Justin Dyer and Kody W. Cooper join host James Patterson to discuss their recent book, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics.

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.

James M. Patterson:

Hello and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today is June 7th, 2023, and I’m your host James M. Patterson. I am a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, as well as an associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University, president of the Ciceronian Society, and a fellow at both the Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy, and the Institute of Human Ecology.

My guests today are Dr. Justin Dyer and Dr. Kody W. Cooper. Justin Dyer is the Executive Director of the Civitas Institute, a Professor of Government, and the Jack G. Taylor Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Dyer writes and teaches in the fields of American political thought, jurisprudence, and constitutionalism with an emphasis on the perennial philosophical tradition of natural law. He is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles, essays, and book reviews. His books with Cambridge University Press include CS Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, Slavery, Abortion and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning, and Natural Law in the Anti-Slavery Constitutional Tradition. And there is a co-edited volume of a two-volume constitutional law case book, American Constitutional Law, with West Academic. Dr. Cooper is an assistant professor of political science in 2016. Have you been promoted, Kody?

Kody Cooper:

Associate, yeah.

James M. Patterson:

Associate now, listen to this. Prior to coming to UTC, Professor Cooper was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Thomas Hobbs and Natural Law on the University of Notre Dame Press in 2018. And together, they are the authors of the book under discussion today, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. Gentlemen, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.

Justin Dyer:

James, thanks for having us.

Kody Cooper:

Thank you.

James M. Patterson:

So let’s start with an easy question. Did the United States have a Christian founding?

Justin Dyer:

Kody, you want to take that one, that easy right off-the-bat question?

Kody Cooper:

Well, I think in the book, we try to make the case that there is a Christian philosophical tradition that influenced the ideas of the founding. So you can distinguish senses  in which the Founding was “Christian.” And I think that Mark David Hall’s work here is pretty helpful. It’s not necessarily the claim that each individual Founder was an active member of a church or was a devout Christian or something like this, or that Christianity was officially established as a national religion. That’s not what the claim is, but the claim is that the natural law tradition that was sort of housed within and carried forward within Scholasticism and Christian thinking has a real influence on the Founder’s ideas.

Justin Dyer:

And James, I actually, I like the way that you phrased the question—of whether America had a Christian founding, and that’s the way that Mark Hall phrases the question too. And it separates it from the question of whether America is a Christian nation, and that’s the one that we are used to talking about and debating publicly in the United States, whether we’re in some sense a Christian nation.

And our thesis is something different than that, much closer, I think, to how Mark Hall talks about America having a Christian founding, and it’s that the ideas that go into the American Founding and structure, its political categories develop out of a Christian tradition. And the title of the book is The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics. It points to both the classical ideas that influence the American Founding, but also point to the Christian context in which those ideas are passed forward and are adopted within the American Founding and structure. How we think about categories of constitutionalism and revolution and politics, sovereignty, and a lot of this gets bound up with the classical natural law tradition as we see its influence in the Founding.

James M. Patterson:

So we see a common refrain that the United States has a Lockean liberal founding. We see this celebrated and criticized on the right, and we see it celebrated and criticized on the left, but this has been a consensus view within scholarship on the American Founding. And what does this story miss? What does it not get?

Justin Dyer:

I think for a long time, we all talked about John Locke’s influence on the American Founders and assumed something specific about that. And as you mentioned, this can go in either direction, but for the interpretation, this is within scholarship, the interpretation was that Locke was subtly subversive of traditional Christian faith, and also of classical ideas about natural law and about sovereignty.

And so to say that we had a Lockean founding was to say that we were distinctly modern in some sense, and it was a modern break from a classical and Christian past. That could be celebrated, and it is in some quarters, that could be bemoaned, and it is in some quarters, but that was a common consensus for a while in the scholarship. And I think people are rethinking that. And there have always been people who have challenged that thesis. One of the scholars that you know James, Kody, and I read in preparing for this book was Donald Lutz.

