The Reverend Ann Holmes Redding
This issue of Chronicles tells the story of Seattle’s Reverend Ann Holmes Redding, who has been ordered to leave her position as an ordained priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church in America simply because she has converted to Islam. They do not seem to have great sympathy for Rev. Redding’s complaint of religious discrimination, but they don’t have much respect for the Episcopal Church, either. Surveying the willingness of that Church’s leaders to discard all of the more hostile-sounding parts of the Christian tradition, they conclude that the Episcopalians’ “understanding of ‘Christ-follower’ must mean a disciple of the imaginary Jesus who never, no never, discriminates.”
The issue’s main feature is a roundtable under the title “Can the Republic be restored?” Not without a moral revolution, says Thomas Fleming: “Constitutions do not make a people free any more than clothes nake the man. Men, in fact, make clothes, and a free people makes a constitution that expresses its character.” It is because Americans have lost the moral character of a free people that we have lost our Republic, not because we have lost our Republic that we have been degraded. I think Fleming is right as far as he goes- political institutions express the habits of the people among whom they exist, they don’t transform those habits. So there isn’t much point in writing a constitution that guarantees free speech, for example, to a people who fear unfamiliar ideas and habitually defer to authority. On the other hand, those habits don’t appear spontaneously, but become widespread because of social institutions that reward them.
Can the American Republic be restored? Donald Livingston says no, because there never was such a thing. The states were Republics when they formed the Union, the Union itself was something less: “a federation of republics is not itself a republic any more than the federation of nations in the United Nations, or in the European Union, is a nation. A federation is a service agency of the political units that compose it. Whatever else a republic might be, it is not a service agency of something else.”
Can the American Republic be restored? Clyde Wilson doesn’t claim to know, but he is quite clear on what will have to happen first if it is to be: the US presidency will have to be reined in. “The American president began as Cincinnatus, a patriot called to the temporary service of his country (a republican confederation.) The president ends as Caesar, a despot of almost unlimited power, presiding over a global empire.”
Can the American Republic be restored? Not unless a republican elite, an untitled aristocracy, reemerges, says Chilton Williamson; our current elite is an “exclusively educated New Class whose narcissism, social irresponsibility, and contempt for their social and intellectual inferiors makes Marie Antoinette look like Jane Addams.” Only a class of civic minded landowners, Williamson claims, can guarantee liberty. “Noblesse oblige can be inherited, but never learned.”
Can the American Republic be restored? Scott Richert recommends we turn to James Burnham’s book Congress and the American Tradition for the answer. “What Burnham saw… is that the legislative power of Congress is as much (if not more) a constituent part of federalism as it is of the separation of powers.”
Can the American Republic be restored? Aaron Wolf says that it hardly matters; the key thing is that we should be a nation of economically self-sufficient farmers. If we are not that, we will not be capable of self-government; if we are, we will be invulnerable to tyranny. He may be right, but I rather doubt the practical utility of his proposal.
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