Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty.

'EVERYONE KNOWS," Edmund Burke stated in his "Speech on Conciliation with America," delivered in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775, "that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favor and every kind of support from authority. The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests 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 unremitting assertion of that claim. 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." That, succinctly stated, is the thesis of Benjamin Hart's Faith & Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty (Lewis and Stanley Publishers, P.O. Box 790609, Dallas, Tex. 753790609; $18.95), a gracefully written, skillfully developed, and strongly argued attack on the contemporary wisdom, which holds that America (meaning the United States) was "invented," to use Garry Wills's phrase, according to specifications derived from the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment. Replying to the purveyors of this wisdom, who believe that this country fulfills its true promise to the degree that it succeeds in becoming a militantly secularist society, Hart argues that the men who founded this country were "firmly convinced that liberty was essential to happiness and prosperity in this world; that constitutional government was essential to liberty; that the preservation of both was contingent on Christian morality informing both voters and leaders; and that Christian morality could not long stand without firm faith in Christ."

"Separation of church and state," Mr. Hart reminds us, "was not a reaction against religion, but a reaction against the state." The seeds of that idea, he believes, are discoverable in apostolic Christianity, where no basis is given (in his opinion) for any kind of institutional church: "That Christ intended to establish a formal universal church structure seems at best doubtful . . . Obviously, Christ, as God, had the power to compel belief if He had so desired. The fact that He chose preaching as the means of spreading faith, and implored His followers to do the same, suggests the nature of the church He had in mind."

Here, Hart believes, is the germ of the central Puritan insight: "that the spirit of freedom and the spirit of Christianity reinforced each other." For Hart, Christ's church set its foot on the wrong path (or had it set there for it) following Constantine's conversion and the elevation of Christianity to a state religion. With "Augustine's mistake," by which secular government was entrusted to compel faith, and the onset of the Dark Ages, distinguished by their obeisance to the Roman bishopric and the formulation of the divine right of kingship, adherence to that path was confirmed for centuries to come. In a remarkably fast-paced account, Hart describes the development of a Protestant reaction to history, which includes the theological dissent by John Wycliffe ("Father of American Dissent") and the Lollards, the rise of the Puritan movement in England, the founding of the New England colonies by English dissenters, the evolution of the colonists' case for independence, and the events that culminated in the devising of a United States Constitution-through all of which he never once drops the threads of his argument, whose burden is that "Christian and democratic institutions are compatible" and probably even necessary to one another's existence. The institutional pattern set by Congregationalism in New England became the model first for local government, then for the New England confederation, next for the United States under the Articles of Confederation, and finally for the mature federalist system devised by the Constitutional Convention. All of it, Hart believes, is ultimately traceable to the relationship between man and his God mandated by Scripture and the apostolic church.

Clearly, this is a very Protestant book-perhaps too Protestant, leading to what I see as a fracture in the pediment of its logic. Mr. Hart treats the Roman Catholic Church as another human institution, when it believes itself to be a divine one, the Body of Christ in fact. Mere human logic cannot fathom why man's knowledge of government should not be analogous to his knowledge of God; and the fact of Protestantism's having its justifiable counterpart in political and historical development is irrelevant to its claim to a similar one in the development over time of theological doctrine. In this respect, it is correct to say that, while America was not engendered by Enlightenment ideas, it is a product of ideas that later gave rise to the Enlightenment-which of course is to concede nothing to the Norman Lears of this world.