And he has a wonderful article in the American Political Science Review back in the 1980s where he does a sample of political tracks published in the Founding-era. He goes from 1760 to 1805, he takes out of this sample political sermons, and so he is looking at political arguments in the Founding-era. And when he looks at the sources, he finds that the Bible is cited more often than all of the Enlightenment sources combined, including, of course, John Locke, and the book of Deuteronomy, in particular, is the most cited text in all of the political tracks.

And so there’s a way in which our focus on John Locke, to the exclusion of all of these other sources, has given us a skewed vision of the sources of American founding thought. And in this book, we’re trying to highlight once again something that people have known for a long time, which is that there are other sources, and those classical and Christian sources are at least as influential, if not more influential, and that’s what our argument is in this book.

Kody Cooper:

And I would just say maybe a little bit more about how to interpret Locke is maybe part of what’s contested here is, is Locke a theistic natural law thinker, or is he more of a subversive thinker in relation to the theistic natural law tradition? And we make the case in the book that, and this is, it’s not super fleshed out, but it’s part of our argument that Locke’s best interpreted as a theistic natural law theorist. And part of our argument there is trying to make sense of his theory of property. And we argue that his critique of Filmer doesn’t make any sense if you take God out of it.

Justin Dyer:

Yeah, I think one of the things is it’s not the case that there’s a hard dichotomy between, say, Republican sources on the one hand and liberal sources on the other, and then Christian sources as though it’s something separate from that.

Part of the argument is that this whole context in which the debates take place in the Founding-era operate within a Christian frame and a frame that develops out of this long Christian engagement with the classical tradition. And so what you get is, of course, a John Locke who is engaging with scripture and is himself making arguments that are within the fullness of that debate. And so I think one of the things we need to do is take a fresh look even at those sources that we had categorized as one thing or another in this whole debate about Founding-era political thought, and recognize the degree to which people were still moving within a system of thought that had been structured for a long time by Christianity and Christianity’s engagement with classical philosophy.

James M. Patterson:

Yeah, the Lutz article is The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late 18th Century American Political Thought. I want to thank you for shouting out Donald Lutz, he was a great professor, I learned a great deal from him at the University of Houston.

So what are the principles, the big ideas that you examine here? We have the ideas I see in the book on Providence, on the idea of God’s sovereignty. What are these various ideas operating as a kind of intellectual frame or foundation for the various people responsible for the American Founding?

Justin Dyer:

One of the things we do in the book is we try to give a fairly specific set of ideas that we would consider classical and Christian, and classical and Christian in the sense they develop out of this older tradition, and set apart from what it would mean to be distinctively modern. And so we have a set of 10 different ideas, and I think for this audience, for Law & Liberty, hopefully, they’ll allow me to go through and talk about those ideas, because they’re technical, but they’re important for how we understand what’s going on in the Founding. And what we do is we give us a set of 10 things we think would be classical. And if we compare then the Founding era primary sources to this set of ideas, we find that overwhelmingly they are operating within this classical framework rather than a modern one.

So going to that, it all has to do with the natural law tradition. And I’ll go through this quickly, we can talk about it, but I think it’s a good way to set up what our argument is. The first is that natural law has a law-giver, that as they understand the natural law, they also understand it to be coming from a law-giver, and that the law-giver is the divine creator, and the divine creator is separate from and distinct from creation. And so nature’s not divine, we’re not pantheists, we believe in creation.

Within that framework, then, it helps us to make sense of things like our practical reason, our ability to reason about the natural law, which helps us identify goods that are proper to human beings, helps us to then figure out how to pursue those goods in our lives through practical reason. The natural law, this way of thinking about the goods in our lives and how we achieve those in action, is prescriptive, meaning it imposes a moral obligation on us. It’s not just descriptive, it doesn’t just describe, if we want X, then we do Y to get it. It’s not just an observation about the world, but there’s actually a sense of moral obligation.

