The American Proposition: Whose Truths? Which Strategies?

Late last year, Americans witnessed an embarrassing spectacle in which the presidents of three of the country’s most prestigious universities were asked in a Congressional hearing whether advocacy of genocide would violate their institutions’ codes of speech and conduct, and in response they gave answers that sounded tepid and equivocal. I might say at the outset that I had more sympathy for these hapless presidents than some did. The application even of fundamental principles can depend on context, I think, as the presidents said. And I am sorry to say that I myself am a vacillating kind of fellow; I certainly would not want to have to answer the questions that were posed to the presidents in that fraught setting. Still, the fact is that against the backdrop of angry campus activism, the presidents’ bland statements came across as a vivid illustration of Yeats’s well-known line about the best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats’ poem is about a society that is falling apart, and that in its dissolution is threatened by some obscure but ominous catastrophe. And this picture seems to many of us to capture the mood of our present situation. Many of us today—pundits, scholars, ordinary citizens—struggle to understand just what sort of situation we are in and how we came to be in this situation. Why is it that the center can no longer hold? Why do the best among us—or at least respectable people in positions of political and academic leadership, and sometimes even religious leadership—so often seem to lack all conviction? What is the monstrous beast that is slouching toward Jerusalem—or toward Washington, and London, and Paris?

These are perplexing questions, and I have no confident or overall answers. Nonetheless, here I want to offer one tentative perspective—a perspective that is related to the issue of religious freedom, and that is also inspired by the spectacle of the waffling university presidents.

So, let me go back a few decades, to 1960. With benefit of hindsight, it seems to have been a time of transition: the “Piety on the Potomac” of the Eisenhower years was coming to an end, but America’s heavy involvement in Vietnam, the Sexual Revolution, and the “Hippy” movement were still a few years in the future. Less conspicuously, I was baptized (at the age of 8). In that same year, Father John Courtney Murray published an important book of essays, under the title of “We Hold These Truths,” about what he called “the American proposition,” or the American project in republican government.

Let me quickly mention three features of Murray’s interpretation. First, as his title suggested, Murray argued that America was founded on a set of important truths—the so-called self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. But, second, Murray did not view these as settled, self-interpreting, once-and-for-all truths that merely needed to be recited and enforced. Acknowledging the country’s profoundly pluralistic character, he envisioned an ongoing debate about these truths—about their truthfulness, their meaning, their implications. “We hold certain truths,” Murray said, “Therefore we can argue about them.”

Third, the primary founding truth was the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God not just over individuals, or churches, but over nations. This divine sovereignty was something to be acknowledged not just privately but publicly. Here is Murray:

The first truth to which the American Proposition makes appeal is stated in that landmark of Western political theory, the Declaration of Independence. It is a truth that lies beyond politics; it imparts to politics a fundamental human meaning. I mean the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual men. . . . [T]he first article of the American political faith is that the political community, as a form of free and ordered human life, looks to the sovereignty of God as the first principle of its organization.

Murray’s interpretation of America reflected a more general supporting philosophy. It reflected a confidence that there is such a thing as truth, including moral and political truth. That humans have some capacity to discern such truth—and to reason about it. That one of those truths—the primary truth, actually—is the reality of a God who takes an interest in the affairs of human beings, including their political affairs. That even under conditions of pluralism, a human community should be based on truth—or on the community’s best efforts to discern and articulate truth. And that the relevant truth would itself prescribe not an imposed orthodoxy but rather freedom—freedom especially in matters of thought, speech, and religion. (This last point, by the way—namely, that the truth prescribes freedom—is central to a very different and important current debate that I will allude to later.)

In a condition of freedom, fallible human beings will disagree about the truth. But they can debate such questions in civil fashion. Or so Murray contended. And civilly engaging your neighbor about fundamental matters on which you disagree is not an affront or an insult; on the contrary, it is a manifestation of respect for your neighbor’s beliefs, cognitive capacities, and character. And this kind of civil engagement about truth is the basis of the American Republic. As Murray put it: “Civilization is formed by men locked together in argument.”

