The Thirteen American Arguments

Howard Fineman, one of our most trusted political journalists, shows that every debate, from our nation’s founding to the present day, is rooted in one of thirteen arguments that–thankfully–defy resolution. It is the very process of never-ending argument, Fineman explains, that defines us, inspires us, and keeps us free. At a time when most public disagreement seems shrill and meaningless, Fineman makes a cogent case for nurturing the real American dialogue. The Thirteen American Arguments runs the gamut, including

• Who Is a Person? The Declaration of Independence says “everyone,” but it took a Civil War, the Civil Rights Act, and other movements to make that a reality. Now, what about human embryos and prisoners in Guantanamo?
• The Role of Faith No country is more legally secular yet more avowedly prayerful. From Thomas Jefferson to James Dobson, the issue persists: Where does God fit in government?
• America in the World In Iraq and everywhere else, we ask ourselves whether we must change the world in order to survive and honor our values–or whether the best way to do both is to deal with the world as it is.

Whether it’s the nomination of judges or the limits of free speech, presidential power or public debt, the issues that galvanized the Founding Fathers should still inspire our leaders, thinkers, and fellow citizens. If we cease to argue about these things, we cease to be. “Argument is strength, not weakness,” says Fineman. “As long as we argue, there is hope, and as long as there is hope, we will argue.” | Praise for The Thirteen American Arguments

"The Thirteen American Arguments is a thought-provoking, engaging study of the great American debate, and a highly worthwhile read."
–RealClearPolitics.com

“Insightful and enjoyable . . . . In The Thirteen American Arguments, Howard Fineman lifts readers above the fog of modern politics . . . and offers a unique vantage point from which to see that the debates that shape American politics are timeless and profound.”
--The Washingtonian

“A spectacular feat, a profound book about America that moves with ease from history to recent events. A talented storyteller, Howard Fineman provides a human face to each of the core political arguments that have alternately separated, strengthened, and sustained us from our founding to the present day.”
–Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals

“With a marvelous command of the past and a keen grasp of the present, Howard Fineman expertly details one of the great truths about our country: that we are a nation built on arguments, and our capacity to summon what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’ lies in undertaking those debates with civility and mutual respect. Few people understand politics as well as Fineman does, and this work is an indispensable guide not only to the battles of the moment, but to the wars that will go on long after this news cycle is long forgotten.”
–Jon Meacham, author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston

“In an impressively thought-provoking original approach, Fineman revisits the great defining arguments that will deepen your understanding of America.”
–Newt Gingrich, author of Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works

“Howard Fineman proves that few things are as compelling as a well-argued debate. This book offers a thought-provoking way to look at America, its history, and our evolving public discourse.”
–Arianna Huffington, author of Right Is Wrong

“A perfect antidote to the old horse-race political journalism–a timely (and timeless) reminder of what’s really at stake in the race for the presidency.”
–Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

“Howard Fineman guides the reader through the controversies that have haunted this nation since its inception. In the process he creates a fresh context for making sense of the 2008 campaign. Both scholars and students of politics can learn much from this book.”
–Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-author of unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

“A stimulating book that should be read by anyone who cares about the idea and arguments that made this country great, and which are critical to our future direction.”
–David Boies, author of Courting Justice

“[The Thirteen American Arguments] couldn’t be more timely. . . . There’s nothing like a good, robust discussion at the kitchen table. Nothing better.”
–Tim Russert

“A books for liberals and conservatives both.”
–The Boston Globe

“A great new book . . . Read [The Thirteen American Arguments] if you care about America and our history.”
–Chris Matthews | Howard Fineman is Newsweek’s senior Washington correspondent and columnist. His “Living Politics” column appears regularly in the magazine, on newsweek.com, and on MSNBC.com. An award-winning writer, Fineman is also an NBC news analyst and a regular on Hardball with Chris Matthews and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. Once a regular on CNN, Fineman now reports exclusively for NBC, and has appeared on most major public affairs shows, including Nightline, Face the Nation, Larry King Live, Fox News Sunday, Charlie Rose, and Washington Week in Review. Fineman lives in Washington with his wife and two children. | Chapter 3 THE ROLE OF FAITH

