He was known as the “Dinner Bell of the House of Commons,” thanks to his lack of rhetorical eloquence, but Edmund Burke’s powerful arguments against the French Revolution saved Britain and made him one of the 18th Century’s most influential statesmen.
Burke was a friend of the American Revolution, however, and his speech on reconciliation with the colonies in 1775 speaks directly to two issues around which our increasingly polarized politics revolve – whether America is a “Christian nation” and the Tea Party Protests.
President Barack Obama summoned the former to the public debate with his comment last week in Turkey that “although…we have a large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish nation, or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”
My Thursday column this week caused a bit of a ruckus by noting that, while the president is technically right as a matter of law, his implicit suggestion that Christianity therefore is irrelevant in defining America, though politically correct, is wildly empty of historical fact.
The reality is that America was created by a mostly Christian people based on principles closely reflecting their faith, which is why, for example, the preambles of all 50 state constitutions explicitly reference God in unmistakably Christian terms. “Almighty God,” the most frequently appearing such reference is the English translation of the Old Testament’s “El Shaddai,” which referenced God’s omnipotence.
Which is where Burke comes into the picture. In warning Parliament, Burke pointed to several crucial factors that would doom the use of force against the colonies, one of which was the nature of the predominant faith among the colonists:
“The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it,” Burke cautioned, which he said was a product of their long-held opposition to the Catholic and Church of England religious establishments.
Since Martin Luther first posted his 95 Theses, Protestants “have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim,” he said.
But the faith of the most resistant colonists went even beyond that, Burke warned: “All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
In other words, Parliament was playing with fire because the majority of the people in the most rebellious colonies had never known anything but liberty because of their historic faith. Burke’s warning went unheeded, of course, and Parliament lost the colonies.
Much has changed in the subsequent two centuries, with the President’s Turkey remark serving as a convenient symbol for the changes driving the country toward an explicitly secular culture divorced from its spiritual moorings.
At the political level, those changes are seen in the progressive centralization of power and wealth in Washington, the parallel decline of individual liberty as the paramount purpose of civil government, and the increasingly polarized views about those changes seen among the American electorate.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen’s latest index of presidential approval – measured by the difference between those who strongly approve and those who strongly disapprove – shows Obama with a mere +3 points, with 35 percent cheering the president and 32 percent turning thumbs down.
Those numbers were produced at the height of the Tea Party Protests, and so might be assumed to reflect more disapproval, but the index has been in the 2-5 point range for several weeks. What is shocking is how characteristic this polarization is becoming despite Obama’s personal popularity.
The Pew Research Center concluded last week before the Tea Party Protests that Obama “has the most polarized early job approval of any president” since surveys started tracking presidential approval four decades ago.
Democrats approve Obama overwhelmingly at 88 percent, but Republicans disapprove almost as intently, at 61 percent. That puts Obama’s disapproval gap a full 10 points higher that President George W. Bush at the same point in his first term.
The problem is Obama’s proposals, according to The New York Daily News’ Michael Goodwin: “Polls show that most people like Obama, but they increasingly don’t like his policies… most expect their own taxes will go up as a result, despite the President’s promises to the contrary.”
And it is the prospect of imminent steep tax hikes and a crushing public debt burden – which is merely another name for taxation – coming from Obama’s policies that was the most common complaint heard at the more than 700 Tea Party Protests.
Something else Burke said bears on these points: “We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates.”
Many, if not most of those who turned out for the Tea Party Protests came from evangelical and conservative Catholic precincts and share many social values. They also share with economic libertarians and limited government conservatives the core aversion to the Leviathan Obama proposes.
Such a coalition reminds us of those who moved the revolution in 1776. We will perhaps see in the days ahead if our dissenters are as fierce a people as Burke saw in his day.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