At the time his book appeared, there was nothing especially heterodox about his position. As we have seen already, Father Murray’s understanding of America was based explicitly on the Declaration of Independence. And his assertion that not only individuals but nations should acknowledge the sovereignty of God was at the time not some radical or reactionary proposal. On the contrary, it was entirely faithful to the American political tradition. If we had the time and inclination, we could support his view with plentiful statements from people who were presumptively sane, not fanatical or reactionary or marginal. People like . . . George Washington. John Adams. Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln. Even FDR. And of course the man who was president when Murray’s book was published—Dwight Eisenhower.

But if Murray’s interpretation was more or less orthodox at the time, it would shortly become heretical, or even offensive—as it probably still is today, at least in respectable academic circles. An almost opposite view or strategy was in process of being formulated, and would eventually be perhaps best articulated by philosophers like John Rawls.

The alternative view reflects a very different and less sanguine supporting philosophy. It holds that whether or not there are fundamental moral or political truths, human beings will never agree about them; and trying to reason about such disagreements (or at least trying to reason about them in public discourse) will be divisive, and will be received as expressions of disrespect. It was disagreements over basic truths, after all, that gave us the Wars of Religion. And what we learned from such horrific experiences—or should have learned—is that government in a pluralistic community will work best not by trying to discern and state ultimate truths, but rather by distancing itself from such claims. Decisions about basic political matters should thus be made through deliberation that does not invoke anyone’s “comprehensive doctrines,” as Rawls put it. Especially religion.

So these two learned Johns—Murray and Rawls—can be taken as representatives of two opposite strategies for dealing with political pluralism. For Murray, political community is formed by engagement with matters of basic truth—including religious truth. For Rawls, political community is sustained by avoiding public engagement with basic truth, especially religious truth.

It will be helpful to have labels for these opposing strategies. For convenience, let us call Murray’s proposal the “engagement-with-truth” strategy or, for short, just the “truth strategy.” We might then be tempted to call the opposing position the “avoidance-of-truth” approach. And I think that description would capture an important feature of the alternative strategy. But just by itself it also sounds pejorative, and merely negative: it does not convey the positive content of the alternative strategy. We need to supplement it with a more positive term. What should it be?

One candidate would be “respect.” The basic idea is that in a pluralistic community, we should try to respect everyone, and everyone’s views. But for reasons I have already touched on, I think “respect” would be question-begging. That is because the truth strategy also values respect; but it holds that even in the context of public discourse, you can respect a person—indeed you show more respect—by taking that person’s basic convictions seriously and engaging with them, than by ignoring or attempting to marginalize those convictions.

So a better and still charitable description, I think, would adopt one of Rawls’s favorite terms: it would say that the alternative strategy finds the basis of political community not in truth—or claims about truth—but rather in “reasonableness.” Reasonableness not in the epistemic sense of rationality, exactly—or of boldly following reason wherever it may lead—but rather in a civic or social sense of “respectfully getting along without questioning or criticizing anyone’s faith or basic beliefs.” This is the sense of reasonableness, I think, that we often tacitly adopt in polite social settings where we understand that it would be a breach of etiquette, and divisive, to bring up religion as a subject of possible contention.

As I have already said, when Murray’s book was published his ideas, including his idea that the sovereignty of God should be publicly acknowledged, resonated with the American political tradition. In the following decade, though, the Supreme Court turned away from Murray’s position, and from the traditional American position, and decisively embraced the Rawlsian, or avoidance-of-truth, or reasonableness strategy. Or, to be more chronologically accurate, we might say that the theories of Rawls and similarly minded thinkers can be viewed as elaborating and defending—and in some ways extending—the basic idea or intuition informing the avoidance-of-truth strategy that the Court had already embraced in the 1960s.

Thus, during the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court would declare, over and over again, that the First Amendment’s establishment clause demands that government must not engage with claims of religious truth. Instead, government must be strictly neutral toward religion—neutral both among religions and between religion and what the Justices sometimes described as “non-religion.” And government must satisfy this requirement of religious neutrality by confining itself to the domain of the secular. Secular not in the classical sense of “of this world,” but rather in the conventional modern sense of “not religious.” This requirement that government must be secular, or “not religious,” applied to the purposes for which government can legitimately act, to the primary effects of government actions and, as the Court eventually made explicit, to the expressions or messages that government might deliberately or inadvertently send. These prohibitions were embodied in what came to be known as the Lemon test and the “no endorsement” test.

