E Pluribus Unum, Yesterday and Today

Pope John Paul II once said: “the continuing success of American democracy depends on the degree to which each new generation … makes its own the moral truths on which the Founding Fathers staked the future of [the] Republic.” One of those truths is that, through virtue and law, national unity can coexist with local diversity: public order and private freedom are not enemies. “E pluribus unum,” as the currency says: out of many, one people can come to be.  

Two hundred and fifty years on, this American ideal of pluralism might seem to be in crisis. The diversity of American politics has decayed into division. Some suggest that certain ethnic groups or religions threaten the American order. Many secular progressives cannot tolerate people with conservative religious views. Some worry that America is growing irreparably fragmented along ideological and economic lines. 

However things stand in fact, America did maintain a functioning and admirable pluralistic society for more than two centuries, and in many respects it still does. If we want to revive that society today, we must remember how and why it worked in its heyday. 

A New Order for the Ages 

As John Jay pointed out in the Federalist, America’s original colonists had much in common: the English language, English political culture, and English Protestantism, among other things. And yet, as David Hackett Fischer showed in Albion’s Seed, Americans were also highly diverse. 

New England Puritans, formed in Calvinism, stressed that freedom had to be ordered toward truth lest it devolve into license. The aristocrats of eastern Virginia thought freedom could only exist within a firm social hierarchy, like that of their Anglican church: a person had maximum freedom within his station, provided he always deferred to his superiors. The poor but enthusiastic Presbyterians from the border of England and Scotland (and from Northern Ireland, hence the term “Scots-Irish”) went to Appalachia to escape their domineering Anglican overlords; in the American backcountry they built a society around the idea that each man, no matter how humble his station, deserved to be free, because he was made in God’s image. The peaceful Quakers, having suffered religious persecution in England—and being strongly devoted to Jesus’s command to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—created in the Delaware Valley a society where citizens respected each other’s freedom to follow their conscience, especially in religion: no state power could make anyone believe supernatural truths, they thought. 

None of these groups could have flourished on its own, not only because each was too small to defend and provide for itself, but because they all had weaknesses. The Puritans’ regard for truth could become excessive, forbidding dissent even on matters of revelation (as their ideological descendants, modern progressives, do in matters of politics). The aristocratic Anglicans of the South denied the universal dignity of human beings and, infamously, established an oppressive slave-based economy. The Scots-Irish could love freedom to the point of violence, as in the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s (among the first of many American uprisings). The Quakers were admirably charitable, but their pacifism made them sitting ducks to military invaders. 

Together, however, these groups throve. Puritan ordered liberty gave America the rule of law, which tempered the Appalachians’ rowdiness. Appalachians’ love of “natural liberty” inspired Patrick Henry (son of an Appalachian mother) and others to agitate for the Bill of Rights and stress the limits of the federal government’s power. The Quakers’ love of neighbor gave rise to America’s tradition of religious liberty and the abolition movement, ending slavery in the South and across the globe. Southerners’ military and political leadership protected the Quakers (and all Americans) in the War of Independence (in men like George Washington) and the whole free world in World War II (in men like Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall). Together Americans came to respect both the rights of the person and the demands of the common good, united by their belief in a reasonable God who created all men equal in his image. 

Each subculture’s strengths made up for the others’ weaknesses, leaving each freer to “be itself.” Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were surely inspired by this balance of cultures when they devised the U.S. Constitution’s system of political checks and balances. America’s diverse subcultures formed, in Fischer’s words, “a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive”—and therefore more durable—“than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be.” It was a novus ordo seclorum, “a new order of the ages”: a polity, with little precedent in history, that struck a middle ground between the expanding, homogenizing tendency of empire and the city-state’s love for local customs and freedom.  

And yet not so far into America’s history, this admirable order came crashing down in the Civil War. Was pluralism itself to blame? Was it a quixotic ideal, doomed from the start? Thoughtful observers have suggested it was not. The problem of early America more probably lay in one flaw that all America’s subcultures happened to share, and that went uncorrected. 

A Mania for Independence 

In his book We Hold These Truths, John Courtney Murray, a Catholic writing in the 1960s, commended the Declaration of Independence in which the Protestant Founding Fathers (representing all of America’s cultural regions) correctly grounded freedom in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which they took to be “self-evident” to human reason. But Murray also noted that the Declaration’s principles contradicted an element of the Founders’ classical Protestant theology, which Louis Bouyer and Servais Pinckaers have explored in greater depth.  

Many Protestants, beginning with Martin Luther, shared William of Ockham’s belief that God created the world from an act of love so free that it was, in the end, unintelligible to reason; otherwise one might suggest that God had to create the world, involuntarily (not out of love), as a necessary outgrowth of his nature. From man’s perspective, the law by which God made the world must be arbitrary. Protestants were nevertheless confident that God’s law would not change, because God had promised as much by biblical revelation; but that promise could be accepted only by faith, not also by reason. 

Over time, this belief in the radical separation between the laws of faith and the laws of human reason slowly conditioned American legal theorists to think that the essence of even human law was not reason but only the will of the sovereign. Under the influence of this legal positivism, it became easier for people to believe, and act, as though power, not truth, were the cornerstone of society. Hence the common good came to be determined less by mutual persuasion among reasonable beings than by the competition for power.  

Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the consequences of such views on his trip to America in the early 1830s. He concluded that Protestantism’s notion of freedom errs toward anarchy, “bring[ing] men much less to equality” (the “primary fact” on which democracy depends) “than to independence.” If God is not bound by rules, it is hard to argue that anyone else is. Tocqueville worried that, over time, Americans’ excessive, antinomian love of independence would erode the civic friendship that must hold democracy together.  

Not long after Tocqueville’s visit, such dysfunction started to manifest itself. In the Civil War, Southern slaveholders insisted on being free of the federal government; then they were defeated not just for lack of material resources, but for their inability to cooperate in the demanding enterprise of war (as Robert E. Lee recognized). In the North, antinomianism fostered the anarchism of American transcendentalists and the greed of Gilded Age robber barons. Then early twentieth-century progressives (heirs of the Puritan spirit) went to opposite extremes: they reined in chaotic capitalism by erecting an administrative state in great measure unanswerable to the people. Lacking understanding of how properly to harmonize freedom with order, they too eroded the rule of law and self-government, by transgressing the Constitution’s wise limitations on federal power.  

Reason and Equality: Catholic Contributions to America 

But despite the calamities of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century witnessed many American successes: the revival of devotion to the Constitution, especially within the conservative movement; the triumph of American democracy over fascist and communist dictatorships; and the final legal emancipation of the descendants of Southern slaves. How did America reunite to achieve such feats? If Fischer’s and Murray’s analyses are correct, perhaps the answer is that a new cultural element was introduced into the American mix: one similar enough to the pre-existing ones to blend in, but that had new insights and strengths to correct America’s antinomian tendency. A likely candidate for that role was the Catholic culture of the immigrants who, having begun to come to America before the Civil War, poured in all the more after. 

Catholics shared with Protestants many basic Christian beliefs, including in the natural law; but Catholic theology emphasized more clearly that, although God’s reason is not reducible to man’s, it is in harmony with it. Lacking Luther’s Ockhamism, Catholics accepted more firmly that God, as the Gospel of John says, is the “Word” or “Reason” through which “all things,” including human nature, “were made.” God’s law, “written on the heart” of men’s nature, as Paul said, is therefore fashioned after God’s nature: for God to violate reason—to command one to break the natural law—would be as meaningless as a square circle; it would be inconsistent with who God is. 

Catholic cultural mores could also rein in Protestantism’s excessive love of independence, reconciling personal freedom with national unity. The Catholic Church fostered the feeling of equality among its members by its liturgy and doctrinal discipline. Within it, Tocqueville observed, “all classes of society” were “intermingled … at the foot of the same altar, … [and] in the eyes of God.” Learned and ignorant, rich and poor, powerful and weak: all believed the same dogmas and followed the same moral code.  

History provides evidence that these beliefs and customs did in fact move Catholics to improve America. After the Civil War, American Catholic schools and other institutions (like those founded by Frances Xavier Cabrini) integrated millions of immigrants into American society, giving them not only the skills and virtues to succeed, but a sense of dignity and equality with their fellow citizens. Whole Catholic orders (like that founded by Katharine Drexel) dedicated themselves to helping former slaves and their descendants, such as Clarence Thomas, integrate into American life. Catholics such as Theodore Hesburgh were at the front lines of the civil rights movement; Catholics have been at the forefront of the pro-life cause. Catholics like Richard John Neuhaus, William Buckley, Robert Casey, Sr., and Antonin Scalia led movements in journalism, politics, and jurisprudence to reground America in its founding natural-law principles. They brought a new vitality to American civic life by learning from the cultures of America’s early years and contributing their own culture’s insights. 

Catholic culture had failures, too. The nuns who taught Clarence Thomas radiated love for all their students, regardless of the color of their skin; but many public Catholic leaders acquiesced in racism (hence why Thomas left the Church for many years). Once they became comfortably integrated into America, many Catholics abandoned natural law morality, especially in sexual matters; had more Catholics been devoted to sexual integrity, America’s wider sexual revolution, and the cultural devastation it wrought, might have been avoided or mitigated. Historically many Catholics condoned the use of civil coercion to enforce supernatural laws. Protestant America reminded Catholic Americans of the value of religious freedom, a lesson that spread to the whole Catholic Church: it was the American John Courtney Murray who drafted the Second Vatican Council’s doctrinal statement on the topic. 

A New Birth for America Today 

American pluralism is not perfect, but for two hundred fifty years it has held together diverse cultural groups—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; Europeans, Africans, and more. America’s diversity and unity are not incompatible, but they require dedicated work. Contemporary Americans must recommit to the traditions of their own subcultures, and consider what more they could do to strengthen their nation’s novus ordo seclorum, which has achieved much good for its citizens and for the world. America may also need contributions from new subcultures: Indian immigrants, for instance, with their culture’s strong devotion to the family, may have an important role to play in correcting contemporary America’s sexual license.

Rather than abandoning the American project of order and freedom, let us strive to give it “new birth,” as Abraham Lincoln said during the Civil War, so “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” 

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