Steve Smith's response to Chris Eberle

A few days ago, Chris Eberle asked:

. . . Even if we assume, as is surely not the case, that there was some one position, even broadly construed, that the founders took with respect to the proper public role of religion, of what normative significance is that fact?  After all, suppose that we agree that, as Prof. Stone says, "the Founders were not anti-religion. They understood that religion could help nurture the public morality necessary to a self-governing society. But they also understood that religion was fundamentally a private and personal matter that had no place in the political life of a nation dedicated to the separation of church and state."  Why should that matter to me any more than their belief in Newtonian physics? . . .

In response, Steve Smith writes:

(1) One standard response, more or less Burkean, emphasizes the superiority of collective, accumulated wisdom over that of any single person or generation.  This claim is debatable, of course, and it may not apply to the kind of argument that focuses not so much on an ongoing tradition as on the particular thinking of the founding generation.  In this respect, Chris says his perplexity may reflect his Protestant skepticism of tradition.  Maybe.  But insofar as the sort of talk he is uncertain about isn't about "tradition" so much as about "the Founders" (and especially, of course, if the Founders are being cited in figuring out the meaning of the Constitution, as is often true), this sort of argument isn't really about tradition.  It might be closer to a "sola scriptura" type of thinking that Protestants presumably would be comfortable with.

2. Or we might just think that the Founders, or their generation, happened to be unusually wise or prescient, so it would be prudent to give weight to their judgments.  Reasons might be offered for thinking this.  A variation is that their generation was part of, or at least closer to, a worldview that understood truths that a modern worldview has trouble grasping.  So we might be interested in what they thought because for us this might be a sort of window into a world that we no longer have good access to.

3. Actually, though, I suspect that perhaps the major reason why we care so much about what the Founders thought is because they were in an important sense constitutive of the identity of our political community.  On a personal level, any sane normative reflection will take into account the kind of person I am, or you are. "What should I do?" or "How should I live?" can't be sensibly addressed without some understanding of "Who or what sort of person am I?"  The same seems true for a community.  But what gives a community its character or identity?  It's a large question, but surely a major part of the answer has to refer to the traditions of the community, and in particular to its origins or founding.  I think we all basically understand this when we give normative weight to what the Founders thought.

Thoughts?