America's "Two Foundings"

Excerpts from a fascinating but lengthy article from Mark Noll in First Things on what he calls America's "two foundings"-- after the Revolutionary and Civil Wars...

Contrasting judgments often arise from studying the Niagara of words that justified the American War for Independence—together with all the words that circulated anxiously during the parlous years under the Confederation Congress—which rose to a great flood in the period 1787 to 1790 in debate over the new Constitution, and which continued to flow during the administrations of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in controversies over executive power, national economic duties, national security with respect to aliens and the seditious, the shape of federal judicial authority, and much more.

Contemporary separationists find, not surprisingly, that the strongest tendencies from the founding were separationist: However much the founders relied on religion for private purposes, they intended American politics to take place in a sphere insulated from direct religious influence. Contemporary accommodationists, of course, find just the reverse: However deeply committed the founders were to the separation of churches from the institutions of government, they thought it was imperative that religion inform all public matters up to the line prohibiting formal institutional connections between church and state.

Noll then notes that "For both sides in modern political debates, much seems to depend on the exegesis of" key documents from that period-- with the exegesis (or eisegesis) leading one to strongly-held inferences. Continuing...

Such serious study of the period from 1774 to 1800 is hardly pointless, wrongheaded, or misguided. And yet, for the purpose of clarifying contemporary debates over religion and public life, we must recognize that both religion and politics experienced two foundings in the United States.

The first took place in those intensely studied years after Lexington and Concord. But the second founding came later—in the first half of the nineteenth century, for religion, and in the tumultuous events of 1861 to 1876, for politics. Certainly the first foundings did influence what came later, especially by providing a republican vocabulary for talking about American public life and by establishing Christianized republicanism as one widely accepted way of uniting religious and political concerns. Yet the second foundings were different. They established the specific conditions, circumstances, and points of tension out of which contemporary realities for religion and politics have emerged. We cannot grasp religious and political interactions today without recognizing both of America’s foundings.

The case for treating the Civil War and Reconstruction as the second political founding of the modern United States has been made frequently. In this perspective, the decisive event—and every bit as pivotal as the break with Britain in the 1770s—was the unequivocal triumph of national authority over local authorities through the Union victory in the Civil War. While the Confederacy defended its cause by calling it “the Second American Revolution,” the South was in fact contending for the political equipoise that had been achieved in the first American Revolution.

That equipoise entailed a genuine national government, but a government whose power was tightly limited both by the wide scope guaranteed to the states in the Constitution and by the persistent uncertainty over the question whether states that had joined the Union by their free action could withdraw from the Union by their free action. The real Second American Revolution was carried out by the Union armies in decisively exerting national power over local authority and by decisively answering the presenting question about the states’ freedom of action.