Welcome to By The Fault. Living in San Francisco, California not far from the San Andreas Fault, I chose this fact to highlight the awesome and sometimes devastating power of politics and economics in our daily lives. Like the Earth beneath me, there is always movement afoot in politics and in the world economy. There are tremors, jolts and shakes every day and some occasional magnitude seven earthquakes. The mission of By The Fault is to cover these events and I hope provide insightful commentary on them. I believe very strongly that politics matter and require great attention for if we fail to pay attention, then quite suddenly in our lives we can find politics happening to us.
What is freedom and liberty but the rights of conscience inalienable? For what that truly means, I suggest that you read a short yet powerful sermon from 1791 entitled oddly enough “The Rights of Conscience Inalienable” written by John Leland (1754-1841), a Baptist minister from Grafton, Massachusetts though this sermon was probably delivered in New London, Connecticut. While it deals primarily with a religious question, Leland writes what it means to be free and to have rights of conscience.
With the cause of liberty under strain both in the United States and abroad, I thought I would start this blog with the thoughts of a Baptist minister from the early days of the American Republic who lived and preached in both Virginia and Massachusetts and who ministered to the Founding Fathers had to say about freedom and the compact between the rulers and the ruled. Leland wrote “that law should rule over rulers, and not rulers over the law” and then adds “that every law made by the legislature inconsistent with the compact, modernly called a constitution, is usurprative in the legislators and not binding on the people.” He believed “that legislators in their legislative capacity cannot alter the Constitution, for they are hired servants of the people to act within the limits of the Constitution.” These three sentences sum my view of liberty and the responsibiilty of all citizens to tackle the erosion of civil liberties that has taken place over the last seven years in the United States and to take up the cause of liberty wherever the dark forces of repression seek to extinguish the flames of human freedom.
Far from a household name, John Leland stands as one of the giants of American political philosophy and American liberalism. He was a Jeffersonian and later a Jacksonian Democrat. He held public office twice, first as a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1788 that ratified the Constitution. Later in 1811, he was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Politically Leland was a liberal, though he himself would have only described himself as a dissenter.
For Leland, conscience was “a censor morum” over the actions of all men. Censor morum is a Latin term meaning censor of morals. This precept dating from Roman times found new life in the Enlightenment where conscience came to mean to speak the truth as the mind understands it. Leland consistently opposed slavery, even in Virginia, and was instrumental in helping to end the Atlantic slave trade. He remained an ardent abolitionist throughout his life and made a distinction between the “civil and religious rights of all men.” He was a strong advocate of the separation of Church and State writing in 1834 that we should “exclude religious opinions from the list of objects of legislation.”
While The First Amendment of the Constitution prohibited the establishment of a state religion or abridgment of free speech by Congress, religious liberties in the various states took a little longer to get fully established. The background to this sermon was the debate over the Congregationalist system in Connecticut. Religious freedom in Connecticut was not firmly established until 1820, if you were not a Congregationalist you were taxed for your dissenting religious beliefs. In Massachusetts, the Congregationalist orthodoxy lasted in 1833 making Massachusetts the last state to permit true religious freedom.
You can read more about the historical perspective of the rights of conscience inalienable. Or you can read the actual sermon. If you prefer you can purchase a two volume set edited by Ellis Sandoz entitled “Political Sermons of America Founding Era, 1730-1805” at your local bookstore.
Politicians are often wont of misquoting the Founding Fathers or belying their intentions. These sermons represent the first native American literature written by the ministers to the founding political class of the nation and their politics is far from what many across the political spectrum would want us to believe.
Speak freely and liberally. Express your rights of conscience inalienable.
en veritas, libertas.
Charles Lemos