God in His infinite wisdom must have designed Tennessee as
the ideal place in which to argue the role of faith in public life.
In what sometimes is still called “the buckle of the Bible Belt,”
locals favor “strong preachin’,” but also the evangelism of a secular gospel
called Jacksonian Democracy. Nashville is home to the abstemious souls
of the Southern Baptist Convention, but also to country singers keening
over lives ruined by drink and dissolution. In 1925 the mountains of east
Tennessee were the site of the infamous Scopes Trial, in which a teacher
was sent to jail for teaching the science of biological evolution. Yet those
same rugged mountains are home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
a leading center for advanced science, and to two nuclear power plants
that operate on the physics venerated there.

So Tennessee was the appropriate launching pad for the political career
of Senator William Frist, M.D.–and also the appropriate place for it to
crash to Earth. In Tennessee, the senator had to fly through the crosswinds
of cultural conflict, between the theories and demands of Bible Belt religion
and of ivory tower science. The bumpy ride ultimately reduced his image
from that of an idealistic, Grey’s Anatomy—style “superdoc” and presidential
possibility to a hopeless political hack. The trajectory of his public life illuminated
the power of an essential American Argument. We are a prayerful,
Bible-believing country, yet that same trait causes us to constantly
fret–and argue–over the extent to which our faith should influence decisions
about education, research, welfare, and other government activities.

Frist rose to prominence on the secular, science side of the argument.
His first calling card was medicine. His father and uncle were prominent
Nashville physicians who had made a fortune assembling one of the nation’s
first HMOs. He was a brilliant, meticulous student, excelling at
Princeton, at Harvard Medical School, and in internships at Massachusetts
General Hospital.

Frist had a need to exhibit his knowledge in dramatic circumstances.
He became a renowned cardiothoracic surgeon famous for steely nerves
and clinical derring-do, “cracking open chests,” as he put it, thrusting his
hands into thoraxes to remove diseased hearts and lungs. He owned a
plane, which he kept gassed up and ready to fly so he could ferry in replacement
parts–living hearts–for his patients. He piloted the plane, of
course. He was forever experimenting with new surgical techniques,
studying logistics, puzzling over the social consequences of the on-the-fly
triage necessary to match salvageable patients with salvageable hearts. A
committed runner, lean as a whippet, and blessed with an ability to concentrate
in an operating theater, Frist slept only three or four hours a night.

He used the wee hours to educate himself by writing medical tracts.
As he launched his campaign for the Senate in 1994, his religious faith
was not a visible part of his public profile. He rarely talked about his
standard-issue Presbyterianism, the denomination of choice among the
Southern business establishment. Rather, he advertised the healing power
of medicine. On the wall behind his desk, he tacked up a picture of a picnic
he had organized and attended earlier that year. He was surrounded
in the photo by a cheerful-looking throng of more than one hundred.
Who were they? “Those are my former transplant patients,” Frist said
proudly. “I feel a deep bond with those people,” he said. “I can’t express it
in words.”

Even after he became a senator, Frist did not abandon his medical pursuits.
He was an unofficial doctor-in-residence in the Capitol. After the
9/11 terrorist attacks, he used his late-night study vigils to produce a
picture-and-text guide and instruction manual on how to treat injuries
and contaminations that might follow a chemical or biological assault. He
insisted that his full title be emblazoned on press releases and in brass on
his office door: Senator William Frist, M.D.

When he began fashioning his political career, Frist had little contact
with the Other Tennessee, the one controlled, or at least defined, by the
Southern Baptists. The state’s largest denomination, they had always set
the tone politically, but not always directly. In pioneer days they were a
liberating political force, opposed to hierarchical authority, especially an
“established” church, of any kind. They promoted democratic ideals by
insisting that man had free will, and by insisting that the route to salvation
lay in the simple, straightforward act of reading and believing the
Bible. Baptists had grown mighty on America’s frontiers, where settlers
had needed a portable, independent faith, one that validated their sense of
freedom but also gave them confidence that they were doing the Lord’s
work in the New World.