And that moral obligation emanates from the nature of God. And the nature of God, this theological question of God’s nature, unites power and goodness. And that sounds like a technical theological question, and it is, but it’s one that the Founders were aware of and that they wrestled with, and that they distinctively came down on one side of that equation. They said that God’s sovereign authority is one in which moral obligation is grounded in his goodness and his power. And so, obligation doesn’t come just from God’s superior physical strength alone, but it’s connected to his goodness, and they drew an analogy between this theological concept and the political concept of sovereignty.

So they said that sovereignty in a rightly ordered political community is modeled after this pattern of divine sovereignty, and so you have to unite power and goodness together. Power alone could never confer sovereign authority. And so this helps us make sense of the idea that might does not make right. That the rule of law means that the sovereign is subject to and bound by a higher moral law, and that higher moral law binds even the democratic sovereign.

Justin Dyer:

That higher moral law binds even the democratic sovereign, even We the People. We are bound by this higher moral law. And so even when sovereignty resides with the whole people, as they argue that it does, we still have recourse to and reference to something higher than human will alone. It’s not simply human will that determines what’s right in politics.

And then this last part, which you had mentioned already about providence, and which is crucial for their framework in understanding this, that God sustains and provides for His creation both through this natural law, as we were talking about, and through exercises of divine providence that include divine revelation in Scripture and divine inner positions in human events. And you see echoes of that throughout these Founding-era sources. And then this last aspect, natural law, is part of God’s providence. And so reason, which is distinct from revelation, is nonetheless part of participation in God’s eternal law.

And this is a very classical idea. It’s one that they got from a lot of the sources that they were reading and that you find in a lot of these Founding-era pamphlets and debates and James Wilson’s lectures on law in some of these other sources. And so those 10 things that I had just mentioned become the standard by which we can then evaluate Founding our sources, whether they’re classical or not.

And the modern or the distinctively modern interpretation would do something that’s 180 degrees from that. You would have natural law without a lawgiver. You would have reason opposed to revelation and not compatible with it. You would have sovereignty founded on will alone and power being the thing that rules, and no unity of power and goodness because goodness is merely a subjective concept.

And that constellation of ideas we find in interpretations of Thomas Hobbes in the Founding, and we just give it a label, which is the label that people used for it in the late 18th century. And it was Hobbism. And I’ll let Kody talk a bit about that because he’s really the expert on Thomas Hobbes among the two of us, but this idea that America was Hobbesian is one that you do find in the scholarship and that we just don’t find any evidence for in our research.

James M. Patterson:

Kody, do you have any insight on, is it Hobbism? It sounds like Hobbitism, which I don’t think Thomas Hobbes would favor.

Kody Cooper:

Having in the past written a book about Hobbes, in which I stake out an interpretation that is, shall we say, a minority view. Part of what we want to say in the book is that to accept our argument, you don’t need to agree or disagree or even have a view on or even read what I’ve written before about Hobbes. But just as a historical matter, there is a tradition of reading Hobbes in a certain way and along the lines that Justin just laid out, a sort of voluntaristic view of Hobbes, merely instrumentalist view of reason, that morality is radically relative, subjective, justice is entirely conventional, all that sort of thing. And so we just use the label Hobbist, which is a historical label, but also to differentiate it as a concept from… It at least leaves open the question of whether Hobbes himself really is correctly understood in Hobbist thinking. We just bracket that question.

James M. Patterson:

So there’s an element to this book that I appreciate, which is that it reveals that in this milieu, this Christian culture, in which there are people of various devotions and different denominations, not a specific agreed upon set of principles, but rather a kind of consensus based on negotiation and deliberation.

And I was wondering if there are some tensions with other readings from this period. I think Vincent Phillip Munoz tries to create a synthesis out of Madison, Washington, and Jefferson in his book God and the Founders. And I have in front of me right here, I have Gregg Frazer’s book, in which he tries to adopt this concept of theistic rationalism as a frame for understanding the Founders. Is this a good idea to synthesize all these ideas into a single concept or, as you guys lay out, I guess this is kind of an answer to the question, you kind of let people be different?