To be fair, we should note that this requirement of a comprehensive governmental secularity and neutrality was not intended to be anti-religious, in the way that, say, Communist governments were anti-religious. On the contrary: as the free exercise jurisprudence that was developing at the same time prescribed, religion was still to be respected and even legally protected in the private sphere—which, as the Justices repeatedly insisted, is where religion belongs. Neither was the new regime anti-truth in any totalistic way: claims and debates about comprehensive doctrines and religious propositions were still permitted to flourish in the private domain. But the public sphere, or the governmental sphere, was to be strictly secular and neutral.

We should pause here to notice something puzzling or paradoxical about the new constitutional regime and how it came about. The Justices themselves, and most of the more elite or learned commentators in the country, do not seem to have perceived anything especially audacious in the new doctrines. They seem to have thought that the new doctrines were merely articulating what had been at least implicit in the American republic all along. And that has come to be the dominant view. Even more conservative or religious justices and commentators, though they have often been sharply critical of particular decisions, and also of general doctrines like the Lemon test, have largely acquiesced in (or even enthusiastically embraced) the premises of the new regime—namely, that state and national governments in America should be neutral towards religion and should stay within the secular domain.

And yet the requirement of governmental neutrality and secularity was in fact a radical departure from the American political tradition. And if these radical implications were mostly lost on the justices and the professoriate, they were perceived at the time by the American people generally—the decisions provoked a massive hostile public reaction—and by at least one Justice. Thus, in the first school prayer decision, Justice William O. Douglas listed other things that might be subject to invalidation under the new doctrine: religious expressions in Presidential addresses, Thanksgiving Day proclamations, and the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem, and the national motto (“In God We Trust”), maybe even official recognition of the Christmas holiday.

And the people and Justice Douglas were right. Of course, the courts have never carried out the sort of full-scale purge that Douglas imagined. The judges have spared many vestiges of the older providentialism by asserting, basically, that these traditional expressions have over time lost their religious meaning. This is an assertion that is offensive to believers and non-believers alike. Still, despite the best efforts of people like Michael Newdow and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the words “In God We Trust” are still printed on every dollar bill. But officially, at least, the words do not mean what they seem to say. Officially, we do not as a nation any longer acknowledge the sovereignty of God. On that and other fundamental questions, individuals can have their individual views, and even politicians and officials speaking as individuals can have their views; but we as a nation are . . . officially . . . neutral.

Murray’s proposal and the American political tradition, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Court’s “secular neutrality” jurisprudence and its elaboration in the philosophy of “reasonableness” thus reflect two diametrically different approaches to the challenges of pluralism and political community. And the implications, I believe, are momentous.

First consider the particular but immensely weighty matter of religious freedom itself—which has often been described as “the First Freedom.” In the traditional American understanding, religious freedom is to be respected because there is a truth—a religious truth, if you like—and that truth entails that people are to be left free in matters of religion. Coercion in such matters would be, as Jefferson put it, “a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.”

In the newer jurisprudence, that sort of theistic rationale is constitutionally out of bounds. So then why is religion deserving of special constitutional protection? Modern theorists stammer out answers, but none of the answers seem at all compelling; and theorists may thus draw the conclusion that although religious freedom somehow managed to worm its way into the Constitution, there really is no very good rationale for such special treatment. Or, insofar as religious freedom is still favored, this is likely on the assumption that religion is a private matter, a sort of personal preference—one that some people still care about, and that is mostly irrelevant to governance anyway; so absent some good reason to the contrary government ought to just leave religion alone.

