Title: Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America
Abstract: Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. By Ellis Sandoz. Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2006, Pp. xv, 230. $39.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.) Students of American political theory have long debated the intellectual and philosophical sources that influenced the American experiment in republican government. Is America a product of, among other possibilities, Enlightenment rationalism, classical republicanism, common law constitutionalism, or biblical Christianity? This is the central inquiry of Ellis Sandoz's Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. Few political philosophers are better equipped to address this question than Sandoz, the Hermann Moyse, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He has devoted a lifetime to the study of the American founding and, in particular, religion's role in that project. Among his many published works on this topic are A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion and the American Founding (1990) and Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805 (1991). Sandoz asserts that America had a rich, sophisticated philosophical background. He identifies biblical Christianity as the chief source of the republic's founding principles. America's republican experiment, he argues, would have been quite inconceivable without a Christian anthropology, enriched by classical political theory and the common law tradition, as uniquely embedded in the habits of the American people at the time of the founding and nurtured thereafter (50). America, in short, drew on diverse philosophical founts, but it was the spring of biblical Christianity, with its sober view of the individual as one created in the imago dei and, yet, a fallen creature, that nourished the institutions of civil society and republican government devised by the founders. The founders were both realists and men of faith who relied on experience and common sense, and the compound representative republic they framed was emphatically a republic for sinners rather than saints and profoundly dependent on Providential guidance (46, 45). The founders assumed the dignity and metaphysical equality of all citizens made in the creator's image. They believed citizens, despite a sinful nature, had a capacity for self-government under laws consented to by the people either directly or through their representatives (60). They believed Christianity could nurture the civic virtues required of a free, self-governing people; but prudence dictated that they not rely on this alone, and so they created the innovative constitutional structures of separation of powers and attendant system of checks and balances. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot