Courageous Good Character Prevails is the first common value of Simple Liberty. This post takes up the first virtue that supports it: Faith.
In the early 1770s, a Baptist preacher named James Ireland stood in a jail cell in Culpeper County, Virginia. His crime was preaching. He had no license from the established church, and men who preached without one went to jail.
His congregation gathered outside the window to hear him. Someone tried to smoke him out by burning sulfur beneath the grate. Someone else tried to poison him. He kept preaching through the bars until they let him go.
Virginia was not a foreign country. It was America, years before the Declaration of Independence and two decades before the Bill of Rights. Yet, it was jailing men for what that state felt was the wrong kind of Christianity.
The licensing itself was the danger
A few years later, John Leland was a New England Baptist who preached in that same Virginia. He came south in 1776, and then spent fourteen years fighting government licensing of religion. He did not want a license. He wanted the licensing to stop.
The danger was never that government might license the wrong church. The danger was that government with the authority to establish religion also had the authority to block a religion. Our Founders would not allow that.
Our Declaration of Independence grounds the colonists’ rights in a distinctly theistic conception of natural rights: Our rights are not granted by the King or government; they are endowed by the Creator. American government’s legitimate purpose is to secure rights that already exist.
Nations still control religiion. China licenses the congregations it approves and prosecutes the ones it does not. America chose differently at its founding and protected this right: Any peaceful faith is free here, provided it is not forced on anyone, not violent, and not promoting insurrection.
Leland made an argument that cost him something. He argued that the state had no jurisdiction over conscience - not over his, or someone with a different view - both peacefully lived out in community.
He wrote that government should protect the Jew, the Turk, the pagan, and the Christian alike, and that truth needs no help from the sheriff.
He found an ally in James Madison, a planter raised Anglican who did not share Leland’s theology. Virginia’s Baptists made their position known during ratification of our Constitution: They wanted amendments securing the rights of conscience, and they wanted this right defined in written law.
Virginia went first. Its Statute for Religious Freedom, written by Jefferson and driven through by Madison in 1786, ended the state church there five years before the Bill of Rights was ratified.
The First Amendment that followed was not written by men indifferent to religion. It was written by men who took religion seriously enough to know the abuse that happens when government controls it.
A door only half open
Haym Salomon was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who arrived in New York around 1775 and joined the Sons of Liberty. The British arrested him twice. The second time he was under sentence of death, yet got out of the city financially broke but not seriously harmed.
He landed in Philadelphia and became a broker. When the Continental Army had no money - which was most of the time - Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance, turned to Salomon to convert French and Dutch bills of exchange into usable cash.
Salomon did that work for the government at little or no commission. He advanced money to members of Congress who could not otherwise afford to stay in Philadelphia and do their jobs. James Madison was one of them.
Salomon died in 1785, in his forties, and left his family almost nothing.
In most of the states he was helping to free, a Jew could not have held office. Some required a type of Christian oath. Salomon was pouring his health and money into a republic that had not yet decided whether he fully counted.
He signed on anyway.
That is what covenant means. The founding generation did not inherit America the way someone inherits a physical asset like a farm. They chose it. They committed - all in - and some did so knowing the door was only partly open, betting that the love of others in their communities would eventually overcome their fears.
What it cost to sign
Charles Carroll was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence. In the Maryland where he was born, Catholics could not vote, hold office, or practice law.
He had been educated in France, because Maryland would not educate him. He came home to a colony that treated his faith as a liability, even though he was, by most accounts, the wealthiest man in America at that time.
He signed anyway, with more to lose than most. He outlived every other signer. He died in 1832, at ninety-five.
He also owned slaves. Hundreds of them.
Carroll knew what legal exclusion felt like. He had been told his whole life that the law would not fully recognize him. That did not stop him from holding others in a condition immeasurably worse - slavery - and he never freed them.
The enslaved never got a choice. Carroll had one, and in 1797 he used the freedom he did have to introduce a bill in the Maryland Senate for the gradual abolition of slavery. Sadly, it failed.
He was not alone in trying, and he was not alone in failing. Benjamin Franklin spent his last years petitioning Congress to end the slave trade. Thomas Jefferson wrote against slavery, yet freed only a handful of the more than six hundred people he held across his lifetime.
George Washington freed the one hundred twenty-three he owned outright, and provided for their support and schooling. However, the roughly one hundred fifty dower slaves at Mount Vernon were not legally his to free. He was the only slaveholding Founder who became president to free anyone. He also waited, his will enacting this change after his death. Doing it while he lived would have cost him something, and it would have said far more.
Courageous good character is not easy. It is right, it is true, and it serves the common good of all Americans.
These men did their best to do what was right because they had courageous good character that prevailed. It’s easy for us to second guess them hundreds of years later - while we give less scrutiny to our own mistakes. It’s healthier to learn from their mistakes and model their good behaviors.
The standard Adams named
In 1798 John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
History has proven him correct.
In the colonial years, and in the early years of the republic, government did not protect Leland’s congregation, Salomon’s synagogue, or Carroll’s Mass. In Virginia, government was the one doing the jailing.