Justin Dyer:

Yeah. And just because we wrote this book together, I think, probably doesn’t mean we agree on all these questions. I’d be curious how Kody would answer it, but as I’m thinking about it, the set of ideas that we’re talking about is the core set of agreed-upon ideas that then structure their disagreements. And when you’re looking at somebody like Phillip Munoz’s book on God and the Founders, what he’s offering is three very different ways to approach church-state relations during the Founding-era.

And so we have these different concepts of how we could understand the relationship between church and state. And I think nothing about the framework that we’re talking about in terms of natural law necessitates any one particular structure for church-state relations. And you actually see that in the Founding-era. So the various colonies that become states all have very different sets of commitments about the relationship between church and state, ecclesiastical structures, whether there would be a favored religion, and whether there would be taxpayer dollars going to support teachers of the Christian faith.

All of those kinds of questions are open. And it takes some time for the doctrines of religious liberty and freedom of conscience and those kinds of things to be worked out in each one of those states as the states disestablish their own religions. And there is, I think, for practical and prudential reasons, a decision very early not to establish a church of the United States. And it makes sense, given the tasks that they had and the denominational differences in each one of the colonies.

But none of that, I think that whole debate, it is in time, comes after the debate about natural law. And there is actually a widespread agreement on a lot of these core concepts that we’re talking about. And one place that you see this is in the lectures on moral philosophy taught by the colonial college presidents. And you can go and get the lecture notes for the moral philosophy classes, which the presidents often were the ones who taught.

And you can see in different places, whether it’s an Anglican college or a Presbyterian college or Baptist college, whatever it is, whatever the denominational origin of the ideas, the core philosophical questions about natural law, about sovereignty tend to be the same. And they do raise the questions I had mentioned earlier, the relationship between power and goodness and God’s nature, the question of the relationship of reason and will and sovereignty, both in the political community and as we understand the obligation that comes from God’s nature.

All those kinds of things are addressed, and decisively, they come down on one side of those questions. And that, I think, crosses over a lot of these denominational differences and these differences about how to approach the question of politics and ecclesiastical structures within politics. So I think that’s all something that happens before. And there is a synthesis that occurs before you get to the real divisions within society.

Kody Cooper:

Yeah, I think that all sounds right. And I would just say that you can see the practical and theoretical consensus can be seen as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. There’s wide agreement on a creator God who endows human beings with natural rights, who’s a providential judge and executor of that law. And that’s a lot.

But when you get down to more specific details about, well, how is this God to be worshiped and how specifically has this being interacted with human beings in history and revelation and this sort of stuff, that that’s not specified, and there’s a robust religious pluralism that is being accounted for and which is seen as a good, and it’s not seen as necessary or good to specify to that degree our Founding public documents. But what is specified is very substantial.

Justin Dyer:

Yeah. One thing I’d mention here that I think actually is important is that there is a tradition that you can find in theological writings within Christianity going into the Founding era where there’s a distinction drawn between God the Creator and God the Redeemer. And the idea is that we have knowledge of God the Creator by reason, and we have knowledge of God the Redeemer by revelation. And that God’s plan for redemption is something that is revealed to us.

And part of the argument, at least as they make it in the Founding era for religious liberty, is that your duty to render worship to God as you understand His requirements of you and as He’s revealed Himself to you is something that should be left to conscience and that should be separated from state direction. But what we know about God as creator is something that is legitimate for the public sphere.

It is something that can legitimately structure our political debates. And you find something like that, I think, reflected in a lot of these public sources and in the Declaration of Independence, as Kody had mentioned. But the key to this is that the idea, the category itself, that would make sense of the distinction between God the Creator and God the Redeemer and how we have knowledge of those things and what relevance it has for politics and the reason why we would have a fairly ecumenical statement of a kind of civil religion that binds and unites people is itself a category that comes out of Christianity and Christianity’s engagement with classical philosophical ideas. And so it’s another area in which even that structure of debate is one that develops out of this tradition that we’re trying to highlight in the book.

James M. Patterson:

So let’s take a slightly more sinister turn where people believe that, or I’ve heard argued that, there’s a surface use of Christianity among the Founders, but a deeper commitment to modern politics. And so there’s not a serious commitment among most of the Founders to Christianity except as easing us into a modern liberal republic. And if you could talk just a little bit about the spy mission stuff to answer this question would make me very happy.