At first, Baptists and their brethren wanted nothing to do with direct
involvement in government, however, which they tended to fear (given
their history in Europe and in much of colonial America) as an instrument
of theological oppression. That attitude changed somewhat in the
1920s, as rural Americans came to feel themselves under assault by a new,
metropolitan modernity. The battle was joined in Dayton, Tennessee,
where a teacher named John Scopes was brought to trial for violating a
state law against the teaching of evolution. Clarence Darrow, the most famous
courtroom lawyer of his day, teamed up with an equally famous
journalist, H. L. Mencken, to make a national laughingstock out of the
law’s chief defender, William Jennings Bryan, the “prairie populist.”
And yet it was Bryan’s side–the Bible-believing one–that won the
case at trial and on appeal. In New York City, textbook authors were
forced to delete evolution from their newest manuscripts. The Tennessee
law remained on the books, banning instruction in “any theory that denies
the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” or that
suggests “man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Similar
laws existed in fourteen other states until the U.S. Supreme Court, in
1968, firmly and finally ruled that they were an unconstitutional imposition
of sectarian dogma in secular classrooms.

The national ridicule engendered by the Scopes Trial drove two generations
of Baptists out of the political arena. Despite their legal early
“victory,” the Southern Baptist leaders increasingly downplayed fundamentalist
teachings, even if their congregants did not.

But by the time Frist was thinking of running for office, a new generation
of hard-liners–more media-savvy and sophisticated, but no less dedicated
to Scripture–had reasserted control of the denomination. Luckily
for Frist (at least it seemed lucky at the time) the Baptists’ leading political
figure in the early 1990s was Dr. Richard Land, who had close ties to Karl
Rove, an ally of the late Lee Atwater’s and the emerging kingmaker of the
Southern-based Republican Party. Land headed the Southern Baptists’ political
and grassroots organizing arm. He was theologically devout, but
had a doctorate from Oxford and enjoyed jousting with the Other Side.
And maybe the Lord had a hand in bringing him to the campaign: Like
Frist, Land was a Princeton man. He could educate Frist in the political
ways of the Word.

It was a slow, careful process. In Frist’s first campaign, in 1994, Land
did not press his fellow Princetonian on faith issues. It wasn’t part of the
GOP’s national game plan. Instead, the Republicans ran coast-to-coast on
Newt Gingrich’s determinedly secular “Contract with America,” which
studiously avoided social and theological issues and instead focused on
anti-Washington themes: tax cuts, spending reform, and the iniquity of
the new Clinton administration and the Democrats who had ruled the
House of Representatives for forty years. Frist was anti-abortion–just
about everybody in the new GOP was–but otherwise had felt little need
to talk much about “the social issues.”

Frist’s focus changed once he arrived in Washington, especially after
George Bush became president, the GOP took control of the Senate, and
Frist, with a behind-the-scenes boost from the White House, became majority
leader. Suddenly he was the man in the middle of an American Argument.
Stem-cell research was the specific issue. Baptists and other
fundamentalists joined with the Vatican hierarchy to oppose the use of
human embryos in such research, even though many frozen embryos
were being discarded by fertility clinics and most scientists thought research
using cells from that source held great clinical promise in the
search for cures to disease.

Frist proceeded to ambush himself on the issue. In 2001, he supported
the president’s decision to limit federally funded research to cultures from
existing embryo “lines.” But under pressure from his erstwhile colleagues
in the medical community–not to mention former first lady Nancy Reagan,
who saw stem-cell research as the route to a cure for Alzheimer’s
disease–Frist reversed course. Now, he said, he considered the existing
“lines” inadequate, and would support the use of embryos that would otherwise
be discarded by clinics and perhaps other sources as well. Since he
was a doctor and potential presidential candidate, Frist’s 2005 switch was
major national news. “It’s an earthquake,” said his Republican colleague
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania at the time.

