Self-Government Starts With Governing Yourself, the Founders Insisted

The phrase is "self-government", and the Founders meant it twice. A free people governs itself in the town hall and at the ballot box. And a free people governs itself in the kitchen, the shop and the heart, because if it cannot do the second, no constitution on earth will let it do the first.

That is an uncomfortable idea for an age that prefers its politics to be about policy and its morals to be nobody's business. The Founders did not think the two could be separated. They thought a republic was a bet on the character of ordinary people, and they said so in documents we can still read.

The claim, defined

Let us define the terms.

Self-government here has its political meaning: rule by the citizens through their elected representatives and laws they have made. It also has its older meaning: the governing of one's own appetites, tempers and ambitions.

Virtue, in the Founders' vocabulary, was not primarily private piety. It was the set of habits that let a person put the common good ahead of his own immediate advantage: honesty, industry, moderation, courage, a willingness to obey laws he had a hand in making. The Latin root, virtus, means strength.

The thesis: The Founders believed that a republic cannot survive without a citizenry capable of restraining itself, that religion and morality were the great supports of that restraint, and that virtue was therefore a political necessity and not merely a private ornament.

The argument in numbered premises

1. Government exists to restrain people from harming each other. Without it, the strong prey on the weak.
2. A free government restrains less than any other. A tyrant can restrain by force: soldiers, spies and prisons. A republic has chosen to rely on fewer chains.
3. Whatever the government does not restrain, someone must. If citizens will not restrain themselves, a free government has to choose between disorder and force.
4. Self-restraint is therefore the hidden fuel of republican government. The less a society can restrain itself, the more it will need to be restrained.
5. So a people that wants to remain free must cultivate the habits of self-restraint, and the Founders thought religion and moral training were how this was done. A republic that neglects them is quietly choosing a different kind of government.

The argument is not "people should be good because the Bible says so", though many Founders believed that. It is a point about political mechanics. A free society runs on the cooperation of people who are not being watched.

What the Founders actually wrote

The record is long. Here are the four pieces most often cited, quoted where the wording is certain.

Madison, Federalist 55. James Madison, the man who designed the Constitution's checks and balances, is often cast as a cynic. Yet in Federalist 55 he writes that as there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Then comes the line that matters: "Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form." The author of Federalist 51, who built the machinery to restrain bad men, admitted in Federalist 55 that the machinery runs only if there are enough good ones. We read his thinking on faction and its cures in Federalist 10 Explains Why a Large Republic Tames Faction Best.

Madison said the same thing to the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788, when he declared that to suppose any form of government could secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people was a chimerical idea.

Washington's Farewell Address, 1796. Washington's departing advice to the nation includes a famous passage: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." He goes on to ask what becomes of the oath on which justice in the courts depends if religious obligation is removed, and he adds that reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. He also wrote that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The passage gets a full reading in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable.

John Adams, 1798. In an October 11, 1798 letter to the officers of the Massachusetts militia, Adams wrote: "Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That is the most pointed statement of the thesis in American political writing. Notice what it does not say. It does not say that the government should compel religion. It says the Constitution depends on citizens who have been formed by it elsewhere.

Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson, the deist, the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, asked in Query XVIII whether the liberties of a nation can be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God.

Four men, four different temperaments, one point. And these were not the quiet men of the founding generation. They were the architects.

The steelman: the Founders were secular rationalists

Now the other side, stated as its best advocates would state it.

The objection runs like this. The Founders were children of the Enlightenment. Jefferson cut the miracles out of the Gospels to make his own edition. Franklin was a deist who was sceptical of church dogma. Washington was reticent about his private theology. The Constitution never mentions God and forbids a religious test for federal office in Article VI. In 1797 the United States ratified a treaty with Tripoli that declared the government of the United States was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. The First Amendment forbids an establishment of religion. If the Founders thought religion was essential to the republic, why would they have built a government that is secular in design? They wanted a rational order that stood on its own feet, and the quotations about virtue are the usual ceremonial language of the age, not a political programme.

That is the best form of the argument. It is true on several of its points. Let us answer it point by point.

The answer to the steelman

One: a secular government is not a secular society. The Constitution does not mention God because it is a charter for a limited government, and the Founders believed religion belonged to the sphere that government should not control. Their view was not that religion was unimportant but that it was too important to be run by the state. Article VI's ban on religious tests and the First Amendment's guarantee of free exercise protect the realm where virtue is made. We read the amendment's religion clauses phrase by phrase in Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase.

