Virtue: Religion and Philosophy, What does the Founders’ Vision Embrace?

Common wisdom among the right is that we are in trouble as a society because we have chased God from our institutions and are no longer religious. Their solution is to bring religion back into our institutions to re-institute virtue. But I am not sure that is really what we need. Is acting “good” because we seek celestial reward or to avoid celestial punishment virtue or compelled behavior?

Remember, Athens executed Socrates, a philosopher, for atheism and corrupting the Athenian youth with his atheist ideas. Essentially, although as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautions us, we have little evidence of the historical Socrates; he pushed for doing the right thing because it was the right thing.

Virtue, I think, is the desire to do the right thing without fear of punishment or fear of reward. If that is true, then does religion really teach virtue or just provide a coda of acceptable behavior? Is it a Skinner box for operant conditioning or a virtuous system? To me, it sounds more like operant conditioning rather than virtue. Operating conditioning is what we do to someone, versus virtue, which is what springs from within a person. It is like what happens to the protagonist in A Clockwork Orange. Something imposed versus something expressed out of free will. Something imposed is not virtue. It is compulsory behavior based on fear. And that is why Athens executed Socrates. He advocated free will, which could question Athen’s behavior.

In the end, religion serves the state. That was the impetus behind Constantine’s Council of Nicaea. He used the council to express a political decision which undermined his political opponents. And now the Church—at least the Catholic and Episcopalian variants of the church—still recite in their liturgy. The Germans, Constantine’s primary antagonists, believed Christ was similar to, but not the same as, God. The orthodox version said “begotten not made”. In one stroke, he used religion to undermine his political antagonists. This is not a virtue. It is the Divine Right of Kings.

It flies in the face of the Declaration of Independence. And for the right to rely upon religion rather than Socratic philosophy flies in the face of what the founders of the Republic sought to establish. We seem to forget that Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and other founders were Deists and not strictly Christians, as the right would have us believe. The Treaty with the Barbary Pirates was quite clear when it stated, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”. In the interests of full disclosure, I changed my dog tags from Roman Catholic to Deist before I deployed to Afghanistan.

I suspect that the Nature’s God referred to in the Constitution has more to do with an imminent numinous that Guy Gavriel Kay discusses in his two volume set on Byzantium than the classical transcendental deity of Christianity. If that is the case, then does the religious right do more damage to the Constitutional approach than good?

If that is the case, are we better served with teaching a philosophical construct of virtue based on doing the right thing for the right reasons, versus a religious construct based on a supernatural based reward and punishment system? Is the right just as averse to the founding of the Republic as the left, but for different reasons? Is our government based on virtue or compulsion? Are both the right and the left trying to subvert the founders’ vision, but for different reasons? Or are the “reasons” just a smokescreen for what they are working on together?

I suspect the founders operated more on the lines of what I call spiritual humanism rather than theology. This is not a call to abandon religion, but rather to keep it personal.