Madison’s Answer to Machiavelli

Mr. Young is a teacher at Richmond Junior Academy in Virginia, one of the schools exemplifying the stand of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church for religious freedom.

An abiding problem in political thought, one that has vexed the soul of many a philosopher and statesman, is the problem of how to establish and keep order in society. Without order, without accepted standards of civility and right con­duct, a nation will lack peace, justice, and prosperity. Without order it will sink backward into bar­barism and brute existence.

The problem of order is especially complex for peoples who live under representative governments. Dic­tators can brandish the bayonet and the bludgeon to restrain and humble their subjects, but on what can republics depend? How can a self-governing citizenry, the repositories of political sovereignty in a free society, rule themselves equitably and with dignity? How can they live together in liberty without soon abusing that liberty and butchering one another like savages?

The answer is that to balance the blessings of order and liberty, republics must depend upon the vir­tue of the people themselves. But how to plant in the breasts of the people those good old republican virtues—honesty, frugality, temperance, self-sacrifice, and vigilance against tyranny—without which they will descend into anarchy and ultimate despotism, the victims of an enterprising Napoleon or Caesar?

There is one medium, important above all others, for transmitting virtue to republican populaces: religion. As Washington stated in his Farewell Address, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable sup­ports.” But that suggests yet another question: What should be the legal relation of religion to government in a republic? Broadly speaking, among republicans there are two schools of thought on the subject.

Two Points of View

One school, a comparatively re­cent development in political thought, contends that the best ap­proach to religion in republics is simply to make government leave it alone. To entangle church with state, it is argued, will surely cor­rupt both. The church best serves society when it is free from in­terference by civil government.

The other school, a much older one, advocates using the authority of republican government to foster and maintain religion—that is, to “establish” it, either through outright legal recognition and sub­sidization, or through less com­prehensive forms of assistance, such as sabbath laws or religious tests for public office. Since virtue is necessary to the prosperity and progress of a republic, and religion is necessary to virtue, we ought—or so the reasoning goes—to use the power of government to promote religion among the citizens. To many spokesmen for this school it does not seem to matter so much which religion or which form of Christianity is promoted as that the religion should help produce dutiful and patriotic men and women.

Consider the views of one of these spokesmen, Niccolò Machiavelli of Florence (1469-1527). Better known for having authored The Prince, a kind of handbook for intelligent tyrants, Machiavelli, in a puzzling and perverse way, was actually an ardent apologist for popular government. His study of ancient history convinced Machiavelli that, as he writes in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, “the observance of divine institu­tions is the cause of the greatness of republics.” Neglect such obser­vance, Machiavelli warns, and a republic perishes. “For where the fear of God is wanting, there the country will come to ruin, unless it be sustained by the fear of the prince, which may temporarily sup­ply the want of religion.”¹ In that case, of course, a republic ceases to be a republic. Religion, then, is essential to republics because it gives them cohesion and durability.

The best republicans are pious republicans.

So far, so fine. But interestingly enough, Machiavelli singles out for praise the legendary Sabine king, Numa Pompilius, who took the ear­ly Romans, “a very savage people,” and taught them habits of obe­dience by using religion as a social cement. Indeed, Machiavelli at­tributes more historical importance to Numa than to Romulus, Rome ‘s founder;. for Numa’s invention of religious forms made possible the rise of Rome to republican great­ness.²

And just how did Numa use re­ligion as a social cement? Machiavelli doesn’t say in great detail, but we learn from Plutarch, an ancient Greek historian, that Numa filled the imaginations of Romans “with religious terrors, professing that strange apparitions had been seen, and dreadful voices heard; thus subduing and humbling their minds by a sense of super­natural fears.”³

In other words, Numa exploited the superstitions of a primitive peo­ple. Machiavelli himself notes ap­provingly that, throughout the period of the Republic, religious sanctions were sometimes used with great effect to inspire, discipline and direct the Roman ar­mies “on the eve of battle with that confidence which is the surest guaranty of victory. “⁴ For example,during the long siege of the city of Veii in the fourth century B.C., when the Roman troops grew weary and threatened to quit the campaign, their generals told them that some of the sacred oracles had forecast the fall of the city when Lake Albano, in central Italy, should overflow its banks, as in fact it had recently done. Actually the oracles had made no such forecast; but the Roman regulars did not know that. Their resolve to fight on revived and toughened, and finally they seized the city.⁵

Its Use to the State

Observe that Machiavelli’s con­cern is not for the truth of the sacred “prophecy,” which he well knows was a fraud, but rather for its effect on the army, its utility to the Roman state. It spurred the soldiers’ spirits, brought about the defeat of an enemy, and hence helped to make the world safe for Roman republicanism. It worked; therefore it was good.

And therefore everything that tends to favor religion (even though it were believed to be false) should be received and availed of to strengthen it… Such was, in fact, the practice observed by sagacious men [in antiquity]; which has given rise to the belief in the miracles that are celebrated in religions, however false they may be. For the sagacious rulers have given these miracles in­creased importance, no matter whence or how they originated; and their authority afterwards gave them credence with the people. Rome had many such miracles…⁶

Machiavelli thinks that even in modern times men, however sophis­ticated, can be led to believe in sham miracles and supernatural manifestations. As proof he points to Florence, the cultured Italian ci­ty where, for a short time in the late fifteenth century, many normally staid and stolid people were mesmerized by the preaching of Savonarola, the firebreathing Dominican reformer who claimed to have conversed with God.⁷

Now the trouble with this utilitarian approach to the problem of order, religion and republican vir­tue is just that—its utilitarianism. Besides its utter contempt for truthfulness, the spirit of it is decidedly unrepublican. For in pick­ing out the Roman solution to the problem, Machiavelli has not picked out a peculiarly republican solution. Roman religion, in fact, was no dif­ferent in its essential relation to the state from the religions of Egypt, the Mesopotamian kingdoms, the Seleucid Empire, or any other an­cient autocracy. It, too, like the other religions, proceeded down­ward from the leaders to the masses. Often the leaders employed it as a propaganda tool, a device for duping the multitude.

Machiavelli does not dwell, for instance, on the exceptionally cynical use made of religion in the later Roman Republic, especially during the civil wars that climaxed with Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Religion became in great degree the instrument of oligarchs and demagogues. Many important Roman statesmen of the period­-Servilius, Lepidus, Pompey, Cicero, and Caesar himself, among others—were also priests of the state religion, and they manipu­lated that religion in order to rein­force their grip on the government.⁸ It is difficult to reconcile this sort of practice with the power of free choice implicit in republicanism.

But in vain would anyone raise that objection to Machiavelli. For he wants utilitarian religion—not quite in the form into which it degenerated in Rome, perhaps, but at any rate an established religion, a religion that is only an arm or ex­tension of the state, a religion that teaches the martial virtues. This ex­plains Machiavelli’s personal hostility to Christianity as he perceives it to be lived by men of his age. Because of its other-worldliness, he feels, Christianity has made them too effeminate, too indifferent to their country’s liberty, too apt “to suffer than to achieve great deeds.”⁹ He doesn’t care a jot whether religion edifies or uplifts in­dividuals, so long as it buoys the state.

Religion as a Social Cement

Without doubt the Machiavellian position is an extreme one. And yet it is true that after Machiavelli’s death, and well into the modern era, most republicans continued to treat religion, the Christian religion in­cluded, as a social cement more than a “sovereign balm” for the soul. They may have lacked Machiavelli’s cynicism, they may even have been devout believers, but in the matter of religion’s rela­tion to republican government they were still Machiavellians after a fashion.