Frist garnered praise from the same medical and scientific community
that had denounced him earlier. But the GOP’s religious fundamentalists
attacked him for supporting what they labeled “destructive embryo research.”
“To push for the expansion of this suspect and unethical science,”
said Dr. James Dobson, “will be rightly seen by America’s values voters as
the worst kind of betrayal of choosing politics over principle.” Dr. Land
had a simpler political reaction, but equally to the point. “I’m heartbroken,”
he declared.

And so it came to pass that Frist was politically doomed, even though
he tried his best to reconnect with the “heartbroken” Land. The senator
sought to placate his religious “base” by championing the anti-euthanasia
cause of Terri Schiavo. Although he had not personally seen the bedridden
and severely brain-damaged woman, he offered a long-range “diagnosis”
of her condition, concluding that she was aware of her surroundings and
thus should be spared. He did so after watching a video of her moving her
eyes in what some had concluded was a purposeful, sentient fashion.

Then, as though burrowing into Tennessee’s antimodern past, Frist
showed up at a Rotary club in Nashville to talk about evolution. After the
Supreme Court in 1968 invalidated statutes that had banned the teaching
of evolution, Biblical literalists had developed a new strategy. Rather than
opposing evolution per se, they supported the teaching of a theory they
called “intelligent design.” The idea was that human beings and other
forms of life were so complex and elegantly arranged that only an intelligent
“Creator”–that would be God–could have made them. Scientists
generally dismiss the theory as nothing more than a faith-based tautology,
an assertion beyond the reach of experimental, factual verification, and
therefore not “science” at all.

But Frist was not one of those scientists. “I think a pluralistic society
should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith,” he
said. Exposing schoolchildren to intelligent design “doesn’t force a particular
theory on anyone,” he said. A few months later, a federal judge in
Pennsylvania disagreed. He struck down a local school-board policy that
required that students be made “aware of the gaps/problems in Darwin’s
theory, and of other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to,
intelligent design.”

By then Frist had bowed out of that debate–and most others in the
faith wars. He had said from the beginning of his political adventure that
he would serve only two terms in the Senate, and as his second term drew
to a close in the fall of 2006, the only remaining question was whether he
would run for the GOP presidential nomination. He was not a deft politician–
you could see the gears grinding with every move he made–but
even a Lyndon Johnson would have had trouble surviving in the riptides
of the faith-versus-science debate.

In his final few months, Frist almost literally wasted away, shrinking
from lean to gaunt, his normally chipper surgeon’s demeanor falling off
into what resembled absentmindedness. On the Senate floor, he seemed
almost lost. He had been chewed to pieces by the Eastern establishment
that had credentialed him initially; he was almost too easy a target for The
New York Times. At the same time, the Richard Lands of the world had
given up on him, looking elsewhere for Republican presidential candidates
to champion. Rove had once been a backer–had led the effort to
get him the majority leader’s job–but Bush aides now privately derided
Frist as a ham-fisted amateur who had never learned to play the game, no
matter how adroit he had been in an operating theater.

In November of 2006, after the Democrats won back control of the
Senate, Frist limited himself to the occasional Washington social event as
he and his wife prepared to return to Nashville. He said he was building
a new home there. In a sad, unself-conscious parody, the new edifice resembled
a downsized White House, with pillars, portico, and all. He
could take shelter there from the argument that had overwhelmed him.

The land we live on was claimed in God’s name, but the world’s first
officially secular government sits on it. We invoked God in making
our Declaration of Independence, but not in our governing authority, the
Constitution. Only one clergyman signed the former; none the latter. Yet
we are among the world’s most devout people; most of us see the Bible as
literal truth, the Word of God. We base our nationhood on the unalienable
rights the Creator bestowed upon all of mankind. So what role
should He play in our public life?

