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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 322.10973
EAN num: 9780895267184
ISBN number: 0895267187
Label: Regnery Publishing, Ltd.
Manufacturer: Regnery Publishing, Ltd.
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 366
Printing Date: January 25, 2007
Publishing house: Regnery Publishing, Ltd.
Sale Popularity Level: 450860
Studio: Regnery Publishing, Ltd.
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'Evans makes a powerful case for returning the nation to high moral ground for, he says, freedom cannot exist in the absence of morality based on religion. A profound scholar, he has probed the words of the Founders.' Indianapolis Star
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Rated by buyers 
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I read this several times many years ago. My now grown kids read it, at my suggestion, while in high school. They have been the scourge of their liberal instructors and professors since then. If I could mandate one book that had to be read and understood before you graduated from high school this would be it. I wish somebody would do an audiobook of it as I would love to listen to it while traveling.
Rated by buyers 
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Veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans begins THE THEME IS FREEDOM by describing what he calls the "liberal history lesson": The freedom and intellectual progress that existed in the ancient world was snuffed out by the Middle Ages only to be reborn in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It came to fruition in the United States, whose founders created a secular nation based on enlightenment ideas. They enshrined this in the very first amendment, creating a "separation of church and state" justifying federal court intervention in everything from prayer in school to the posting of the Ten Commandments on public property. Who knew that a bunch of dead white guys could turn out to be such a progressive lot.
As Evans tells it, this view is almost entirely wrong. Religion (specifically Christianity) has had a positive role in western culture. The Middle Ages were in fact times of advancement in both science and politics, in which decentralized control was the norm. The Puritans combined the medieval ideas of decentralized control with representative government. Evans cites studies showing that the Puritans in New England permitted a much larger percentage of the population to vote than any European nation.
Evans' discusion of the founding of the United States and the drafting of the very first amendment may be most interesting to readers, since church-state issues pop up from time to time. Evans, relying on the work of M.E. Bradford, argues that most of the founders belonged to orthodox churches. He also argues that at the time of the revolution most of the states had some form of established or semi-established churches. Many also required voters or office holders to hold religious beliefs. Since the very first amendment applied to the federal government only ("Congress shall make no law . . .") the intent of the very first amendment was to prevent the federal government from interfering with state establishments of religion. I find Evans' discusion generally persuasive, but the evidence is subject to different conclusions. If in fact the majority of the states had established religions (and religious requirements to hold office) then one might see the very first amendment constituting a rather clear break with precedent. Even more so, the religious test ban (Article 6) was fairly radical for its time. Church membership is somewhat nebulous as well, since membership doesn't always mean agreement. It is certainly the case that many of the leading lights of the founding period weren't fully orthodox believers, on the other hand only a relatively few were probably deists. Evans didn't have the space to discuss whether the fourteenth amendment applies the very first amendment's restrictions to the states, but does direct the reader to the important work of the late Raoul Berger.
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From the teachings of Jesus Christ and Saint Augustine, to the Magna Carta and Blackstone, and still onward to the Puritans and the American founding fathers, M. Stanton Evans traces the ascendancy of liberty in the West. Evans gives particular attention to the roots of Western liberty, which arose in the fertile soil of Christianity; added focus is given to the Anglo-American common law tradition. This is a prudent piece of scholarship that eschews the Enlightenment conception of history while explaining how religion-specifically the Christian faith-has helped fortify corporate liberty in the West and particularly in Anglo-American civilization. Liberty owes as much to the institutions that progressively developed as it does to political philosophy.
The chapter entitled the Age of Despots explores the collectivist and totalitarian movements whose progenitors Robbspierre and Rousseau helped to inspire countless revolutionaries. Evans makes light of the anti-Christian character of twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies, which are essentially millenarian religions. Hitler stated that Nazis hoped "to eradicate Christianity in Germany root and branch." Mussolini signaled a disdain for objective truth in declaring: "If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an external objective truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity..." For fascists and collectivists, truth was subjective and they were apt to affirm their will to power; they sought to tailour their own collectivist ideology, propel it into the limelight, and espouse it as the Gospel truth. Fascists embraced the sentiments of Thrysamachus in Plato's Republic who defined justice as the will of the strongest. Simply put, might makes right! Evans asks a pressing question: in the absence or refutation of religious and ethical absolutes, who will define the truth and who will define right and wrong? The American Republic must refocus her sight on the very first principles of her framers least she succumb to the totalitarian trap and morph into a totalist Enlightenment polity.
If Men were Angels is an exploration into human nature; this chapter drawing from a Madisonian proverb affirms the necessity of government owing itself to original sin and fallen man. A corollary to a mistrust of human nature is a mistrust of power, which is precisely why the framers of the Constitution sought to fortify checks and balances and decentralize power in the United States.
In contrast to pro-Enlightenment interpretations of history, which exalt the French Revolution and mystical belief in progress, Evans finds the ascendancy of Christianity as end to the absolutism of the pagan regimes. While the state exists to restrain evil (i.e. force and fraud), the state itself was to be retrained, because a mistrust of human nature and concentrated power. The Calvinist belief in man's depravity played no small role in the development of the Anglo-American polity. The proteges of Jean-Jacques Rousseau do not acknowledge sin, but rather characterize society as sick and men as being perfectable if freed from the shackles of sick society. M. Stanton Evans does a remarkable job at explaining the debt that Americans owe to Christianity in the political developments that made the West free. He offers prescriptive wisdom against Enlightenment ideologies promising absolute freedom, which usually results in an absolutist state. Likewise, he eschews the Byzantine symbiosis of church and state, in favor of Protestant conceptions of sphere sovereignty, which acknowledges the God ordained sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and civil governments in their respective sphere. All things considered, this book is an impressive contribution to political science by capturing the interplay of religion, politics and tradition in the last few centuries.
A special thanks to my former political science professor Dr. S.A. Samson for introducing me to Evans' book.
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This book is a confirmation of the truths of the impact of the Bible on America: its foundation and its culture. The uniqueness of the USA in the world yesterday continues to prove the scholarship of Stanton's work. For anyone who studies history, this book is a supurb summary of how our laws, moral values, and concept of individualism come directly from the Bible and its teachings. While America is leaving many of these principles over time, the events following September 11 reafirmed our roots as described by Stanton.
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I was assigned this book to read for a master's class several years ago, and how glad I was for it. Evans thoroughly backs up his arguments -- and in my view, his most compelling stance is that the American Revolution was actually a *conservative* one, directly challenging modern "conventional wisdom." How so? In a nutshell, he says that by desiring to uphold decades and centuries of established legal foundations, the Founders were at odds with an England (Parliament) that was more and more acting without lawful permission. A must read for those interested in *true* liberalism ("classic" liberalism), not contemporary liberalism.
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