What protected these men was that enough of their neighbors would not go along. Some sheltered a preacher they disagreed with. Some kept trading with a merchant their own church told them to shun.
Most simply declined to inform, to harass, or to stand by while others violated their values. They did not protect treacherous or murderous people, but rather commoners like themselves who were trying to live a higher purpose.
The First Amendment held because enough people had already decided to live as though it were true.
Some of them disciplined themselves because they submitted to God. Some because they answered to conscience, or honor, or what a man owes the people on his road. The particular answer varied more than we know - our founding generation included orthodox Christians, Jews, Quakers, Catholics, deists, and a fair number of quiet skeptics.
They did not agree on everything and regularly participated in civil yet spirited discussions of what might be right or wrong. All of them demonstrated that part of their covenant - their choice to be Americans - included respect of each person’s peaceful pursuit of their individual faith.
Think Back.
Remember a time when you fully lived out your faith. It felt so good. It meant something - to others, or to no one but you.
Relive the joy.
How can you build on it?
What if we changed first?
Freedom of religion is a core right of Americans, secured by the First Amendment and ratified with the rest of the Bill of Rights in 1791.
Our faith and how we live it out determines how we process information and experiences to decide what is true.
This means faith is important, whether it’s simply in our subconscious - or intentionally lived out.
Rather than jump to judging others, what if we first assessed how our faith - whatever it might be - is affecting our lives?
These two questions are a starting point:
#1 - Why do I believe my faith is true?
#2 - How can I better live out what I believe?
Study, trustworthy counsel, and honest conversation with others who share your faith will provide ideas for how to embrace it more fully - for your own meaning in life, and for the common good.
The Seven Daily Disciplines
Faith is the first virtuous root of Simple Liberty’s values. Consider our Disciplines through the lens of Faith:
Faith and Purpose - How can I be in deeper relationship with God, and/or my belief in a higher purpose - for greater meaning in my life and my relationships with others?
Integrity - How can I better apply my faith to consistently demonstrate integrity?
Common Good - How can my faith better serve the common good of my family, community, and nation?
Justice and Compassion - How can I better live out my faith to support equal justice for all, and compassion for those less fortunate?
Faithful Relationships - Faith is love for God and/or a higher purpose. How can I better express healthy forms of love to others?
Excellence - How can I dismiss fear, and take the time necessary to do my best work and fully engage in the relationships most important to me?
Legacy - How can I better serve my family, friends, community, and America, so they are better than they were before me after I’m gone?
Leland argued for the rights of a Turk he would never meet. Salomon financed a government that would not have seated him. Carroll signed a statement that all men are created equal, then went home to hundreds of people he held as property.
None of them was flawless. Every one of them served their covenant to America’s common good beyond their own interest, and they all fell short of it somewhere.
Where this leads
What you hold as ultimate - consciously or subconsciously - decides how you define truth. It decides whose testimony you accept, which inconvenient facts you seriously consider, and what you do when the evidence contradicts your opinions or hard-felt beliefs.
People who answer to nothing except their tribe and its information feed too easily believe whatever their group promotes. They do not catch dishonesty because they have chosen to blindly trust the source - in exchange for being accepted by the group.
People whose behavior contradicts their stated faith are equally lost.
No one is perfect. Fear motivates most of our worst choices. Courageous good character chooses from love instead - and the result is more meaning in life, less stress, and better relationships.
Faith comes first and truth second, because faith decides what you are willing to receive.
One thought to leave with you. American government establishes no religion. Instead, our Founders established a standard of rights and freedoms equal for all citizens based on Judeo-Christian principles and a respect for our Creator - in such a positive way that some atheists refer to themselves as cultural Christians.
Your challenge this week. Choose one habit to develop that strengthens you in one of the Seven Daily Disciplines’ areas above.
As an option, you could also choose someone who has a faith different than yours. Invite them for coffee or a walk. Sincerely ask them questions about their faith to learn more about it. Not to debate or convert them - or yourself. Just learn more and end the conversation as friends.
If this helped you think back, share it with someone you care about.
Next, we discuss Truth - what is truth and why it is important for a free people to stay free.
We can do this.
Sources
Primary Source - George Washington, letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, August 1790. The government of the United States, he wrote, gives to bigotry no sanction and to persecution no assistance. Roughly three hundred forty words that say the whole thing.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-the-hebrew-congregation-at-newport/
Primary Source - John Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (1791). The argument in his own words, from a man who had watched his friends go to jail.
https://www.consource.org/document/the-rights-of-conscience-inalienable-by-john-leland-1791/
Primary Source - John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102
Research - Robert Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010). Worth reading for the method as much as the findings: A longitudinal panel rather than a single snapshot, tracking the same people over time. Their result on interfaith friendship and civic trust is the modern measurement of what this post describes.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/American-Grace/Robert-D-Putnam/9781416566731
History - Thomas Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (2010). The evangelical and deist alliance behind religious liberty, told by a serious historian.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-s-kidd/god-of-liberty/9780465022779/?lens=basic-books
Reflection - Bradley Birzer, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll (2010). A sympathetic biography that does not look away from the contradiction.
https://books.google.com/books/about/American_Cicero.html?id=2EpcAwAAQBAJ