A CATO discussion of the relationship between theology and American Democracy, i.e., political theology, provides an interesting example for an analysis by a developmental epistemology. Is American Democracy founded and/or guided by religious principles or is it secular in its foundations thus effectively separating Church and State?
To start the discussion, Mark Lilla laid out his thesis of secular foundations:
But once you understand that, the radicalness and newness of the American secular idea is what looms large. I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.
In the discussion that followed Andrew Sullivan summarized Lilla:
I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.
To debate the emergence of American Democracy to either secular or religious foundation seems to be an argument between two reductionist. A developmental framework might find that the American form of government brought together a number of ideas, themselves having their own individual developments, into a completely new framework that replaced the previous forms of governance. A parallel development might be cited in the replacement of Aristotelian physics with Newtonian physics.
It was not the discovery of new facts or even the formulation of new concepts that caused the scientific revolution. Even though Aristotleian physics had been shown repeatedly to be inconsistent, illogical, and counter to factual evidence, it was not until the complete reconstruction and formulation of a new and different scientific framework occurred that the old Aristotelian science could be replaced. Even though Aristotelian physics had been long outmoded it was not until Newtonian principles provided an acceptable, new framework for reasoning, posing experitmental problems, gathering evidence, demonstrating correspondance with reality, and all the rest that made widespread acceptance suddenly possible.
Now consider how religion and governance have been linked throughout history until American Democracy reformulated concept and principles to coordinate them into an integrated framework. This framework of property rights, individual liberies, trial by peer juries, civilian control of the military, divided government and limitation of powers, etc, had roots in fragmentary forms earlier in history. The invention and genius was to organize them into a coherent, workable whole. Not only did this whole have a coherence that made its logic inescapably obvious to the writers, the inidividual concepts such as property rights also achieved a new found logical necessity when organized into an overall framework.
Thus, the revolution in governance came about not because of some separation of Church and State (although that was one of its results) nor did it have its roots in any divine religious principles. It came about, or more accurately, it developed out of a natural process of abstraction, differentiation, and integration of governance and concepts of human activity just as those processes are integral to scientific progress. The seat of these processes clearly were the Founding Fathers but their discussions and reflection using the previous experiences of human governance developed out of the problems they posed to themselves. It was the ability to pose the problems of human governance more than anything that drove their processes of thought such that collectively and individually the American form of Democracy developed and then was formalized in written documents. The importance of getting the problem right was perhaps the underlying reason for why the Declaration of Independence took on such importance.
So to say the American form of Democracy “evolved” is to recognize that the vector to history lies in the constant constructions out of previous idea, constructions, and frameworks and that American Democracy required certain of these previous political constructions and attempts at governance—property rights, voting, monarchies, etc.—before these ideas could become reflected and reconstructed into a more coherent form of governance. The previous history and ideas of governance captured by earlier writers, provided intellectual aliment but it was the work of abstracting and reformulation that combined many previous notions into a new, more valid form of governance that marked the radical leap forward by the Founding Fathers.
By the new coherence and inescapable political logic it introduced, American Democracy also necessarily enriched many individual concepts that now became elements of the system. For example, the Greek idea of voting and democracy by the polis is relatively unimportant in American Democracy because the system gave it more specificity as when it could be used, who used it, how it was to be used and so on. In essence American Democracy fundamentally redefined democracy and voting by radically delimiting it. Democratic voting as a means of governance is unwieldy and unworkable. It often doesn’t know its limits or capabilities. The Founding Fathers understood these problems and that they had to protect the governance process from the stupidity of ignorant citizens and the radicalism of mob rule that can result from unfettered democracy. Thus, their American design limited and defined when and how democracy, in the sense of citizen voting, was to be appropriately used; they did this by making it subservient to a republican system.
All this to say that it was the epistemic process by which a new method of thinking about how to constitute a government was developed that was the source of American Democracy, not theology nor even the history of conflict and separation of religion from the state. These are certainly events and even important or necessary phenomena but they are only the fodder for the epistemic processes of history. They are not the cause any more than previous experimental evidence caused Galileo and Newton to reformulate and reconstruct the whole of physics. Only when the problems were posed properly, itself a mark of an advance in thought, and a proper seat be established for the processes of abstraction and reflection could their be a fundamental reconstruction and advancement be made in physics, in governance, and indeed, in any are of human affairs.
The two features of the emergence of American form of Democracy—the clarity by which the problems of governance were posed by the Founding Fathers’ careful abstraction and articulation, and the reconstruction and formalization of the new, integrated framework in a written constitution out of many historic preliminaries, and in addition because these same processes find their parallel all scientific advances—these facts compel us to avoid reductionism in the study political theology by placing it in the perspective of a developmental epistemology. Human progress cannot be reduced to mere history or religious sources. It is due to the epistemic processes whereby order arises out of its sources in human activity and particularly in the activity of human thought.
