In the Summer 2005 issue of Azure there is a review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book The Road to Modernity, in which she argues that the French Enlightenment and the Scots Enlightenment were different. The French were purists who believed reason trumped all other forms of insight. The Scots saw enlightenment as a process of empirical testing and learning.
There is also a major article by the founder-publisher, Yoram Hazony who shows that the democracy we have inherited was not purely secular, it had moral roots in religion. Religion and the state should not be considered as separate and distinct as many contemporaries believe; the roots are not antagonistic.
Hozany reminds us both Hobbes and Locke knew Hebrew and read the Torah. I only read the first
half of Hobbes’ Leviathan, because the second half was about Torah. I
read the second part of Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, the first
was on Torah and religion.
The connection I see between the Himmelfarb book and the Hozany article is that the Scots
were Protestant, Protestantism is based on empirical learning
directly from religious sources, the true basis for our view of
enlightenment and our view of democracy. Similarly, French democracy is
anti-religious and sees the enlightenment in terms of pure reason, because the French is
derived from the absolute and unyielding nature of Roman Catholicism. The Scots are our ancestors, not the French.
Seeing the package of Scots’ enlightenment, democracy and Protestantism makes a strong case for interpreting the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as a prohibition of State Religion not a prohibition of religion itself. A Protestant society has very little to fear from public expressions of religion because there is no true, universal or ex cathedra quality to Protestantism. I’m going with Hazony… we should become more comfortable with religion in our public life and should recognize its value.