Kody Cooper:

The spy mission stuff. So the idea being that Christianity is just being used for its utilitarian value to get people to go along with the new program. Is that the idea?

James M. Patterson:

Right.

Kody Cooper:

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a hypothesis that deserves serious consideration. And we do take it seriously. Because it’s not crazy to think that people would find religious ideas and use them as a vehicle for an agenda. I think the history is replete with examples of this. So one way of trying to get at it is asking the question, “Well, when the Founders talk about God’s favoring of the revolution, and they invoke God’s signal into positions of providence, one way of testing whether it is sincerely believed or not is to go look at the examples they invoke.” And the counter-

Kody Cooper:

Go look at the examples they invoke. So in the counterintelligence chapter, the Continental Congress said, “There are many instances in which divine favor has been shown, of which you just mentioned a few, discovering the councils of our enemies, raising up for us a powerful ally and turning the evil predations of the British and the Southern Theater to the good of our union.” And so we kind of say, “Okay, well, let’s go look at the actual people on the ground, the military officers, the spies, the people who are not your founding elite, highly educated people, and see how they thought about themselves in the midst of these great historical events.” And similarly with the Franco-American diplomacy, that whole episode that was so important for the winning of the war was Silas Deane and Pierre Beaumarchais and Benjamin Franklin have this sort of great negotiation and to try to get material to the American troops.

And so we look at these different episodes, and what we find is in the moment when Washington spies are in New York and keeping an eye on what the British troops are doing and sending these letters in invisible ink back to Washington and stuff. They will speak in a way that indicates they believe that there’s a providential governor of the universe, and they will specifically invoke Christ as God and believe that God is favoring them, protecting them from ill. There’s one episode where one of the spies is searched by a couple of ruffians on the road, and he writes in his letter, “Thank kind providence. They didn’t search my boot.”

And so in these letters, you’re not going to find deep theological reflection, but you find, it seems to me, evidence that shines through of a genuine belief about God’s causal relationship to the world being manifested in this event. Similarly, with the Franco-American diplomacy, Silas Deane, Benjamin Franklin, they made the argument to the French monarchy that God had raised up France for this moment. Now again, you could argue that it’s this use of utilitarian appeal to their vanity, to their pride that God is raising them up and it’s in their interest to go take out some British navy and that sort of thing. But in these private letters, you see these reflections come out where they seem to express a belief about it—that if it was all cynical, why add that in the private letters? That it does seem to require a stretch of the imagination to think that they would be covering their tracks that carefully if they were all MPs atheists.

And there are a number of times throughout the Revolutionary War where various events happen when we discover Benedict Arnold’s plot, and there are many letters written about how this is a sign of God’s favor. That we saved West Point, all this sort of thing. There are big victories that happen in the South, in the sort of latter part of the war, where they’re interpreted by various generals and officers as providential favor. So all of that to say, it looks like there’s evidence that the Congress’s declaration was not just post hoc pious cover, but it looks like it was reflecting something that the actors in the events actually seem to believe.

Justin Dyer:

And the question you asked, I think, helps make sense of the argument they were making in the book because there is such a gulf between interpretations here—people reading the same sources and having very different interpretations of it. And one example of that is a recent book that came out. Matthew Stewart, a philosopher, wrote a book called Nature’s God. And the subtitle of the book is The Heretical Origins of American Politics or something along those lines. But it points to his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as representing an emancipation of modern politics from a theological past and an interpretation of the phrase Nature’s God as ultimately being pantheistic, as equating nature and God as one thing, as pointing to an eternal universe. And God is the same thing as the universe. And then he says, “And that’s just a fancy way to say atheism.”

