Oh, Holy Government

...Olasky, by contrast, emphasizes the growing moral estrangement from the British after the Great Awakening...

...their newspapers and sermons were filled with self-reproach, and Olasky shows, in almost prurient detail, that some of our forebears did a lot more than just lust in their hearts...

...In the French and Indian War (1756-1763), Americans saw first-hand the cruelty and dissolute nature of many British officers...

...These notions crystallized into an irrational fear of power, and so the Revolution was, in Bailyn's view, a tragic but inevitable overreaction, a kind of ideological mass hysteria...

...In one way or another, according to Olasky, this alliance between the supporters of personal virtue and the supporters of limited government has been central to American politics ever since, right down to its revival in the conservative movement of our day...

...At any rate, his eye for the "interplay of politics, religion, sex, and revolution" distinguishes this book from any other on the subject...

...Without denying Jefferson's rhetorical artfulness, however, it is clear that the "Awakened" believed in the Declaration's natural law doctrine every bit as much as the "Enlightened" did...

...At the least, it behooves Olasky and other conservative populists to explain how and why the Constitution, which had successfully restrained the federal government's power and ambitions for so long, should suddenly, late in this century, have given its blessing to an American version of social democracy...

...Like many conservatives today, he appears to think that the opponents of the Constitution had the better argument, or at least were more prescient than its supporters...

...The "laws of nature and nature's God" meant precisely that...

...The mother country didn't help matters by sending as royal governors some of the most inept and shameless characters imaginable-among them Lord Cornbury, who between persecutions of New York Presbyterians and Dutch Reform preachers took time out to don women's clothing and prowl around the governor's palace in drunken drag...

...They had to agree that holiness demanded religious freedom rather than religious persecution...

...Reading today's politics back into the past is a dubious enterprise, of course, but Olasky claims only to be discovering the latent parallels between "political and cultural wars in eighteenth-century America" (the book's subtitle) and those of the past three decades...

...The idea seems of a piece with the right's growing tendency to trace our contemporary problems of "big government" back to the defenders of the Constitution 200 years ago-instead of blaming the relentless critics of the Constitution who over the past century have done everything they could to subvert and supplant it...

...Faced with such provocations, the Americans really did begin to see the British as corrupt-their once virtuous empire going rapidly the way of pagan Rome, their godly kingdom falling into Babylonian sensuality...

...Examples of similar reasoning could be multiplied...

...Marvin Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion, the influential social history of American welfare policy that has become the bible of devolution, argues in Fighting for Liberty and Virtue (Crossway Books, 316 pages, $25) that at the heart of the American Revolution was a coalition of religious activists and tax rebels- advocates respectively of "holy government" and "small government," in Olasky's terms-who united to throw off the "big government" pretensions of the British empire...

...West then proceeded to confirm these principles by arguments drawn from Scripture, and to demonstrate that reason and revelation concur in giving men the right, and the duty, to overthrow tyrannical government...

...Why get so upset over a small tax on tea, after all...

...But surely it ought to be celebrated as a victory for the sanctity of the individual's relation with God, which lay at the heart of the Great Awakening and would soon blossom forth anew, thanks in part to the law and spirit of religious liberty, in the Second Great Awakening...

...This is populist history with a vengeance, always finding someone besides ourselves to blame for our troubles...

...But it does aid in making sense of the suspicious reactions here to the Stamp Act, Quebec Act, and other British policies of the 1760s and 1770s...

...Today we tend to think of one part of the conservative movement as being concerned with morality, and the other with freedom, but the American Revolutionaries were concerned with the morality of freedom itself...

...Books Oh, Holy Government By Charles R. Kesler At a time when the winning alliance between social and economic conservatives seems ready to unravel, here comes a book on the American Revolution designed to reassure and inspirit today's aspiring revolutionaries...

...Olasky comments, for instance, that after the Great Awakening, "America was looking more and more like a Christian commonwealth that combined the best aspects of individualism and community...

...Charles R. Kesler teaches government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif...

...Fighting for Liberty and Virtue casts a bright but narrow light on the religious background of the American Revolution and is a lively reminder that neither virtue nor liberty, taken by itself, is the American idea...

...The most important and persuasive part of the volume is Olasky's account of the religious roots of the Revolution...

...But the point is that the more "Awakened" and more "Enlightened" patriots cooperated not out of compromise but out of conviction, because they believed that revelation and reason taught essentially the same morality...

