by Michael Metzger, Th.D.
“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but I am afraid it is not going to be a success.“
Why was Sigmund Freud (quoted above, 1856-1939) so pessimistic about our nation’s prospects? Perhaps Freud recognized something most folks in the faith community do not.
In his fatherly Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington referred to our new republic as an “experiment” in self-government. Can a nation’s people be self-governed — allowed liberty with minimal constraints?
America’s Founding Fathers felt they could, devising a “most nearly perfect solution.” It included religion. Freud was no fan of religion but he recognized it was central to the experiment.
The framers’ solution looks like a triangle with three interlocking points:
The first point says liberty requires virtue. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. As Lord Acton famously observed, “Freedom is not a permission to do what we like, but the power to do what we ought.”
To survive, a self-governed people have to be a virtuous people.
The second point says virtue requires religion. “If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion; what would they be without it?” asked Franklin. For the framers of our Constitutional republic, virtue required religion — although not necessarily Christianity.
The Latin root religio means to “rebind.” Without exception the framers believed that religion was essential to rebind people to virtue.
The third point in the triangle says religion requires freedom. In his Memorial and Remonstrance, James Madison argues that Christian faith does not need political establishing:
“Religion — or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the Manner of discharging it
— can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.“
Only a freely chosen, dis-established faith can ground the virtue that guarantees freedom.
In 19th century Vienna, Sigmund Freud recognized religion’s role but noted that Christian faith was waning in public and cultural influence, becoming a privatized affair. So while he felt our American experiment was great and grandiose, he doubted it was going to be a success.
He may have been right.
In his carefully researched, 2012 bestseller Coming Apart, secular sociologist Charles Murray recaps America’s great experiment. He hopes it will succeed but recognizes that the Christian religion has been relegated to the periphery of society. Over 80 percent of America’s elites are “balkanized” into just 882 U.S. zip codes, and most of those elites “do not have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian.”
But Dr. Murray is hopeful. He believes advances in genetic and neural (brain) science will replace privatized religion as a way to instill virtue. In addition,
. . . the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated.
Christian faith doesn’t need to be vindicated, but recent discoveries on how human nature works at our deepest neural levels do align with the early church’s understanding of human personality.
Murray believes the institutions aligning with neuroscience “will be found to be the critical resources through which human beings lead satisfying lives.” In a post-Christian world, this could be a way for the church to return to renewing the great experiment in ordered liberty.
That’s worth remembering as we celebrate America’s great 243-year experiment. Unless our churches return to a wise, public faith, Freud might very well prove to be right.