% of the population was active as church members, but allegiance to Protestant Christianity was dominant and probably close to universal.  This allegiance was not universally a big feature of daily life in much of the country.
In the North, Dissenters were in the majority: those are, for instance, Calvinist sects, Anabaptists and so forth.  In the South, the Anglican Church, still officially supervised by the Church of England, dominated.  Apparently the Anglican Church in the South was a “lazy” church with difficulty keeping parishioners organized and with finding clergy.
Far more women than men were active participants in Church.  The authors of The Godless Constitution suggest this might have been because they were denied access to political participation in their communities.
There were are a sizeable minority of Catholics and a small number of Jews.
It would be fair to say that Protestantism was a part of the cultural identity of most of the Anglos in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Brief summary of pre-Constitutional relations between Church and State in Europe and in the Colonies

European antecedents to the philosophy underlying the Constitution

We have to remember that the states of Europe were ALL were Christian states with a state religion.  Religious struggles in Europe were often political struggles for the control of states, and they were brutal, starting with the Emperor Constantine. Our revolutionaries were struggling, in fact, against an English monarch who sat at the head of a state church and who, though it was no longer much discussed, had his roots in divine kingship. These theocracies wielded power over who had access to offices and jobs large and small and to education.  They held sway over social systems that locked people into poverty and that punished them for heresy and infidelity with torture and death.  The Inquisition marched on through the 18th and into th 19th century in Spáin.

Religious tyranny joined economic and political tyranny in the oppression of individuals.  It’s worth noting that individualism in our country rose as a response to these tyrannies: The Founding Fathers were aiming for freedom of conscience, of thought.  They were aiming to free individuals from the oppression of indentured servitude and of having to give away huge quantities of what they made and earned to an oppressive master.  Thus, the State as the Fathers had experienced it was something to keep away from people’s lives and livelihoods.

In eighteenth century, religious leaders, be they clergy or politicians, fused the state and religion not only in Europe but in the Thirteen Colonies.  As Kramnick and Moore write,
"Th[e] traditional Christian view of the state, which the American founders (i.e. Jefferson,      et.al.) rejected and the Christian right is dusting off today, fuses religion and politics by making the state part of God´s design to redeem humanity.  Its purpose is the execution of God´s moral laws, the protection of God’s faithful, and the furthering of God’s truth.  God has given His creatures a revealed law through scripture, a set of absolute and timeless principles of right and wrong, and enjoined His creatures to live lives of virtue and morality.  The state’s mission is to implement this godly order in a particular time and place.  Its laws are to proclaim God’s truths and to reward the virtuous life, while punishing sin and immorality.  Those who preside in the state – traditionally monarchs, lords and magistrates, and today legislators and presidents – are God’s servants, His agents in this timebound realm for the realization of the moral mission.  The Christian commonwealth, be it the Catholic realm for Aquinas or the Protestant realm for an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop, or Christian America for the religious right today, sees religion and politics as forever bound together (p.71).”               
                 "In Christian states, the state church proclaimed “the necessity of deference and subordination to the political rulers” and “the Christian magistrate in turn ensure[d] that proper religious observance [was] enforced and sinner [were] punished by the secular sword that assists in the achievement of a Christian society (p.72)."

American Religious Antecedents

Although, as we all learned, many people came to Anglo-American shores to escape religious persecution, some, as we also learned,  turned to persecuting others in our Thirteen Colonies both in an effort to establish that “city on a hill” and because of prejudice. 

Roger Williams left Puritan Massachusetts for Rhode Island to escape the rigidities of the Puritan theocracy.  Into the discourse in this country, Williams, a very religious man, introduced the notion of a godless state.  He did so to protect the purity of his Christian beliefs from attack in Massachusetts.  He “grew absolutely convinced that God favored no nation over another and that civil governments had no role to play in the millennial drama.  Religious purity and good government were two separate issues (52).”  He knew that being a good ruler did not require one to be a good Christian.  In fact, our very oldest understanding of law and government comes from non-Christians such as  Hammurabi, Solon, Pericles and Julius Caesar.  Williams also pointed to counter examples of good Christians who made lousy rulers.  Of primary importance to Williams was his observation that when religion and government were mixed, each corrupted the other. 

Yet by the time of the Constitution, the seeds of an opposite formative belief had been planted in our country: that this was a redeemer nation, “a Christian nation upon which God had showered great blessings (p. 61).”  At the time the Founding Fathers sat down to write the Constitution, eleven of the thirteen states had religious requirements of  for holding office, all of them Protestant Christian.

