TaxProf Blog

Dispatch Faith:  A Declaration Against Idolatry, by Kevin D. Williamson:

Abraham Lincoln … leaned into the Declaration when confronted with slave-holding Southerners who believed that the time had come when it was “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” What Lincoln derived from the Declaration was not a writ for secession but a mandate for the fundamental principles, then as now imperfectly realized, of the American Revolution itself.

As Union soldiers marching into battle to the tune of “We Are Coming, Father Abra’am” surely appreciated, the 16th president, with his presagious Hebrew name, was a kind of patriarch (he dreamed of visiting Jerusalem in his retirement), and the Declaration of Independence that he took as his political scripture presents the American proposition as a theological statement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

We modern rationalists find much in those words that our secular sensibility can digest easily: legal equality, unalienable rights, consent. But those were not radical or revolutionary ideas: They were, at most, extensions of principles of English government that went back at least as far as the Magna Carta.

But the Declaration of Independence complicates and enriches—inestimably—those old English notions of equality, fundamental rights, and consent by associating them with its most radical claim, which is a matter of supernatural rather than natural law: that we must enjoy the dignity of citizens, rather than endure the servility of subjects, because we are “endowed by our Creator” with the capacity for higher things.

(more…)

Dispatch Faith:  Is Antisemitism Un-American?, by Jack Miller (Founder, Jack Miller Center) & Wilfred M. McClay (Hillsdale; Author, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story):

[Are] antisemitic attacks un-American? We should be very careful in using the word “un-American.” It has a history of being misused, and sometimes used in dishonest ways. As Americans, we rightfully prize our freedom, and being a free society means that we give a wide berth to all sorts of opinions and differences.

But our freedom does presuppose something important: a shared respect for the fundamental values that are basic to the American way of life. Those are the values and the vision conveyed in our Declaration of Independence, the belief that all men are created equal and have a natural right to their life, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness.

It is vital to recognize the deep Jewish roots of those ideas. Go to any church in America, sit down and pick up the Bible, and what is the first book that you come to? The first book, of course, is Genesis, followed by Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—the first five books of the Jewish Torah, followed by the rest of the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh). These books were part of the Old Testament that the settlers who built America carried with them when they came to our shores, the texts from which our Founders drew their inspiration for the principles behind our political tradition. As one of us has previously written with Pete Peterson [Pepperdine], the Hebrew Bible shaped foundational principles including the separation of powers, our sense of justice, and the exalted vision of human dignity at the heart of our nationhood. …

[I]t is important to insist that antisemitism is un-American.

(more…)

Christianity Today Book Review:  These Pastors Loved America So Much, They Wanted It to Stay British, by John D. Wilsey (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Author, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea) (reviewing Gregg L. Frazer (The Master's University), God Against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy's Case against the American Revolution):

When a person dies, that person is usually forgotten as time advances. The Book of Exodus opens with the memorable saying: “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (1:8, ESV). Let’s face it, when most of us are laid low by the sweeping of the dread sickle, the memory of our lives will be swallowed up by oblivion. The psalmist reminds us of this reality: “As for man, his days are like grass. … The wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (103:15–16, ESV).

The same can be true for ideas. Many ideas die with those who strove, fought, and suffered for them. This is usually the case for the people and ideas that were on the losing side of some great controversy. If later generations do not forget them outright, they at least tend to remember them as inevitable losers, in part because the victors have reduced them to caricature.

Both dynamics seem to be true of the individuals who remained loyal to the British crown during the American Revolution. The Loyalists and their ideas are unknown to many, if not most Americans. And if they are known, they are too often remembered in simplified and distorted ways.

The living owe something worthier to the dead than forgetfulness or, worse, their misconstruing or mockery. We owe them our empathy and even, as historian Beth Barton Schweiger has recently argued, our love. And loving the dead means laboring to tell the truth about them in all its complexity. In God against the Revolution, historian Gregg L. Frazer considers the Loyalist clergy and their arguments against American rebellion and independence, giving their viewpoint a careful, comprehensive, and fair treatment. …

(more…)