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The Founders and the 'Superintending Principle'
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13483 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
4,980 Words |
| Author
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Hadley Arkes
Hadley Arkes is Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and
American Institutions at Amherst College. |
The story is told in the First Book of Kings that when Elijah lodged himself on Mt. Horeb, he was instructed by God to journey to Damascus and anoint Hazael as King over Aram. This account has been thought to date from the first half of the ninth century, B.C., and it provides evidence of how early the Jews had absorbed the notion of monotheism: The God who could order a local prophet to cross the border, install a new king or cashier an old one, was not one of those local gods so familiar to antiquity. He was not a deity whose authority was confined to the land of Israel; his authority was the same in all places, his "jurisdiction" was understood to be universal.
In our own day, there has not been even a tremor of denial of the point made by recent writers, that the common "religion" of American college students, especially in the most selective private schools, is "cultural relativism," Under this reigning superstition, our most schooled young people are disposed to believe, without the strain of reflection, that there are no moral truths that hold universally. Their inclination is to assume that the truth of any notion of right and wrong must always be relative to the person who holds it, or to the understandings that are dominant in the local culture.
If a survey were taken on the religious affiliations of these students, it would show that the majority of them come from backgrounds that are almost entirely Christian, Jewish or, in rare cases, Muslim. All three religions are founded on monotheism, and yet could we suppose that a universal God, the author of the moral laws, would create one standard of right and wrong for Uganda and another for New Jersey? Today's students have curiously failed to draw the most rudimentary conclusions that arise from the logic of that monotheism in which they have been nominally raised. The orthodoxy of relativism, drawn into the currents of our public talk and our private therapies, has apparently taken hold of our children far more surely than anything religion has imparted to them, with all the drama of deepest wonder and the claims of gravest authority.
Legitimate Government
This secular religion of the young has not only put them at odds with their own religious traditions but has radically separated them from the understanding of those men who made the American Revolution and founded the republic. The Constitution whose bicentenary we now celebrate, is the second charter that was produced in the attempt to provide a legal framework for the American Union. As the Supreme
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