Faith and its traditions and institutions can strengthen society’s social
fabric, and amplify its commitment to family and justice. But if the Word
rules all, the faithful are duty bound to spread–yea, even enforce–it.
The result: sectarian crusades in secular realms. Some are noble (abolition
or the bioethics movement), but some foment intolerance (the anti-
Catholic Know-Nothings, the ravings of Louis Farrakhan), or warp scientific
inquiry, public education, and foreign policy. We are one country,
yet forever torn between two methods of understanding, Revelation and
Reason, and two sacred texts, the Bible and the Constitution. Of all the arguments
that define us none is more vexing–alternately troubling and
inspiring–than the one we had for four centuries over the role of faith.
America, the late Jerry Falwell proclaimed, was a “faith nation.” His
political foes disputed the specific term, but they cannot gainsay the basic
point. The polling figures are as familiar as they are immutable: 90 percent
of us say we believe in God; 85 percent believe in the personal power
of prayer; 70 percent are affiliated with an organized religion; 42 percent
say they attend religious services regularly; and 38 percent refer to themselves
as “committed Christians.” Senator Barack Obama summarized
these numbers in his tart fashion. “Substantially more people in America,”
he said, “believe in angels than they do in evolution.”

Looking back, it is clear that it is our destiny to argue about faith in
public life. History makes us do it.

One reason is the centrality of the Bible–not just what it contains, but
the fact of its new, wide availability at the time of our founding. Our earliest
seventeenth-century settlers arrived with Reformation ideas. They
came bearing new ways of thinking and guiding their lives created by
post-Gutenberg technology (the movable-type printing press) and individualistic,
post—Martin Luther theology. To these early Protestants, and
for those who came here over the next two centuries, the Bible–not
popes, prelates, or princes–was the arbiter of morality and the road map
to heaven. What’s more, it was within the power and the ken of any mortal
to read it and interpret it for himself. He could and did go forth into
the New World to seek its riches and master its dangers with a rifle, an ax,
and a Bible. “Those who believe that knowledge of God comes direct to
them through the study of the Holy Writ,” observes historian Paul Johnson,
“read the Bible for themselves, assiduously, daily. The authority lay
in the Bible, not the minister.”

The result was a uniquely American invention: a lively, supply-side
marketplace of religion. “The direct apprehension of the word of God,”
writes Johnson, was a formula for dissent–“for a Babel of conflicting
voices.” Diverse faith was, and is, like the energy from splitting the atom.
“Nowhere else in Christendom was religion so fragmented,” writes colonial
historian Gordon S. Wood. “Yet nowhere was it so vital.” It was all
the more vital because, in a New Eden of America, there was more ur-
gency in finding the right biblical path away from sin. The place was
pure; the temptations of freedom were great.

As with other parts of our heritage, this marketplace was so fervent
because it was based on freedom of the individual. As with other marketplaces,
it was buffeted by crowd psychology, the dynamics of salesmanship,
and the laws of supply and demand. Without the clerical structure of
an official church, preachers rose to power on the strength of eloquence
and marketing skill, convincing the layman of the wisdom of their interpretation.
Popular preachers were early fruits of our democratic thinking–“
in a sense, the first elected officials,” says Johnson, “of the New
American society.”

Philadelphia, birthplace of our Republic, was known through most of
the eighteenth century as the ultimate faith-based bazaar–site of the legendary,
building-packing sermons of George Whitefield, American’s first
revival evangelist. The Founders who convened there in 1787 to draft a
Constitution knew the history of the city. They were not hostile to religion;
indeed, they were not all firmly against some version of an official
church, if it could be democratically selected.

Just two years earlier, a committee of the Continental Congress had
come within a single vote of moving in that direction. Drafting rules for
selling land in the Northwest Territory, the committee voted to allot for
“the maintenance of public Schools” one section within each square of
surveyed squares. Then they voted to devote “the section immediately adjoining
the same to the northward for the support of religion. Profits arising
therefrom in both instances to be applied forever according to the will
of the majority of male residents of full age within the same.” In other
words, the public would pay to “support religion,” presumably by constructing
the church the locals wanted.

