Enlightened no more?

The hysteria among the liberal elite over the "values voters" who re-elected President Bush last week is reaching a fever pitch. Maureen Dowd wrote, "W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches."

Thomas Friedman says that those people of faith who voted for the president "have used that religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad." Garry Wills is even more direct: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still becalled an Enlightened nation?" Wills, however, is just getting started: "Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. . . . The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment." (Give the New York Times credit for consistency, at least; it printed all of the above-cited articles.)

So the voters to whom faith is a valuable part of their lives are no different than members of al Qaeda? The functional equivalent of the insurgents in Iraq who have been decapitating innocent hostages?

Garry Wills is a historian. He should know better. Consider the following "radical" passage:

"It would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations . . . that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes . . . . In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own . . . . No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of man more than the people of the United States."

That's from the first inaugural address, not of George W. Bush, but of that famed religious bombthrower George Washington. James Madison, a key member of the Constitutional Convention and the man who introduced the Bill of Rights in the first Congress, said "Religion [is] the basis and Foundation of Government."

Abraham Lincoln: "It is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the Supreme Government of God; to bow in humble submission to his chastisement; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to pray, with all fervency and contrition, for the pardon of their past offenses, and for a blessing upon their present and prospective action."

Gouverneur Morris: "[T]he most important of all lessons [from the Scriptures] is the denunciation of ruin to every State that rejects the precepts of religion." And John Witherspoon, a signer of the Decalaration of Independence, said, "Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country."

That so many contemporary writers believe that religious principles are new to American political life is a sad commentary on the state of education at all levels in this country. The principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence are more rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition than the Enlightenment, although the Enlightenment did fuel one revolution in the eighteenth century -- the French, which deteriorated into a disastrous mess. That event prompted Washington to make the appeal in his Farewell Address that is posted at the head of this blog. If the liberal columnists want to start whacking at every person of faith in the public square, there are some big names at the top of the list -- Washington, Adams, Madison, Lincoln -- that should give them pause, but sadly, they don't.