Think of any famous republican political philosopher prior to about 1780, and almost certainly he will have advocated in some sense the mixing of politics with formal religion. He may, like the Genevese Rousseau or the Englishman James Harrington, have favored toleration for most dissenting sects, but he could not have brought himself to call for complete severance of church from state.^¹º He could not have visualized full religious liberty—an almost untried freedom until the eighteenth century—invigorating a republic. To abandon men wholly to their private judg­ment in religion, his instincts would have told him, would kindle social chaos and destroy the state, no matter how well-ordered and free its purely political institutions might be. Remove the official religious props and any popular government would crash down like the house of Dalton.

Not for more than two centuries after Machiavelli did any prominent republican sally forth to assault such ideas. Significantly, the definitive refutation of Machiavelli came, not from the continent of Europe, but from the New World, from the pen of James Madison, quite possibly the profoundest political thinker who ever lived.

Spiritual Crisis in 1780′s

A bit of historical background is necessary. In the early 1780′s the thirteen newly-confederated repub­lics of America were faced with a spiritual crisis no less grave than the political crisis which had forced them, in 1776, to cut their connec­tion with the British Empire. As so often happens in the midst of war and in its aftermath, America suf­fered a sort of moral depression. This is an often-overlooked aspect of our Revolutionary history, but it was much commented-on by con­temporaries.

Political and moral corruption were reportedly proliferating and threatening to unfit the people for republican freedom. Newspapers bemoaned the evaporation of virtue because of “the visible declension of religion,… the rapid progress of licentious manners, and open pro­fanity.”¹¹ Clergymen warned of im­pending divine judgment upon an impenitent people, but they were plainly not the only ones alarmed. “Justice & Virtue,” wrote George Mason to Patrick Henry in May 1783, “are the vital Principles of republican Government; but among us, a Depravity of Manners & Morals prevails, to the Destruction of all Confidence between Man & Man.”¹² Mason wondered if America ‘s independence would prove a blessing or a curse.

What would the new republican governments do, in these cir­cumstances, to retrieve the disap­pearing virtue of the people?

For a time they yielded, or seemed to yield, to the utilitarian temptation. To cite the most notable example, Article II of the Massachusetts State Constitution, drawn up in 1780, granted freedom of worship “in the manner and season most agreeable to the dic­tates of [the citizen’s] own con­science”; but the very next article, declaring that “the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality,” empowered the state legislature to require local governments and “religious societies” to provide for “public worship of GOD, and for the sup­port and maintenance of public pro­testant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.”¹³ In other words, the Massachusetts constitution-makers were harnessing religion—in this in­stance “protestant” religion—to the state.

Virginia Considers Tax Support of Teachers

Similarly, in 1784, a bill was in­troduced in the Virginia General Assembly calling for an annual tax assessment to support teachers of the Christian religion in “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge,” knowledge which would help “preserve the peace of society.”¹⁴ With apparent impar­tiality the bill would have permitted each taxpayer to designate which Christian denomination his tax con­tribution would go to. Along with many Presbyterians and the recent­ly disestablished Episcopal Church, honest republicans like Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Marshall, and Richard Henry Lee supported the measure.

Legislative opponents of the assessment, among them James Madison, managed to postpone for almost one year a final vote on the bill. Meanwhile they launched a campaign to work up opposition to it from the grassroots. The big gun in their arsenal of intellectual weapons was a pamphlet by Madison, “A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.”¹⁵

In the numerous collections of American historical documents, Madison‘s pamphlet does not ap­pear nearly as often as Thomas Jef­ferson’s more eloquent Statute for Religious Freedom, but Madison‘s is in truth the superior statement on religious rights. It should be read in its entirety, but for our pur­poses we may draw out of it that thread of thought which refutes the Machiavellian thesis. Without referring directly to the Florentine, Madison demolishes with impec­cable logic the old Machiavellian argument that established religion is necessary to sound civil government.

To begin with, civil society, ac­cording to Madison, is not the highest good. Other things take precedence over it. A man’s duty to his Creator, for example, is prior to any duty to society. Government, even with the force of majority opinion pressed behind it, must not encroach upon man’s natural right to worship the Almighty as con­science obliges him. Obedience belongs first to God, the “Universal Sovereign.” Civil obligations come second.

A Power to be Feared

Notice here that Madison has stood Machiavelli on his head. The Florentine republican makes the stability of popular government an end in itself, with individual rights tacitly subordinated to that end. But to the Virginian any truly popular government will respect popular rights, especially the right of free worship. This conviction of Madison necessarily determines his attitude to established religion. Because he would protect men’s rights and their power of free choice, he must oppose the slightest suggestion of enforced conformity to a particular religious system, Christian or non-Christian, even if the state needs the underpinning of virtue that religion provides.

After all, if the state has power to Civil policy,” and this in spite of prodigious resistance to its growth.

On the other hand, fifteen cen­turies of establishment have very nearly emaciated Christianity in those countries where one or another version of it has received of­ficial sanction. And if enacted, the Virginia assessment bill—which Madison regards as in effect an establishment of religion—would actually obstruct the progress of Christianity. It would make Vir­ginia little different from those heathen countries that seek to shut out the light of Christian revelation, for “instead of levelling as far as possible, every obstacle to the victorious progress of truth, the Bill with an ignoble and unchristian timidity would circumscribe it, with a wall of defence, against the encroachments of error.” That wall would frighten away potential con­verts to Christianity. Benefit religion? Establishment destroys it.

Prelude to Tyranny

Now if religion is better off without direct government support, then government itself need not rest on an official religious founda­tion. For if government is helped by healthy religion, and if religion is healthiest when unbridled by the state, then government ought for its own sake to leave it be. It should not, in Madison‘s words, “employ Religion as an engine of Civil grant recognition to a religion, it has also the power to suppress other religions and religious opi­nions. And that is more power than can safely be entrusted to it, power enough to pervert the ends for which genuinely republican govern­ment is instituted.

As to one of the arguments put forth by the friends of establish­ment, that it is needed to help religion—this, says Madison, is unhistorical nonsense. Consider the history of the Christian church. At what point in its development was Christianity at its purest and most vigorous—before or after Constan­tine? In fact it flourished in “the ages prior to its incorporation with policy.” To do so would be “an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”

In fine, legal establishments of religion plunge a people into spiritual or political tyranny. “In no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the peo­ple.” A just government (and to Madison “just” means republican) “will be best supported by protec­ting every citizen in the enjoyment of his Religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property; by neither invading the equal rights of any Sect, nor suf­fering any Sect to invade those of another.”

It is important to grasp what Madison is saying here. He is say­ing that republican government does itself a favor when it relaxes the political control of religion in society—an assertion that would have shocked Machiavelli, if anything could. Government inter­ference will destroy genuine religion and thereby thwart the supposed purpose for interfering in the first place, which is to aid religion and thus republican government. But relax the controls and religion can prosper; and, as Machiavelli himself would say, when religion prospers the state prospers.

Madison‘s fellow Virginians sided with him in the debate against Machiavelli, for popular pressure brought on defeat of the assessment measure. But when the General Assembly proceeded to enact in 1786 Jefferson’s bill for complete religious liberty, lamenta­tions went up elsewhere, especially over New England. By disestablish­ing religion, declared one northern critic, the Virginia legislators have crushed “the most powerful seeds of that very virtue it must be sup­posed they wish to see flourish in the state they represent.”¹⁶

But had they? Years later, when a correspondent asked Madison about the state of religion and morals in Virginia, Madison replied that, contrary to some reports, religion had not been blown to pieces by disestablishment. The number of denominations had multiplied and, despite failure of the assessment bill to pass, knowledge of the Christian religion had increased:

Religious instruction is now diffused throughout the community by preachers of every sect with almost equal zeal… The qualifications of the preachers, too among the new sects where there was the greatest deficiency, are understood to be improving…. The civil government, though bereft of everything like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability and per­forms its functions with complete suc­cess; whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.¹⁷

