FFQF: Moral Authority, From Whence it Comes?

See what’s up with today’s FFQF at Meet the Founders blog

Hercules Mulligan has begun a new theme for a new month. This month it is “moral authority.” What did America’s founding fathers say about the measuring stick for virtue in a free republic? Is it reason as the basis for virtue, that man inherently recognizes that which is good and virtuous? (Answer: no). What did our founders mean when they said virtue was absolutely necessary to maintain a free government?

Here’s something John Adams said:

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.

Benjamin Rush, Adam’s contemporary and known as the “third most influential founder” of the American idea of liberty, said:

By renouncing the Bible, philosophers swing from their moorings upon all moral subjects. Our Saviour in speaking of it calls it the “Truth” in the abstract. It is the only correct map of the human heart that ever has been published. It contains a faithful representations of all its follies, vices, and crimes.

All systems of religion, morals, and government not founded upon it must perish, and how consoling the thought — it will not only survive the wreck of these systems but the world itself. “The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” (in a letter to John Adams, 1807)

and he also said this:

The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty.

I think Hercules Mulligan has chosen a very good theme for the month, especially meaningful in light of a new visitor’s center that has opened in Washington, DC. The visitor center is glaring in its glorification of government and its dismissal of God as the giver of our inalienable rights. As a matter of fact, one of the statements on display at the visitor’s center says:

We have built no temple but the Capitol. We consult no common oracle but the Constitution.

That statement reeks of dishonesty and self-gratification. It is not the American form of government that is so great, it is the foundation upon which it stands. Take that away, and our government is NOTHING.

George Washington said:

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

On the contrary, here’s an interesting quote by none other than Joseph Stalin.

“America is like a healthy body and its resistance is three-fold: its patriotism, its morality and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” Joseph Stalin, former dictator of the Soviet Union