Declarations, continued

Via somebody's Zachary Taylor Pinterest page.

OK, I hope you all don't mind this extension of the previous post. I think it should be the end. One part of it continues the stupid debate over whether (white) Christian churches ran the abolition movement in the 19th century, with a backing off the position:

Rich Puchalsky 06.20.15 at 11:35 pm

Getting back to the thread, Jerry V. writes:
“What I mean is that neither of those other languages had the kind of penetration that would have been required of a mass movement in opposition to a society-wide problem like slavery. “

I can believe that the language of the French Revolution wasn’t widely known in America: I can’t believe that the language of the American Revolution wasn’t. As far as I know, America has always generally venerated the Founders. So if abolitionists could have made a convincing case around more or less liberal ideals, that was always available to them. And indeed, as you write, they tried — abolitionists used just about every argumentative source that they thought might help. But historically, the core of abolition was religious. I don’t think that you can say that they were religious, so religion was a weapon they picked up. They had a few different weapons they tried to use, and only one really worked in an American context...

yastreblyansky 06.21.15 at 12:06 am

@215 Ah. If it’s about the use of religious rhetoric in 19th-century America I have no quarrel. William Lloyd Garrison and Abraham Lincoln used lots of it.

What I object to is a hypothesis being pushed [I left out "by"] all the GOP evangelicals: that it was churches (evangelical white churches, as opposed to the necessary Quakers, and the black churches founded in the 2nd Great Awakening) that did all the work, to the exclusion of movements like Garrison’s, which was downright anticlerical, and political parties, the abolitionist faction of the Whigs and eventually Republicans, and workers’ Free Labor and Free Soil movements. But they certainly used a lot of spiritual language.

Rich Puchalsky 06.21.15 at 12:58 am

yastreblyansky: “What I object to is a hypothesis being pushed all the GOP evangelicals”

Do we have to take it seriously? I really didn’t think that was worth arguing against here. At most people seem to be arguing against a vaguely Straussian idea that people need religion in order to actually follow through on these ideals. And, again as I mentioned upthread, that’s disproved by history as a general contention even in an American context. The feminism and gay rights movements have had substantial success in the U.S.: neither one was or is essentially religious, so they serve as examples against the theory that only religion can motivate this kind of movement. Racism is a special case because the ground of value that racism provides in America is a lot like religion’s ground of value.

You mention Garrison, so here’s the Garrison “no compromise with the evil of slavery”speech, worth mentioning because he cites the Declaration prominently and religiously.

225

yastreblyansky 06.21.15 at 1:20 am

@222 “Do we have to take it seriously?”

Maybe not. That was what got me going about Goldman’s OP, which I thought was more than vaguely Straussian, though “vaguely Straussian” was the expression Goldman used, and pernicious, pointing subtly at the “America is a Christian nation” canard and everything in the rightwing project that it entails.

Though an unsalvageable unbeliever I actually kind of love religion. I love Amos and MLK’s use of him, and I love the longstanding black use of the Exodus story, and I love Pope Francis and all the Jesuits like him, of whom there are many, and I love the person Goldman called the “Dahlia Lama”. And I love the Sufis I know. But I hate the other thing, Strauss or Huckabee or Taliban or Orthodox Putin, so much I maybe lose a little judgment when I think I see it. Sorry if I was complaining about things that weren’t there.

The Garrison Rich links to is just wonderful preaching, full of biblical reference as promised. He also said, at the Fifth National Women's Rights Conference in Philadelphia, October 18 1854, on an attempt to bar the atheist Harlem librarian and abolitionist Ernestine Rose from chairing the meeting:

“Why go to the Bible [about woman suffrage]? What question was ever settled by the Bible? What question of theology or any other department?

The human mind is greater than any book. The mind sits in judgment on every book. If there be truth in the book, we take it; if error, we discard it. Why refer this to the Bible? In this country, the Bible has been used to support slavery and capital punishment; while in the old countries, it has been quoted to sustain all manner of tyranny and persecution. All reforms are anti-Bible.”

The other part refers to the reply I noticed this morning from Sam Goldman, the author of the original post on readings of the Declaration of Independence. The bits addressed to me are quoted in my response:

yastreblyansky 06.21.15 at 2:41 pm

@163:

Now Yastreblyansky argues that the result of the compromises in the drafting process pose an “unresolvable theological contradiction”. There’s a tension, to be sure. But it seems pretty easily resolved.

First, why would you resolve it? The thing was written by a committee, and it has a contradiction representing the members’ different opinions. If it actually was a constitutional document, it would have to be resolved in court, but fortunately it isn’t. As Danielle Allen put it, “In fact, the Declaration is just an ordinary memo.” It’s contradictory around the inessential edges, like a State of the Union speech, with an effort to placate irrelevant worries in the Committee of the Whole. Get over it.

The deconstructive effort to give it a singular theological meaning, making the memo into primordial écriture saying something at least three of the authors didn’t think, as if God had written it and the Committee of Five just tried to capture the divine text, is inappropriate; theology isn’t even what its subject is. The subject, as Allen’s analysis is said to show (I’m looking at Gordon Wood’s review in NYRB) , is political equality: she writes,

If the Declaration is right that all people are created equal—in the sense of all being participants in the project of political judgment—then all people should be able to read or listen to the Declaration, understand the work that it is doing, and carry on similar work on their own account, with no more help in unleashing their capacities than can be provided by the example of the Declaration itself.

And if the authors didn’t foresee that this equality would have to apply beyond boundaries of race and gender, they were well aware that it would have to apply outside creedal boundaries to include Quakers, Jews, Muslims, and atheists.

The four theological references in the text don’t make any difference to that reading. Unless there’s some answer to the question Quiggin posed @38, which you haven’t yet addressed:

Or maybe I’ve misread the post and there’s something in the Declaration of Independence other than an assertion of the right to self-government, and that depends critically on a deity. What is it?

The main problem with your argument is that as far as we can tell you don’t have an argument.

Or that it simply dissolves from your initial question, “Can you agree with the Declaration of Independence if you don’t believe in God?” into a trail of unintelligible slug-slime, as:

The main issue is whether a the long-term health of stable and reasonably democratic society depends religious support–or perhaps a different conception of the sacred. Again, I’m skeptical about that [about what?!], although I don’t deny its *possibility* as some commenters have claimed. My self-description as “quasi-Straussian” was a bit of a joke. But I do think Strauss is onto something when he discusses the non-rational foundations of an political “regime”.

Actually you described yourself as “vaguely Straussian”, not “quasi-Straussian”. But anybody who knows how to use Google can see that you’ve devoted an academic career to Leo Strauss and the defense of his thinking.

And there’s something Straussian in the bad sense, tactically deceptive, about attacking Allen in this roundabout way, not by engaging with her thesis on the egalitarian (= anti-libertarian) meaning of the Declaration, but by ignoring it as fully as if it weren’t even there in favor of the (Straussian) subject you’d like her to be writing about.