A prejudiced appraisal? Possibly. But such evidence as survives seems to support Madison. We know, for instance, that among Baptists in the James River set­tlements there commenced in 1785, the year of the assessment’s defeat, a revival that lasted well into the 1790′s and spread throughout Virginia to other dissenting sects. Even the old Anglican-Episcopal Church appears to have profited in the long run from disestablish­ment.¹⁸

Nor did the nation in general fail to profit from Virginia‘s experience. Largely at Madison‘s instigation, religious liberty became a constitu­tional (and republican) principle with passage of the First Amend­ment, so that Tocqueville, the astute French observer who visited America in the 1830′s, could write:

For most people in the United States religion, too, is republican, for the truths of the other world are held subject to private judgment, just as in politics the care for men’s temporal interests is left to the good sense of all. Each man is allowed to choose freely the path that will lead him to heaven, just as the law recognizes each citizen’s right to choose his own government.¹⁹

Such freedom, Tocqueville believed, had animated religion in America, causing it to hold “quiet sway” over the country while in Europe the pro­gress of secular social revolution was sweeping away established churches in its fury.

Unanswered Questions

All this doesn’t answer the ques­tion of what happens to republican virtue when religion decays of its own accord, when republican Chris­tians, for instance, lose their “first love” and lapse into vice and folly. Nor does it answer a second ques­tion implied, perhaps, in the first: Does history turn in cycles, making the rise and decline of religion, and hence of republican government, in­evitable? Personally this writer sees few things inevitable in a world where the great conditioning reality is man’s freedom of will. But let the philosophers grapple with that one.

The truth that Madison taught us, the thing which ought by now to be burned into our brains, is that republican government can do nothing to help religion except to guard jealously the freedom of religion. And, in the final analysis, as Madison showed, that is much.

Whatever becomes of the American Republic in the years ahead, let us do our best to see that Madison‘s answer to Machiavelli is never forgotten.

 

—FOOTNOTES—

¹Machiavelli, Discourses, in The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 148.

²Ibid., pp. 145-48.

³Plutarch’s Lives, trans. John Dryden, rev. A.H. Clough, 5 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1910), 1:137.

⁴Discourses, p. 158. ⁵lbid., pp. 153-54. ⁶Ibid., p. 150.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 148-49.

⁸See Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), pp. 76-97.

⁹Discourses, p. 285.

¹⁰See, e.g., Rousseau’s chapter “Concerning Civil Religion” in The Social Contract, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954), pp. 148-62. On Harrington see Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 141.

¹¹Charleston S.-C. and American Gazette, 21 January 1779, quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 417.

¹²Mason to Patrick Henry, 6 May 1783, in The Papers of George Mason, ed. Robert A. Rutland, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 2:770.

¹³The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, in The Popular Sources of Authority, ed. Oscar and Mary Handlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1966), pp. 442-43.

¹⁴Charles F. James, Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), p. 129. On the religious controversy in Virginia see John M. Mecklin, The Story of American Dissent (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934), pp. 264-83.

¹⁵For full text see The Complete Madison, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), pp. 299-306.

¹⁸[John Swanwick], Considerations on an Act of the Legislature of Virginia, Entitled an Act for the Establishment of Religious Free­dom (Philadelphia, 1786), p. 6, quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, p. 427n.

¹⁷Madison to Robert Walsh, 2 March 1819, in The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G.P. Put­nam’s Sons, 1908), 8:430-32. Spelling and punctuation updated here.

¹⁸See James, Documentary History, pp. 147-49; William Henry Foote, Sketches of Virginia, new ed. (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1966), pp. 348, 412-29; George MacLar­en Brydon, Virginia’s Mother Church, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1952), 2:506-7.

¹⁹Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), p. 397. For a classic essay on separation of church and state, and how that principle pros­pered American government and religion in the early days of the Republic, see Ibid., pp. 294-301.