contemporary implications of the "two foundings"

In 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), he concludes with "several suggestions about the contemporary assessment of the tangled issues of religion and politics":

First: Many of the most important issues of contemporary religion and politics simply cannot be resolved by referring to principles and precedents of the first founding. Since the principle of the separation of church and state as defined in that era was focused on correcting problems of European Christendom, problems that have arisen in the wake of the United States’ second foundings often cannot be solved by reference to the first founding.

Second, contenders on all sides of current religious-political issues need to restrain their appeals to history. Instead, appeals to precedents and principles of the first founding should always be put in the context of an awareness of how the history of the United States actually developed. Treatments of the constitutional era as establishing either a Christian republic or a thoroughly secular modern state are especially damaging, since they make it harder, rather than easier, to resolve contemporary problems in accordance with main historical developments since the constitutional era.

Third, no one gains anything by complaining about the federal government as such or the exercise of national authority as such. Since the era of Lincoln, Sherman, and Grant—and the era of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—a large, powerful, and potentially active federal government has simply become a fact of American life.

Fourth, a strong argument can be made from American history that, without a large and active federal government, the United States’ greatest moral problems could never have been resolved. I regard the first of these problems as slavery and the second as the pervasive racial discrimination that long survived the formal end of slavery. For these two intractable political problems, which were also pressing moral problems, there was no solution without the exercise of active federal power, first in the Civil War and then in the civil-rights laws and judicial decisions of the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever evil consequences came from the expansion of federal authority because of the Civil War and its expansion to enforce civil rights, great good was also the result.

Fifth, for reasons articulated strongly in the first foundings of religion and politics, and continuing as important principles in the second foundings, worries about unchecked national government are not whimsical. Reasons for wanting to check governmental power are, in American history, intimately intertwined with the commitment to religious and social voluntarism that has always done so much to define the most positive features of American civil society.

Sixth, since the strength of religion in American history has been its voluntary organization, religious organizations would be well advised to guard carefully their voluntary character while they carry out their religious and social missions....The strength of America’s voluntary religious heritage is not imperiled by a small measure of government funding, but it will be imperiled if religious groups insist on that funding and come to rely on that funding for their existence....

Seventh, as the modern civil-rights movement suggests, religious interventions in American public life are most effective when they are directed at principles developed in the nation’s second foundings. The call of energetic voluntary organizations to implement what already existed in the post-Civil War constitutional amendments was a call that, eventually, had to be heard. Similar appeals have the prospect of similar compelling power.

Eighth, for causes that cannot be securely grounded in the first or second foundings, the course must be to realize that religious interventions should be advocated through public arguments that rely more on moral persuasion, on appeals to long-term self-interest, and on the other well-tried means of democratic polity than on well-intentioned but historically uninformed appeals to the past.

This list of suggestions derived from acknowledging that the nation’s two foundings may not include the most important consequences. Yet efforts to resolve the nation’s current problem of the intersection of religion and politics will not advance far without thorough understanding of the nation’s second foundings in religion and politics as well as that of the first.