But the new doctrines were not merely a reinterpretation of the First Amendment, or of religious freedom. They amounted to a fundamentally different conception of what America is. And that newer conception has had consequences that go far beyond the specialized constitutional field of religious freedom. For example, in constitutional law, issues about marriage, human reproduction, and sexuality are not usually thought of as religion clause issues. But those discussions are powerfully affected by the conception of government as strictly secular and religiously neutral. In this way, there was, I believe, a discernible line from the school prayer decisions (where the new regime of secular neutrality was announced) to Roe v. Wade. And to Obergefell v. Hodges.

Which brings us to the obvious question: which of these opposed strategies is to be preferred? And how would we go about answering that question?

Well, most of us will be influenced in part by whether we like the consequences of the newer conception. So if you think Roe and Obergefell were just or enlightened decisions, that would be a reason to favor the secular neutrality or reasonableness approach. And vice versa.

But beyond their specific consequences, we can also think about the underlying philosophies that I have said these strategies reflect. Murray’s strategy, once again, is more sanguine—and Rawls’s is more reticent—about the existence of fundamental truths (including the existence of an attentive God), about the ability of humans to debate and discern these truths, and about the importance of truths not just for individuals but as a necessary foundation for political community—and for our political community. So then, which of these philosophies, or these orientations toward truth, seems more valid or persuasive with respect to our present situation?

When the question is posed in that way, I find myself vacillating (a bit like the university presidents, I am afraid, that I mentioned at the beginning). And I confess that I do not have as much confidence in our ability to discern basic truths through reason as some have, or as Murray seems to have had—or about our ability to articulate the most fundamental truths in human language. Nonetheless, I favor Murray’s truth strategy over the alternative. Why?

Part of the reason is that I think that unless they are grounded in truth commitments, concepts like the idea that every human being has inherent dignity and equal moral worth come to seem like convenient but ultimately implausible fictions. I also think that in their application to practical questions—school prayer, teaching of evolution, religious reasons in political decision-making, and so forth—the operative concepts in the reasonableness strategy—concepts like equality and neutrality—become question-begging and vacuous. Here I will just offer a summary allusion to a famous article by Peter Westen.

I have spent a lot of pages—too many, probably—writing about these problems in my scholarship. But here I want to emphasize an even more fundamental reason.

Professor Richard Garnett often likes to stress the importance of what he and others sometimes call moral anthropology. Everything turns, he suggests, on “an account of what it means to be human, of what a ‘person’ is.” I think Professor Garnett is right, and I also think that Father Murray’s truth strategy is more compatible with a sound moral anthropology—with what human beings distinctively are—than the Court’s secular neutrality or Professor Rawls’s reasonableness.

In support of this conviction, I would invoke Thomas Aquinas’s observation that “truth must consequently be the end of the whole universe, and the consideration of the wise man aims principally at truth” (Summa contra gentiles 1.1). Of course, there is a lot more to say on this subject than can be said here—or than could be said by me even in a very long article. But I think the claim, basically, is that what makes us persons and gives us a distinctive dignity is not our physical speed or dexterity, not our ability to satisfy our physical wants more efficiently than other animals do, not our capacity to build skyscrapers and rockets and communication systems, not even our inclination to form ourselves into complex societies. Rather it is our orientation to truth—our commitment to finding truth, our (admittedly limited or impaired) capacity to discern truth, and our inclination to live in accordance with the truths that we find, or that we think we find.

On this view, Murray’s truth-oriented strategy attempts to found human community on our essence, or on the feature that makes us distinctively human. It will be as full human beings that we come together in community. By contrast, the reasonableness strategy asks us, basically, to suspend or bracket or suppress this essential human quality for public purposes—in the interest of getting along, or not offending others. It is only as partial persons—as shadows of our real selves—that we come together in political community.

Michael Zuckert, who recently retired from the Government department at Notre Dame, expressed the point by imagining a comment of Calvin on the modern strategy.

For shame, Professor Rawls. Is a bit of threat to your comfort and safety all it takes to scare you off your “convictions”? . . . Do you men of Harvard know nothing of truth? Martin Luther said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” He knew the princes of church and state would give him no peace, no rest, yet he stood. And you Harvard philosophers, what do you say? “Here I sit. I dare do no more.”

