3/20/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal leads off with a bipartisan op-ed at RealClearPolitics by John Hamilton and Kevin Kosar. They argue that the constant bickering and rigid partisanship in both major political parties is “not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.” Instead, they contend that the founders “believed that elected officials should be stewards of the public trust” and should “work out compromises based on deep analysis of the issues and debate with their fellow elected officials.” For example, they note that a strong majority of Americans want Social Security reform, a third rail of modern politics. Most Americans want to lift “the level of income subject to Social Security taxes,” raise “the payroll tax rate from 6.2 to 6.5 percent,” and increase the retirement age from 67 to 68, solutions they argue “would keep Social Security solvent for 75 more years.” These views of course are unpopular today and currently have no way of being turned into law. Hamilton and Kosar find that examining this and other areas “leads to the conclusion that policy debates in Washington need to be recentered” around what the American people want.

At the Acton Institute, Thomas Kidd reviews “America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911,” the latest work of evangelical historian Mark Noll. Kidd writes that Noll presents a grand synthesis of the entire corpus of secondary literature on the Bible’s influence on American public life. As Kidd points out, the Bible suffused American culture, so much so that even “non-orthodox figures such as Thomas Jefferson” could affirm “that America’s ‘benign religion” was moral ballast for its republican polity.” He also notes Noll’s ironic argument that the move toward religious disestablishment at the state level actually “made the voluntaristic, Bible-centered religion of the reading believer the norm in America in ways it had not been in the Old World.” But not all was well in Americans’ use of Christianity. The U.S., Kidd writes, was “just about the only place in the entire Christian world” where the pro-slavery biblical argument was persuasive. “The unwillingness to consider one’s faith and biblical interpretations in global historic context fueled white Christian Southerners’ self-deception,” he notes. Of course, the United States has shifted markedly since our country’s early days: “The idea of the Bible actually framing public policy, or serving as a basis for American cohesion and virtue, had become mostly a nostalgic dream,” Kidd concludes.