...Not that the colonists thought themselves so good or holy...

...Is James Madison really responsible for the collapse of federalism...

...Thus, in late 18th-century America, the Awakened and the Enlightened were not in fact two sharply defined and opposed groups, and the Revolutionary movement was not a self-conscious coalition of them...

...Olasky describes how the movement for independence-the alliance between "libertarians who feared governmental power" and "Christian conservatives who emphasized sin"-was knit together by the political craftsmanship of Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Witherspoon, and other statesmen...

...Though the Reagan coalition was largely (not entirely, of course) negative, the Revolutionary movement did stand forthrightly for a set of principles that received their most authoritative expression in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence...

...This interpretation finds little favor in contemporary scholarship, which tends to view the Revolution either as the last gasp of classical republicanism or the first eruption of Lockean liberalism...

...Reports circulated widely of the blasphemies and sexual libertinism of prominent British aristocrats, who built Playboy Mansion-style pleasure palaces outside London in which to indulge their vices...

...Rather, he accepts it as a tactical concession to reassure the Enlightened...

...This isn't good for us as children of God, or as citizens of the Republic...

...Is it Alexander Hamilton's fault that the federal budget is unbalanced...

...There was consensus on this from very early on, but it took a while for its implications to be thought through and worked out...

...Olasky's stimulating book carries the story of the fight for liberty and virtue up to the writing and ratification of the Constitution...

...Yet at the same time he is acutely aware that the established churches in Virginia and other colonies, though moderate by British standards, had plunged Christians into internecine warfare-Anglicans against Presbyterians, Congregationalists versus Baptists, and so forth...

...Like the Reagan coalition two centuries later, this original American coalition was defined more by its possession of common enemies than its allegiance to common principles or purposes...

...The movement's character was determined by the negative judgment, shared by both sides for different reasons, that political "authority must be circumscribed...

...But left in the shadows are the moral and political principles that actually inspired and guided the Revolution, which renders the book much less useful to present-day conservatives than it might have been: Populism is no substitute for constitutionalism...

...Yet here is where Olasky's attempt to assimilate late 18th-century and late 20th-century politics goes seriously awry...

...And the chief prelates of the established Anglican Church, who constituted a sixth of the House of Lords, schemed to bring dissenting Americans to heel by appointing bishops for the colonies...

...Here, unlike in 18th-century France, the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom went together, usually in the same persons, as Tocqueville pointed out famously in Democracy in America...

...Olasky knows that the voice of the people is not the voice of God, yet he so despises today's secularized elites that he often forgets to remind the people of their own limitations...

...The "most perfect freedom" therefore consisted not in following one's passions but in "obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law...

...He shows that the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s helped prepare the way for later political upheavals, insofar as the "criticism of a corrupt church" set the stage for the "criticism of a corrupt government...

...But Olasky doesn't celebrate the gradual movement toward disestablishment of state churches, perhaps because it looks to him like a dilution of religious seriousness...

...But the Americans were acutely conscious of their backsliding, and so-whether from sterner morals or the frontier shortage of vices-they came to regard themselves as more vigorous and virtuous than the British, at least...

...Historian Bernard Bailyn and his followers attributed the deepening mistrust to the ideology Americans had imbibed from Cato's Letters and other opposition Whig writings of the early 18th century-the idea that liberty is always threatened by power, whose encroaching nature must perforce be resisted...

...Olasky treats the Declaration as a "rhetorical compromise" between contending notions of nature, liberty, and Providence-a successful effort to parchment over differences between groups who had agreed to disagree for the sake of escaping Britain's clutches...

...Samuel West, a well known Congregationalist minister, argued in his 1776 Election Day sermon before the Massachusetts Council and House of Representatives that the equal rights of men derive from their original equality in a state of nature, a state of "perfect freedom" that was nonetheless "very far from a state of licentiousness," inasmuch as the "law of nature gives men no right to do anything that is immoral...

...Hence he blames many of the problems of our current centralized welfare and administrative state-high taxes, the imperial judiciary, the "Beltway mentality"-on the Federalists, who wished to "make the country safe for ambition" by creating a complicated, self-regulating government in a faraway city that with any luck would soon become "a new London...

...Of course, for "holy government" and "small government" to coincide, Americans had to agree that holiness was something too precious to be entrusted to government...