Canterbury Tales

In the news:

New York Senator and ex-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has called on opponents of abortion rights to work with her and other “pro-choice” leaders to implement programs that could limit the number of abortions by reducing unwanted pregnancies and/or providing social and other types of support – so that pregnant women would be more likely to feel “safe” enough to decide to carry their pregnancies to term. Such a move would also likely lead to fewer late-term abortions. She did not initially make clear how much emphasis she would place on the use of the emergency “morning after pill,” or RU-486, both of which act to end pregnancies during the first few hours or weeks of a pregnancy. Critics attacked her call as being a dishonest attempt to entrench abortion rights.
This sets up an interesting political dilemma. There is strong popular support for some limits on abortion rights – for example, “partial birth” abortions and parental supervision rights. There is, at the same time however, strong popular support for abortion rights in general. This general support gets stronger the closer the abortion takes place to conception. If the “pro-life” side accepts Senator Clinton’s call, and the number of abortions continues to decline, many embryos/fetuses/children would be saved – but the right to early abortions would be strengthened. If, on the other hand, they do not accept the Senator’s offer, they could be placed in the uncomfortable position of being held responsible for not cooperating in an attempt to save many aborted children – because they would prefer to sacrifice them for the sake pursuing a total ban. It will be interesting to watch how this “values debate” works over the next few years, especially if Senator Clinton decides to run for president in 2008.

In History:

We have often heard that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and that this provides us a context for interpreting our founding documents, particularly the Constitution. We are reminded that the Declaration of Independence establishes our rights as having been “endowed by our Creator.” We are told about how many of the framers were active Christians, and how religious the public was, and we read in the works of French writer Alexis de Tocqueville about how extraordinarily religious Americans were around 1830 when he toured the United States. There is much truth in this story, and I would call it “the religious story of America.”

There is another competing story, which I would call “the Enlightenment story of America.” In this story, the American people have not always been so universally religious in time or in place. The First Great Awakening of religious revival took place through about 1750, and the Second Great Awakening began in the early 1800s with the move to populate the new West. Since the Constitution was framed and ratified in 1789, this happened between revival periods, when religious sentiment in the population was less intense. There was also a significant difference in religious fervor between Puritan New England and Anglican Virginia.
We read that Benjamin Franklin, not the most religious of the founders, made a motion to open the Constitutional Convention each day with a prayer, but his motion was voted down (presumably because nobody wanted to get into a fight about what kind of prayer would be read – Catholic, Puritan, Episcopalian or Baptist). We also read in the Constitution that the document is founded on the will of “We the People,” and see in other founding documents the emphasis placed on Enlightenment values by some of the framers (e.g. James Madison). We can recall that Madison, often called the “father of the Constitution” had worked earlier with Thomas Jefferson to end the established church in Virginia (over Patrick Henry’s objection). With the coming of the industrial revolution and the institutionalization of science, this secular Enlightenment story runs parallel to the religious story of America up through today’s culture wars. The two stories ran directly into each other with the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 (you can watch the movie Inherit the Wind for a fictionalized account of the trial), and they continue to clash with each other today.

We cannot understand American history without reading the two stories side-by-side. Neither story is the fully correct story, and neither is completely wrong. Instead, both capture a piece of the reality of who we were and are as a nation and as a country. And this, I think, is a very good thing. Our secular, progressive, scientific, rationalist history stands against the excesses of an overbearing religiosity, while our religious sensibility helps us to avoid the worst dangers posed by an arrogant, values-free scientific and consumerist society. May we hold both stories in our minds and our hearts – for our present was born of both them, and we who were born into this present are their children.