To James Madison’s great relief, the “support of religion” clause was
voted down in the end. “How a regulation so unjust in itself, foreign to
the authority of Congress . . . smelling so strongly of an antiquated Bigotry,
could have received the countenance of a committee is a matter of astonishment,”
he wrote to James Monroe. Presbyterian clergy, Madison
reported, “were in general friends of the scheme,” but they had tempered
their “tone, either compelled by the laity of that sect, or alarmed at the
probability of further interferences of the Legislature, if they once begin
to dictate in matters of religion.”

In writing a Constitution, Madison and the other Founders took another
step back from the approach the Continental Congress had considered.
The idea of a state-supported church–even one democratically
chosen by local elders–would not even be considered. When it came
time to draft a Bill of Rights four years later, they hammered home the
point. “Congress shall make no law,” the First Amendment says, “respecting
the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof.” The framers were not banishing faith from the public square–
but they were banishing the possibility of state monopoly in the market of
creeds. They made the point in 1796 in another, but significant, context.
In the Treaty of Tripoli, they tried to soothe the Muslim ruler there by asserting
that “the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian
religion.” That wasn’t quite right, of course. We were set in motion by
Christians in the name of Christian kings. But after 1776, the kings did
not govern us, and neither did their faith. No one faith could. You could
believe in any you chose–or in none at all.

The fact is that the focus of the Founders–what they thought the
country indeed was “founded on”–was not Christianity per se, or the
Bible, or at least the Bible alone. The focus of their intellectual, political,
and moral ambition was the world, history as it was lived, and the Enlightenment
spirit of inquiry and science. Many were Deists, skeptical of
Christian dogma about the divinity of Jesus. They studied Athens and
Rome–not Jerusalem–for most of their clues to the nature of government.
Their holy trinity was Hume, Locke, and Montesquieu. The decision
of the committee of the Continental Congress is a footnote in history,
but a crucial one, reflecting and foreshadowing an argument for the ages:
They concluded that the only kind of education that government should
pay for is the kind that takes place in a secular classroom.

But, as was the case in 1785, it was always a close question. In 1801,
Baptists, a minority in Connecticut, wrote to President Jefferson to complain
that their state viewed religious liberty not as an immutable right
but as a privilege granted by the legislature–as “favors granted.” In his
famous and carefully considered reply, Jefferson said nothing about Connecticut,
but noted that it was an “act of the whole American people” (the
Bill of Rights) “which declared that their legislature should make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
Perhaps no single “thus” has generated so much controversy. To be
sure, Jefferson’s “wall” means there can be no state-sponsored church. But
must it mean no role for faith in public life?

Probably not. Even in his letter, Jefferson seemed to make the point.
He closed his “wall of separation letter” to the Danbury Baptists this
way: “I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of
the common Father and creator of man.” However guarded his words,
he was reciprocating something. Faith and public life are not a unity, but
Jefferson understood that here they are virtually inseparable in many
ways.

The idea of “revival” is one example of how faith and politics in
America are intertwined. Indeed, it is, arguably, our most important political
metaphor. We are a nation that operates by continual revival. Without
an established church, with each of us free to read the Word for
himself, we compete with each other to win souls, and revivals are our
unique method for doing so. The religious Great Awakenings were mirrored
in our politics, and vice versa. In a nation that prays for the advent
of Good News, every deal is New, every political campaign is a crusade,
and every crusade is a campaign. The mechanics of a Billy Graham event
(he no longer calls them “crusades”) and those of a candidate rally are indistinguishable.
Much of the language is the same, sign-up tables are the
same, prayer counselors and precinct workers are the same. Only the objective
is different: souls versus votes.

What we think of as civic life would not exist without the religious impulse
to lead, to educate, and to convince. That impulse fostered the
founding of our great universities and colleges, from Harvard to Notre
Dame to Brigham Young to Brandeis. It encouraged us to be the most
charitable of people, with faith-based institutions leading the way from
the time of the Puritans through Dorothy Day and