Our public debate about religious liberty is missing a clear definition of religion, leading to confusion, frustration, shrill voices, and short tempers.

Is religion a public or a private right?

by Susan Hanssen 

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According to George Washington, religion involved a public affirmation and was a matter of grave public concern. He would have been mystified to hear it discussed as a solitary spiritual experience, a personal feeling, opinion, or preference—something akin to a “high” or a “hobby.” In his Farewell Address, Washington referred to “Religion and morality” (Religion with a capital “R”) as the “indispensable supports” of the country’s political prosperity.

For Washington, patriotism, that is to say civic virtue itself, could not be maintained without reliance on the “great Pillars” of “Religion and morality.” Morality, he argued, cannot “be maintained without religion.” A “sense of religious obligation” was the very foundation of the adjudication and enforcement of public justice.

It takes some real intellectual labor for us in the third millennium to grasp the definition of religion as essentially one of the res-publica, the public things, that ought to concern patriotic men. But it was certainly nothing new for Washington. It was as old as Aristotle or Cicero.

Washington had in his library at Mount Vernon an English translation of Cicero’s great work On Duties, originally written in Latin (De Officis) in 44 BC. In the introduction, Cicero made two things clear: Rights derive from duties, and duties derive from some “doctrine of the supreme good.” What we call rights, Cicero said, are obligations. And he said this not on his own authority as an inventor of the idea, but based on the ideas of the Greeks: “Absolute duty we may, I presume, call ‘right,’ for the Greeks call itkatorthoma, while the ordinary duty they call kathekon.”

Much has been written on the “invention” of the notion of natural or human rights in the eighteenth century, but certainly the American founders did not think of themselves as inventors but rather as defenders of the idea of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” For them, as for Cicero, if we have an obligation to do something, derived from some doctrine of the supreme good, then we can claim a “right” to do it. “Right” is a secondary concept deriving its force from some prior conception of absolute moral obligation, duty, or “office.”

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