Loud Noises!
‘Hell & The High School’ has to be an alley-oop toward an R.L. Stine novel
A Timeless ?
David Brooks jokes that Alexander Hamilton has been reborn as a Latino hip‑hop star from Washington Heights. The real Hamilton, writing Federalist No. 1 on 27 October 1787, set our national stakes more soberly:
“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
Two‑and‑a‑half centuries later, the experiment remains unfinished.
Bad Manners
To govern by intention rather than chance requires reckoning with faith’s place in America. Those who sport Christopher Hitchens tattoos proudly quote Jefferson’s wall between church and state, and Adams’ proclamation to those pesky Pirates that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
Others see Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” as evidence that Providence itself underwrites the republic. I am an agnostic who once tried out the louder varieties of atheism (read as “obnoxious”). I also sincerely sought to understand, investing two college spring breaks in mission trips rather than tomfoolery. I never found God, but I did find fellowship. Religion is not simply a system of propositions; it is a social technology capable of astonishing good and shocking (though not surprising) harm.
The founders saw and foresaw the tension:
- Explicitly, they refused to bake any single creed into law, knowing that privilege bestowed on one faith becomes alienation imposed on another.
- Implicitly, they accepted and even appreciated that faith shapes leaders, and to police their interior lives would be to criminalize thought itself.
The line that matters is practical: does an office‑holder serve co‑believers better than dissenters? If so, the wall has cracked. If not, the republic absorbs the moral energies of many traditions without adopting the dogma of any.
Monkeys in Tennessee
That porous tension was on full display in Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925. Clarence Darrow’s withering cross‑examination of William Jennings Bryan embodied what we might call cruel criticism, skepticism laced with contempt. Bryan’s strident public refusal to entertain the evidence for evolution illustrated purposeful ignorance, moral pity fortified by dogma. The encounter solved nothing but did illuminate a danger: when contempt and dogma harden into rivalry, the space for republican deliberation collapses.
The crowd swelled such that they moved the court outside.
The same pattern emerges whenever reaction threatens to overtake reflection; the $10 term for this is moralized antagonism. We reach not for dialogue but for denunciation, trading Hamilton’s “reflection and choice” for the very “accident and force” he feared.
So What?
Abstractions dehumanize. Embarking on those college mission trips (besides keeping me out of trouble) enriched my label of believer, making it damn difficult to criticize in broad strokes. Similarly, I shaded their understanding in a way that contaminated their thinking, forever frustrating any absolutism—i.e., yes, I’m the equivalent of the popular “gay uncle” argument bandied about in the early 2000s.
Neither of us changed each other’s minds because that wasn’t where we sourced our relationship. We had a common purpose that bound us over those weeks. We have many in America today. Alas, we’re far more interested (sometimes understandably) in indulging difference than recognizing commonality. For those with more skin in the game, I get it, and we remain neighbors nonetheless. So don’t fall folly to thinking Frost was pro-fences and we’re better walling off faiths (we’re not).
The last word, as always, to someone much more erudite.
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”—(O)G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World (1910)
Say what you will about Brooks, but he is abnormally funny (as measured by being a NYT journalist and a professor at Yale).
All angles selectively collage our past to serve their interests, which is why originalism feels untenable as a productive approach to policy making.
Orson Wells’ Clarence Darrow Monologue here
Though his views were much more nuanced than we now recall. See Jill Lepore here if interested.
Dr. Frances Lee’s recent work is well worth your time.
Geoffrey Canada taught me to take back contamination.