Is this characterization unfair? I suppose a proponent of reasonableness might respond that no one is asking anyone to sacrifice their commitment to truth, but only to act on that commitment mostly within the private sphere—not to bring it too overtly into the public domain where it is likely to provoke contention and offense. But I would offer, quickly, two observations.

First, to indulge in gross understatement, the public domain constitutes a not insignificant portion of our lives. To ask us to be less than our full human selves in the public domain is no small demand.

And second, quarantining our truth orientation to the private domain is likely to enfeeble that orientation even in that domain. That is because truth is . . . truth. It makes no sense—or it makes a hash of the concept of truth—to treat a proposition as true only in the private domain. To treat something as a merely private truth is to imply that it is not really truth at all. And thus the exclusion of truth from the public domain reflects a devaluation of truth in general. I think, by the way, that this is a major reason why today, as Yeats foresaw, “the center cannot hold.”

Almost a quarter century ago, in an essay defending the Rawlsian position, Notre Dame philosopher Philip Quinn acknowledged that a Rawlsian society would be uncongenial to people who, as he put it, “as a matter of conviction want to live in ways tightly integrated around their comprehensive doctrines.” He thought this class might include many religious people, and also “Millian liberals and Marxist socialists.” Writing long before the term acquired its current associations, Quinn called such people “integralists,” and he conceded that Rawlsian type liberalism “does impose special burdens on the integralists,” and that it might even “doom integralist forms of life . . . to extinction.” This was cause for regret, he thought, but alas, “there is no social world without loss.”[1]

I think Professor Quinn’s observations were cogent as far as they went, but they failed to acknowledge the depth of the problem. The desire to live in accordance with what we believe to be true is not just a preference that a few peculiar or exotic groups happen to have. It is what makes us human and gives us—all of us—a distinctive dignity. And if we trade our orientation to truth in exchange for the hope of getting along amicably (which is basically the trade that the Supreme Court’s neutrality jurisprudence ordained and that Rawlsian liberalism proposes) we are sacrificing our humanity in exchange for a shallow, dehumanizing peace. So it is not just a few exotic “integralist forms of life” (as Quinn put it) that would be burdened and maybe doomed to extinction: it is life that respects what gives humans generally our distinctive dignity.

So it should hardly be surprising if more and more people rise up in rebellion against this ill-conceived bargain—sometimes even embracing the label of “integralism.” Nor should it be especially surprising if people flock to a political leader whom they perceive as having the courage to proclaim unpopular truths—even if on closer inspection that leader seems to have no regard at all for actual truth.

And the irony is that as a society we have not even gotten the benefit of our dubious bargain. On the contrary. Far from attaining civil peace and mutual respect, we now live in a society that is as fractured and contentious as it has been in decades, and arguably in its entire history, and in which mutual respect seems almost utterly lacking. And this condition reflects not just a failure of the reasonableness strategy; it is, I would argue, ironically, a product of the reasonableness strategy.

How so? Well, in the first place, if we teach ourselves to see and engage our fellow citizens apart from what makes them essentially human, and what makes them the humans they are, it is not surprising that we will have less reason to see and treat them with respect.

But on a more practical level: even in a society that attempts to embrace reasonableness rather than truth as its basic community-constituting commitment, people are still going to disagree about many things, and they are still going to need to engage in arguments explaining why their own cause is meritorious and their opponents’ cause is not. So then, what will you appeal to in forming your arguments? The natural course is for you to appeal to your comprehensive doctrines—to what you believe to be true and fundamental. That is what the Declaration of Independence did, and what Father Murray advocated. If those sorts of doctrines have been ruled out of bounds, there will be fewer rhetorical resources available to you.

But at least one thing will still be available. If the founding norm is reasonableness—meaning mutual respect and civility—then the obvious and powerful rhetorical strategy will be to convict your opponents of violating that norm—of being disrespectful or uncivil, hateful or bigoted. Paradoxically and ironically, adopting mutual respect as a grounding norm virtually ensures that people will not be mutually respectful; they will be almost compelled to resort to accusing others who disagree with them not so much of being mistaken with respect to the truth but rather of being uncivil and hateful.