And so there’s an interpretation of these ideas that are being put forward in theological terms as a cover for a project that is inherently atheistic, and that is seeking to emancipate modern politics from its Christian past. And we came to the project knowing that that was, if not the dominant, at least a dominant interpretation in scholarship on how we think about the ideas in the American Founding. And there’s just such a difference between what you get in popular public discourse where a lot of people are going to argue that America’s a Christian nation and you get the kind of David Barton interpretation of America. From scholars who are much more likely to argue something that is almost exactly the opposite, which is America, not only is it not a Christian nation, but it’s in some sense anti-Christian in its origins. That it’s designed to precisely break from some Christian past.

And so that gets into this question of this political order, this new order for the ages that the Founders are bringing into being, is this designed to be something distinctively modern and secular and liberal and commercial? And in doing that, we’re they using religious concepts and ideas and using Christian ideas to bring about this order that is inherently hostile to Christianity. And there is some plausibility to the thesis. And so people that are looking at modern politics and wondering what went wrong, and they do identify things that kind of sound like we’ve emancipated politics from theological concepts and beliefs, questions of ultimate concern. That we do prioritize commercial endeavors over other things. That we prioritize human will over reason. That we believe in unlimited sovereignty. All of those ideas do seem to characterize at least a big part of our modern politics.

So the question is, can we draw a direct line from where we are today back to the American Founders? Are they the ultimate source of those ideas? And we just disagree with that thesis, that straight line back to the Founding. That there’s a way in which it sounds like the Founders were anticipating John Rawls and John Rawls’ theory of political liberalism and its separation of politics from metaphysical concepts, all of that. And we just don’t think it’s there. If you go back and read the Founding sources, read them deeply, read them carefully, read them with this analytical framework that we have in mind in terms of asking what they’re communicating and how these ideas are operating.

We just don’t see that straight-line thesis being plausible. That actually, they’re quite serious about these theological concepts, quite serious about the role of reason as opposed to will, about the unity of power and goodness and sovereignty, about natural law having a lawgiver, about there being a creator and a creator who’s distinct from creation. And that actually matters for how we think about politics and for how we think about individual rights, and how we think about separation of powers and the Constitution. All those things are bound up with these deeper concepts. And I just don’t see the modern emancipation thesis really being plausible once you get into the sources.

James M. Patterson:

Speaking of the sources, a friend of mine, a colleague of mine here, John Coleman, likes to joke about people who defend the arguments in your book that it’s James Wilson, front to back. The solution to the problem is that you put the spotlight on James Wilson and ignore more secular or more humanistic approaches that are found, and people like the aforementioned, Benjamin Franklin, as well as Thomas Jefferson. And the book directly challenges this problem. I mean, Wilson’s in there, the chapter and the discussion of Wilson’s really great, but you include Thomas Jefferson and not in the Bartonian “Jefferson-was-an-orthodox-Protestant-Christian” [way], but in a way that illustrates that Jefferson still structured his ideas in a way that is adapted from classical and Christian sources. So who are some of these other people you talk about besides James Wilson? And maybe talk a little bit in particular about Jefferson and where he stands in all this.

Justin Dyer:

I’ll offer an offense of James Wilson and then let Kody talk about Thomas Jefferson and what we did with him. But James Wilson, on the one hand, it’s not that it’s Wilson all the way down, but Wilson is an extremely important and forgotten figure who signs both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, serves on the first Supreme Court, who writes a series of lectures on law that he thinks will be for American lawyers, what Blackstone was for English common lawyers. And so he’s deliberately thinking about the foundations of American jurisprudence. And so, for that reason, I think he’s extremely important to understand. But not only that, the people who argue for, in the book we call the subversive theology thesis, the idea that these theological concepts are being put to subversive use. They do still, nonetheless, interpret James Wilson as part of that project.

And so Wilson provides a challenge to us in one way, which is, here’s this guy who’s outwardly pious, who seems like if there’s anybody who holds to a classical and Christian view, it would be Wilson. And he, of all of the Founders, is nonetheless still engaged in this subversive project. That’s a hard challenge we have to address. And so we do that in a chapter on Wilson. But then the other challenge, of course, is that there are a lot of people that don’t look nearly as pious as James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson is first among them. And Jefferson is the guy who writes the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. And so what do we do with someone like him? How do we put him in this framework? And Kody did a lot of work on the chapter that we have on Thomas Jefferson.