British Liberal (non-religious) influences

Our notions of the value of a laissez-faire economy; of the sanctity, of individual rights given by God and the extremely high premium we put on individualism as opposed to communalism; and the concept that government’s function is purely negative, that is, mainly to protect from conflict and crime, come from the influence of the Enlightenment, particularly as expressed by John Locke.  It is important to recognize that these values were articulated against a history of political, economic and religious tyranny experienced at the hands of monarchies.  These American values as guiding principles of civic behavior I think have spiraled out of control in the hands of some.  They exist in isolation from their context and without the recognition of the need for limits.

The particular rights that Locke most had in mind to protect were property rights, and by extension, protection of life and liberty.  In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson replaced “property” with “happiness.”  In this, he appears to have been influenced by European humanists.  The European school of law rising as part of the new humanist thought sought to replace the lost hope that the Church could be an instrument of peace with secular laws to regulate international behavior.  These scholars thought much about Natural Law and and about the concept of Just War.  Early in this development were the ideas of Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish Dominican professor of theology of the sixteenth century. 

According to Sanderson Beck, Vitoria said that “human societies are established to bear each other’s burdens,…and that a community is needed for mutual assistance, because a single family does not suffice, especially in regard to resisting violence….  States have the authority or right to use public power by governing in order to protect and preserve people….  A prince or good rulers should subordinate both peace and war to the common good of all, but a tyrant directs the government towards his individual good.  Thus the government is not legitimate unless a majority agrees with the exercise of power. 
               
“Vitoria suggested that the law of nations derives from natural law and confers rights and obligations.  The world as a whole has the power to create international laws that jare just for all persons and no country should be permitted to refuse to be bound by international law that has been so established (www.san.beck.org/GPJ13.InternationalLaw.html).”

Vitoria’s heirs followed his lead in establishing definitions of natural law and its uses in preserving human safety.  For instance, Pufendorf in the 17th century “believed in human freedom and equality.  Although humans are naturally sociable, their unsocial behaviors need to be regulated by law.  Humans often go beyond the nature of other animals in their greed, lusts, vanity and competitiveness.  From natural law reason indicates that humans have duties to God, oneself and to others.  For mutual advantage and to gain protection from others, humans organize their communities.  Pufendorf believed that civil government is more effective in restraining abusive behavior than either God or conscience (www.san.beck.org....).”

Christian Wolff, a German born in 1679, started his scholarly life as a mathematician but became absorbed in issues of philosophy and theology.  He upset Pietist theologians by trying to apply scientific methods to theology.  He was an advocate of academic freedom and the “unhampered search for truth.”  His conflicts with theologians came to a head when he said, citing, yes, Confucius, that “one may attain happiness without revelation (www.san.beck.org...)”  He also wrote that it was Natural Law that should be at work in the relationships of human beings.

Emerich de Vattel, a contemporary of Jefferson’s, brought to the fore the idea that after self-preservation, the promotion of and protection of the welfare of others is the next most basic obligation of people.  He saw states as under the same constraints but on a larger scale.  His expanded ideas of what matters to human life dwarfed the idea of “property.”  One of his most striking observations is that the use of war to decide an issue is ridiculous since the winner may be stronger but not right. 
It is essentially from these European humanists that Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, declared and justified  the right of the colonies to overthrow British rule.

So...      
             
Drawing from all these sources and experiences, the Founding Fathers built into the Constitution a “wall of separation” between Church and State, between secular and religious interests.  They were anxious to protect an individual’s rights to his own thoughts and beliefs, her freedom of association, and his ability to participate in civic life.  Among many religious groups and people, there was affirmation of this separation because it prevented forced joining of a denomination and permitted the development of one’s own spiritual identity.  There was the generally held belief among supporters that faith could not, in any event, be imposed from the outside, and that efforts to do so resulted in corruption of both the political and religious sides of life.  Participation in politics and institutions of secular power by religious folks and domination of religious institutions in the name of secular authority also corrupted both groups of participants.
                   
It’s also important to note that our Founding Fathers did not view untrammeled economic activity and individualism as “inalienable rights,” but had a strong sense of the need for individuals to balance their rights with the rights of others.  Moreover, they were steeped in philosophy that recognized the importance of ethical participation in community in the protection of individual rights.

In conclusion...

Please do make an effort to find The Godless Constitution by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore for a very effective treatment of the relationship of church and state in the United States, not only in the 18th century but up until the present.  The authors trace the long history of opposition to the “wall of separation” as well as the history of efforts to preserve it: the notion of the U.S. as a “redeemer nation,” special in the eyes of God versus the support of the “wall” as essential to our freedom to practice religion or not according to our consciences, to be safe from persecution, and to confine our government to civic affairs.  And should you be lucky enough to find the time, delve into both primary and secondary sources about our heritage: The Federalist Papers, as an A-1 primary source, for instance;  Founding Brothers for a short, lively and enlightening secondary source as starters.