Two: the Founders disagreed about theology and agreed about the need for virtue. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Hamilton held different beliefs, from orthodox Christianity to a rational deism. The remarkable fact is that on this question they converge. Adams and Jefferson, who edited his own version of the Gospels, say virtually the same thing about what free government needs. If the claim were mere piety, it would not appear across the spectrum.

Three: the Tripoli treaty does not say what its quoters think. The sentence in Article 11 was written in the context of a treaty with a Muslim power, to assure it that the American government had no religious quarrel with it, since America was not a confessional state like the kingdoms of Europe. It says nothing about the people's character, and it speaks of the government, not of the people. Even Jefferson, who was no friend of established churches, wrote to Virginia that the foundation of liberty was the conviction that it came from God.

Four: the Founders acted on the premise. The Continental Congress called days of prayer and fasting. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery from a vast territory, declared that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The sentence is examined in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause. State constitutions of the time were full of similar language. These are not decorative.

Five: even the sceptics wanted the support. Franklin, in his Autobiography, described a plan for the pursuit of moral perfection through thirteen virtues. Whatever he thought about doctrine, he thought character could and must be trained. A rationalist who wants a free government with no virtue has not read the argument. A rationalist who sees that free government needs virtue will look for what produces it, and in 1787 the answer was the family, the church and the school.

The verdict is that the Founders were not theocrats and not secularists. They were republicans, and republicans know that liberty is fragile.

Where virtue comes from

If a republic needs self-governing citizens, it matters where they come from. The Founders had a short list.

First, the family. A child learns to wait, to share, to obey and to take responsibility at home or, if not at home, nowhere. Every totalitarian regime has known this, which is why each one went after the family first, a story told in Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident.

Second, the church, the synagogue and the voluntary association. Tocqueville, visiting in 1831 and 1832, saw that Americans did not look to the state for the things Europeans expected from it. They formed a society for it. He wrote that religion, which among Americans never takes a direct part in the government, should be considered the first of their political institutions, because if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it facilitates their use of it. We have set out his idea of self-interest rightly understood in Self-Interest Rightly Understood Was Tocqueville's Answer to Selfishness.

Third, the school. The McGuffey readers taught millions of children to read and to be honest in the same lesson, and the Northwest Ordinance told the territories to encourage the means of education for exactly this reason. See The McGuffey Readers Taught Reading and Virtue to Millions of Americans.

Fourth, honest work. A person who earns his bread and answers for his debts has a stake in the order that protects him.

None of these is the government. That is the point. A republic cannot manufacture virtue by decree, and when it tries it ends up with the force it was supposed to avoid.

What it means for a family today

The point of this argument is not to wag a finger at the neighbours. It is to notice what a free country is made of.

When a community's institutions of character weaken, when families fray and civic groups empty out, the bill does not disappear. It arrives as laws, regulators, police and surveillance, all the substitutes for what people used to do for themselves. Each one may be defensible. The total is a country that is governed more and governs itself less. Adams's whale goes through the net.

Conservatives sometimes make the mistake of treating this as a call for more laws about morals. The Founders' view runs the other way. The answer to weak character is not a stronger state but stronger families, congregations, schools and neighbourhoods, which is why Gratitude Is a Conservative Virtue, and Ingratitude Fuels Every Revolution is a political essay, and why Ordered Liberty Is Not a Contradiction, It Is the Only Kind That Lasts belongs on the same shelf.

The case in brief

1. A free government restrains less than a tyranny, so it depends on citizens who restrain themselves.
2. Madison in Federalist 55, Washington in 1796, Adams in 1798 and Jefferson in the Notes on Virginia all say that republican government rests on the character of the people.
3. The claim that the Founders were secular rationalists mistakes a secular government for a secular society; they built the first because they believed in the second's importance.
4. Virtue is formed in family, faith, school and work, not by the state, and the state that tries to supply it becomes the force the republic was designed to avoid.
5. A people that wants to remain self-governing must keep the institutions that teach self-government.

What you can do: this month, read Washington's Farewell Address in full and pick one institution in your own town, a congregation, a school board or a scout troop, where you can give an hour a week.