And so we see today a public discourse—one that is rampant in politics but also in the academy, and that even reaches the Supreme Court—of people trying to carry their cases by implicitly or openly accusing their opponents of being hateful, racist, sexist, or bigoted. If the targets of these accusations protest that they do not hate anyone, and if these protestations seem to be sincere, the hatefulness can now be ascribed to their subconscious, or to the social structures within which they live.

More generally, we now live in a society, even in a civilization, in which truth—or at least ultimate truths—have been systematically marginalized or devalued. Joseph Ratzinger observed that “the really critical issue of the modern age” is that “the concept of truth has been virtually given up.”

Which brings us back to the woebegone university presidents, and to the condition of the best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And to the loss of a center that can hold. Because if central ideas and commitments cannot claim to be grounded in ultimate truths, what is going to hold them in place?

At this point, it is customary for the author to address the obvious practical question: what is to be done? And the obvious answer might seem to be: we should renounce the jurisprudence of secular neutrality and the reasonableness strategy and thereby free ourselves to once again ground our community on, as Murray said, truths, and ongoing debates about the fundamental truths. And indeed, the Supreme Court does in recent years seem to be moving away from much of that jurisprudence, although the ideal of neutrality remains very much in place and popular among both conservatives and liberals. Critics find the Court’s recent First Amendment jurisprudence alarming; as you might imagine, I find it insufficient but, overall, generally encouraging.

And yet I have to admit that I am not sanguine about our prospects. Observations and recent studies seem to show that Americans generally are no longer oriented to matters of truth. This condition is evident in the pervasive “fake news” and the flagrant disregard for actual facts so often detectable in contemporary journalism and politics. And it is evident in other ways: a study several years ago found that almost three-quarters of American millennials agreed with the statement: “whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know.” It is as if the reasonableness strategy, in its determination to filter truth out of our public deliberations, has infected our whole culture—perhaps even, in some instances, our churches.

The framers of the Declaration of Independence founded the new nation on a statement of truths. “We hold these truths . . . .” Father Murray advocated a similar strategy. But what truths do we hold today? Are there any such truths? Truths, that is, that “we hold”?

In these circumstances, I have to admit that I cannot see how any academic book or article, or any legislation, or any electoral victory, or any Supreme Court decision can get us onto a more promising path.

At this point I should probably confess, though, that in one respect my diagnosis of our situation might have gotten things backwards. It might be that the loss of belief in truth has been not so much a product of the jurisprudence of neutrality and the reasonableness, avoidance-of-truth strategy, as a cause. Father Murray could advocate that the nation be founded on truths—including the primary truth of the sovereignty of God—because he believed in truths, including the truth of God. Conversely, although as a Princeton undergraduate John Rawls had written a precocious senior thesis that exhibited a sort of Calvinistic faith, in a later autobiographical essay Rawls related how he lost his faith during his service in World War II. So in advocating that religious doctrines be removed from public discourse, Rawls was proposing a position for the nation that he had long ago adopted for himself. The fact that the nation’s leaders, including the Justices and academic elites, gravitated to Rawls’s strategy rather than to Murray’s may suggest that these elites were already closer in their own beliefs (or lack thereof) to Rawls than to Murray. And to the extent that the causal chain runs from loss of belief to a jurisprudence of secular neutrality, not the other way around, it becomes even less likely that changing constitutional jurisprudence will be a solution to our problems.

But then again: if the primary truth is, as Murray thought, the sovereignty of God over nations as well as individuals, maybe there is a glimmer of hope after all. Maybe there is nothing that we can do, just on our own, to repair our situation. Maybe that intervention would need to come from outside—from a more transcendent source.

In the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin quoted the biblical admonition:

We have been assured, Sir, [Franklin said] in the sacred writings, that “except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded; and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages.

I believe that what Franklin said was true then. Prophetic even. And I believe that nothing has happened in the intervening years to make his prophecy any less true now.

EDITORIAL NOTE: A version of this essay, entitled "We Hold . . . What Truths? Further Reflections on the American Proposition," was delivered as part of the University of Notre Dame Law School Rice-Hasson Lecture Series on 18 November 2024.