Kody Cooper:

Jefferson, he has over 20,000 letters and read hundreds, thousands of them. The deeper I’ve gone into Jefferson, it seems like there’s always something more to learn. And he certainly is an eclectic thinker. And some people like Alasdair MacIntyre have said, “You can’t really even call Jefferson a philosopher. There’s not enough coherence there.” I could see why he would say that, but I guess I disagree. I think he does have a more or less coherent view of things, but he doesn’t lay it out all systematically. When you [inaudible 00:35:22] through all the evidence, I think a more or less coherent view of God as a creator and the universe being, as it were, existentially dependent upon God and that God is the source of conscience or the moral sense. And that’s through this, that we know the moral law.

Again, being an eclectic, he’s got various influences on him from the Scottish Enlightenment and other Enlightenment figures. And Jefferson, he seems to me that he would get interested in a thing and kind of chase it. Kind of like a dog chasing the car for a little while, and then he would…

Kody Cooper:

Chase it, like a dog chasing the car for a little while, and then he would go to something else. But anyway, all that to say, I mean, I think that the idea that Jefferson, as someone like Matthew Stewart, would say that he represents this idea. And when he writes the Declaration of Emancipating, the political order from God, I mean the evidence does not bear that out. I mean, he adopted, as his personal motto, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” I mean, he helped author an initial seal idea for the National Seal, which was a picture of Moses leading the Israelites away from the tyrant Pharaoh. And the national motto would’ve been “Rebellion to tyrant is obedience to God.” I think that he really saw natural rights liberalism as deeply, deeply grounded in and favored by God and that he saw God in his…

He talks about, in the notes in the State of Virginia, how can the People’s liberties be secure if they don’t believe that they come from a God? And I think that he did really believe that. Now, that’s not to say that he was personally some kind of Orthodox Christian. He clearly rejects Trinitarian thinking. I mean, he calls Calvin an atheist, because Calvin affirms the Trinity. So he has these things that he says, but that’s just one example of why, if in his private letters, Jefferson was really an atheist. When he writes to Adams and says how he rejected the French philosophs, materialist atheism, he’s like, “I never agree with any of that.” Why would he say that if he’s really an atheist? And then go on to say, “Oh yeah, and Calvin’s an atheist.” What would be the utilitarian value of that? And sort of covering his tracks. I don’t really see that.

And so I do think that he was a sincere theist and that it made a difference in how he thought about the foundations of morality and politics. And interestingly enough, you wouldn’t necessarily expect this. But when he gets in later in his life, and he starts discussing these metaphysical questions with Adams, that’s what you do in your retirement. You sit at Monticello and you send letters up to Massachusetts and debate metaphysics. And at one point he quotes Thomas Aquinas to Adams to explain his view. And I think that’s quite interesting.

Justin Dyer:

And thinking about Jefferson here and his challenge for our thesis, how we understand him and his thought, there are, of course, tons of debates about Jefferson, and you’ll get those debates and scholarship when you’re trying to interpret a thinker like Jefferson. But the importance here for us is that, yes, Jefferson is admittedly heterodox in his thinking. He does not believe in divine revelation and scripture. He doesn’t believe in core Christian doctrines or historic Christian doctrines like the Trinity. But nonetheless, he does seem to believe in a creator. He’s the draftsman of the original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. And in that original draft, he locates the source of our natural rights in our equal creation as he writes. And then, of course, later drafts insert language about God as provident as a judge. You have those other core theological concepts that come in later, not from Jefferson’s pen, but that also then, I think, highlights the way in which this is a document that comes together from multiple sources and is ecumenical.

It’s something that everybody can sign on to. But even some of these core theological concepts do originally come from Jefferson, who seems in his other writings and confirmed by the sources that Kody’s talking about later in life, to believe in God as a creator, as the source of natural rights and is still operating from within this Christian framework, even if he himself is not an Orthodox believer. And so the burden of our thesis is not to show, we don’t attempt to show that any particular Founder was Pius or Orthodox in their own beliefs. That’s not the goal or the point. It’s really one about influence, and it’s about the influence of these ideas that do develop within a Christian context. And I think that that is something that we’re able to demonstrate.

James M. Patterson:

So one of the surprises of the book for me was how it ended. I was expecting maybe to see some discussion of church-state stuff, which is there, but then you end by talking about two issues that don’t immediately come to mind, but you tie in rather brilliantly. And they are identity politics and Catholic integralism. So why did you choose to talk about those at the end, and how do they relate to the broader effort that you initiate in the book?

Justin Dyer:

Well, I think there’s always the question, what’s the relevance of this? And as it was coming out, you’re reflecting on, here’s this historical study. It’s important in its own right to get the Founders correct in terms of their thinking. And this interpretive question of the Founding is always important, but there’s also a question about the particular moment you’re living in, and what relevance this would have for that moment. And I think there are two different directions that things could go right now. And this reflects currents within modern politics. And one is a leftward trend toward identity politics, that people have seen as a theological phenomenon, an inversion in some sense of Christian theological concepts. And so we wanted to address that and tackle it head on how this thesis would relate to the trend of identity politics that we see today. And then, of course, the other one is Catholic integralism.

And there’s, in fairness, I think, a movement in Protestantism that looks something like it, but it’s just not nearly as coherent because there’s not a coherent ecclesiology to have a theory of integrating church and state in the same kind of way. But people are rejecting the Founding as we present it, the Founding synthesis of these ideas. And in its place, putting other theological concepts in there. And that looks different on the left and the right, but I think it’s a fragile moment for this political order as we describe it, as it comes forward from the Founding.

James M. Patterson:

Yeah, I think I saw somebody on Twitter proclaim that the United States needed a Protestant Franco, and the mind reels that the idea of Franco becoming Protestant, but-

Justin Dyer:

Twitter, the source of all good ideas in politics.

James M. Patterson:

That’s right. It’s a perfect distillation of the worst ideas. So we’re running out of time, and I just wanted to give you, Justin, an opportunity to talk to us about what you’re doing at the University of Texas with the Civitas Institute.

Justin Dyer:

Oh, well, yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. I came to the University of Texas just a year ago and took on a project here. It’s called the Civitas Institute. And it is part of a larger, I think, national trend that we’ve seen where either boards of regents or state legislatures have invested more resources in civics institutes on campus. And it reflects part of the founding mission of public higher education, to train citizens, to be leaders in the next generation by equipping them with a knowledge of their constitution, of the political system that they live in, of the ideas that animate our civilization. And so we’re excited about this. We’re getting started in terms of building out programs for students and faculty. And the University of Texas also recently announced that we would be creating a School of Civic Leadership at UT, and that will allow us to carry on this project and to do it well, concentrate resources for it.

And there are people around the country doing the same thing. Listeners will be familiar with these efforts, but you have things at Arizona State, the University of Tennessee, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Florida. There are conversations about other states doing this as well. So I think it’s actually, it was on nobody’s bingo card five years ago, that we’d have a movement like this around the country. And I think it’ll create a lot of opportunities to develop new courses, to hire new faculty, opportunities for our graduate students to find placement, and to really reinvigorate civic education and make it a central part of higher education. I think it’ll be a positive thing for higher education and for the country.

James M. Patterson:

Well, I can’t think of someone better to lead the effort than you, Professor Dyer, you’re taking on a very serious task here, but I know you’re up to the challenge. And I’m on record at Law & Liberty as saying, let’s give up hope in all these places. So nothing would make me happier than to be proved wrong in this case. I just want you to know that.

Justin Dyer:

Retain some hope. We’ll see how it goes.

James M. Patterson:

Well, thank you both very much for coming on Liberty Law talk. The book again is The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding. Dr. Justin Dyer and Dr. Kody Cooper, thank you so much for coming on.

Justin Dyer:

James, thank you. It’s a pleasure.

Kody Cooper:

Yep, it was great. Thanks.

Brian Smith:

Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.